Desperadoes

When Eugenia returned to Guthrie the next night, Mr. Mundy was in the dark at the dining-room table with knife and fork in his hands. She was wearing a collared white cotton dress over which she tied on a yellow flowered apron. She carried a candlestick out from the kitchen cupboard.

‘It gets dark so early these days. Don’t you want light in here? Your supper smells delicious. You get along without me very well.’

Mr. Mundy carefully cut up two lamb chops, crossed his silverware on his plate, and sat very still with his fists on the tablecloth. He could hear Mrs. Mundy pumping water into a percolator and lifting the black lids on the stove. She called, ‘Do you want your coffee now?’

He didn’t answer. The candlelight fluttered.

She pushed open the dining room swinging door. ‘I could bring applesauce up from the cellar. Have you had applesauce with lamb chops? That’s one of my favorite combinations.’

His voice was croaky. ‘May I ask where you’ve been?’

She looked at his white shirt, his narrow hunched shoulders, the black dye stain on his neck. ‘Certainly.’

He waited. ‘Where?’

‘A cousin in Ingalls was sick with the stomach flu. I had to stay up with her all night. Mercy, I hope you don’t catch it. I seem to be immune.’

She walked outside and lifted the broad cellar door, letting it whump in the snow. She got a jar of red applesauce from the board shelves and screwed off the lid and smelled it. She leaned her forehead against the earth wall.

14

My brother Bob left Woodward soon after Bill came up with his proposition and he stayed in a sod house until late December with an Osage Indian on Bluestem Lake near Pawhuska. They fished from a rowboat for smallmouth bass and crappie and fried them with bread. They’d sit in the weather in rickety chairs and smoke shredded weed in clay pipes they’d made. All of this is contained in his copious diaries of that period—the temperature varied only thirteen degrees in his entries; there was a skin of ice on the lake every morning; a fish froze near the surface and birds walked around it on the ice, cocking their heads and pecking. Sometimes it would be three hours before the Indian and Bob said anything to each other. The Indian believed that he could fly around the chimney at night; he would walk into the house as Bob made breakfast and say, ‘I have been flapping my arms.’

I guess Bob was bored stiff with that because he saddled a mare and spent a weekend with me in Big Jim Riley’s bunkhouse, pitching pennies, cooking brass for a bullet mold, and stringing Glidden barbwire with me in the cold. I’d nail the wire snug and look up to see Bob shivering with his hat pulled down, his coat collar up, his hands pushed deep in his pockets. ‘We’re going south, darn it. I didn’t rustle and rob trains to end up with sniffles and fingers about to freeze off.’

By that time, Eugenia had put the first and last month’s rent money down on a small, peeling house in vacant Greer County, which was then Texas land, a hundred miles southwest of Oklahoma City and twenty-five from the nearest settlement. The furniture and kitchenware came from the Montgomery Ward mail-order house in Fort Worth, charged to her husband’s account.

Bob took a rag-leather suitcase with him and stayed there through the winter, making ten-hole wren houses. Eugenia would visit Mr. Mundy in Guthrie just long enough to soften him and stuff an envelope with his money and pick up any newspaper that had Bob Dalton’s name in it. Then she’d be back with Bob in the creaking bed at Greer with stories about the jasper and about incidents I would have been inclined to keep secret. For example, Eugenia’s night in Madame Mary Pierce’s house at Ingalls, with the girl of the henna-dyed hair. Bob said he’d heard already, from brother Bill.

‘Does it upset you?’

‘I find it mysterious, that’s all. Maybe I shucked it from my brain.’

He walked outside and shivered in the night air as he stood naked on the soft board floor of the outhouse. He smelled ammonia and lye. He imagined a naked woman kneeling to a woman on a bed. He walked back to the bedroom rubbing the gooseflesh from his arms and he stood behind her as she unpinned her hair in the tall dresser mirror. She said, ‘I wanted to find out what it was like with a woman. It was curiosity mostly. Afterward I was afraid that you’d feel spurned. You shouldn’t be, you know.’

