By that time the men in the smoker had begun their preparations. They snapped shotguns closed or pulled up their socks or stood on the platform between the cars urinating onto the couplings. Then the conductor opened the connecting door and said, ‘Pryor Creek, the next stop,’ and they sat like quiet schoolgirls. ‘Sweet Jesus, the Daltons,’ a man said.
But the Dalton gang wasn’t at Pryor Creek. Kinney stood on the iron walkway between the smoker and baggage car and squinted into darkness and cinder smoke, his tie flying wild in the wind. Then his tie settled on his shoulder as they slowed and he saw three railway detectives with legs spread wide on the platform, rifles relaxed in their arms. He saw the fireman swing down and talk with a man in white spats. They waited three minutes and all they heard were crickets and the slow pant of engine steam.
The bandits were at that time striding the main street of Adair, the next stop north, in every variety of wide, scurvy hat and striped collarless shirts and famous black raincoats, blue bandanas loose at their throats. The horses were tied to the town water tower where Pierce sat on a springboard wagon peeling the sunburn off his thumb of a nose. Three-pound pistols in grimy brown holsters sagged from our trouser belts near our front pockets. Doolin had a Winchester crossed over both shoulders; Newcomb, Powers, and Grat had their rifles hugged close, as you’d carry a long loaf of bread.
The night train was a summer event in small towns and Adair wasn’t sleeping at all. Lace curtains curled out under a window sash and I could see a girl with her short legs stuck out straight on an overwhelming stuffed chair while her father picked at a banjo and the oil lamp flame grew and lessened in its glass chimney. There was a girl skipping rope with petticoats flouncing and a bent woman weeding marigolds who straightened when we passed. A boy was riding a bicycle in circles with a small squealing boy on his handlebars. Two doctors were in the drugstore reading the label on a brown remedy box. A woman sat on an upstairs windowsill for the breeze, looking on like we were railroad crew and that we must be especially hot in our coats.
I hunched at a back depot window, smelling window putty, and I saw the unsuspecting Katy ticket agent chewing the hairs of his mustache, turning the pages of a Prudential life insurance brochure. Then my brother Bob banged the back door open and the man’s head jerked up and seven giants stalked in, spurs clanking and black raincoats shrieking and boot heels pounding the slivery floorboards like we were stallions in heavy lead shoes: a bad nightmare of meanness, the stuff of night chills and story books, the scariest bunch of desperadoes that ticket agent ever saw.
A coat tree wobbled and little Newcomb kicked it over, a branch snapping off into a dance on the floor. Bob clicked a hammer back on a .45 caliber pistol and stuck it straight out to touch the nose of the agent who was standing up from his desk. ‘You keep those hands up and don’t say a blessed word,’ said Bob. ‘Don’t even think about talking. Back up flat to the wall and sink down until you’re on your butt. If I look over and see your hands at all moved, I’ll lean over this counter and blow a hole the size of a bucket in your crotch.’
I stood there being ferocious while Doolin pushed a castered chair aside and slammed desk drawers over onto the desk top, picking up from the paper ruckus quarters and matches and a white box of Smith Brothers cough drops. Powers sat with his ankles crossed on a quiet hickory rocking chair at the front of the depot, a rifle standing in his lap. Newcomb was in the back room clawing boxes open with a garden sickle. Broadwell unlocked the money drawer and handed some limp paper bills through the grill to Bob. Broadwell pushed the drawer shut with his stomach and I saw the agent staring at the legs of Broadwell’s jeans, which were stickered with cockleburs and foxtail and had yellow seeds in the cuffs.
I wasn’t doing anything. I was the lookout, I guess. There was a calendar on the wall with a long arrow drawn through a week of dates and ‘Harold Higgins on vacation’ printed over it. A glass ashtray cradled a crusty black pipe.
