On Kingdom Mountain (12 page)

Not five minutes later, into the twilit summer sky shot multicolored pinwheels, green and pink skyrockets, exploding rainbows. It was Henry Satterfield's fireworks display. There were great pyrotechnic battles in the clouds, volcanic eruptions of vivid primary colors, thunderous explosions high over the church steeple and courthouse tower. A red and yellow panorama swept up the sky above Anderson Hill, resembling the fiery fall foliage on Kingdom Mountain. Then, streaking blue and silver across the northern horizon, there appeared an astonishing reproduction of the aurora borealis, followed by a meteoric shower of yellow sparks like gold coins, falling onto the south end of the green. The finale was a huge American flag, unfurling in the night. The sky went dark. A prolonged detonation seemed to come from all the points of the compass at once. Then silence. The celebration was over.

“I
COULDN'T HELP
but think, Mr. Satterfield,” Miss Jane called up through the ceiling grate that night, “how much my father would have loved the goings-on today in the Common. Especially the re-creation of the Great Raid and the historical pageant.”

“It was a wonderful pageant, Miss Jane,” Henry said. He was propped up on three goose-down pillows, reading a story by lantern light in the latest issue of
True Detective
, about two brothers with the rather improbable names of Wendell and Kendell Orbison, who had recently escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary in a prison hearse.

“Your father was, I believe, a lawyer?” Henry said.

“He was a lawyer and judge and the State Supreme Court chief justice and a farmer,” Jane said. “My mother used to say he was the best chief justice and the worst farmer on Kingdom Mountain. It was a joke and not a joke. But even though my dad was no farmer, he was a crack shot and a very good hunter. Every fall he located a good buck on the mountain, and woe betide the unwary moose that wandered down from Canada and into the sights of Lady Justice at any time of year. Father believed that moose compete with deer for the available feed, and he dealt with them accordingly. So too do I.

“About the time I reached my teens,” she continued, “my father took it in his head to make me into a hunter. Not just an ordinary run-of-the-mill weekend hunter, either. Dad's idea was to turn me into a kind of Kingdom Mountain female Nimrod, so that I could follow in his footsteps and carry on the Kinneson family tradition of providing meat for their own table.”

Henry was not surprised to note, in his copy of
True Detective
, that his own aversion to guns was not shared by the brothers Orbison, who, by the time they ran into a roadblock in Amarillo three days after the breakout, had acquired six rifles, three shotguns, and a Thompson submachine gun with which they fired an estimated two hundred and fifty rounds at the police.

“Miss Jane?”

“Aye?”

“What does the word q-u-i-e-t-u-s mean?”

“Why, it is usually used to mean a death.”

The
True Detective
article had ended with the sentence “And so it came to pass that, at a dusty crossroads in the Lone Star State, young Wendell and Kendell met their just quietus.”

“Father picked the fall I was sixteen for my initiation into the mysteries of deer slaying on the mountain. The trouble was, opening day of hunting season fell on Homecoming Saturday at the Academy, and Ira Allen had just asked me to the homecoming ball. It was my first real prom, and though it's amusing to me now, it wasn't then. However, once I realized that Ira was impressed that I was going to deer camp, I began to hint to him, scheming minx that I was, that I was an old hand at stalking the roebucks of kingdom Mountain.”

Henry, only half listening, turned the page of his detective mag and began reading the story of a crazed vigilante who had set fire to a churchful of millennialists in Newark, New York. Guiltily, he sneaked a look ahead at the end of the story. “On the Ides of March, in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine, John ‘Laughing Jack' Before, who had burned up twenty-three (23) misguided devouts and laughed about it, burned in THE CHAIR in Ossining on the Hudson. He did not, at the time of his incineration, appear to be laughing.”

“Father's plan was that we would establish ourselves at Camp Hard Luck, on the far side of the mountain, and spend the first afternoon hunting the lower north slopes. I was still angry with him for dragging me along, and quite determined to spite him and myself by refusing to cooperate. The November morning we headed out was very cold after a week of unseasonably cold weather. The three ponds in the Chain of Ponds were iced over from shore to shore, and we walked up to the camp over the frozen surface. In the middle of the afternoon it began to snow. We scouted along a game trail at the foot of the mountain for an hour or so, then Father said the deer would bed down until the snow stopped and we might as well return to camp.”

