He said, ‘This is better than money can buy, Miss. You don’t see finery around these parts like this. Do you? The answer is no. This is San Francisco quality; every blessed piece.’
And they sat naked on top of the sheets upstairs with warm champagne and a white candle burning orange on a chair seat. She asked, ‘Do you enjoy having people afraid of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like your father better than your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Emmett your favourite brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Umm. If you had a choice would you rather live in the city or the country?’
He poured champagne into his crystal glass and put the bottle down on the floor. He drank the champagne looking at her. ‘City. New Orleans maybe. Next to the ocean.’
‘Do you dream about me?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Am I naked?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled and kissed him on the shoulder. She got off the bed and poured the rest of the bottle into her glass and blew out the candle on the chair seat. ‘When you’re inside me what does it feel like?’
He looked down into his glass and finished off what was there. ‘Ask me another question.’
Eugenia stared out the tall windows. The wind was teasing the curtains. She rolled the glass against her cheek. ‘Okay. Spend some time on this. Don’t give just a short answer. What do you think about when you’re alone?’
He rocked forward with a pillow mashed in his face, worrying it and muttering. Then he drank from her champagne glass and shut his eyes. ‘How famous I’m going to be. How it’s just around the corner.’ He opened his eyes as if that were enough.
‘Amplify,’ she said.
He shouted, ‘How famous I’m going to be. How—’
‘Idiot,’ she said.
He kissed her hand and put his head on her thigh and b
rushed the blond bangs from her forehead. ‘My name’s going to be in all the New York and Chicago and Denver papers; boys who only saw me once will say we worked a hay baler together, and Easterners who never stepped in a cow pie will make up adventures about me for Beadle’s Half-Dime Library. I’ll be as important as Jesse James and soon as I’m dead they’ll steal my clothes and auction off my pistols and strangers will visit my grave. I’m looking forward to it.’
She sat there in the dark.
He said, ‘Do you want me to ask you questions now?’
He never told me what they were.
9
They honeymooned all that summer. They’d sleep until ten and swim naked in Canton Lake and sit on a yellow porch-glider at dusk. They didn’t even farm. But they put tables in the front yard for a cookout in July and the whole of the Dalton gang was there: Bob, Eugenia, Julia, myself; and Doolin, Broadwell, Powers; Bitter Creek Newcomb and his buddy Charlie Pierce; Blackface Charley Bryant came with Miss Jean Thorne, and the black cowpuncher Amos Burton brought three prostitutes from Dover who ate their suppers on the back porch and later walked into the crab apple tree shade with the cowhands.
That was diamondback rattlesnake country. Newcomb and Broadwell stuffed their pants in their boots and hunted dry coulees and burnt ground and the stone rubble of hills with forked sticks and gunnysacks and they came back at two o’clock with a dozen live snakes that Broadwell dangled over the chopping block so they could strike and flutter their tongues before he lopped off their heads with a hatchet. Powers skinned them and Doolin fried them up and we ate them with scrambled eggs and strawberries on biscuits until the sun was glinting in the leaves of the trees and our black shadows were long in the grass. Eugenia stood at the head of the table and lifted a glass of warm tea. ‘Here’s to robbery,’ she said.
Newcomb and Pierce went out back to the shed where they practiced leaping from the tin roof onto their saddles. Doolin and Broadwell arm-wrestled, the loser having his fist slammed into a plate of butter, Broadwell red-faced and grunting, Doolin laughing in that odd way of his, ‘Hayuk hayuk hayuk.’ And Julia sat across from gentleman Bill Powers as he resined up his bow. He said, ‘My tomatoes burned up in the sun this year. Cornstalks went brown and shredded apart before they’d reached my knee. I chopped the heads off thirteen rattlers out by the privy. Walked everywhere with a hoe and was glad I never married. It’s too dry in the West for gardens.’
Julia looked especially genteel in that rough company. She had a parasol she stayed under for most of the hot afternoon and she gingerly lifted the hem of her white dress whenever she walked through the grass. My brother and I sat at the table playing checkers and she sat very quietly next to me while Eugenia sketched her with a copy of The Woman’s Home Companion that she was using to fan herself. I’d jump a checker and king myself and Bob would lean to gaze at Miss Moore’s drawing pad. ‘That’s very accomplished,’ he said.