My brother Grat slouched around, smelling like green cheese and fish heads, making noise with a bleached axe handle he’d picked up, striking a bench seat, a sill, a waste can, a clock, like a circus bear with a tin dr
um. He bashed some mahogany wall pigeonholes and a stack of MK&T tickets slewed out. He stood in front of the ticket agent and before I could yell out Grat’s name, he whapped the axe handle bingo into the man’s nose, the sound like a snap of your fingers. The man cried out in pain and blood gushed over his chin and shirt and he fell down to his elbow with his nose skewed over like it was hinged. He kicked out at my brother’s shins and said, ‘You bastard, what’d you do that for?’
Bob stood on his toes to see the man’s bloody shirt. He asked, ‘Was that really necessary, Grat?’
Grat smirked and walked out the front door, and I collected Newcomb and the package loot, and then the whole Dalton gang was gone from the waiting room, there for barely three minutes, leaving behind us chaos and silence and the very first robbery of a depot in American history as far as I know. We stood on the board sidewalks or sat on benches and talked brief sentences to each other. The boy on the bike rattled up to the depot; then he turned his bike around. Mosquitoes whined in the air. I walked the railroad ties and saw a woman shooing her children into the house, her hand latched onto a boy’s wrist, while a crowd of elders stood under an elm tree, talking and gesticulating, and a man in slippers climbed down his porch steps loading a double-barreled shotgun. Don’t know what ever happened to him. I hooked my steamy raincoat over my pistol butt and walked back to the depot, theatrical as they come. I was sweating like sweat was my full-time job. Powers said, ‘Looks like we’re going to have an audience.’
Doolin said, ‘They won’t be around long.’
The station agent stopped his nose bleed with twisted railroad stationery and sat obediently with Broadwell on the front bench. Bob wavered a lit match over the schedule board until he found what he wanted and blew out the flame. ‘Comes at 9:22,’ he said.
Passenger train Number 2 was then about three miles away and men who’d boasted after Pryor Creek about having repelled the Daltons and made us turn tail now sat stony on their cushioned green seats, swaying with the coach, sweating and smoking and letting the scares crawl all over them. A man vomited into his hat. Reports indicate that at least three of that crew walked out to piss and flung their rifles away, and the cowards crashed through coach doors to the rear of the train where they slid down into safer passenger seats with their badges in their pockets.
The engineer pulled the whistle cord twice and saw the Adair way signal flash red and he threw up the long throttle valve lever and turned the valve cutoffs that let air pressure escape from the drive cylinders. Steam rolled out white and unribboned in the air and the boiler gauge arrow swung left and fell while the air pressure gauge arrow climbed and they were coasting with the bell ringing loud and the engineer hanging an elbow out the cab window while the fireman drank the last of his vacuum bottle of coffee, what trainmen call crank, and fastened a sweaty suspender strap on his overalls. The engineer pushed the valve levers for the drive cylinder brakes and the steel tires screeched on the rails. The fireman said, ‘There’s two men in black raincoats at the depot. That would be the railroad guards, I suppose.’
‘Oughta be more than two.’
The fireman leaned out to see and got swacked in the neck with Grat’s bleached axe handle. Then the ladder clanged under Grat’s boots and I was hooked on the left ladder with a dangling leg and my pistol was cocked in my hand, the grip seated on the board floor next to the ash-pan damper handles so the gun was pointed mostly at a tallow can they used for oiling cylinders.
There was a purple mouse under the stoker’s hand at his neck. The engineer asked his buddy if he was all right. ‘Neck’s just a little scratchy,’ he replied.
I was still making an effort to climb into the cab. I shouted at the two crewmen, ‘Hey! Look down in this direction!’
The engineer looked down at me, at a burly boy with steel-colored eyes and a blue mask over his nose, while the fireman touched the welt on his neck and backed away from Grat who was then large in that hot square of space. Grat poked the engineer against the furnace with his handle and heaved against the air-brake lever and momentum jerked us a little off our boots. The engineer leered at my brother’s exposed pistol, which waggled in a holster near his watch pocket. Grat noticed and said, ‘How would you like your nose broke? I just discovered a talent for it.’
The engineer smiled. ‘Could I still drink whiskey?’
