Home in Outlaw Land
An Ozarks Adventure
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
January 2024 meant resolutions — one of those was to continue to spend as much time with my family as possible —and in a real way, not a politician resigning ahead of a scandal way. Another was to get more dispatches of the highest quality out to you wonderful people—this one is long, and it’s limited to paid subscribers in its totality, so please subscribe to read.
This is how, on January 4, 2024 I found myself in the portrait studio at Eureka Springs, choosing between costumes for a photo session. I’d been up in Barry County, Missouri and Carroll County, Arkansas, visiting kin (the same ones I talk about in the Dinosaur Park Piece I wrote for County Highway), which reminded me of this piece that I wrote this summer that never found its way into print, until now.
I hope you enjoy this non Tom Clancy - related dispatch, Happy New Year!
On the Ozarks Outlaw Trail with my Old man
My dad and I nearly died together a decade ago in a Honda on a highway in Tennessee. Nobody's fault, the car hydroplaned in heavy rain, spun into a cut—the hard rock wall part where they carve a road out of a mountain—by some miracle, we were the only two things in that car untouched by the crash.
I can still go back there in my mind, colors vibrant, that first jam of excited but serene adrenaline feeling, the fear, of course; I somehow knew, just as the car began to hydroplane, to reach up and pluck off my glasses, holding them in my hand as we "impacted." I'll put it this way; everything in that car, besides us, was damaged, broken. It's been on my mind a little bit as I pack clothes, there are some that still have holes.
The car itself was totaled. So was a bicycle. A laptop. A series of clothes with strange holes, worn for a month or so before you realize, oh, that's where something metal and sharp went through all the clothes in a suitcase but missed you.
We walked away; then took a tow truck. It shook us both up.
I had some pot and a one hitter squirreled away in my backpack, I went off to take some medicine as soon as I was able. At the time, my Dad and I were on the way to Virginia, Charlottesville to be precise, in the late spring/early summer of 2012; I was on my way back to college after the war, to see about finishing up that degree. We walked away, got a rental car and continued to Charlottesville. There, we got a new bike. Got a new laptop. We were lucky. We were fortunate. I got on my way to a new degree.
I don’t get it that time around; I do find out, after my colleague’s death in a car crash, that I’m getting investigated by the FBI for my reporting on an American soldier held hostage by the Haqqani network in Pakistan; I finally go back to school for a January term in 2019, finish up my last three credits by, graduate that spring in the dome room. My folks are there for that, we take pictures.
There's a cut or two on the highway we're taking today, down south an hour or so through the Ozarks and Boston Mountains from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Fort Smith, Arkansas. No rain, though, and we've done this drive dozens of times in the intervening years with no problems, heading down to shoot shotguns past Alma—there’s a statue of Popeye, the sailor man there, because Alma grows a lot of spinach—or go out fishing on Lake Fort Smith.
My dad likes to do things. He's good at doing lots of things. Today, we're combining some of those skills. We both like seeing things. He's driving the truck, his truck, I'm in the passenger seat. This is not the seat I'm used to. In Afghanistan, it was the TC seat, the Truck Commander's Seat; my Lieutenant sat there, or my platoon sergeant. I drove then.
We were once in a tense situation, him driving, me in the passenger seat while the truck was doing about 45 outside Jackpot Nevada on Christmas Day--well, night, really, it was 1010PM, Mountain Time--when I, for reasons too complicated to get into here, told my dad I loved him, strapped my backpack to my front and jumped out of the truck, then executed a picture perfect parachute landing fall, Sergeant Airborne would've been proud, and then set off into the southern Idaho country briefly, until I realized I had made an error and might need to go to the hospital; my Dad's voice snapped me out of it.
This was at an especially paranoid time in my life, but some of the paranoia was justified by seeing the FBI documents. It’s unsettling knowing the lawmen are on you, for some reason, and my reason wasn’t nearly as cut and dry and, say, Pretty Boy Floyd.
Today, we were on our way to the gravesite of Pretty Boy Floyd, in Aikins, Oklahoma. Born Charles Arthur Floyd, he hated that nickname, a souvenir from an early heist where the Kroger manager described him as a pretty boy with Apple cheeks. He preferred to go by Choc.
Charles Arthur Floyd is what’s written on his reddish stone grave marker in a large and well-maintained cemetery near Sallisaw. Between 30,000 and 40,000 people showed up to Pretty Boy Floyd's funeral in 1934; the largest showing at a funeral in Oklahoma, and believe me, Oklahoma's had a lot of funerals.
