"You look purty in that dress," Clem said. She shot a look at him.
Here was a man, she thought, a Montana Freeman, who had held out in a dirty farmhouse outside Jordan, Montana, for months in defiance of local, state, and federal law enforcement. A man who had patrolled the flat scrub earth of eastern Montana wearing a ski mask and carrying a Ruger Mini-14 with a banana clip. (His image had been broadcast around the world during the siege.) A man who had spent three years at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge rather than tell the authorities what he knew about the Freeman leadership. But a man who was so damned scared of her that he flinched when she turned on him and started crying like a eunuch when she threatened to leave him. Clem the Freeman, she thought. Clem the Freeman.
The bell rang again. Recess was over. Jeannie watched April and the other girls go back inside the building.
"That woman, Marybeth Pickett, thinks she's a better mother to April than I am," Jeannie said bitterly.
Clem grunted in disapproval of Marybeth.
"She took advantage of me, and my April," Jeannie spat. "She took that child when I was at my worst, when I couldn't care for her. Now that woman wants to keep her because she lost one of her own."
Clem grunted again.
"People been taking things from me all of my damned life. Just because I'm smaller, or had less school than them, they figure they can just take what they want from me." Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she lit another cigarette. "My first husband, Ote, took my childhood and my future from me when he moved me out to this damned place so he could be a mountain man. Then that judge in Mississippi took my boy away after that. That damned judge said I abandoned my boy, which was a damned lie. Everybody has a right to go on a vacation, and that's all I done. How could I be blamed for the fact that my baby-sitter, that little bitch, went on vacation, too? But that judge took my boy away anyway."
Jeannie's youngest, her three-year-old daughter, was with Ote's parents in Jackson, Mississippi. They claimed they were going to keep her, but Jeannie had other plans.
She looked at Clem, her eyes blazing. He was shaking his head slowly.
"It's a crying shame," Clem said.
"You goddamned right it is," she said, turning back to the windshield, which was fogging again. "Once we get April, we'll go back for my baby."
Jeannie pulled two envelopes from her purse. One was old and brown, and the other was crisp and white. She shook out a thin sheaf of photos from the brown envelope. Clem watched as she shuffled through the snapshots.
"I'm gonna show these to April to remind her where she comes from," Jeannie said. "This one's her and her brother when they was babies. April used to suck her two fingers all the time, instead of her thumb. Ote said that was unnatural."
She went through all of the pictures again, smiling at some, riffling past others. Then she dropped them back into the brown envelope.
The white envelope contained a court order assigning immediate custody of April to Jeannie. The order was signed by Judge Potter Oliver of Kemmerer, Wyoming. Clem had been the one who knew of Judge Oliver, and they had driven across the state to meet the judge, after hours waiting in his office. Clem had told her Judge Oliver was "eccentric," but had his heart in the right place. What he meant, she found out, was that Judge Oliver was sympathetic to the Freemen and had okayed several of their most outrageous financial schemes to fund their militia group. Despite petitions and threatened judicial and legislative action to have him removed from the court, Oliver had somehow stayed on. He was now being forced to retire within the year, he told them. Because of his age.
Judge Oliver was massively fat, with a wispy beard and heavy-lidded eyes. A single green-shaded banker's lamp threw garish shadows across the judge and across the room. When he met with them, Oliver wore an ancient three-piece suit that was shiny from wear and stained with grease spots. Because of an attack of gout, Oliver explained, he was forced to wear slippers on his feet instead of shoes. She saw the slippers under his desk. They were big, like elephant slippers.
Jeannie had pleaded her case for April while Clem sat next to her, holding her hand. Judge Oliver listened impassively, his fingers intertwined across his stomach.
When she was through, the judge asked Jeannie to leave the room while he talked with Clem.
She had waited outside the door for less than ten minutes when Clem came outside to retrieve her. He nodded and told her things were going to be okay.
"I have remanded custody of your daughter to you upon your request," Judge Oliver told Jeannie in a wheezy voice. "My clerk is preparing the order as we speak, and we will fax it to Twelve Sleep County."
Jeannie actually cried with joy, and reached across the desk to shake his huge, crablike hand. She was so happy, and so grateful, thanks to Judge Oliver.
Oliver smiled back, but his eyes were on Clem.
Clem ushered Jeannie to the back of the room while the judge sat at his desk. She could tell when she looked at him that Clem had done something awful.
"The judge asked about compensation," Clem had whispered nervously. "I told him we couldn't pay him very much."
"Clem, you asshole," Jeannie had whispered back, furious. "We can't pay him anything!"
Clem had hesitated, then gulped, then pulled at his collar.
"What, damn you?" she asked. Her whisper was loud enough, she thought, to be heard by the judge.
Clem continued to look at his own boots. Then she understood. The judge wanted compensation.
She turned toward Judge Oliver and smiled sweetly.
"I'll wait for you out in the truck," Clem mumbled, still looking down.
"You bet your bony ass you will," Jeannie said over her shoulder, through smiling teeth. "I guess I don't get it why you want to go into that school and get her," Clem said. "With that order and all, you could march right up to their house and take her."
Jeannie sighed and rolled her eyes. "Clem, sometimes you're even stupider than usual."
He looked away, stung.
"It's been three long years," she said. "Do you want to drag a crying, screaming kid out of somebody's house?"
Clem frowned. "But you're her mother. She'll want to go with you."
She glared at him. "Who knows what kind of crap and filth about me they've put into her head? Who knows what they'll tell her tonight, now that they know we've got this here order?"
Clem shook his head, confused. But it was obvious he didn't want to argue.
"What this order means," Jeannie said, "is that they can't get her back."
Clem dropped his eyes to the floorboards of the truck. "I'm just sorry what you had to do to get it."
Jeannie snorted. "I've done worse." For once, Jeannie Keeley was lucky. She remembered the layout of the school well enough to walk straight to the office without asking anyone where it was.
Her heels clicked on the tile floor and her green dress swished with purpose as she walked down the hallway. Most of the classroom doors were open, and the sounds of children and teachers came and went like radio stations set on "scan" as she walked.
The school office was empty except for a secretary who sat at a computer behind the front counter. Jeannie had been thinking about this for a long time. This was a small town. Everybody knew damned near everybody else. She had not been inside the school for four years, since April was in kindergarten. She doubted she had made enough of an impression to be remembered. When she finally decided how to play it, it was simple. She operated on one premise: What would Marybeth Pickett do? When the secretary looked up, Jeannie smiled at her.
"Hi again. I'm April Keeley's mother," Jeannie said with such familiarity and assurance that the secretary should be ashamed for not recognizing her. "Third grade. I'm here to take her to the dentist."
The secretary looked befuddled, and plunged into a spiral notebook on her desk. "I'm filling in today for the secretary because she came back from Christmas vacation with the flu," the woman explained. "I'm trying to figure out how this works."