Desperadoes

He opened the door to Bob Dalton, who pushed in followed by Powers and the rest of us, stamping our boots on the rug, opening cabinet doors, letting a water glass roll off the table and crash loudly to the floor.

The owner’s wife was sitting up in bed, drawing a sheet up over her nightgown

. I’d only seen her before with her hair braided and circled on each side of her head like earphones. Now it frayed long over her shoulders. Bob sat on the bed and bounced it, squeaking the springs. He smiled at her. ‘Am I a figment of your imagination?’

The woman cooked supper and the cleaner four of us used the bathwater in a single wooden tub, and then we slept on iron bunks in the rear of the place, an hour of nightwatch assigned each man.

I woke up at noon to see Bob on the striped mattress beside me, the very same on which I would lie dying in something short of three months. He had a tin cup of coffee and the Coffeyville Journal, the Stillwater Gazette, and the Kansas City Star, each spread open to the story of the daring train robbery at Adair. I got up on an elbow and he handed me a small, handwritten, railroad poster that was torn where the tack holes had been. Dated yesterday night and rushed out to every depot in three states, it said the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway Company would pay five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of each of the masked men engaged in the robbery, to an amount not exceeding forty thousand dollars. (I have that poster on file.)

Bob grinned at me as I read it. He said, ‘Forty thousand dollars. That’s the largest reward ever put on the heads of an outlaw gang, bar none. And that’s not mentioning the offerings attached to us still from California and Wharton, Leliaetta, and Red Rock. I am impressed as hell with myself.’

I groused, ‘Well I’m plain, flat-out tired of trains. I don’t want to hear one word about them. What would make me darn impressed with myself right now is if I was to interview and land a two-dollar job digging sump-holes, or filing nails to a point, or stacking canned figs in a grocery store. I’ve had a bellyful of excitement.’ I plunked the newspapers onto his mattress.

He said, ‘I guess most folks would shoot a little higher for the stars, Emmett, but each to his own vista I always say.’ He slumped back on the bed. ‘But let me tell you about our next job. I’ve been thinking that banks are where the money is.’

‘I’ve got wax in my ears,’ I said.

‘My! You’re already churned and clabbered on the issue, aren’t you?’

‘Yep. You’re talking to yellow headcheese. You ain’t gonna get me theoretical about banks, Bob. I’m just gonna sit here and stink.’

‘Dear me, I went and did it, didn’t I? I got you in a snit. I better hide before you start chucking pillows.’ He got off the bed and walked barefoot to the front room where he bummed a cigarette from the owner he’d tied to a chair.

* * *

We stayed in Coffeyville two nights, which was stupid, because somehow word got out that the Dalton gang was headed south from there and a posse of thirty men piled out of wagons for an ambush at the Caney River crossing. They dunked handkerchiefs in kerosene and wiped their skin to keep mosquitoes and chiggers away; then they squatted in high weeds and sweated and itched in their coats, or they sloshed through the river in high rubber boots to sit under the bridge, waving their hats at gnat swarms, staring up at the rotting, moss-green, overhead boards.

They would’ve had us for sure except they’d tried to recruit Julia’s older brother Garrett and he talked about the ambush at supper that night. She excused herself from the table and dressed in Garrett’s overalls and a blue denim jacket. She rolled up the cuffs and snuck out of the house to saddle a gray mustang that she galloped along the hard, moonlit road in the direction of her intuition. I recall that we heard hoofbeats like the wooden block noise they use in radio plays, and the gang trotted our horses into the dark of blackjack trees and sat there with hands on our holstered pistols.

I recognized Texas Johnson’s mustang, then Julia, and she cut from gallop to stop when she saw me ride out of the trees. ‘Emmett, thank goodness I found you,’ she said. Her horse nodded with his exertions and pranced around in a circle and I grabbed ahold of his bridle and walked my horse alongside as she warned me about the posse at the Caney ford.

I saw Bob and the others sitting on their horses in the trees. Newcomb lit a cigarette. I said, ‘It was brave of you to interfere.’

