Desperadoes

8

Afterwards they sat in the narrow bed with a bottle of red California wine Bob had wrapped in a gunny-sack, and the two of them made plans. He said he was tired of being poor and he was tired of being pushed around and he wanted to make a strike of some kind instead of always reacting to whatever the railroads did. She said Bryant and Newcomb were hungry enough for anything, that it was Emmett who needed convincing, but she had an inkling I wanted to make a name for myself, make a haul that would guarantee lots of money so I could stop mewling about it.

The next morning they took the train to Wharton, Bob looking shaved and clean in the coach with a saddle under his boot and a horse in the cattle car, Eugenia in the smoking car dressed in Bob’s photographed suit, her bleached hair slicked back to the color brown with pomade. She looked like a lady’s man.

Bob sat on the bench in front of the depot in Wharton, reading the local newspaper, and the man he got off with went inside to talk to the local express agent. ‘Hello!’ Miss Moore said loudly, but that was all Bob could hear. His horse was coaxed down the ramp from the slatted car. He watered it and wiped the sleep out of its eyes and threw on a blanket and saddle. And the man who was wearing his suit came out of the office and crossed to the water pump with a ladle. Bob walked over with a canteen. ‘What’s happening in there?’

Eugenia said, ‘I told him I was a telegraph officer from New York; that the western air was medication for my lungs. He says there will be a shipment of currency on the Santa Fe–Texas Express, stopping in Wharton at ten-thirty on the ninth. Marshal Payne admitted the same thing; said he’ll be riding with it as escort.’ She drank water and wiped her mouth crude as a man and smiled. ‘The agent looked a little scornful. I fear he thinks I’m effeminate.’

Bob smiled and put the stopper on his canteen.

She said, ‘He doesn’t know me like you do.’

That was May 6th. On the 9th Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant rode the hard dirt highway from Newcomb’s shack near Guthrie to the stockyards south of Wharton, which was a cow town of five or six stores made of foot-wide unpainted planks. It is bigger now; named Perry. The four of us wore chambray shirts and chaps with the oil worn off and twisted red bandanas at our necks. We hung our spurs on the saddle horns and tied up our horses at the railroad cattle pens and walked to the tracks at ten o’clock, loading our revolvers in the darker side of buildings.

Bryant limped badly, swinging his leg with each step. He already had his mask up over his nose, which would’ve been a giveaway had anybody been up in the town. He noticed Bob staring at his infirmity and said, ‘I got the whore disease. My balls are swoll up like fists and my fly is caked green in the morning with pus. Brings tears to my eyes when I piss. They tell me you get suppurating sores and cankers like Bing cherries. I’d want my jaw blown off with a ten-gauge rather than worsen.’ He glanced at Bob. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

Bob said, ‘You tell me when you want it finished and we’ll walk behind the barn together. But don’t do anything stupid just so you can exit under fire.’

Bryant didn’t know what to do with his face so he smiled underneath his bandana.

‘Don’t kill anyone, understand? If you want to be shot dead, I’ll do it. I don’t need a murder charge tacked onto everything else.’

He stared at Bryant until he turned. Bryant said, ‘Hell, I wouldn’t want to offend anybody. Not for anything.’

Bitter Creek and I had walked on to the depot. A male passenger with stains on his clothes was asleep on the varnished bench. A boy who was the night station attendant and telegraph operator, whose name has not survived, was buffing his Sunday shoes. Newcomb asked for the ladle Eugenia had used and walked out to the pump, scouting; I looked at the reward posters for three other men and then a yellowed one for the Daltons. I walked over to the counter and folded my arms and leaned against it. ‘Pretty quiet,’ I said.

The boy looked at the shoe his hand was wearing as he buffed it. ‘You got your ticket?’

I didn’t answer. Newcomb walked back in, wiping water from his red mustache and goatee, and then the two of us left.

Newcomb said, ‘I think the lawmen must go to bed here at darn near eight o’clock. Walked all the way down the main street and never even heard a bed squeak.’

I looked down at him and said, ‘How do you suppose he got to be a ticket agent and not even sixteen years old?’

‘Maybe it’s easy, Emmett. Maybe there was a “Help Wanted” sign. Should I get you a job application?’

‘Seems like a good life to me. He’s got himself a blue suit of clothes at home I bet. Plus a railroad pension. I bet he’s got a black lunch box he carries to work. I don’t believe I’d mind that at all.’

Bryant was north on the road bed, squatting near the interlocking machine at the double-track junction, smoking a brown cigarette. Bob leaned against the mailbag post, his pocket watch open in his hand. I walked over next to him while Newcomb crossed the tracks and sat down in the soot-blackened grass, his back against a pile of taken-up ties.

My brother stared off down the tracks where the Santa Fe would come from. ‘I can remember the first time I rode a train. Farmers stopped their plows and wives came out of their houses, drying their hands on their aprons. Children stood in fields of yellow grass and waved until their arms got tired.’

I said, ‘Won’t that be something when the news gets back to California? Won’t those railroad detectives be peeved? Grat will laugh so hard he’ll cry.’

I heard the rails hum and I saw Bryant throw down his cigarette up ahead, and then I saw the train, all smokestack and smoke and cowcatcher, the white steam flying out from its brakes. The engine boiler made its chattering noise while the wheels screamed on the rails, and the stoker was hanging onto the cab rail by one hand, the other hand swinging a lantern low and then holding it up to see Bryant. Newcomb ran out of the grass tugging his bandana up over his nose. Bob and I lifted our bandanas up and walked onto the vibrating cinder bed and stood facing the train like gunfighters. Bob raised his pistol high over his head and fired, wincing when gunpowder stung him.

Bryant yelled, ‘Brakes!’ as the train clanked past him and he let go a shot at the firebox that rang off metal and banged into something else. Newcomb was plugging his ears at the screech of steel; then he ran alongside the locomotive and hopped up onto the footrest as it slowed. He struggled up the two-step ladder and shoved his pistol straight at the engineer’s head, striking him hard enough behind the ear to start a trickle of blood and knock him onto his right leg. Then Bob was in the cab with his red mask up and his broad hat pulled low. He slammed the stoker against the boiler and slapped him with the flat of his pistol. The stoker groaned and sat down on the floor with his cheek in his hand. Bob glared at the engineer and took him by the striped coat and swung him off the stopped locomotive. He hit the cinders stiff as a chair. I kicked the engineer off his hands and knees and pushed a boot heel down on his throat and clicked the hammer back on my pistol. I was too scared of myself to talk. The pistol quaked in my hand.

The stoker in the cab had tears in his eyes. The newspapers said he was fifty-two years old. His left cheek was as swollen as a balled-up woolen sock; his left eye was drooped and closing. He said, ‘What do you want us to do? Say something.’

‘Get down from here,’ said a masked man.

The stoker cautiously climbed down a ladder step and jumped.

Bryant was walking backwards past the passenger cars, limping like a man with a six-inch wooden shoe. He held his pistol straight out with both hands, lifting it from one window to the next. Faces ducked out of view.

After he heard Bryant’s gunshot, the Wharton ticket agent rushed out from behind the counter and suffocated the lamps. The train conductor took off his cap and sat down on his step stool, frozen. The mail car attendant, called in those days the messenger, jammed the bolt up into its seat at the top of the door and threw the double latch bolts above the handle. Then he removed the money of large denominations from the safe and stuffed the bills into a Franklin stove, where we missed them.