Desperadoes

My wife had the grace to seem flattered by that sentiment, and it was printed verbatim in the next edition of the Star, along with everything else I said during that long afternoon. A hotel limousine carried us to the Eldridge House, passing under a banner that welcomed my wife and me, that swelled and subsided with the winds. And we were shown to the Governor’s Suite, where lunch was wheeled in on four wooden carts. My wife and Macdonald huddled together, discussing the schedule for that day and the next, Julia canceling the more rinky-dink affairs with a simple cross of her pen.

John Tackett dearly loved playing host, and he entertained us with stories through most of the meal. He said, ‘You know what I was ruminating about this morning? About how it was when you and me casted that movie about the raid.’ He turned towards Macdonald. ‘There must’ve been a hundred boys in audition, each of them scowling worse than the one before and shouting bandit talk as they waved two pistols around, and every one of them giving Emmett scared looks as he sat there in a theater seat putting check marks next to their names.’

‘Any stars in the bunch?’

Tackett ignored the question and said, ‘Afterwards Emmett and I would drink sherry and I’d work at convincing him about what a million-dollar idea it was. I’d say, “Do you know how much money there is in these Westerns? Do you have even an inkling of how America craves stories like yours? You’re going to be a rich man, Emmett.”’

‘And he was right, wasn’t he,’ said Macdonald.

I didn’t answer, but Tackett winked and said, ‘I always was pretty savvy that way; just like his brother Bob.’

That afternoon we were on tour. My wife and I sat in the back seat of Tackett’s green La Salle and Macdonald sat in the front with a note pad, recording whatever was said as we rode slowly down the streets of a town that had radio shops and grocery stores and Tackett’s two movie theaters where once there were houses and vegetable patches. A mailman walked down the street and mailboxes clinked. Boys swerved down a sidewalk on bicycles with balloons in the spokes. A woman rocked on the porch of her house, flapping her apron dry; a man stood in his yard with a garden hose, water trickling off the nozzle onto his shoes. Every once in a while someone would wave at Tackett’s automobile and he’d acknowledge by lifting a finger off the steering wheel. He said, ‘This is the way they rode into town that morning, right in on Eighth Street.’

Macdonald said, ‘I see.’

Tackett said, ‘Along about here is where they found Dick Broadwell dead. His horse was standing over him and it reared up whenever anybody got close. I guess they couldn’t pull the corpse away for a long time.’

Macdonald turned in his seat to see me. ‘Is that true?’

‘I really can’t say. I was sort of distracted that morning.’

Tackett continued, ‘Then on Saturday Dick Broadwell’s kin came down from Hutchinson, Kansas, and demanded his remains, his horse, and the $92.40 the sheriff discovered in his braid wallet. That’s why there’s just the three men buried there now. Nobody ever came for Bill Powers. Name was probably an alias.’ Tackett looked at me in the rearview mirror. ‘Maybe we could show him the grave.’

At Elmwood Cemetery I stopped first at my brother Frank’s gray stone monument and then strolled under the shade trees to the potter’s corner next to the railroad tracks. The burial plot was marked by white-painted stones at each corner, and my simple granite slab with three names chiseled in it lay hidden in deep blue grass at the head of the common graves. Tackett stole a red-flowered wreath from another plot and Macdonald wanted to photograph me placing it near the headstone, but instead I leaned against an elm tree and bent to light a cigarette with a match, and when I lifted my head Macdonald was standing across from me with his pencil in his pocket. ‘You miss your brother Bob a lot, don’t you.’

‘I miss all my brothers.’

‘But Bob especially?’

I squinted from the cigarette smoke. ‘I miss the past,’ I said.

Julia and I had room service breakfast the next morning with Tackett and Macdonald and three representatives from the Chamber of Commerce who wouldn’t let go of my hand once they shook it, plus two other surprise visitors, Charley Gump and Jack Long. Gump was seventy-seven years old, a dealer in secondhand parts for motor cars, a lean, bald man with a dark mustache and eyeglasses with black circle frames. He seemed pleased as Punch just sitting with me on the sofa, and he w

as quick to show off the mangled scar on his thumb that my dead-eye brother gave him when he swung around at the First National Bank and blew his shotgun to smithereens. Then blond Jack Long, a stout and cheerful man who was by then in his fifties, spouted about leaning on the porch railing to stare at the Condon bank until I punched the windowglass with my rifle and yelled, ‘Get away from here, son, before you get hurt.’ Then Tackett told the men, ‘It took three doctors to dig all the buckshot out of Emmett’s back. I stood over Emmett, fanning him with a magazine during the whole operation. He told everyone his name was Charles Dryden and wouldn’t admit his real name until they dragged the bodies of the gang upstairs so he could study their faces and allow they were dead.’

I managed to smile at most of the stories but finally I stopped listening. I put on my bifocals and sat under a lamp with my legs crossed, and I saw my company only when I licked my thumb and happened to look over the top of my newspaper.

There were photographs in it of yesterday, of me with my hat in my hands and my head bowed, praying for the souls of my brothers, and another of me with John Tackett in the hotel dining room, examining the chamber of my pistol, and a third of Emmett Dalton astride a dark horse in the woods of Onion Creek, ‘where the raid was planned.’

Julia was fastening a necklace in the bureau mirror; Macdonald stood next to my chair, rubbing a cigarette out. ‘Ready?’

And the Dalton party took the elevator down to the lobby where there was a large audience of applauding people, drugstore clerks and foundry men and secretaries in polka-dot scarves, and under the shade of the hotel’s roof were gas station attendants and boys chewing gum and house painters in white coveralls, men in dark suits and gray felt hats, two schoolteachers with small schoolchildren, and flashbulbs going off when I waved my left hand.

I walked to the First National Bank just as I had at twenty and little boys tried to place their shoes on whatever bricks I stepped on. Maybe a thousand people gazed in awe as I stood at the doors of the Condon bank, my hand skating over the riddled wood, and gave my version of the Great Coffeyville Kansas Raid. Then I crossed Walnut Street just as my brother Grat had, recalling aloud the withering gunfire and wagon barricades and the smoke hanging at Isham’s. I walked with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where my brother Bob was killed. I scraped my heel in the cinders to indicate the place where I lay dying, and then I saw that the crowd had retreated, and there in the alley in black suits with red ribbons on their pockets were six survivors of those men who’d shot at me there forty-five years before. One sat in a wooden wheelchair; two leaned on canes; they shaded their eyes from the sun and grinned at me, and then they slunk up to shake my hand.

The end