Desperadoes

She cooked pork sausage and four eggs for him every morning and washed the breakfast dishes. Then she window-shopped in a bustled dress and veiled blue hat and drank tea across the dirt street from the office where Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen worked at a rolltop desk with his files and newspaper clippings—he’d lost Bob and he’d lost Daisy Bryant; there was a rumor they’d left for Tampa. Tall Heck Thomas, who had a harelip scar from a pistol shot by the outlaw Sam Bass, was Madsen’s closest buddy and he’d carry in jars of banana peppers or chili; Deputy Marshal Ransom Payne would stop by to chat and rock back in a chair with his white sombrero on his boot toe; or dignified Bill Tilghman, later Oklahoma City police chief, would pull a miscreant handcuffed to him across the street planks to the office so Chris could copy a statement about us: we were planning a bank job in Carthage, Missouri; we’d stolen twenty-six cases of dynamite from the Army; Bob and one of the gang had fought and Bob’s eye was poked out with a spoon. Chris Madsen checked out every lie. And Mrs. Mundy would note all that and, wearing chaps and sheepskin and a ten-gallon hat, Bob’s red woolen scarf over her nose, she’d meet my brother Bill at cold feed stores in Stillwater, Vinco, or Agra.

Sometimes Doolin was with my brother, smoking his corncob pipe in a ladder-back chair and turning away when they talked about Bob. In Stillwater, in a snowstorm, she sat with my brother Bill and Powers and Broadwell in a wagonbed with a potbelly stove bolted to it. They roasted corn and drank to the holidays with grain alcohol and made coffee from snow in a frying pan. Then they decided to visit Bitter Creek Newcomb at the close-by ranch of Bee and Rose Dunn. She was Rose of the Cimarron; pretty and dark-haired and convent-schooled, for several years the sweetheart of both Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Doolin, but eventually the wife of a prosperous man whose name I won’t divulge. Her brother Bee Dunn was a badman himself so he made every kind of rapscallious outlaw welcome on his place; he even constructed the famous Rock Fort on Deer Creek, as lodging for men on the scout.

My brother Bill took Eugenia on a tour of the property. Their horses broke through snowdrifts and the two riders ducked their heads from the sleet; then Bill, in his fur-collared greatcoat and three-piece suit and galoshes, jumped from his saddle and waded through snow and tore away some stacked tree branches until he’d revealed a dirt cave. Eugenia nudged her horse to the entrance.

Bill stood inside grinning, his hands on his hips, tarps thrown off frozen kegs of water, cases of food, a wooden box of shotguns and rifles. His voice had an echo to it. ‘What’d’ya think? Pretty fancy? You give me time, Miss Moore, and I’ll have hideouts in every county. We’ll have the best escape and intelligence network the West has ever seen. I’ll have every sheriff paid off, every circuit judge bribed, every banjo-assed politician running scared for his job. They might even make me director of a railroad.’

Eugenia touched a handkerchief to her nose and lifted the woolen scarf up again. ‘Maybe you ought to go slow on this, Bill. Bob and I really do want to quit for Argentina.’

Bill blew on his hands. ‘My little brother isn’t the only train robber in the world. I’ve been talking a few things over with Bill Doolin. We may just reach agreement one of these days.’

Snowflakes were dissolving on her face. She brushed them away from her lashes. ‘Shall we go back?’

‘We could wait out the snowstorm in here. I’ve got a stash of food, mattresses, blankets.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Bill pulled the tarps back over his provisions and propped the dead trees again. He lifted an overshoe into a stirrup and swung on and slapped the snow from his pants legs. He reined his horse southeast towards Ingalls. ‘We’ll have a toddy at Old Man Murray’s saloon.’ He turned in his saddle. ‘Or doesn’t that meet with your satisfaction?’

She spurred her horse past him. ‘Sounds fine.’

He followed and for three miles never lifted his eyes from her deep tracks in the snow. When they tethered the horses

at Ingalls, he said, ‘I’m not really such a bad guy, Mrs. Mundy. I’m liked by most who know me.’

She slouched in a saloon chair drinking whiskey with Doolin, Newcomb, Broadwell, and Powers. Bill hung his greatcoat on the hall tree and walked from table to table in his chalk-striped suit, the buckles jangling on his overshoes, shaking hands and finding anything in the world to laugh about and paying for drinks with bills he snapped from a silver dollar money clip. Eugenia wore greased wing chaps and a nappy coat and her tall hat was canted down to her nose so that she looked like a male hired hand. She said, ‘That’s Bob’s money Bill’s throwing around.’

Doolin looked over his shoulder at my parading brother and back again at Eugenia. His voice was sweet with sarcasm. ‘Now how could that be? Bob didn’t get but a measly few hundred bucks from the Katy holdup in Leliaetta, same as the rest of us. And mine’s already gone. What about you, Bitter Creek?’

‘Swiped cash is fast cash, just like they say. I ain’t seen a smidge of my take in six weeks.’

Doolin settled in his chair and his eyes blazed at the woman. ‘See there? You must be mistaken.’

Down the block was Madame Mary Pierce’s whorehouse-hotel, so her chippies walked in, shaking snow from their coats, and stood at the bar reading catalogues and taking sweet gum out of their mouths. Bill sidled up to a girl with green eyes and henna-dyed hair who looked just about sixteen.

‘Do you know who Tom King is?’

‘Does he come here?’ she asked.

‘Tonight he did. He’s a gunslinger from away back. Put many a mean desperado under flowers. That’s him at the rear table.’

The girl looked and saw what she thought was a man in wing chaps with one leg over the arm of a chair, a red woolen scarf lumped up on his face, turning an empty shot glass.

‘The feller with the scarf?’

‘He’s fairly swooned over you since you walked in.’

‘You mean he wants me?’

Bill stripped a two-dollar bill from his clip. ‘Asked me to give you this.’

The chippy dragged her wool purse off the bar top and swung it as she walked over to Miss Moore. There were words and then the woman in the greased chaps glared at Bill and out of spite squealed a chair away with her boot and hauled herself up on the girl’s arm.

Doolin scowled and turned away in his chair. Newcomb and Broad well folded over with their sniggering. My brother shouted, ‘You two love birds snuggle up in this cold, y’hear?’

They slogged through snow and Eugenia heeled off her boots on the newspaper that was spread on the carpet; then they climbed the stairs to an upper room.

Later, Eugenia sat top-naked on the bed pulling boots back on over her wool socks and jeans and the girl lay flat on her back with the sheet drawn up to her neck, staring at the yellow gas lamp next to the door. ‘Some of the others, they said I’d get around to this someday. They said it would be a relief.’