Zee sifted white flour into a bowl and said, “This isn’t my kitchen. We’re renting.”
Bob let the water dipper sink in the bucket. He scratched his calf. Zee spooned bicarbonate of soda from a canister and set it down. Bob was about to reach for the canister in order to read it but Zee shot a glance at Bob’s knuckles and he stalled. He sniffed a sliver of brown, gritty soap; Zee mashed cream of tartar into the bicarbonate of soda with a soup spoon. She asked, “Why are you so antsy?”
Bob improvised by saying, “It’s just this cussed boredom. This sitting around inside the livelong day, getting into your hair, getting slow and sleepy, making jail house dogs of ourselves.”
She looked at Bob with some animation and attention subtracted from her eyes, as if she were recalling something even as she spoke. “He’s sometimes gone for months. We sometimes change houses five times in a year. It’s gruesome being hunted, Bob. He can stay in his nightshirt all day if he wants; I’m just grateful that he’s around.”
“You can see it’s damaged his mind some,” Bob said.
She ignored his comment by rubbing flour from her palms with her apron and returning to he
r recipe.
Bob watched her work a minute more and said, “You’re making a cake.”
THEY WALKED TO A POOL HALL at nine on Saturday, and as the Fords shot eight-ball, Jesse maneuvered among the pool tables, letting players clap him on the back, making jokes, remembering names and relationships, visiting corner tables if anyone called him over, which was frequently and with gusto. A gunsmith chatted with Thomas Howard about a .22 caliber pistol the man carried inside his boot. Mr. Howard said, “You can’t more than make a man itch with that article,” and soon the two were in good-natured argument about marksmanship. They settled on a competition and walked outside to the alley with a starved-for-entertainment crowd.
Bob watched Jesse pry the lead ball from a cartridge and saw a notch in it with a skinning knife that he then fixed into the crook of a tree so that the cutting side was a thin, silver streak in the night. He worked a string into the cut lead ball and stomped his bootheel on it to close the nick, and that string he fastened to an overhead branch so that the ball swayed close enough to tick the skinning knife. He made a boy stand near the target with a coal-oil lamp. He took five strides from the oak tree and announced to the audience that the boy would set the cartridge ball in motion and the gunsmith and he were going to fire five times. The trick was to strike it just so and make the skinning knife shave both the swinging and the speeding bullets with one shot.
The crowd grumbled their grave doubts or murmured in awe or made side bets and the gunsmith raised a .22 caliber revolver with grim resignation. The boy flipped the ball into a metronomic swing and stood aside with the coal-oil lamp as the gunsmith shot at and missed the moving target five times, scattering oak bark and cursing the foolishness of the contest.
Jesse then removed his suit coat, rested his right hand on his hip, and with his left lifted the revolver he called Baby. The boy slapped the cartridge ball into a wide arc and retreated and Jesse squinted down the muzzle sights and fired. Wood chipped but the ball continued to swing. It ticked against the knife like a clock. Jesse jiggled his left arm by his side to relax it and then raised it again and missed a second time.
“Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” the gunsmith said. “It’s next to impossible.”
Jesse grinned at the gunsmith and said, “If I didn’t know I could do it, I wouldn’t have concocted it.”
The ball still clocked but with shorter strokes and Jesse squinted a third time and then there was a gunshot noise of plank clapped against plank, a chime as two cartridge balls skinned off the knife, and the long song of the steel blade as it quivered and rang.
Silence followed the accomplishment and then some men applauded and yahooed and some others crouched at the oak tree and a gratified Thomas Howard was rushed to by people who wished to congratulate him and vigorously pump his hand and gladly introduce themselves.
The boy carved the cartridge balls out of the oak tree and walked around with them as if they were wedding rings on a silver tray. Bob lifted one and rubbed his thumb on the flat of it and the boy asked, “Is it still hot?”
Bob moved over to his brother. “He arranged that for our benefit.”
Charley smiled. “You thought it was all made up, didn’t you. You thought everything was yarns and newspaper stories.”
Bob looked over at the shootist, who was then showing Baby to the gunsmith. “He’s just a human being.”
The Fords returned to the pool tables and Bob won the next rack. He supported his chin on the pool cue if standing; he snared his coat over his gun butt so that it showed when he leaned over the green felt and clacked the ivory balls. At midnight, Jesse winged his arms around Charley and Bob and weaved them out into the street, and on the climb up Confusion Hill gave them his recollection of the James-Younger gang’s robbery of the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank at Corydon, Iowa, in 1871: then nearly everyone was at the Methodist church as Henry Clay Dean pleaded the case for a contemplated railroad; the holdup attracted no attention and seven men were able to split six thousand dollars. Jesse now expected many people in Platte City, Missouri, to be at the courthouse on April 4th to see Colonel John Doniphan perorate in the defense of George Burgess, who was being charged with the manslaughter of Caples Burgess, his cousin. The Wells Banking Company—commonly called the Platte City Bank—would remain open for its commercial customers, but with only a teller or two in attendance.
They reached the cottage and Jesse reclined on the sitting room sofa, sending Charley out to collect firewood for the stove. Charley lolloped off and Jesse wedded his fingers on his stomach and closed his eyes. “How it will be is we’ll leave here next Monday afternoon and ride down to Platte City.”
Bob seated himself on the floor and crossed his ankles. “How far is that from Kansas City?”
Something in Bob’s inquiry made Jesse resistant and he chose to answer around it. “Platte City’s thirty miles south. You and me and Charley will sleep in the woods overnight and strike the Wells Bank sometime before the court recesses.”
Bob asked when that would be exactly, but his voice was too insistent, his attitude too intense, and Jesse said, “You don’t need to know that.”
Bob scrawled on the floorboards with his finger and Jesse arose to a sit. He said, “You know, I feel comfortable with your brother. Hell, he’s ugly as sin and he smells like a skunk and he’s so ignorant he couldn’t drive nails in the snow, but he’s sort of easy to be around. I can’t say the same for you, Bob.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that.”
Jesse was silent a moment and then asked, “You know how it is when you’re with your girlfriend and the moon is out and you know she wants to be kissed even though she never said so?”
Bob didn’t know how that was but he said that he did.
“You’re giving me signs that grieve my soul and make me wonder if your mind’s been changed about me.”