Still, Papa somehow flung himself in the car, and shut the door, saying, “Go! Go!”
Frightened as he was, knowing his father had been shot, Michael did his job, hitting the accelerator, speeding and winding and weaving in and around and through the morning traffic, as sirens wailed behind him.
On the outskirts of town, he allowed himself to look at his father, who was holding onto his left shoulder with fingers that had blood seeping through them, making red trails down his hand.
O’Sullivan could see the panic on his boy’s face, and he snapped, “I’m okay! Eyes on the road! I’m okay... ”
The boy drove.
And in the bridal suite, Harlen Maguire dropped to his knees, as if about to pray, only he didn’t clasp his hands: he held them before him, palms up. In the other room, through the open door, the corpse of Alexander Rance beckoned.
But Maguire didn’t have his camera. And he was busy looking at his hands, anyway, the hands that had been holding his poor glass-ravaged face...
... hands covered in blood, dripping with red, and he was startled. It was as if all the blood he had on his hands was finally showing.
Fifteen
As the great film director John Ford put it, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Depictions of my father and myself paint us as well-known figures in the outlaw Midwest of the 1930s, placing us side by side with the likes of the Dillinger gang, the Barker boys, and Bonnie and Clyde. In truth, latter-day stories of my renown as the Angel of Death’s “boy getaway man” are gross exaggerations.
The only time we made the papers was the shooting at the Grand Hotel in Stillwater, when witnesses indeed saw me fleeing the scene at the wheel of the Ford, my father slumped on the rider’s side. Those contemporary newspaper accounts, however, were even more inaccurate than subsequent speculation about us at the hands of Hollywood and the more sensationalistic true-crime writers.
In recent years, the truth has been sorted out, somewhat, as Alexander Rance’s role as a Capone organization financial wizard has come to light; and research into photographer/reporter/assassin Harlen Maguire’s bizarre life has helped clear our record.
At the time, “the Bridal Suite Bandit” was painted as a homicidal thief who murdered a respectable accountant — one Alexander Rance — robbing him of hundreds of thousands of dollars from his rooms at Stillwater’s Grand Hotel. Of course, my father took no money at all, merely records — ledger books and files.
And, at the same time, Harlen Maguire was portrayed in the press as Rance’s bodyguard, who bravely did his best to ward off a murderous brigand, suffering injuries in the process. Which was how Maguire managed to walk away from the carnage, or rather was gurneyed away, spirited like a hero to the Stillwater hospital for emergency care of his glass-ravaged face.
Rather crude suspect sketches of my father and me hit the papers, though until subsequent events put Michael O’Sullivan, John Looney, Connor Looney, and Harlen Maguire back in the papers (and on the radio and in the newsreels), neither Papa’s name nor mine was associated with the story headlined “ARMED ROBBERS SOUGHT — Getaway Driver a Young Boy.”
At the time, of course, my father and I had other, more pressing concerns — chiefly, survival. Fortunately for us, other families — perhaps most families — in those hard times were scratching out a modest living and knew what it was to struggle just to exist. None of what has been written about my father and me has covered — no amount of diligent research has uncovered — the identity of the people who helped us, in the aftermath of the Grand Hotel shoot-out.
They are gone now, and their deeds — whether interpreted negatively or positively — cannot harm these good Samaritans. I would ask that you think of them as representative of a breed of American who lives no longer — hearty pioneers who managed to wrest a livelihood of sorts out of hardscrabble land.
Farming in the Great Plains never really made a recovery after the collapse of farm prices in 1920 and ’21. Though even worse adversity lay ahead — droughts and dust storms would soon place Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma in the middle of the so-called Dust Bowl — farmer families were already barely scratching out a living, after the Depression drove prices into the cellar.
Thus the landscape into which I drove my wounded father was topsoil rich and money poor, a desolate paradise that promised us, if not salvation, respite from the road.
Frightened though he was, Michael could handle the situation as long as his father was conscious, giving him directions — turn here, stay at the speed limit, take a left. Papa had managed to get the bleeding stopped with a piece of cloth torn from his own shirt, wouldn’t even let the boy stop to help wrap the makeshift bandage around himself.
That may have been what finally taxed his father’s considerable stamina and willpower, sending this strong weakened man into unconsciousness.
And then panic rose in the boy like water overtaking a sinking ship. Instinctively, he pulled off the main road, knowing he had to find a residence, a farm maybe, to seek help for his father. The Ford did well on the rutted dirt road, but Michael had to slow, not wanting the jolts to cause his father pain, even in his unconscious state.
Up ahead were some rickety buildings — a farmhouse, a barn, shack-like structures constructed of paint-peeling planks — that might normally have put the boy off. Right now, he was happy to see any sign of civilization, even if this spread was more like the hillbilly houses he’d seen in moving pictures and funny papers than the nice farms around Rock Island.
A pair of old people — in their fifties, maybe — were working in a field that looked pretty rough; warmer here, spring easing out winter, already. The couple was moving along slowly, kneeling at tilled soil, the man digging, the woman planting; their clothes were old and worn-out looking, the man in overalls and a ragged shirt and raggedy hat, the woman in a calico dress — both she and the dress had probably been pretty once, before the boy was born.
Michael pulled up at the edge of the field, where the couple worked, the boy thrilled to see any human being, particularly any that weren’t shooting at him and his father. He ran between tilled rows, desperately waving his arms, and the couple glanced at each other, knowing help was needed, ready to give it.
What followed was a frenzied blur to the boy — a heated knife digging at his delirious father’s shoulder, a bloody bullet dropping into a tin cup like a coin in the offering plate at church, his father shivering with fever on a makeshift cot in the front room of the shack-like house.
“Night sweats,” the farmer said. His name was Bill; he had kind blue eyes, a grooved face, and mostly white hair. “It’s good he sweats out the poison in him... but tend him, son. Stay with your father.”
Michael didn’t have to be told that. His father had tended to him, over these long weeks, and now he removed his father’s shirt, buttoning cuffs that were frayed and stained from their travels. He folded his father’s tie, placing it over the end of the cot, ritualistically, in the way he’d seen his father do, so many times.
The farmer and his wife — her name was Virginia, and she had blue eyes, too, in a face as pleasant as it was weathered, and dark-blonde graying hair — stayed in the room, but out of the way, mostly over by the kitchen part. They wore concern in their features that seemed unusual to Michael, considering he and his father were strangers. They didn’t have Catholic icons in their house, so they weren’t of the faith of his family; but Michael knew these were Christians, because they did Christian things... unlike some people who said they believed in Jesus.