“A wise decision, Miss Jane. But to tell you the truth, hunting has always made me uneasy. It seems somehow akin to armed robbery of the woods, you know. I've never approved of armed robbery.”

Miss Jane found this a peculiar statement. Who, other than one of the hardened gunmen Henry loved to read about in his crime periodicals,
did
approve of armed robbery?

“During supper, my father went over his plan with me again. If the snow had stopped by morning I would hike up the game trail beside the big wooden chute that used to convey logs down the mountain to the pond below. There I'd wait, with Lady Justice, while my father drove the far side of the mountain.”

“‘I knowed that if I pulled that trigger, I'd never again be the same little blue-eyed country gal from Manhattan, Kansas.'” Thus began “The Diary of a Small-Town Gun Moll.” Henry wondered. Would the girl's eyes change color if she pulled the trigger? There was a grainy picture on the opposite page of the Manhattan country gal who had fallen in with bad companions. Wearing a baby-doll nightie, she crouched behind a haystack, wielding two machine pistols. The caption read, “Setting a Deadly Ambuscade.” A sturdy-legged little filly like that would have been a natural-born wingwalker, the airman thought.

“Have you nodded off, Mr. Satterfield?”

“By no means, Miss Jane. You planned to set a deadly ambuscade on the mountaintop.”

“I planned no such thing. I thought about my high school chums, marching around a bonfire on the village green, enjoying cider and doughnuts and one another's company while I was trapped up on that forlorn mountain. What I planned was to spend the morrow sulking. Still, if by some stroke of sheer blind luck I killed a buck, I might, by an act I could only see as barbaric and under utterly false pretense, win Ira Allen's heart,
which I could then wickedly break. That was worth considering.”

“And?” Henry said.

“And what?”

“Did you get your deer? And impress your beau?”

“You will find out,” Jane called up through the grate, “in due time. For now, I will let you get back to your literature.”

A
T
8:15
ON THE MORNING
after the Fourth of July celebration, President George Quinn strode across the common toward the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank. The barbecue pit was still smoking, and the green, littered with hotdog wrappers and bits of fireworks casings and empty Nehi and Coca-Cola bottles, had about it the slightly melancholy air of an empty fairgrounds. By any measure, George thought, the fundraising gala had been a success. Miss Jane seemed to have come round, the Connector would go forward, and the Common would at last join the twentieth century. As usual, George got out his keys, unlocked the front door, and stepped into the lobby. As usual, he inhaled deeply to catch that first satisfying whiff of furniture and brass polish, old wood, and money. This morning what he smelled instead was the acrid odor of powder, which still hung over the village from the fireworks display the night before. Why would that scent be stronger inside the bank? The answer was almost immediately apparent. The massive vault door had been blown entirely off its hinges, and the emergency exit at the rear of the bank stood wide open for the entire town to come and go as they pleased. George actually thought he
might be having a stroke. Not since the Great Raid of 1864 had the First Farmers been robbed or had any patron lost a single penny.

Only later that morning, after it was ascertained that the stacks of greenbacks from the celebration the day before, right out in the open inside the vault for the safecrackers to see and help themselves to, about three thousand dollars in all, not to mention the trays upon trays of silver and the few hundred dollars in gold coins that the bank still kept on hand, were intact, was George able to take a relaxed breath. Whoever had blown their way into the First Farmers had taken nothing but the contents of a large safety deposit box in the lower row of boxes near the back of the vault, rented decades ago by Miss Jane's father, Morgan Kinneson.

 

“Here's something,” Henry said that afternoon, holding up his
True Detective
for Miss Jane to see. He was lounging in the porch hammock with his white hat pushed jauntily back on his head, like a teenage boy on his first ice cream soda drugstore date. On the yellowish page of the magazine was a touched-up black-and-white photograph of a biplane swooping low over a little town that looked to be somewhere on the Great Plains. Standing on the dreary street below, by an automobile with a star embossed on the door, were two men in uniforms, firing Tommy guns at the aircraft. Obviously the photograph had been staged. The headline read
COURTEOUS CLYDE OF THE CLOUDS STRIKES AGAIN.

