Desperadoes

Grat legged up onto his saddle. ‘Where will you boys be?’

‘We’ve expanded operations, Grat. We got ourselves a gang now. Newcomb, Bryant, McElhanie. We’re traipsing off to Silver City, there to recover our lost kingdom.’

Grat smiled with all his brown teeth. ‘Kiss me an octaroon whore if you can.’ Then he throttled horse and mule into a jog.

So Grat left the state unscathed and the Dalton gang rode the railroad tracks through Arkansas and the badlands to the New Mexico Territory, stepping our horses off the roadbed and down into bramble to watch the big locomotive engines and the smoke-blackened cars pass by, waving our hats at the passengers in the windows.

The gang moped into Silver City hunkered over in our saddles, our slouch hats yellowish with the dust and brown about the sweatbands. We all wore big red neckerchiefs and hide chaps and slickers that used to be white. A boy who was pumping water in a horse trough ignored us and I knew it was my kind of town.

Some cowboys were slumped in chairs on the porch of a hotel and not doing anything else at all. Four hatless old men sat at a picnic table outside playing nine-point pitch, a nickel a game. A woman in a pale gingham dress and a sunbonnet crossed the street with a market basket. Bob kicked his horse up to a walk beside her but she said she didn’t talk to strangers.

‘Maybe I could find someone to introduce us,’ he said, but she hustled inside a dress shop.

Bob crossed over to a man in a bowler hat and a suit coat that was only buttoned at the lapels so that his checkered vest and watch chain showed. Bob told him he was looking for lodging in the town and a place to get a tub bath and a smith who could doctor the horses. They wanted new oats and new shoes, he said, and they were badly fistulowed.

The man directed Bob without taking his hands from his pockets and the five of us tied up at a boarding house where the widow had a sign up saying, NO COLOREDS. NO CHINESE. NO MEXICANS. NO IRISH. We heaved our saddles up her varnished stairs to a room of six single bunks and a dresser and a China washbowl and pitcher. There was a thundermug under each bed. We each paid a nickel and the widow fried up tomatoes and bread, put on a pot of coffee, and brushed down our coats and hats with a broom. We slept in our clothes until three in the afternoon and sat in iron tubs while a girl poured steaming water from a bucket. Then we sat in the widow’s parlor in our wrinkled black suits, watching the brass pendulum clock until Bob descended from the bedroom with envelopes of spending money that he parceled out at the door. Thereupon we split up, each to his separate pleasure.

Blackface Charley Bryant knew the place and he left us without so much as a good-bye, and he walked the plank bridge across the arroyo with his head sunk down and the lapel collar up on his coat. He bought jars of green peppers and Chile Colorado from a Mexican and squatted down in the dirt to eat them. A dog came up to sniff and Bryant gave him a lick of a pepper he held by the stem. The dog grimaced as much as a dog can and Bryant got a big kick out of that. He ate the pepper and wiped his hands on his pants. The Mexican was staring at the ugly blister on Bryant’s face.

‘Do you sell peyote?’ Bryant asked.

The Mexican frowned.

‘How about tobacco? Do you have it?’

The Mexican sold him a pouch for a dime and they both sat in the dirt to roll it in papers and smoke. Bryant said, ‘What do you think of my scar?’

The Mexican squinted and smoked.

‘I believe I’d rather be harelipped,’ Bryant said. ‘Came about when I planted a woman with child in San Antonio. She hunted me out when she got ripe and found me in a flophouse with a six-fingered whore. Tried to shoot me in the ear with a cap-and-ball pistol and burst the pillow I had my head on. Powder burnt my face like hot tar. The woman that deformed me lost every one of her teeth to the butt end of her pistol. I was careful not to miss one.’

Bryant didn’t move for a minute or two, then stood and brushed off his pants. ‘You have a sister or something?’

The Mexican showed Bryant to a one-room shanty with a blanket for a door. Inside there were two black girls and a Mexican woman of forty, smoking from a pipe. The black girls sat on their beds and watched him as the woman leaned back against a pillow and lifted the front of her dress.

