Desperadoes

They weren’t convinced and I guess Bill left in a huff that night; then Bob and Eugenia collaborated on a letter to Broadwell, Powers, and me at the Skiatook bunkhouse. They faced each other at the kitchen table, reciting sentences and composing. Eugenia poured tea and Bob leaned on his fist and passed an index finger through the lick of a candle flame, formulating tortuous paragraphs that Miss Moore copied down in her perfect school-teacher’s hand.

The gist of the letter was that they wanted a gang of five men to attempt a bank robbery in either Van Buren, Arkansas, or Coffeyville, Kansas. Van Buren, because the Clinton County Bank’s president was Chief Marshal Jacob L. Yoes, who’d been Grat’s boss two years ago and chided him on several occasions. Coffeyville, because we knew the town and the banks seemed easy and the Condon and the First National had both had the gall to deny brother Bill a loan.

Eugenia walked with a teacup reading the letter aloud to Bob. ‘“But our plan is more provocative than it appears, for we choose not just to rob a certain bank in a town, but to rob two banks at the same time! an amazing exploit no other gang will dare duplicate, and awesome enough to overshadow the most famous raids of the James gang and the Youngers and others of that ilk.”’

My brother grinned. ‘Laid it on a little heavy there, didn’t I.’

She shrugged. ‘You need to evangelize sometimes.’

I received the letter a week later and showed it to Broadwell and Powers in the bunkhouse. They’d signed it, ‘Yours affectionately,?

?? but just above that scribbled in, ‘Your comments are solicited.’ I didn’t have many, nor did Bill and Dick, and I didn’t hear another word about banks from my brother, so I figured it was just something he’d worked out on paper because he was peeved.

I remained a cowboy through August and most of September, and Bob and Eugenia vacationed on their stolen money. They watched the sun go down from the porch swing with their coffee cups and saucers in their hands. They lay on top of clean linen sheets and saw the morning sun whenever a breeze pushed the bedroom shade. He told her again about the thousand longhorn cattle they’d have on the ranch in Bolivia or Argentina where pasture grass grows so high it tickles your chin. She told him about the white plaster walls and the red tiles on the floor and the orange flowers in vases of crystal. She told him she’d wear a sun hat and carry an easel down to the beach where she’d paint pictures of the surf and sea gulls and South American fishing trawlers.

They picked green apples from the trees behind the farmhouse and they made love in the cool of the morning and night. And he smoked a pipe of Danish tobacco on the sofa while she read him poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

“‘Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”’

Eugenia closed the book. Bob blew pipe smoke and sat there.

18

I think the informer was Bill. I think he rode down to Cowboy Flat, fifteen miles southeast of Guthrie, and talked with Doolin on the stoop of the Fitzgerald bunkhouse with tin cups of whiskey in their hands. It would have been night and the wind would have smelled like cattle and they’d talk about partnering in an outlaw gang, the Doolin-Dalton gang. My brother Bob’s plans for Coffeyville, Kansas, would be somewhere inside of that. Doolin would glance at my brother and act like he didn’t hear what was said about the two-bank job and he’d stand up to piss into pigweed, but before the month of September was half out, some cowboy with green scales on his teeth and a smell strong as turpentine would tell Marshall Jacob Yoes some of Doolin’s gossip about how it was with the Daltons and banks.

Yoes took it kind of personal that his bank was being considered and he printed the man’s words on yellow tablet paper and mailed a letter to Chris Madsen in Guthrie. ‘What do you make of this?’ he wrote. Three cases of government issue rifles were shipped to the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store in Coffeyville, and a dozen men wasted the last of September and October 3rd and 4th clicking magnets together, picking through plumbing supplies, expanding and closing monkey wrenches, while they stared across a brick plaza at the Condon and Company bank.

When Bill Dalton was reached at his Bartlesville farm on October 5th, he had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and was chopping with a hoe in his garden. A newspaper reporter stood at the gateposts with his skimmer under his arm. ‘Am I the first to inform you?’ he asked. My brother paused and leaned on his hoe. ‘Oh God.’

I think it was Bill.

In middle September, Bob and Eugenia closed up the Hennessey house and sold the animals and Eugenia left to stay a week at the stockman’s ranch of Dan Quick, her father. She said, ‘I’m going to South America. I’ve come here to say good-bye.’

He stood at the stove stirring a cauldron of chili. After a while he said, ‘I thought you said good-bye many moons ago, Florence.’

‘I did. It needed repeating.’

Powers, Broadwell, and I bid the Skiatook ranch good riddance when Amos Burton rode out from Dover and said Bob required us. It wasn’t that I thought yea or nay about banks; Bob assumed I’d be there, so I went. The four of us stayed a week in the dugout, playing Monte next to a bonfire at night or relaxing in the sun smoking cigarettes with the broad leaves of Paradise trees on our heads. And when Bob came in from the west at last, my brother Grat was with him, two crockery jugs of cornmash in his lap.

Bob uncinched his saddle and unfolded the horse blanket on grass where the sun was while the men sat in the shade of the dugout overhang, rolling tobacco in papers and passing the jug. Bob slapped his hat off on his pants and found a curry-comb in his saddlebags and squinted at me over the rump of his horse. ‘You make your proposal to Julia yet?’

‘Nope.’

‘That’s something we’ll have to do then.’

I said, ‘She won’t marry me. I mean, it’s not like she’s some mail-order bride. She’s like Miss Moore; she can have her pick. I’m gonna ask but she won’t elope, not Julia. I think I’d be kind of disappointed in any girl who’d want to settle for me, anyway. That’s true, I would. How smart could she be? Julia’s going to say NO in capital letters. And I don’t blame her, not one bit.’

My brother seemed to think all that was funny. He said, ‘I believe your sales talk could use a little work, boy.’ Dust floated from the horsehide whenever he raked the comb. The mare’s coat was polished with sweat where the blanket had been.

I said, ‘I reckon you and Eugenia had yourselves a good time on her farm.’

‘You bet,’ said Bob. ‘It was romantic as hell.’

I stood there with thumbs hooked in my chaps and a cigarette between my fingers. I said, ‘Women can fix it, can’t they.’

The gang made Kansas by dusk of the next day and Coffeyville at midnight. This was practice, a trial run, Powers’s and Broadwell’s first real acquaintance with the town. We broke our horses out of a trot when we entered the Coffeyville city limits and walked Eighth Street past the Farmers’ Home into the downtown business district. The street lamps were lit at the corner of each block and Ozark breakdown fiddle music was coming from the Masonic Hall at Maple and Ninth Street, but it was quiet and black otherwise and Bob had some trouble making out structures. Out of a sock in his saddlebag he got some reading spectacles I’d never seen him wear before and he hooked them on an ear at a time. ‘I can see clear to Nebraska with these.’

He stopped his horse in front of the Opera House and said, ‘We’ll wrap the reins over this hitching rail. That puts us in striking distance.’ Then we followed Bob in a walk around the west side of the Opera House past a short alley that no longer exists, that’s now filled by the Chamber of Commerce office, the side limit of that alley being the rear of the two storey Luther Perkins building which was narrower in front than back because of the angled convergence of the side streets of Walnut and Union, the resulting trapezoid considered as baffling an architectural wonder in the Sunflower State as the Flatiron Building was to New York. It was an 1890 construction, the pride of the town, as fussy and gimcracked as wedding cake, and occupying its front windows and first floor was the C.M. Condon and Company bank.