He could see his clavicle, the jut of his hip, how each sinew was tied onto a bone; he saw the sway of her breasts under a collared white nightgown of flannel, and the hidden green veins of her hands. He picked yellow hair away from her brown eyes. He said, ‘I love you; I don’t own you.’

The money was gone, except what Bill had invested, which he claimed was turning profits like a small manufacturing business. We weren’t living that high, as the foregoing should’ve made amply clear, but we had to make payoffs and gifts to every tickbird and sheriff and nose-wipe of a farmhand who could identify us from the REA Express photographs. Bob paid for a four-hundred-dollar pinewood stable for a rancher who’d hinted he needed one pretty badly. Because we kept rustled horses in one farmer’s stalls and his wife wanted their daughter to know the joys

of music, Bob had an eight-hundred-dollar piano hauled out on a wagon that flattened on its springs. Then we had supper of ham hocks and chick-peas and listened to the girl hunt the keys until ‘Lead Kindly Light’ was over. A case of whiskey was dispatched every month to two craving deputies in Kingfisher. And in my study I can see displayed an 1873 Hopkins & Allen handgun given to a Dr. Steaman by my brother ‘for professional services.’ Don’t know what those services could’ve been, but then I wasn’t privy to every blessed thing about Bob.

It cost plenty but we needed the protection because we were hounded as badly then as the more vicious and profitable James gang had been twenty years earlier. A train was robbed in St. Charles, Missouri, on the same night that another was held up in El Paso, Texas, a thousand miles away, and yet we were blamed for both though responsible for neither. A rancher’s steer would turn up lost and he’d claim we chopped it up for flank steaks. A house broken into in Fayetteville; school desks overturned and ink bottles smashed on the blackboards in Durant; a jeweler burglarized in his Pullman coach at a nightstop in Amarillo: all bore, the newspaper said, the unmistakable traces of the Daltons.

And with that came detectives: Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, Bill Tilghman; then more. Book salesmen without sample cases walked door-to-door in Guthrie, looking the closets and living rooms over as they delivered a canned speech about encyclopedias; Pinkerton men sat on the cracker barrels in those general stores and post offices where Bill had received his steamed-open letters from his wife. The Southern Pacific sent Will Smith east to Kingfisher to interrogate my mother. He sat on the stuffed purple sofa with a burlap bag clutched to his stomach and his handkerchief pressed to his cheek, waiting for Adeline to return from the kitchen, while my sister sat leaning on a Shaker chair and touched her ankles together and stared. My brother Littleton stood in the kitchen doorway, drying his hands and frowning. Water spotted the front of his work shirt dark blue. ‘I’m given to understand you’re a distributor of sample garden seeds.’

My sister turned. ‘He’s waiting for Momma to finish cooking the ketchup.’

Detective Smith shoved the burlap bag aside and stood. ‘You’re Littleton, aren’t you?’

‘We’re not informers, Mr. Smith. We’ve had about enough of your kind.’

‘I know exactly how you feel. I must’ve lost all respect for myself to try this penny-waste disguise.’ He picked up the burlap bag and walked over to the front door. He saw a robin in the yellow grass of the yard. ‘Looks like an early spring, doesn’t it?’

When he left he slammed the door so hard a piece of window caulking broke off. Then he turned the knob and leaned in. ‘I pray every night that your brother Grat is not being picked apart by vultures. Out in the desert. Where I can’t see it.’

All these intervening years of meditation and repentance have not leached away my contempt for that man.

After his record-making one-hundred-and-seven-day journey over two thousand treacherous miles, my brother Grat rode into Oklahoma and the pole corral that Charlie Pierce had constructed in the cedar brakes near my dugout. A tickbird supplied the directions to it. Nobody was there of course, which surprised Grat; he didn’t know Bob had dissolved the gang. He found tins of deviled ham, sardines, and apricots I’d cached away in the damp earth next to the stove. He flopped back on a bunk mattress and jabbed open the cans with a pocketknife and spooned the food out with his fingers. Then he slept until the next day, washed with a brick of laundry soap in the South Canadian, and sat naked on the warm stones, letting the spring sun bake him dry, waiting to be discovered.