So's my family, unfortunately, that's just the way things go sometimes. In one of those weird quirks of fate, Pretty Boy Floyd was born the day my brother died, February 3, 1904; so same day, but 106 years before.
Pretty Boy Floyd at 29 was gunned down by Federal Agents in a cornfield in Ohio; my brother's helicopter went down when he was 39 in a forest in Bavaria.
I saw Barbie yesterday, with friends and family. We all laughed when Barbie said, during a dance number, "Do you ever think about dying?" Gallows Humor.
Speaking of Gallows, on the way to Pretty Boy Floyd's gravesite we'll be stopping by Fort Smith, home to an American National Park who's central feature is a method of execution; a gallows.
The gallows at Fort Smith served as an instrument of federal justice for 23 years, from 1873-1896. During those years, 86 men were executed for capital offenses. The Gallows have their own entry on a national park service website. I don't normally find myself laughing at a URL, but here we are. https://www.nps.gov/fosm/learn/historyculture/gallows.htm ; it's the learn/historyculture/gallows/ part that gets me.
That website also has text. It reads.
"While the gallows that stands today is a reconstruction, visitors are still drawn to the place where these executions were conducted. Perhaps no other place in Fort Smith illicits such interest and strong feelings."
Mindy, an eight year old border collie that might be the best dog I've ever seen, is in the back of the truck because her former owner, an old timer who lived and farmed near the ranch where my dad grew up in the southern Idaho foothills, died a few months ago.
My Dad volunteered to take the dog; he wanted to send a picture of the dog out and about to the old timer's sister, show her the dog was being well-taken care of.
It was. My dad's a veterinarian, now retired. He's good at taking care of things. Last summer he took care of me by letting me spend part of the summer, when I was getting a divorce, camping out on the ranch, imagining myself as a farmer; I'll never get there, I like to garden, I like to grow plants, but man, that's a tough racket, I don't think I'd make it really, so I'll stick to what I know and dabble in the rest.
This summer he'd been taking care of me by helping me get the house I'd bought here a few years ago when things were still pretty cheap and I was flush with some cash from a book I'd written, only smart financial thing I've ever done; I borrowed his Kubota to clear my backyard of the weird recycled materials garden boxes I'd started during the pandemic and wound up taking off a piece of my corner cladding with the same tractor trying to angle it out and concentrating on avoiding hitting the house next to me, which became an airbnb a couple years ago, to my continual dismay.
My dad helped me repair that a couple weeks ago. He went up to help another family member pull wire for their house renovation project while I was at Barbie. Today, he was helping me out with a story; I wanted to follow some outlaw trails around here.
I'd started and gotten a third of the way through a novel last summer, about Afghanistan Veterans and their interpreters robbing armored cars in the Walmart Belt, which had as its climax the third heist, taking place in the shadow of the Christ of the Ozarks Statue in Eureka Springs, an half hour up the highway and a half hour up switchbacks from Fayetteville in the opposite direction, toward the Missouri border, toward Cassville, where my Great Grandfather came from.
Today we were going the other way, toward the Oklahoma border, which meant going through the Bobby Hopper tunnel. That's where I’d had the boys hit the first armored car in the not done novel. They get away by BASE jumping off the bridge, if you're curious. Point Break is a great movie. The Bobby Hopper tunnel is the state's only interstate highway tunnel. It was built in 1999.
A dude with Kleinfelters syndrome and a brain tumor named Shane used to come by to shoot the shit while I was working in my garden. Shane once told me that he knew where Jesse James gold was hidden, it was in the mountains near the Bobby Hopper tunnel, the tunnel in fact was cover for excavation that had gotten close but missed the mark. He then gave me a rock that he'd found that looked like the state of Arkansas. I still have it, packed away somewhere now.
Driving down, I tell my dad that Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd.
*If you'll gather 'round me, children,*
*A story I will tell*
*'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw,*
*Oklahoma knew him well.*
Charles Arthur Floyd grew up in poverty on a tenant farm, hearing stories of Jesse James and his bandits, who became folk heroes for a string of robberies between Arkansas and New Mexico. Then, as Woody Guthrie tells it
*It was in the town of Shawnee,*
*A Saturday afternoon,*
*His wife beside him in his wagon*
*As into town they rode.*
*There a deputy sheriff approached him*
*In a manner rather rude,*
*Vulgar words of anger,*
*An' his wife she overheard.*
*Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain,*
*And the deputy grabbed his gun;*
*In the fight that followed*
*He laid that deputy down.*
I'm in the midst of a move; a week from now, I'll be back on the road to Virginia, this time to stay there for a while. Back to Charlottesville, back to the University, back for another degree. This one will take two years, not seventeen, InshAllah. I've got my apartment up there all figured out, I've got my Veterans Affairs doctors notified, I've got my boxes packed up, a trailer is packed.
