Desperadoes

He was dedicated then. I’d wake in the morning before sunup and see Bob crouched by the fire drawing up law enforcement inventions in his diary: gloves with hinged metal fingers, a contraption that locked a man’s legs to his saddle, a mace; a vest of a hundred pockets that would hold a hundred iron plates so a lawman couldn’t be gutshot. In his right boot he carried a .32 caliber pistol on a heavy .45 caliber frame so he could quick-draw on a miscreant simply by lifting his knee. Sometimes he’d lag behind me and I’d turn to see him muttering arguments with someone imaginary. Then he’d slap his pistol up.

‘Keeping amused, are ya, Bob?’

‘Heck, they don’t have a chance against me. We’re almost out of work.’

After the Louisiana Purchase, displaced eastern Indian tribes were moved west of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory, which then took up most of the plains states. Farmers and railway companies worked on Congress to reduce the land area over the years until it was only the Ozarks and badlands of what is now Oklahoma. The property was considered inviolable and owned ‘until the rivers cease’ by a strange collection of Indians, but chiefly by what were called the Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole; nations with their own executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, their own laws and schools. The Indians leased their grassland to cattlemen for grazing and they traded with sutlers, but otherwise ignored the pioneers and immigrants as much as they could.

So if a cowhand woke up one morning with blood on his knife and sleeve, or if a boy stole the receipts from his uncle’s cooperage, or a woman poleaxed her husband as he snored with a two-dollar chippy, the territories were where they got away; a vast, rugged section in the middle of the United States where your name was what you called yourself at the time, where a man could ride a horse for three or four days and not see another human being.

But Bob’s Osage deputies could stalk a man who’d spent a week sloshing up rivers. They could root a child out of muskrat pits and smell a woman in the leaves she’d brushed against. I once locked ankle clamps on a man who’d been on the run so long he never stopped gasping, and another time I walked into a cave to discover a convict still in his prison stripes, squatted down and scratching himself, the smell of vomit near him. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ he said. ‘Only thing I’ve tasted for a month now is gopher. And I got chilblains from the cold.’

I’d drive an ox team with a stern Osage riding shotgun, and Bob would crouch in the back of the police wagon interviewing prisoners like that was his occupation. He’d ask, ‘What got you started in crime?’ ‘What was your crucial mistake?’ ‘Why aren’t you repentant?’

He asked, ‘Did you like the life of a cowboy?’

The man said, ‘Yes sir, I did.’

‘Emmett seems taken with it.’

‘Well, it’s outstanding education for the youngster and it’s a worthy and stable livelihood. Cowboys are going to be riding herds for eons. I’ve got myself a bunk and three squares a day and I’m paid thirty dollars a month, and by God that’s enough for a howl on a Saturday night and a savings account in a bank if I want it.’

‘Then why were you rustling livestock?’

The waddy scratched his chin. ‘Forgot my upbringin’, I guess.’

Bob sat next to me on the bench seat. ‘I hope you heard that,’ he said.

Or my brother Bob would ride through undulating prairie grass on patrol and he would rhapsodize: ‘When Dad first came to the territories, he was swapping brood mares and Army mules under government contract and this whole countryside was wild savannah and savages and prairie chicken and bears. There were buffalo then by the hundred thousand. Ground would shake nine miles away whenever they stampeded. Indians would climb inside the bleeding hides and skulk right into the midst of them, spear bulls so big it took two men just to carry the head. Twenty years later and his Great Plains were chockablock with sod houses and barns; squaws had all turned into oily nags; weather went sour and rivers dwindled; snakes dangled from branches of trees. Dad used to claim he traveled the entire Louisiana Purchase on twenty cents a week and he recalled neither hunger nor want. He was refreshed like the Israelites. Now he sits in a chair and forgets himself and the Army sends him six dollars a month in pension for duty in the Mexican War.’

I said, ‘I onetime put salt into the sugar bowl just so’s it would ruin his coffee. I once put a note in his shaving mug that said, “Why don’t you die!” I used to shove his left boot under the sofa and watch him thump through the house hunting it down. You never seen anyone so creased.’

And Bob said, ‘Must be that you and I have different ideas about the Fourth Commandment.’

The two of us would camp at sundown and he’d chop brush with a machete while I cooked pinto beans and sorghum in an old lard bucket. Then I’d lie with my head on a saddle, learning songs on the harmonica, while Bob rubbed his deputy marshal’s badge with silver polish and made entries in his diary with a carpenter’s pencil.

