‘I’m not exactly sure.’
He smiled. ‘There’s three thousand five hundred dollars in each of my saddlebags. Seven thousand dollars, Emmett. How’s that for a yearly income?’
I suppose I should’ve said something about it not being right to short-pot and steal from your friends, of doing unto others, but the words failed me just then.
He said, ‘I can see you’re disappointed in your brother.’
I asked, ‘What’d you do it for, Bob?’
He smirked and nudged his horse ahead and without facing me he shouted, ‘Greed, Emmett darlin’! One of the seven deadly sins!’
11
Grat was still in jail in California. With my brother Bill’s considerable help, he’d written several narratives about the abuse and indignities he’d suffered during his incarceration which the San Francisco Examiner had published. And he was reading the back pages of that newspaper when he noticed two brief articles reporting the September 15th robbery of a train in Leliaetta in the Oklahoma Territory, and a September 16th robbery of another at Ceres, California, two hundred miles from Visalia.
The Ceres holdup, of course, wasn’t ours. A Southern Pacific employee named John Sontag had been hurt pretty badly at work but the railroad wouldn’t pay him compensation, so he joined with Chris Evans and pulled some smallish jobs all over the state. My hunch is the Alila train robbery which Grat and Bill were framed with was the Sontag-Evans gang’s too. I know that Ceres was. But the Dalton name was famous then and we somehow took the blame for most everything lawless in the forty-four United States.
Grat folded the newspaper to the ads for ten-dollar suits, ‘made from an honest piece of cassimere.’ A prison trustee leaned on his mop handle to push a sloshing bucket on rollers down the aisle between the jail cells. He was a huge, slow, black man made forever back-sore from chopping cotton in Sarepta, Louisiana. He stopped at Grat’s cell door. ‘You know the law just hauled in your brothuh Bill again? Wants to ax him some questions about those train holdups.’
My brother licked a thumb and turned a page of the newspaper; then he noticed a hacksaw blade under the trustee’s foot. Grattan slipped it into an inseam of his trousers while the black man straightened the tongue on his high button shoes.
He said, ‘You don’t have to thank me. I been paid.’ He dragged his mop behind him, streaking the floor wet; then he was gone.
The jails were not very difficult in those days. My brother sawed the bars at night and covered the damage with lampblack and soap. And after supper on the Sunday evening of September 18th, three days before his prison sentencing, Grat Dalton popped four bars of his window into the gravel outside. They made a pong sound when they hit. He stood on his bed and climbed out; then two other prisoners walked from their cells and dropped into the dirt behind him.
From a Baptist church hitching rack, the three of them stole a light buggy and a team of gray horses that were powerful enough to pull a beer truck. At Goshen the two jumped a freight train north while Grat drove ten miles farther to the ranch of a gambler he knew named Middleton. This Middleton was a toothless man who constantly wore the same white shirt that he laundered once a week. He gave Grat his mattress for the night and hitched the buggy and horses back in Tulare to throw the detectives off; then he loaned Grat an Appaloosa horse and a canvas tent and half his closet of clothes. He sketched a map of the Sierra foothills above the town of Sänger. ‘I’ll be up in about a week with tobacco and fresh meat,’ said Middleton. ‘A convict named Riley Dean may be around there already. You have any money for the grub?’
‘There’s sposed to be a check waiting for me in Visalia.’
‘Okay. You stay pitched in this vicinity—’
‘Where the X is,’ said Grat.
‘So I’ll know where to find you.’
Grat folded the map inside a blue flannel shirt that had the bacon grease smell of the rancher, pulled down a high round-topped gray hat, and slapped the Appaloosa ahead with the reins.
After he was gone, Middleton rode down to Visalia to read the wanted posters and collect a fifty-dollar check intended for Grat and mailed care of general delivery by Eugenia Moore. He spent it on a desk of twelve drawers and three secret compartments. Then he rapped on the glass of the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office and a deputy turned in his chair. Middleton opened the door. ‘I wonder if you and me could jaw for a bit.’
