Desperadoes

One hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece wasn’t hardly enough for the gang, so that night, after drinking potato whiskey, Newcomb and I left the camp at midnight to laugh like kids and thrash through the bramble and grabbers until we came to a horse pasture owned by George and William T. Starmer. We peed against a fence post and took off our boots and hats and slunk through the wet grass until we saw a dozen horses and foals asleep on their legs or reaching for short clover. I used comforting talk on the animals until I could pet the velvet of a horse’s nose; then I fed it sugar lumps and pulled it away to Newcomb with a rope thrown over its ears. A few got peeved and tossed away but many just nickered and sleep-walked behind us and in this way we got ten horses by three in the morning and rode them back in a trotting string made noisy by the two Yountis dogs. We picketed the herd with wooden stakes in the ivy and planned to leave with them in the morning after alteration of the brands.

George Starmer discovered the missing broncs when he carried out the milk pails. By six-thirty he’d collected his brother and William Thompson and four immigrant farmers they’d sponsored out of Sweden. And the first place they checked was the Yountis property because he was slovenly and disliked in the county.

The dogs announced themselves to skittish horses and Ol emerged from the shack in his bib overalls and he kept on rubbing his eyes as the farmers shouted. He turned his back and slammed the screen door behind him without ever answering them, so they rode around to the back of the yard and saw the puzzle of hoofprints and the broken weed stalks, the grass beaten down, and the farmers went after us in a rush, ducking low as the flanks of their horses to escape the maul of the trees. But Bryant had been sleepless with his pain and heard them soon after the dogs barked. And the gang was gone and somewhere in the trees when the farmers dropped from their horses.

William Starmer had been a military man in the War Between the States, and he directed a sweep through the forest, but it did the men no good because the four of us took off our boots and clothes and smeared ourselves with black mud and hunkered down under broad leaves while Bryant towed the horses south to the road. Then we crashed loudly through the weeds or we yodeled or pitched stones, drawing the farmers where we willed.

The farmers were unequal to it. They hunted like a parish men’s club out for a rabbit shoot. They fired at screams and shadows and flashes of a runner in the trees. Seven men used up four boxes of cartridges by noon. At which time they discovered themselves exactly where Bob had wanted them, in canebrake one mile from Beaver Creek, slapping gnats from their eyes, biting nettles from their wrists, feeling the sting of sweat in thorn scratches. Bob and I and Bitter Creek crouched behind a havoc of lightning-struck timber in the dark of standing trees, looking down at the brush-stopped farmers from topography known as Twin Mounds.

Bryant was with us, sitting with his trousers at his ankles and his sick parts exposed on a flat rock that was hot from the sun. Then he loaded the two chambers of a ten-gauge shotgun he’d bought from Yountis for thirty dollars. He buckled his trousers and limped over next to me. He said, ‘What do we have for targets?’

The immigrants were yelling in Swedish to each other and firing at the unseen but the four of us didn’t answer until we saw the front rank of men struggling in the weeds below us. Then Bob whispered, ‘Now,’ and we lifted our rifles overhead and fired down into the bracken without raising to see if we’d even got close to any mankind.

Somebody struck William Thompson at once and he slumped against a tree. When a friend lifted him to standing, the whole front of his shirt was sagging heavy with blood. The gang of us fired again but sporadically, cautious about the few unspent cartridges still in our pistols, the six cartridges grating together in our hands.

Two farmers pulled Thompson by the collar of his coat into a shaded clearing of wet leaves. ‘What a bellyache,’ he said. ‘Merciful Jesus, it hurts.’ He rolled to his side and vomited food and blood. He heaved until he was empty and it was coming out of his nose. A friend wiped Thompson’s face with his sleeve. ‘Feels like acid and razor blades.’

Word carried back to William Starmer who became so crazy with rage that he lurched straight at the two breasts of land where we were hidden, firing at us until he’d shattered much of the bark off the timber, until he’d used up all his shells. Weeds snatched at his legs like heavy dogs and he was clutched and slow and scratched in the face, only ripping his coat sleeve free of thorns, when Bryant wandered out into the sunlight with his ten-gauge and blew the jaw off Starmer’s head.

Bitter Creek Newcomb left Twin Mounds at a slow lope. He had one hundred fifteen dollars in his bedroll and one of Starmer’s brown horses jolting behind him on a rope and the brim of his hat slapped up in the front like a cavalryman’s. He stopped in a small town that afternoon, ate chili in a tavern, and drank warm beer with an egg yolk in it. He found the town prostitute doing laundry outside in a washtub and they leaned against a trellis that was strung with green beans. She was four inches taller than he was. Her wet sleeves were cold to his skin.

