Desperadoes

She closed the book Italian Journeys and slid it under the vanity. He stood next to her bed in his striped pajamas, his fingers twitching by his legs. ‘Can I climb under the covers with you?’

She smiled and pulled the quilt aside. He curled down with his cheek on her breast and his eyes pooled. ‘I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I get so suspicious and angry. I resent everything you do. Then I contradict myself. I want to give you the world, fulfill your every heart’s desire. But I’m not a rich man; I’m a butcher. I’ve already spent everything I had. You’re a beautiful lady in a country of rude, evil men.’ He kissed her breast, her nipple, the hand that lay on his head. ‘All I can offer you is myself. And I get so scared that I won’t be enough.’

Mrs. Mundy was quiet: then she said, ‘I’ve been misleading you. I don’t have sick cousins anywhere. I’ve been gone because I’ve been consulting a variety of doctors about a serious illness I’ve contracted. None of their medications seem to work. My last hope is a rest cure in Silver City in the New Mexico Territory, but they say it will cost in excess of a thousand dollars. You’ve been so generous with me already that I couldn’t possibly mention the malady or their prescription for fear you’d want to care for me and we aren’t married, I’m not your responsibility, anything you did would be just too much, too much, and I don’t deserve it. I’ve treated you very badly.’

‘A thousand dollars?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid so.’

He crawled up to her and whispered, ‘Who’s B? Who’s E and J? Who’s Bob?’

They were motionless for a long time; then Mundy slid out of the bed and walked in his old man’s slump to the door where he leaned a hand on the wall. ‘I don’t want to know about him,’ he said. ‘I want you out of this house.’

By then Bill’s wife Jenny and two of their six children had arrived in the Oklahoma Territory. He’d mailed her a post office money order of a hundred thirty dollars to pay off a bank note in Visalia but she’d used it to buy three railroad tickets and some twenty-five-cent basket lunches and she made the long trip east by train with three rope-tied suitcases and a hatbox.

Bill left his little boy and girl with Littleton in Kingfisher and took his wife up to Coffeyville for a second honeymoon. They stayed in the pink suite of the Eldridge House and saw Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury at the Opera House across the street. He introduced her to Charles Ball of the C.M. Condon and Company bank and they asked for a loan on a two-storey house in Havana, Kansas, that would be big enough for a family of eight. His collateral was the wheat farm in California that his father-in-law was now managing. But there was a financial panic in Wall Street and Washington in 1892 that was nearly equivalent to the Depression we’re just climbing out of, and it was a bad time to need money. Ball gave them an application to complete, a procedure not common then, and Bill tore it up and littered it as he stomped out of the cashier’s office. He crossed the bricked plaza to the smaller First National Bank, which looked like a hardware store, and parlayed for a while with Tom Ayres, the chief cashier. Again he was denied. Ayres said, ‘I’m not trying to crawfish out of it, Bill, but it’s something I simply can’t do. This bank can’t be dealing with Daltons. Your brothers’ve gummed it up for you.’

So Bill remained with his wife and kids in Bartlesville for a week and then he snuck down to the sod house, bringing two angel food cakes and his fiddle, and we had a jamboree that night: the Dalton gang and three stout whores who sashayed in corsets and garters, plus two scrofulous job applicants about three years younger than I was whom Bob invited to stay for chow but then to mosey on.

/> Visitations like that were becoming common as we gained in notoriety. Plowboys and scudders and gandy dancers, sneak thieves and Mennonite farmers, would stand next to their horses in the rolling grass a mile or two away and then wade in to the sod house with their coats buttoned up in the heat, grinning from two hundred yards out so as to illustrate confraternity and good will. All they wanted was to see us up close and clamp handshakes on an outlaw and say that when the subject was Daltons, they read every word the newspapers had to say, disagreeing the while with the slant most publishers took. They said we were great lions of the plains, living legends, saints, that we’d already bested the James gang and our names would be enshrined and writ large in the annals of history. At nightfall once a girl of thirteen hiked her dress up for Bob and pleaded, ‘I want to have your baby.’ My brother merely said he was in the middle of the Farmer’s Almanac and he wanted to see how it ended. It did not surprise me that Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen had us under surveillance there, nor that a photograph of the sod house was in a swelling file kept closed with three rubber bands.

The day the news arrived that Robert Ford, the coward who shot Jesse James, had himself been assassinated in Colorado, my brother Bill came down to celebrate with two angel food cakes. He asked me if I wanted to go to the river and squeeze cornballs on hooks and maybe snag some channel catfish. I didn’t mind, so Bill and I lazed in sticker grass with trotlines set out and fishing line tied to our toes, like a calendar painting of a better American past.

Bill said, ‘I’ve got another job planned.’

I spit the shells of sunflower seeds.

He said, ‘It’s in our old stomping grounds: Pryor Creek. Train runs from Kansas City, Missouri, to Denison, Texas. Should be perfect for us.’

I said, ‘It’s too soon to bushwack a train again, Bill.’

‘Says Bob.’

I licked the last seeds out of my palm and slapped the dust from my hands. ‘Well, he’s the executive.’

‘You’re his favorite; you suggest it. You tell your pampered hero to hold up that Pryor Creek train and he’ll have travel fare to Buenos Aires or Vancouver or Hartford, Connecticut. Then he can couple with that blond bitch in Woodward and raise himself a whole board of directors.’

A raccoon trundled along the bank and stopped to smell a fish head. I untied my line and reeled it in on my fist. I said, ‘You must need the money pretty bad.’

‘I’ve got four kids who barely remember me sleeping on the front porch of my father-in-law’s farmhouse. I’ve got a crippled girl with a leg brace that pounds and squeaks when she walks. I’ve got mice in the sofa and toads in the well and right now my financial affairs are a thousand percent more dismal than Dad’s ever were. I’ve spent all my loans and borrowed still more and if my mule dies I’ll be bankrupt. So yes, I need money. I need money bad. Emmett, I’m on my ass.’

I stood up and walked to the sod house where the three braying prostitutes were squirming out of their dresses. ‘When, Bill?’ I asked.

‘July.’

Miss Moore had repaired to the Woodward bungalow and Bob rode up there to quench himself. He sat on the porch swing at evening with her, shelling green peas into a tarnished pan, his boots hooked like ears on the back of a spindle chair. The pea vines laced an arched trellis that gated the backyard where he’d tied his horse to a picket ring stamped in the earth. Baked rhubarb pie was cooling beneath a white dish towel that flies were crawling over. The split pods were dropped to a newspaper that was soaking gray at its folds.

‘Bleh,’ she said, and dropped her paring knife into the pan. ‘I feel so middle-aged.’

Bob smiled. ‘Can’t allow that,’ he said. ‘Let’s play a quick game of kick the can. Let’s have a spelling bee.’

She plucked the brown hairs of his arm. ‘Do you think we could brazenly stroll down the street, like normal people, like lovers?’

‘I reckon.’

They took their socks off and walked in land blue grass to the Woodward depot, then teetered on rails still warm from the sun. They clutched each other and swayed down a road and Eugenia giggled when Bob whispered. An old man with his shirt off snapped hedge clippers at a forsythia bush while his wife watched them, screened by the door, her hands in the deep pockets of her apron.

Eugenia asked, ‘So when is Pryor Creek.’