While the train was still rolling, Kinney had lifted a window shade in the club car and seen the depot platform and Bob and Broadwell solemn at the elbows of the ticket agent. Sid Johnson, a man with prominent cheekbones and squint wrinkles around his eyes, peeked under the shade on the left side of the train and saw Doolin pass below him, stroking his red mustache and staring toward the caboose. Johnson raised his pistol and whispered, ‘Bang.’
LeFlore stood at the front connecting door waiting for Kinney’s go-head. All the other volunteers were sunk down in their seats with their hats off, revolvers cold in their hands, fear of us recruiting them man by man. Kinney said, ‘Okay, this is it,’ and stood in the aisle like a boss politician. ‘Well, boys, shall we go out and fight them?’
I guess his boys didn’t answer.
Johnson, LeFlore, and Kinney braced on the seesawing iron platform, hearing the slow click of the wheels and some words in the engine cab and the abrupt extra whine of brakes when Grat muscled the air-brake lever. Then Kinney leaped from the stairs into a sprawl of soot-black ivy that was taking over a coal shed to the left of the train. LeFlore and Johnson hung waiting a second for the train to stop, then scurried inside the coal shed’s open door. That’s when I saw them, when they ran from the club car like children playing let’s pretend. I thought they were frightened passengers and didn’t pay them proper attention.
Kinney maneuvered into the shed and the three of them stood there in silence for several minutes, smelling coal dust. A black cat skipped across some crate tops and dropped to the earth and rubbed against Kinney’s pants leg. They quietly listened to the cinder crunch of Dalton boots on the roadbed and heard Bob shout for Grat to bring the stoker and a coal pick back to the express car. Sweat blotted through their shirts. LeFlore had his pistol cocked and next to his ear and his eye kept sliding toward J.J. Kinney. Finally, Sid Johnson said, ‘Should we get them now or wait for the suspense to build?’
I looked down the siding and saw Newcomb and Doolin standing in weeds like signboards, and Powers, Broadwell, and Bob pounding the wooden door of the express car, and suddenly the three lawmen in the coal shed cut loose and a bullet hit the ladder kapang and then a dozen shots struck off the boiler, triangulating inside that steel cab so that not one of us should’ve been spared; deflected slugs that were flattened like mushrooms whizzed close to Grat and me and the crewmen but not even a raincoat was nicked and all we heard was clang and peeyow as the hot lead swiped at our faces. Grat and I were quick with our guns and returned two shots for each we received, letting all fly at the coal bin since the firebox had blinded us to night-seeing and we couldn’t pick out the three bushwackers to draw a bead on them. The engineer and the fireman bellied down to the floor; ricochets sparked off the drive wheel eccentrics, and a wild shot skidded a coal shovel off the tender and it landed bawong in the grass. (If I sound excited, I am; I was.) I rammed six cartridges into my smoking chamber and waited for a pistol flash intended to rip my face off, and I fired everything I had straight at it. I must’ve done that several times. A man traveling from St. Louis later claimed that over two hundred shots were exchanged before the firing lessened. He must’ve been an accountant.
Then Bob drew his pistol and crouched under a baggage car to see how many were the shooters, and he saw men he recognized: LeFlore sitting down on an abandoned shuttle car that was poked through with weeds, cupping his left elbow, blood bulging out of his coat sleeve. Kinney had been downed by us too. His white shirt was twisted out of his trousers and his pale belly showed, so that he resembled a workingman napping in the grass at lunch hour. Sid Johnson knelt in a coal pile, his right arm out stiff and the pistol smoking out of its muzzle and chamber. The pistol kicked up when he pulled the trigger and then he let his arm stiffen again.
My brother Bob waddled underneath the carriage until he wasn’t twenty feet from the shed. And he said, ‘Sid Johnson! You old scalawag!’ And the deputy marshal swiveled and then one of his five or six best friends, the one who could turn the pages of a Bible with a bent-sight .22, put a .45 caliber slug into Johnson’s shoulder and knocked him onto his seat in the coal. There were black circles on his trouser knees. (I heard when the doctors pulled off Sid’s shirt, his shoulder flapped loose like a stocking cap. ‘Boy oh boy,’ said Johnson. ‘Bob’ll never let me live this down.’)