He had a squatter’s farm of sixteen acres near Guthrie that he arrived at on a Sunday. He swapped Starmer’s horse for a mule and some farm implements, and he gave over the next three days to cursing his animal and driving a two-blade plow, and his summer was spent walking the plant rows under the hot sun with a soaked bandana tied to his head, sloshin

g water from a bucket.

In June he had somebody who was educated, possibly Rose Dunn, a pretty girl he’d begun courting, print a letter to my brother that said, ‘I think you should consider expanding the gang to include Bill Doolin, Bill Powers, and Dick Broadwell, who are exceptional men with real sand in the craw who do not wither under gunfire. The railroads are getting nervous. We’ll want the extra security.’

Since I was closer to Guthrie than he was, Bob sent me to chat with Newcomb about the proposal and Bitter Creek agreed to make the necessary connections. And I sat up in bed that night to smoke a cigarette and saw Newcomb in a rocking chair on a hill of Russian thistles and blond grass in the middle of his property, feeling the gun in his lap like a blind man, clicking the cylinder around. A summer wind filled his shirt. He stared at the stars until his neck hurt.

After the gang dispersed at Twin Mounds, Bob gave me control of the horses and was bold enough himself to ride into Kingfisher where he paid for a bath and a haircut and had supper that night with Mom and our sister Nannie Mae and her husband J.K. Whipple. Whipple owned a meat market in Kingfisher and he later spied on us for Marshal William Grimes, the top lawman in the territory and later a Republican governor. Whipple gave Bob a six-cent cigar.

Then my brother splashed his horse along the river and hurried it up a silt bank where I was growing a smokeless fire. The stolen horses all had their heads down in the sweet grass, their tails flinging and shoulders twitching flies away, stomping whenever they walked. I was scraping dried green saliva from a clove bit so I didn’t take hold of the newspaper section on farm sales when Bob unfolded it for me.

‘Which one?’

He said, ‘The circled one, doorknob. Hundred fifty acres, spring-fed.’

I read about a farm sale from someone recently deceased. The bereaved were coming down from Wichita on Thursday to hold the auction. That meant we could hide the remuda at the farm for a day or two. ‘Is there hay in the barn there?’ I asked.

Bob nodded and poured an inch of coffee into a cup. ‘Dropped by to check this afternoon. Wasn’t nobody home. Best keep the horses in stalls until Annie Walker sends her buyer.’

I hung the bridles on a branch and then the two of us squatted by the fire and I stared as it burned down to nothing. He said, ‘I didn’t sleep at all last night. I just hunched next to a tree and stirred the dirt with a stick and tried to decide if I had any remorse for those men that got shot. I couldn’t find anything. Sometimes I wonder if I’m human.’

I said, ‘It’s the railroad’s fault, appears to me. They grab up land and cheat the farmers and make these tremendous profits. It ain’t right. They got all the money in this country locked up and pay almost no taxes at all. They’re the working man’s enemy, is what they are, same here as in California. And if somebody sides with them and gets killed in the bargain, welp, that’s too bad and it makes me miserable but it’s like that in every battle. This is civil war.’

Bob got a cigar out and pushed it against a coal and when it was drawing he stood. ‘I don’t feel guilty; I just feel sad. I guess that will disappear too.’

‘You leaving tonight?’

‘Yep.’

‘What do I do? Mail your half to the Hennessey post office?’

‘Care of Daisy Bryant,’ said Bob, and got up on his horse and hauled its head around. I doused the fire with what was left of the coffee and it whispered for a while.

I stared at the face of my pocket watch and told myself to wake up at three. I opened my eyes at 3:10, and dunked my head in the river and buttoned on a wool shirt and strung together eleven horses with quarter-inch rope I looped through the bit rings. And even with them kicking and jostling and making indignant noises, I had them stabled in the vacant barn by nine. I forked silage into the feeders and carried a bucket of oats from stall to stall and pushed their noses away. Once they cooled they gave off a smell like apples that’ve gone brown.

I locked the barn and walked through a hairy yard of rusty machines and tools and implements waiting for auction: three hog pens on limb skids, a bee house, a pile of harness and leather yokes, a roll of barbwire deep in weeds, and two unpainted wagons with extra wheel spokes in their flatbeds. I smashed out the window to the kitchen door with a dry mop and walked through a shut-up house with all the valuables crowded on the dining-room table or tagged on the living-room floor. Drapes lifted at me when I opened a bedroom door and I saw that Bob had climbed through the window and left the sash halfway up. On the lavender bedspread were the printed tags for what he’d stolen: ‘1848 New York crystal.’ ‘A valuable silver set made by Paul Revere.’ ‘A fine authentic oil painting depicting Venus and the four seasons.’