Desperadoes

I didn’t overhear all of this, lest you think me a sneak. Some of it I got later from Bob and some from Miss Moore’s letters to me at prison. Canty consumed two pieces of apple pie and I slumped across from him with my cheek on my fist. He scraped the plate with his spoon, glancing in their direction. He said, ‘They sparked right off, didn’t they?’

‘I can’t figure it out.’

‘I’ve seen ladies stir for gamblers, pimps, every kind of sinner. Seems to me the best sort of woman likes to be tainted a bit.’

Canty and I left the restaurant and I spent two hours in his office flipping through his brown photographs of outlaws hauled in dead by bounty hunters and leaned stiff as planks against jail-house walls.

My brother and Miss Moore remained in the restaurant until closing. Bob sat back in his chair with a toothpick and listened to her tell all she knew about the Daltons, which pleased him. Her information was substantial. Then the cook yanked shut her burlap curtains and Bob paid the bill and took off his boots and wool socks to walk barefoot with Eugenia on dirt streets as soft as talcum. They sat in deep blue-grass under mesquite trees beside the Mexican Catholic church, drinking rum from a hammered silver flask.

She said, ‘I was a schoolteacher and twenty-four years old and I washed my face with lilac soap and read novels by William Dean Howells. I spent my evenings grading papers on the porch or cooking in the kitchen, spooning melted wax into jars of apple jam. The only man I knew was landlord of what I rented. He was odorous and decrepit and he spoke ever so solemnly of the weather. He proposed marriage to me once and it took me a week to say no. Then I got my senses and knew I didn’t want a wooden ice chest or Chippendale furniture or the crawl of a husband’s issue in me each night in our four-poster bed. I didn’t want to be one of those sullen wives who glare at the camera from the front of a plain sod house.’

‘I can understand

that,’ he said.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty.’

‘How old is Emmett?’

‘Eighteen.’

She rolled her dress up over her knees for the cool night air. She said, ‘I saw your name on a wanted poster nailed to a telegraph pole in Dodge City, Kansas. The picture had not the neighbor of a resemblance to you but I subscribed to unsavory thoughts just the same. I thought of all the sweet favors I’d do this man Bob Dalton whom they’d given five hundred dollars for.’

They talked until the town was quiet and then they walked to her narrow room above the grocery store. They took off their clothes and Bob washed himself in her porcelain bowl, looking into the round spotted mirror. His face and neck and hands were red, the rest of his skin was milk white. He saw her crouched up under a Navaho blanket staring at him with half a smile. He walked over to her with his hand disguising his manly condition. She was wearing a yellow flannel nightgown that she allowed him to push up over her breasts when he called upon her body.

The next morning she cooked coffee in the fireplace, spread biscuits with comb honey, sliced oranges from California, and they ate naked and cross-legged on top of the sheets, discussing their ambitions.

Bob said, ‘We were fifteen kids on a hardscrabble farm near Belton, and then again near Coffeyville. The barns leaned; snakes slithered under the porch; rats went into a frenzy every time I walked in the corn crib. In March the winds would strip off the roof, nine or ten shingles a day. My sisters used to have to walk four miles to town for sale merchandise marked down from three cents to two. My dad was not a good provider. He tended a saloon; he swapped horses for the Army; he worked as a carnival barker and played square-dance fiddle, a nickel a set. It brought in hardly nothing at all. One winter we got so poor I had to wear my mother’s high-button shoes. And I can remember one time watching my dad talk with two livestock buyers at the gate. They wore black wool coats and round-topped gray cropper hats and when they leaned in their saddles their big irons showed. Years later, when the James-Younger gang got shot up on the Northfield, Minnesota, raid, my dad said at the dinner table, ‘Well, I guess now I can say it. Those men you saw were Jesse James and Cole Younger.’ He put his thumbs behind his suspenders and grinned like he was the richest man in the world. I think it was then that I decided I wanted to be somebody people remember, and not some no-account fool sawing a fiddle for nickels or wearing his mother’s high-button shoes.’

Bob got up from the bed and squatted by the fireplace to pour more coffee into his cup.

Eugenia said, ‘One morning I looked in the mirror and saw lines around my mouth. It didn’t take any more than that.’