‘Why? Because you’re wanted men? Because this makes me an accomplice?’ I couldn’t see her eyes well enough to know if they carried tears but there was a pitch of anger in her voice, and she chose her words with care. She said, ‘I still care about you, Emmett. I know that doesn’t matter much to you but it’s more than enough for me.’

‘You know what I heard about you? I heard you’d taken up with a farmer who honks when he laughs, and with a cowhand forty-five years old who calls you Daughter all the time.’

‘They just live at the house. They’re boarders.’

I stared at the road and watched my horse twitch his right ear free of flies. I said, ‘What’s that mean when you say you care about me?’

She said, ‘I suppose it means I’m going to be steadfast. I’m going to be the girl you send pictures to and visit when you’re in the neighborhood, the girl who pines away at night and will probably soon be bereaved.’

My brother Bob rode over and she pulled her high-headed mustang around and galloped home in her brother’s clothes. He called hello to her but she didn’t answer; then he signaled the gang out of the trees. ‘You get everything squared away?’

‘Everything is just grand, Bob. Thanks for asking.’

The gang sashayed across the Caney River about a mile away from the posse and we got into no trouble at all. Then we split up. Grat and Doolin went southwest to summer at Cowboy Flat; Pierce and Newcomb returned to Bee Dunn’s Rock Fort at Ingalls. Bob walked his horse off to Hennessey, where Eugenia had set up housekeeping again after her return from Silver City, New Mexico. Broadwell and Powers and I headed south for a bunkhouse at Skiatook, near Tulsa, where we could cover as hired hands and I could salt my money away for my South American fantasy.

I had the alias of Charlie McLaughlin when I worked on that Skiatook ranch; Broadwell was Texas Jack Moore again, and Powers was calling himself Tom Hedde, after a local badman he had a resemblance to. It was unbelievably dull work. I’d be in a saddle under an unpleasant sun sometimes seventeen hours a day, sore in the crotch, perspiring, walking my horse among hundreds of Hereford cattle. Their hides were glossy with sweat and their white eyelashes opened and closed on bluebottle flies, and incapable steers would keep climbing up on heifers until I kicked them off, raking my spurs on their pink nostrils if I could. I’d look across a panorama of heat wave and dust and dry yellow grass and see Broadwell in his dust goggles and his red bandana over his nose, dragging a wide-looped lariat, and Powers would have a brown-stained sombrero off and canteen water dripping from his hair, and the cattle would ruminate and stare as if I were the least challenging example of God’s creative imagination, and I couldn’t hardly believe that I’d ever robbed a train or scared any of the brave, stout hearts of the West. I forgot my fears and my arguments with Bob that quick. And I canceled out everything Julia had said. I wanted to be a dangerous man again.

Bob stayed quiet in the two-storey house near Hennessey. There he and Eugenia had a milk cow and three chickens and zucchini, green peppers, and corn in a garden marked with string. He walked the plant rows in the hot sun, sloshing water from a bucket, a soaked bandana tied to his head, while Eugenia sat in the shade of an elm tree with a wooden butter churn.

Then my brother Bill rode out to visit, bringing along a newspaper he’d picked up at a barber shop. He drank whiskey and water on the front porch swing while Bob read an account of an outlaw gang that had walked into the town of El Reno and robbed a bank in broad daylight. It had been ten in the morning and the streets were crowded with wagons and surreys, and women walked from window to window in their bustles and parasols, but the bandits strode right in and the wife of the bank president fainted and the gang remounted their horses with ten thousand dollars in a satchel.

When the article stated the outlaws were presumed to be Daltons, Bob slapped the newspaper down. Then he and Bill walked with their heads down and threw apples against the barn wall and made plans that they discussed with Eugenia as they washed and dried the supper dishes.

Then there must’ve been an argument about limiting participation, whittling down the gang. Newcomb was too interested in marriage these days and with him went Pierce. That was fine. But my brother Bill couldn’t fathom why Bob would want to cut out Bill Doolin in favor of Grat. ‘Doolin’s tough and smart and dominating, and Graf, well, he’s my brother and I love him dearly but the poor guy is dumb as a turnip.’