In his best recitation voice, cultivated at the knee of his schoolteacher mother, Henry read aloud the following paragraph.

 

The so-called “Courteous Clyde Barrow” of the Clouds has not been professionally active in his old stomping grounds for
several months. The polite robber/pilot, renowned for saying “please, sir” and “thank you, ma'am,” has not been seen in Oklahoma, Kansas, or Missouri since robbing a string of banks in that region in an 18-month period ending this past March with his near-capture in Tulsa. “Courteous Clyde”—his true identity is not known—has developed a unique
modus operandi.
Stealing a local automobile, he then robs the bank, drives to a field outside of town and is met by a biplane flown by his bonny (“Bonnie”?) bride, or partner, described as an exceedingly goodlooking young woman. The couple has endeared themselves to the populace of the “dust bowl” states by quite literally “papering” the towns they target with some of the currency taken from the bank. Also, Clyde generally takes with him into the bank a sack which, when the more important business has been transacted, he thrusts across the teller's counter, requesting that it be filled with “silver dollar cartwheels for the children,” which he then showers down upon the local schoolhouse in a gleaming cascade just before flying into the “blue yonder.”

As reported in our April issue, after a spectacular midday robbery in Tulsa, in which “Courteous Clyde” landed on the main street of town in front of the Wheatgrowers' Savings and Loan, which he promptly and politely proceeded to rob, he was fired upon by one Charles “Choctaw Charlie” Flying Eagle, age 14, returning to town with his .22 rifle from a successful prairie dog hunt. It was thought that “Bonnie” may have been struck by one of the bullets.

We are told that Clyde is much missed by this magazine's dust bowl readers, if not by the bankers of the region. Follow-up reports on his whereabouts will be printed in future issues of
True Detective.

 

“Well, Miss Jane, I am clearly in the wrong line of work,” Henry chuckled. “Think of the opportunities I've missed out on. This Courteous Clyde fellow is one up on me.”

He closed his magazine, flopped back in the hammock, and pushed his white boater down over his eyes as if preparing to take an afternoon snooze.

“Are you a betting woman, Miss Jane?”

“I am not.”

“No, of course not. But if you were a betting woman—”

“Which I am not.”

“Which you are not, but if you were, you could bet your last dime that Courteous Clyde, whoever he may be, would not have left three or four thousand dollars in cash to lie fallow in the Common bank but would have taken it to redistribute from aloft.”

“Why would
anyone
who broke into the bank leave the cash?”

“Well,
anyone might
leave the cash in order not to draw down the G-men on himself. If they don't even know what was stolen, you see, they can't be expected to investigate too zealously.”

Miss Jane looked at Henry, his hat tipped over his face, and was quite sure that she did see. Just what he had found in the bank vault, if her suspicions were correct, was evidently going to remain a mystery. It seemed clear to her, however, that her friend the judge had been right about Henry Satterfield. There was little doubt in Miss Jane's mind that for the past three and a half months she had been harboring a professional bank robber on Kingdom Mountain.

 

The drought continued. Commoners and farmers had begun to use the word now:
drought.
The first cutting of hay had been sparse, and at this rate there would not be another. In the meantime the Connector, despite Judge Allen's ruling that it could not infringe upon Miss Jane's property, came closer and closer to the mountain. One morning near the end of the month a gigantic steam shovel appeared on a flatbed of the
Boston to Montreal freight. That afternoon the machine began widening the cut at the foot of Blue Clay Hill, where the Upper Kingdom River pouring out of Lord Hollow joined the East Branch from Kingdom Mountain. Miss Jane could stand on her porch and watch the progress of the right of way by the dust clouds rising above the oncoming construction. It was evident that the town fathers and Eben fully expected the Supreme Court to decide in their favor, though the case was not scheduled for another month. In accordance with Ira Allen's recommendation, Miss Jane had hired his son, Forrest, to represent her. She hinted to her dear people in On Kingdom Mountain that if they were willing to lend their assistance, she still had a surprise or two up her sleeve for Montpelier.