6

The Dalton gang stayed in Silver City all of that summer and as long into the fall as our money held out, and Bob and the woman known as Eugenia Moore were together everywhere. They stood in front of the grocery store with the children and watched the circus parade and touched the nose of a camel. They sat on the blue lawn to the side of the moveable schoolhouse and heard a piano recital. And they got the photograph taken that is still around today: of Bob looking teenaged and haircut and stern in a smallish pink-striped tan suit and wrinkled white collar; of Eugenia Moore posed standing, her left hand on his left shoulder, she with a nineteenth-century woman’s hat and six yards of blue dress with a white frill of a blouse sleeve and collar showing; and neither of them facing the camera, both a little annoyed, as though the photograph was merely historical documentation and one of the obligations to their biographers they wanted done with soon.

And what of Julia? It worked out that I didn’t see her for over a year, but we kept up a mail correspondence that kindled our affections far better than my clumsy courtship ever had. I have always been somewhat daunted by female emotions, and flat-out amazed at the way they spend love as if it wasn’t something to save and purse away somewhere, so it was probably best that I was gone, for my sweetheart then was undergoing a romantic spell that soon would have exhausted me.

For instance, when the family still lived near Coffeyville, Julia would ride up to visit my mother and chat about me as they baked cherry cobbler. And she’d sit with my sisters on the white iron bed I’d slept in and, while Leonie swiveled in a dress she’d sewn, Julia would close her eyes and try to imagine me sleeping beside her there—the springs squashed down, my brown arm disposing of a pillow, my nose flattened against her thigh. She assumed my perspective and saw the kerosene smut on the ceiling, the plaster chip near the window sash, the crude pencil marks on the wallpaper that spelled, ‘I HATe coLLaRd GReeNs.’ She discovered shirts of mine in the closet and ironed them just for the chance to press them hot to her face.

She stayed with my brother Ben and his family for a week while his wife recovered from their fourth child, and Julia used her evenings to study Ben at the dining-room table as he tacked together a wren’s house, and she’d find me in his eye-brows and jaw. She’d say, ‘You’ve got brown hairs on your wrists just like he does,’ and Ben would look bewildered. And when Charles or Henry stopped by for coffee, she’d bake butterscotch cookies just to hold my brothers there long enough to quiz them.

‘You’re asking the wrong fella about Emmett,’ said Henry. ‘All I remember about him was that he made believe he was Jesse James’s son. This would’ve been when he was eleven years old. I mean he was convinced. You remember that, Ben? He had it all laid out how he was going to revenge his pa by killing Robert Ford. He was a character, even then. He couldn’t talk about a walk to the privy without some embellishment.’

‘He was colorful all right,’ said Ben. ‘Plus he’s got brown hair on his wrists just like I do.’

Julia dug out the Dalton family Bible and memorized birthdays and deaths. Sometimes she’d wake up when her father did and like a good wife have a special breakfast of blueberry flapjacks and sausage patties waiting for him when he returned from his morning chores and kicked off his boots in the pantry. ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ he’d say.

She’d brush her long black hair with my photograph in the lap of her flannel nightgown. She devoted hours to her diary, recording each night the fluctuating conditions of her heart and experimenting with her presumed name: ‘Julia Dalton,’ and ‘Mrs. Julia Dalton,’ and ‘Mr. and Mrs. Emmett Dalton,’ with the afterthought, ‘(and sons).’ Her perfumed letters to me would end in sweet complaint: ‘Why aren’t you here?’ and ‘Will I never see you?’ and ‘What can I promise to spur you homeward?’

It was nice to be revered and sought out but there was little in me to give back, and all I could muster in response to her was, ‘I sure do miss you. Love, Emmett.’

When I saw her again, the spell had worn off.

The gang congregated for the first time in a long time on a Thursday night in October, clomping up the wooden stairs to Miss Moore’s rented room. We were eager and loud and jovial and walked in like Christmas cheer, McElhanie carrying a brown bag of Congress Water and ginger pop and corked St. Louis Beer. Newcomb had some ears of sweet corn and he stoked the fireplace to roast them. Bryant sat down at the desk after his fashion, with his coat on and a brown wool scarf reaching up for his face. Newcomb opened the windows and the fire pulled the outside cool in and I played my mouth organ, announcing the songs before I commenced them. ‘Shenandoah,’ I said. ‘Oh, Susannah.’ ‘Shoo, Fly, Shoo.’