Mostly he commented on sunrise and sunset, the direction of the wind, and the relative temperature: ‘balmy and pleasant,’ or ‘chilly, frost on the grass until late morning, could see my breath when I talked.’ About every two weeks he’d take stock of himself and then there’d follow a list of commandments: ‘Resolved: to be more charitable in my speech; to be generous to those less fortunate than I am (for example, a meal, or an unexpected gift); to conduct myself like the knights of yore; to sit tall in the saddle.’ He wrote on January 11th: ‘Why am I so quick to ridicule and criticize others, yet so eager to hear flattery and praise of myself? Am I trying to deprive them because my need is so great? How can I mend the fences I’ve broken? These questions revolve in my brain as I gaze up at the galaxy of stars, and I have no satisfactory answer.’

In many ways my brother was a stranger to me and for several months working with him I wasn’t sure that I liked him very much. But there was an innocence and good faith to him that was convincing. He could be very sincere and intense about things and you discovered yourself seeing the world through his eyes and forgetting everything else. Sometimes we’d leave the Wichita jail and pound down a board sidewalk with suit pants stuffed inside our boots and Bob would announce, ‘I picked out a hotel room and got

us a table at the Ambassador Grill; then we’ll go play snooker. How would that be?’ And I’d try to object but my mind would go blank; there didn’t seem any alternative. If a night went his way he’d reward me with fantastic smiles and charitable speech; if he saw me bridle a bit he’d say graciously, ‘But why don’t you do the thinking, Emmett. No reason I should have the vote on every dang thing,’ and like as not I’d botch it, the night would be miserable.

He was paid at the same rate that Frank was, a pissant two dollars a prisoner and six cents per mile traveling expenses, from which he paid room and board for himself, his assistants, and his suspects. After he rendered his accounts to the federal court, thirty-five percent was deducted as the marshal’s fee and the bill sent on to Washington where the money could be delayed for months; so some weeks the only meals we had were what we took at farms we visited, and I scrounged a quarter a day sweeping out a saloon in Pawhuska or stacking cords of firewood for some widow in Ponca City. The two of us were stung so bad at times that we started administering our own fines for the smaller infractions and we put the money straight into our pockets.

I discovered two of the cowpokes I’d known at the Turkey Track ranch were rustling cow ponies for a racehorse trainer named Charlie Pierce, and I caught them in a copse of sycamores burning alterations on the brands. That would’ve been Bitter Creek Newcomb and Blackface Charley Bryant. Newcomb threw his hands up but Bryant extended a pistol at my face and I nearly cashed in right there but for the fact that we started conversing. I told them I couldn’t see jail for them since they were buddies, but they convinced me they ought to be penalized something just to keep my conscience unsullied, and they paid me thirty dollars in silver coins that I split with my brother that evening.

Bob and I had a big restaurant supper of ham hocks and beans, during which he wiped his mouth with a napkin and concluded that what I’d done was almost legal and the sort of simple justice that he’d recommend in the future.

Maybe he thought I needed the salve but my conscience hadn’t even tingled, whereas I think Bob got beat up by his. He denied himself the next day and that night; before he gazed up at the galaxy of stars, he probably took stock of himself in his diary and listed three or four more resolves.

3

He used to claim that he knew secrets about women that no other man did, and there were rumors late in his short life that prostitutes would take him upstairs for free just so they could be schooled; and more than once I saw Bob straddle a chair opposite a strange woman at a café or train depot and, after some brief talk, stroll out the door with her arm engaged in his.

I never had his knack but I was jealous of it. I was common as toads to women. To work up even the faintest glimmer from them took everything I had and I’d sleep that night plumb worn out.

Julia Johnson was my sweetheart then and twenty years later I married her. She was sixteen when I first saw her practicing hymns on a church pedal organ that had a small mirror on the music stand so she could see the altar and pulpit. I rode up so close to the church window that my horse sunk down to its fetlocks in a spaded flower garden, and in the mirror Julia saw me leaning in with my elbows on the sill and my fists making my eyes slant like a Chinese rube, and her eyes dispatched me with one of those glances that girls have the handle on, which said I was boring and simple and big-eared and she’d just as soon I disappeared. I was seventeen and sold on myself in those days, however, and I couldn’t countenance disregard, so I clomped inside that vacant church in my brown plow boots with red mud sliding off them in dollops and with two months’ worth of smoke and unpleasant smells in my coat, and I slumped in a pew fairly stupefied as she worked through every song she had, from funeral to wedding march.

She had sun-browned skin the color of gypsies, and blue-black hair that was dark as a raven’s wing and spilled down her back almost to the bench she was sitting on. I recall to this day that she wore a light-blue dress with a bow at the waist that had come untied, and she wasn’t wearing shoes, just knee-high white socks that seemed new. And I believe the first sentence she used on me in that church was, ‘I hope you’re not going to make a nuisance of yourself.’