Desperadoes

Julia looked at me with one of those ‘do tell’ expressions. ‘And who have you been talking to?’

‘Bill,’ I confessed.

She put her head back where it had been. ‘Bill. That’s what I thought. At least Bob doesn’t make believe.’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘That’s his real attribute. Bob neither shirks nor confuses.’

13

Miss Moore took a stagecoach from her bungalow to my mother’s Kingfisher farm where she helped with the canning and made applesauce and left a cigar box with two hundred dollars in it hidden behind the apricot preserves. At the standard Sunday meal with the family, she said she was moving to Guthrie to hunt work as a seamstress. Ben and Littleton ate like machines but my brother Bill let his fork clink on the plate and looked at her as he drank a glass of milk.

My sister Nannie Mae’s husband J.K. Whipple leaned over his mashed potatoes, his tie sliding in gravy, to see Eugenia at the end of the table. ‘What about Bob? Where’s he hiding these days?’

‘I honestly can’t tell you,’ said Eugenia. ‘Bob and I have split up. For all eternity.’

‘Well, that’s a bolt out of the blue,’ said Ben.

My frail mother folded her napkin, ‘Just the same, you’re welcome here irregardless, dear. You don’t have to be relatives to visit.’

Whipple whispered into his wife’s ear and giggled. Nannie Mae frowned. ‘Oh shush.’

The next morning Eugenia sat in a shawl and coat beside Whipple in his decorated sulky. The woodrows were furred with white frost that was turning to sweat in the sun. She could see the horse exhale as he walked; steam curled off his back.

‘I take it that’s true what you said about you and Bob going your separate ways. It isn’t just a smoke screen?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I could see how you’d profit if you threw certain people off the track.’

Miss Moore crawled down in her coat. ‘Everything became unbelievably complicated. This seemed the simplest thing.’ She saw Whipple smiling stupidly, at the harness and reins, a scour of barn dust high on his neck, blackheads sprayed over his nose: the face of a chimney sweep. She said, ‘I’ll miss Bob very much but I doubt that I’ll ever see him again. I’m telling you this because you’re family. He’s retired the gang and resigned from train robbing. He’s leaving for Tampa, Florida, soon.’

‘You’re a fountain of news, young lady.’ He grinned self-consciously, like they should be pals.

The barbed wire fence to her right was tufted with brown cattle hair. A bunch of white-eyelashed Herefords stood in hoarfrost, staring at her. Steers climbed up on each other.

He said, ‘I’m a meat market proprietor, Miss Moore, and I have an associate in Guthrie I’m trying to swing a deal with. Name is Mundy. Mr. Mundy. Never been married. Lived with his sister for thirty-two years until she passed on to her final reward. He’s looking for a housekeeper and being as you’re looking for work I figure we might just satisfy a whole slew of situations. Now Mundy ain’t young and he ain’t handsome and exciting like Bob, but he’s stable and honest and owns his own house and butcher shop, and I reckon you’d be the most special woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Heh. He’d be beholden to me for many a year if I connected you two up.’

The woman in the shawl smiled. ‘Introduce us at lunch.’

Whipple talked business in the restaurant and wiped his plate with slices of white bread until it gleamed, while Mr. Mundy smiled at Miss Moore. He wore a gray wool sweater over a blood-stained butcher’s apron. He had a nose like a shoe and pouches under his eyes and a thin mustache that made him look Belgian. He paid for lunch and hung his apron on a nail in his shop and walked Eugenia to a scroll-porched white house with a white picket fence and a yard that he cut with a heavy iron push mower. He showed her the dark green sitting room and the kitchen with pots and kettles and skillets hanging over the stove, and the dining room with his cup and saucer and tableware already set out for his supper. They walked up quiet carpeted stairs to the bedrooms. ‘You’ll have my sister’s. The dresser drawers are cleaned out. There may be some dresses in the closet you’ll want.’ He walked to a walnut door and opened it to a bedroom that smelled of pipe tobacco. His hands shook at his sides. ‘And this is where I sleep.’

Eugenia brushed past him and sat on his quilted bed. Three scratched brown window shades were pulled down and the sun was on them like yellow hairs. His combs and brushes and shaving mug and razors were neatly arranged on his mirrored dresser. She looked at the books on his vanity. ‘Oh, you have the Montgomery Ward catalogue!’

‘You may need some household goods. I don’t know about those things. If you want anything just put the order in.’

Eugenia lay back on the bed with her hand behind her head and her dress curled off her ankles. He walked over to the bed and stood there. The black dye he used on his hair leaked from his scalp with sweat. Her left hand dangled against his pants leg. ‘Can I visit you in the night?’ she asked.

His left hand was in his pocket; his right hand reached out to stroke her hair. She kissed it on the palm and gazed into his eyes as she slid his hand over her cheek and down her neck and onto the laced bodice of her blouse. He took a breath and quavered.

‘You can touch me here—’

‘Oh God.’

She moved his hand lower. ‘—and here.’

He dropped to his knees and crushed her dress to his eyes. ‘I don’t. I don’t believe it. I’ve waited so long. I’ve been without companionship—she treated me like a child!’

She put her hand in his hair. ‘We’ll tell everyone that we’re married,’ she said. ‘My name will be Mrs. Mundy.’