Then Bryant walked to a Chinese laundry where he bought opium and a small metal pipe, and an ancient woman scraped at his cheek with a bone knife and pressed herb leaves to his face as he slept. Then he returned to the hotel room where each member of the gang discussed his own entertainments.

Bitter Creek Newcomb was calling himself ‘The Slaughter Kid’ in Silver City so everyone would think him a Texan. He spent his afternoon whittling a reed flute and picked up body lice in his evenings with an obese Missouri farm girl. He treated himself with a hot bath and kerosene and from then on indulged in gambling at the green felt tables where a boy from Alabama called him a carping cheat and Newcomb thunked him in the Adam’s apple with a quart bottle of Kentucky whiskey. The boy sat down hard on the floor and would have swallowed his tongue like a fresh trout had the, bartender not gripped hold of it with a pliers.

Newcomb thought that was the end of the altercation and two hours later he was raking in a pot of fourteen dollars when the boy walked up behind him and knocked Newcomb to the floor with one of the tavern’s beer pulls. Newcomb went for his gun but the boy stomped on his hand, splitting the thumbnail with his boot heel.

Newcomb sucked on it and asked, ‘Are you through now?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘I believe I am.’ His mouth quivered and tears slid out of his eyes.

Newcomb just slumped there on the floor for a bit, staring at the bloody tail of the shirt he’d wrapped around his hand.

William McElhanie and I occupied ourselves at the bordellos, though it was only Bill who ever had his pants down. We crossed the arroyo to the cathouses after a twenty-five-cent breakfast of pancakes and four eggs and steak, and we hunched up on the stoops with weeds in our teeth, itchy and hot in our three-piece suits. We’d watch the chippies coming out of the four-holer in the back, or fetching water from the artesian well, or hanging their laundry out on the line. Those who were cursed in the month did the housework in the mornings. They did not dress to entice. Their hair was in strands and their long gray dresses were black about the armpits. They might’ve been farm wives coming back from the hen house with eggs. McElhanie would sit on the chintz parlor furniture at night and whisper to me whatever he’d heard about those available. ‘Word is, she’s dry as pumice,’ he’d say. Or, ‘She stuffs sandwiches in her blouse.’ William McElhanie was sixteen years old in Silver City. I’ve always wondered how he turned out.

My brother Bob spent most of his first week in the city carrying on like a politician. He listened to excess, shook many hands, introduced himself to men of substance as a retired deputy marshal, and he bought shot glasses of good whiskey for the permanent residents though he was stern as a woman from the temperance movement when it came to the subject of liquor.

But he gathered information, he did not dispense it, so there were considerable moments of awkward silence whenever he lunched with strangers. Here I was of some use, for I could extemporize like a bicycle salesman. If a banker was discussing the Chicago Grain Exchange and had his thoughts peter out and got to staring at his fork, I’d get a nod from Bob and proceed to rattle on about Billy the Kid, whose true name was not William H. Bonney but Henry McCarty, of Brooklyn, New York, who’d headed west in a Pullman car and lived in Coffeyville at the a

ge of twelve and became a criminal after escaping through the chimney of a Silver City jail, held there for stealing laundry. ‘It isn’t gaudy,’ I said, ‘but it’s fact.’ The banker would be amazed and Bob would sit back in his chair and consider the banker’s face. I think my brother had a surprise in store for Silver City, but then he was introduced to Miss Eugenia Moore and got distracted from his plans.

It was Thursday evening of our third week there and I was speaking on subjects I knew nothing about to an audience of Bob and City Marshal Ben Canty, when the woman walked into the restaurant. Canty had a mouthful of boiled potatoes but put them out onto his spoon and stood with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar. ‘My, what a pleasant surprise,’ he said.

The woman walked over and smiled. She said, ‘Hello, Ben,’ and that sort of thing, shook the hands of the two Dalton boys, and spoke with me about Cass County, Missouri, where Bob and I were born and where she had her early raising, and where they say she’s buried now. Bob let me talk, as was his custom. He sat back in his chair with a toothpick in his mouth.