Desperadoes

She said, ‘I was expelled from Holden College in Missouri for moral turpitude. I was discovered flagrante delicto—’

‘I don’t know what those words mean,’ I said.

‘Latin,’ she said. ‘“While the crime is blazing.” The man was a bachelor geography teacher with a beard large as a neck bib. He took me down to a refectory table, and rucked my skirt up to my shoulders, and traced me with clammy hands. My chief regret about our brief encounter is that he heard footsteps and panicked before I could be defiled.’

Somewhere in the midst of that I tried laughing, ‘Ho ho ho,’ but no one else seemed even tickled, and Julia’s face was on fire.

Miss Moore continued, ‘I managed my fall from grace soon after that, then tried to restore my reputation by becoming a schoolteacher in Oklahoma, but found it ungratifying. Then I cohabited with an Indian gambler named Jesse White Wings who instructed me in horse thievery. And I learned how to walk out of jail scot-free simply by consenting to a turnkey’s secret wish. Sometimes an abandoned pose was enough. None of it struck me as very distasteful.’

‘My! So many skills,’ Julia said. ‘I guess you’ll never lack an occupation.’

‘Ho ho ho,’ I said.

Eugenia said, ‘I suppose I never considered virginity an enviable condition; and innocence seems no more blissful than admitting you can’t read. I don’t want to be one of those sweet, blank, coddled girls whose highest ambition is their impregnable chastity.’

I made a deathbed appeal with my eyes but Miss Moore must have assumed it was the result of Julia’s cooking because she went on, ‘I don’t want to be one of those puling, simpering, sterile aunts who worry over the state of their souls if they let the dishes sit. The only approval I want is my own.’

It had crossed my mind by this time that my special evening might very well be crumbling, and I sought to save it by exercising one of my learned words. ‘I’m sorry you’ve taken such umbrage, Eugenia,’ I said.

But then Julia rushed in. ‘I suppose you want excitement, don’t you? You’re one of those women who can’t stand to be bored, who wish life could be more interesting. I’m frankly sick of things happening every second. Why does everyone have to be famous? Why do they want their names in the papers? What’s so wonderful about being fascinating? I think I’d rather be sweet and blank and coddled and not fuss so much about recognition.’

‘Landsakes,’ I said. ‘Nothing I like more than a spirited discussion.’

Eugenia ignored me and said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve disturbed you, haven’t I? I’ve spoiled your appetite. Pity me for my bad manners. I believe I’d better excuse myself now and go tantalize the bunkhouse.’

She smiled at me when she got up from the table and as she walked down the hall I could hear her exclaim like the most soulful tragedian, ‘Evil! I embrace you!’

‘Well!’ I said. ‘Lot of food for thought tonight, ay Julia?’

Julia was staring at her plate and making an effort not to cry.

I said, ‘I think if you made an inventory you’d find you two really have a lot in common. You’ve got different philosophies, is all.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think she just wishes Bob was here.’

I reckoned that was true. My brother there would have been a relief to many people. In late April, Bob and McElhanie made it to the Arizona border and slid their horses down the orange west banks of the Colorado River. They let them drink and crop at the weeds, then pulled them into the river and gripped the saddle horns and lost a mile with the currents as the horses lurched and coughed and swam scared across the red river, leaving California.

The boys uncinched the saddles and lay back in the river grass on their elbows while the horses rolled in the dust. McElhanie said, ‘My brain’s too awkward for robbery, Bob. My hands are only happy with tools.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’m tired of the chase, is what I’m saying. My stomach’s all topsy-turvy.’

‘You want to split up,’ said Bob.

‘That’s it,’ said McElhanie. ‘You put the hammer square on the head of the nail.’

So they sold their horses to a man in a shepherd’s kraal and hopped a train for the Oklahoma Territory where the two split up. ‘The Narrow Gauge Kid’ h

iked to Arkansas where he would eventually work a small farm and die in his bed with a kitten under his hand and the radio on in the kitchen.

Bob would have gone to the family home in Kingfisher except he’d crouched in the top limbs of a sixty-foot cotton-wood tree all of one afternoon and saw that he was being trailed across the badlands by a railroad detective in a dark suit and gray businessman’s stetson who would kneel by a track and look around and pack down his pipe with a match stick.

So instead Bob sequestered himself in a twenty-five-cent room in the ex-slave settlement of Dover, Oklahoma. Cowhands in flophats and raincoats would canter their horses down the main street, frowning and spitting and acting like nobility, but otherwise it was dark men in suspenders and rough wool shirts, dark women in bandanas, and children with their hair tied who’d throw things at Bob and run. My mother visited him once in the afternoon behind the Free Will Baptist church. They linked arms and strolled under blossoming trees and she smiled as he told her of Littleton and Bill and her grandchildren. Her only comment about money and work with him was that they were hiring in the coal mines.

Bob stopped shaving and took up snooker with some of the males and paid for a teenaged girl who smelled like a cellar floor and who had straightened her hair with a clothing iron.

He walked back from snooker one night and saw the curtains flying out the window of his upper room. He took the stairs three at a time, his pistol cocked high at his shoulder, and pushed the open door to see Eugenia Moore smoking a cigarette by the window, a kerosene lamp the only light. She turned and smiled and unbuttoned her blouse as she walked to him. ‘I hope you haven’t used yourself up.’