Desperadoes

‘I’m no better now.’

‘You oughta try New Mexico. They say the climate there’s pretty special. What time you got now?’

Ball opened his watch and snapped it shut. ‘9:41.’

Grat said, ‘I believe you’re lyin’, Mr. Ball. I’ve a mind to put a bullet through your eye.’ Grat thought hard. Vice-president Carpenter wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. Ball unbuttoned

his collar and peeled it off. Grat asked, ‘How much cash did your books show last night?’

‘Four thousand dollars. One thousand dollars currency and three thousand dollars in silver. It’s all in your sack. Nothing in the safe except some nickels and pennies and deeds to squatter’s farms. There’s money on order from the Denver mint but the express office hasn’t delivered it yet.’

Bill Powers listened to that, then pulled his rifle from the cashier’s cage and sidled to the southwest casement when he heard boots on the Walnut Street sidewalk. It was John D. Levan, the moneylender, and D.E. James, a dry goods salesman, come to warn the bank about the Daltons. I guess that sounds comical now but it was dang brave under the circumstances. I truly admire those men. Levan opened and shut the door and still had a hand on the inside doorknob when Powers clutched his coat sleeve and kicked him in the ankle so hard the old man fell to the floor like boxes. He split open his lip somehow. Blood spattered on his white shirt. The dry goods clerk sat down with his hands high and a bowler hat cocked on his head and he looked across at a wild-looking bank robber with a blue bandana over his nose.

Broadwell grinned. ‘Did you wake up this morning thinking this was your lucky day?’

The sound of a rifle climbed over a pistol shot and Broadwell looked over to the First National Bank where a string of pale businessmen stood on the bricks with their hands up while Cox and Cubine cowered in the drugstore and gun smoke rolled under the porch roof where a door casing had been splintered. Broadwell saw Bob walk out and fix north, then swing around and fast as that break apart Gump’s shotgun and his hand. Then Bob was in the green dark of the bank again and the hostages scurried away.

There was a dead silence for about a minute; then with the suddenness of rain, gunfire cracked off the Condon porch posts and bricks and metal roof, and a front window near Powers that was lettered BANK in gold paint crashed into pieces big as a carpenter’s square.

The men in the front room flattened themselves and Powers scooched to the brick wall where he slapped broken glass from the casement and put his gloved hand down on the windowsill for a rifle prop. He fired his Winchester six times, moving from left to right, then swiveled away from the window to load and hear the rifles from Isham’s chop at the wood sash and boardwalk.

Broadwell knelt by the southeast bank doors and saw Parker L. Williams stooped low on the porch roof of Barndollar’s two hundred yards away. The man was in his white stocking feet loading a Colt .44. Broadwell shot a half-dollar hole through the plate glass but the bullet strayed wild of the man on the roof and shattered some queensware stored on the shelves in Barndollar’s clothing department. Broadwell’s second shot broke a shingle in half; then Williams lowered his Colt in both hands and the revolver bucked up and the shot ripped through Broadwell’s right arm as if it was a long pipe. He tore his sleeve with his teeth and looked at blood and a tatter of shirt and the flat blue slug that split the bone. His shoulder screamed when his fingers moved. ‘I’m shot, darn it. I can’t use my arm.’

Powers looked across the room. Broadwell’s eyes were scared and his right hand dripped blood from the fingers. ‘It’s no use, Bill. I can’t shoot anymore.’

Powers had nothing to say.

My brother Grat hunched at the teller’s window but couldn’t see much for the gun smoke. Powers would fire up whole magazines, then sit with his legs crossed and load while bullets smacked the window shades. Broadwell was slumped against the brick wall with his eyes closed and his mask pulled down and his arm bloody and loose in his lap.

Grat went into the back room where Carpenter and Ball now sat on the floor out of harm’s way, flinching whenever a bullet peeled the wallpaper or punched a hole in the floor. Ball’s shirt was so soaked with sweat you could see through it. The skin of his chest looked yellow.

Grat asked, ‘Is there a back door to Eighth Street?’

Ball answered no.

There was.

Grat asked, ‘That time clock about to go off, is it?’

‘Nope,’ said Ball. ‘You’ve got a couple of minutes yet.’

My brother couldn’t manage it. He dropped to his knees and his hands squeaked on the rifle as they slid. Each shot from the street was loud as planks slapping together and his brain wasn’t giving him anything. He pushed the two-bushel sack between Carpenter and Ball. ‘You two grab that and carry it to the door.’

The two men bent with the weight of it and Grat walked behind them to the front. The room was blue with gun smoke and lead was flying every which way. Powers slumped by the southwest doors where the glass wasn’t busted out yet, loading a rifle that hung in the crook of his arm. Broadwell hefted up his single-action pistol and it picked up when he fired it south. His right sleeve was slick with blood and he could hear the bones grate in his arm when he used it. He shot T. Arthur Reynolds in the right foot. The doctors removed a toe.

A shot knocked a chair off one of its legs; a shot hit a fountain pen and blue ink spidered the walls.

The bankers lugged the sack and then dropped it. Powers said it looked too cumbersome, so Grat had Mr. Ball cut the twine with a penknife and haul all the silver out. The coins clinked and rolled on the floor. Ball refolded the paper money and pushed it deep and twisted the neck of the sack. Broadwell stared at the cashier’s work and rubbed the blood from his hands with a white hankerchief. ‘How much is there?’

‘A thousand dollars,’ said Ball.

‘I think you’ve been honkered, Grat.’

My brother didn’t say anything. He squinted through the blue haze in the plaza where the citizens were firing still, then took the grain sack from Ball and shoved it down in his pants and grinned. ‘I can’t wait to see their faces when we get away with the loot, can you?’

Broadwell let his right arm hang with a pistol and lifted his bandana up on his nose. Powers stood with his hand on the doorknob and nothing at all in his face. ‘Ready?’

Tackett got it all on film that is now orange and disintegrating.