But Grattan was more canny than people gave him credit for. Horse and rider climbed a winding bridle path into thin air, Grat ducking under tall sequoia pine trees, hooking on a mackinaw, cradling a single-action rifle. Then he tore up the map and let it flutter away and swung right instead of left. He said, ‘What’s that fool done to your lungs, horse? You sound just like a freight train.’
Afternoons, Grat slept on black earth and blue pine needles, or he fished for trout in a tossed mountain stream that was so cold it made his sinuses ache when he drank it. He whittled forks and spoons out of green wood and hardened them in a fire. In a brand new baking soda can he kept rocks that seemed like animals to him: lion, magpie, buffalo head. At night he lay inside the tent with his hands behind his head, watching cigarette smoke ascend to the canvas and flatten out, or he’d open his trousers up and imagine pasty women and his semen spill would dry crusty on his stomach.
He fried squirrel for breakfast one morning and saw a greyhound that was just ribs and tail slink out from the trees. Grat threw a squirrel strip in the dirt and the dog snatched it down; she broke a hard biscuit in two and coughed on it and Grat poured water into his hat. Then the escapee named Riley Dean walked out of the trees in torn shirt and trousers, a big stick in his hand. ‘I see you’ve introduced yourselves,’ he said. ‘Do you have food? I’ve been eating cave bats and that’s it. They sit in my stomach like glass paperweights.’
My brother hid with Riley Dean until the California winter rains came, which was snow at that altitude. A posse used information supplied by Middleton and risked the weather and crags and cliffs to climb Mill Creek Canyon in search of the two dangerous men. They caught Dean as he waded through drifts in his shirt and trousers.
Grat was with the greyhound hunting a small pocket mirror he’d dropped, when the dog lifted her head and whined. Grat stood and brushed the snow from his knees and heard the creak of a wagon and the cough and rasp of too many horses; and he backed up to the tent as the dog glanced over her shoulder, then back to whatever was down there. Hair stood up on her back as she growled. Grat tied his clothes inside a shirt and shoved what food he had in the pockets and sleeves of the mackinaw, and the dog was barking loudly as he grabbed his canteen and rifle and hurdled over scrub brush and snowcapped tree stumps into a drifted gulley. He heard the greyhound say everything over again to the horses, and he lay on his belly in snow that had yellow grass poking through it. Aspens rattled in the wind; a bird folded its wings and sailed out of the blue sky into the green of the pines. My brother saw the veined legs of roan quarter horses, then heard the springs of a wagon and more horses scrabbling up the stones of the hill.
The dog was talking to them from the white ashes of the fire. Riley Dean was bound and gagged in the wagon. Soon a deputy sheriff and six other men in derby hats stood around the
tent with shotguns and rifles carried in two hands like they were abnormally heavy. The sheriff yelled, ‘We’ve got you covered, Dalton. Come out of there with your hands up.’
Grat sat deep in the snow, roofed by a spread oak, and saw the possemen in their dark suits and fur coats and trousers tucked into Wellington boots. A mustached boy with a long muffler let his shotgun blast the canvas flap and then another gun went off and then all of them were firing. The tent pegs broke and the pelted canvas flapped and gunsmoke reached into the trees. It was loud and then it was quiet and Grat slid down the mountain shale dragging his stuff through the snow. The dog chased after Grat, and a deputy in a string tie stood on the brink of a cliff firing down at the dog and the snatches of mackinaw coat that he saw. Grat crashed through snow-heavy bramble and dodged between trees and after he sloshed across a flashing stream he sat against the mud bank and looked up. Aspen leaves were curling with the smoke and the posse was shooting every which way. Then they must’ve lost heart because the shooting stopped and Grat never saw the posse again.
The dog limped to the other side of the stream. Her front right paw had been destroyed by a bullet. Blood had splashed up on the dog’s face.
‘You stay there, you hear? Don’t follow me. Stay.’