My dad's going to tow that out to Virginia a couple of weeks after I get up there and assess the apartment situation, I rented it sight unseen, trusting the judgement of a friend from middle school who lives in Charlottesville and has it much more together than I do. I'll get up there, go to my orientation, get into my apartment before classes starts, he'll bring up the rest of my furniture and books and then bring the dog down to the beach to get a picture of it down by the beach. He's a good dad. He loves the dog. The dog is good for him. He deserves good things.
It is 1300. We pass a billboard for an Organic Restaurant called Squash Blossom. I used to grow organic squash blossoms in my garden, I liked putting them in omelettes. We pass a brown sign that says Fort Smith National Cemetery, exit 7. My older brother is buried with his crew and their co-mingled remains in Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia; I was out there last October, when I made the decision to go back to school. Hard to not make that association; it’s how my brain works. We pass the True Grit Trail. Exit 8B. Charles Portis quit the New York Times and wrote that book, that became those movies. My Dad loves those movies.
Our first stop is the U.S. Marshal's Museum, to see the law's side of things suppose. The dog isn't technically supposed to come in but nobody cares, she's a well-behaved dog, I've never heard her bark, but I make sure to ask the employees; we're talking about the law here.
I am underwhelmed by the Marshal's museum; there are little in the way of artifacts, actual things. A few badges, but mostly signs and TV's and interpretive documents. I learnt a bit about the law, how the Marshals were Washington's original lawmen, how they were integral in the Indian Removal Act that created the Trail of Tears, how they'd evolved through the ages, how they'd had a group called Special Operations Group since 9/11.
After I go through the museum, one of the docents comes up and starts talking to me; I make him for a former lawman, ask him what he did. HSI, though back when it was immigration, back before 9/11. He'd helped bust up a Russian Mafia outfit run out of a German restaurant in Eureka Springs before 9/11, back when it was still immigration; they'd been keeping the important Czech workforce hostage on the second floor off shift, not allowed to go anywhere.
I knew the place he was talking about, they had great Jagerschnitzel, I went there when I went camping at Lake Leatherwood with one of the friends I'd just seen Barbie with. We popped smoke from the Marshal's Museum and decided to eat, at a Beergarden BBQ restaurant catty corner across the Main Street from a mural up a two story brick building.
https://fortsmith.org/badlands-by-d-face
"Badlands by D*Face
The first of two pieces installed during the inaugural Unexpected Project, the mural is inspired by stories of the Deputy U.S. Marshals and the infamous outlaws they pursued inside of Indian Territory. In D*Face’s trademark pop-art style, the large piece features a masked pistol-yielding cowboy riding his horse as bullets fly past. In the foreground, a skeletal hand fires a pistol into the distance, symbolizing the dangers that awaited in The Badlands of the Old West." https://fortsmith.org/badlands-by-d-face
We got pork sandwiches; I got pulled pork, he got sliced, and some brisket for the dog. As we waited for our food a heavyset man named Stevo, missing his central incisors and appearing to be on crack cocaine, asked me repeatedly for a light until our waitress ran him off.
"I should lock that gate,” she says, but never does.
Steve-O asks for a light once more.
As we were leaving from our meal, two Fort Smith Police Officers in tactical sunglasses sauntered our way. I put my hands up, smiled, the cop smiled at me and my dad, we walked out past the BBQ smoker.
Steve-O was nowhere to be seen.
The cops were driving a side-by-side with Fort Smith police department decals on it. We got in the truck and went to our next stop, the Fort Smith Museum of History, which has 40,000 artifacts from Fort Smith inside. He'd been in the museum, said he'd go walk the dog by the courthouse while I took a look; there was too much to see in side to do it justice on a day that was so hot, while my dad and the dog were outside, so I asked a lady there with her mom and dad if she would mind taking a quick photo of me sitting in the replica of Hanging Judge Parker's podium, gavel in mid swing.
Then it was on to Pretty Boy Floyd's Grave in Aikins, Oklahoma, outside of Sallisaw. That drive took about 30 minutes, we went west out of town, over the bridge, and found ourselves on the MSG Joshua Lloyd Wheeler Wheeler memorial Highway. Wheeler was a Delta force dude killed in Iraq during Operation Inherent Resolve, from a town around here called Muldrow.