Desperadoes

He crossed his arms on his saddle pommel and we heard the mutter of a rainstorm somewhere in the distance. He said, ‘Emmett, you’ve got no idea how your life is going to improve. Pretty soon you’re going to have any woman you want. You’ll come back to your hotel room at night and they’ll be standing at your door. They’ll steal handkerchiefs from your pockets and buttons off your coats and they’ll write you letters pleading for locks of your hair. Wait a month and you’ll see. You just can’t conceive of what it’s like to be famous. That’s how special it is.’

And he was right. I couldn’t conceive of it.

Miss Moore had the gumption to steal six horses from her hated father, and the five of us stole our clothes. Bob used the keys the general store owners in Gray Horse had given him when he was the Osage police chief and he opened the front doors one night and the Dalton gang bumped into each other in the dark, hardwood aisles, pulling starched white shirts out of blue boxes mailed from Chicago, wadding and throwing out odorous long underwear, slinging striped pants and checked pants and corduroys on our shoulders. We skimmed our sweatbrowned hats to the floor to try on white round-tops, black slouch hats, and bowlers, derbies, muleys, silk top hats, and tan stetsons with indented crowns. Powers buttoned a cable-knit sweater over a vest and blue flannel shirt; Broadwell wore an ankle-long gentleman’s coat over a sheepherder’s tweed; Grat stood his stiffened jeans against a corner.

From another store we got saddles: not just Texas working saddles with the leather soiling black and the lead wearing through the horn and the ties forever breaking off like shoestrings, but Mexican saddles, five of them, with stirrups of plated silver, all sturdy as pews and deep as trousers, with roses and tulips hand-tooled at tree and hindbow and side bars, and this leather so soft it was slow to recover from the prod of a finger. They creaked with the newness like boats and hinges and snow at ten below zero. I never felt so regal.

Then we went south in buffalo grass that was high as our flashing spurs, seeing six horses in the sod house corral, seeing Eugenia Moore hang clothes on a line, snapping them out of a bushel basket. Next to the sod house was a schooner with the white tarp off its ribs and a black man caking grease on the front axle and sliding on a spoked wheel. Amos Burton said something over his shoulder about the approaching riders and Eugenia turned and waved.

My brother Bob yawed his horse to meet her; Grat and I stayed in a walk with Broadwell and Powers as they talked animatedly about hopping a freight train to New York afterwards so they could eat prime ribs at Delmonico’s and attend the Wintergarden Theater with consorts. I said, ‘Maybe I’ll just join you boys instead of traipsing off to South America. I’ve always hankered to be a city slicker and I think you ought to travel to somewheres really eye-opening when you come into a ton of money.’

‘Yep,’ said Grat, who hadn’t a single plan beyond perpetual dr

unkeness. ‘Kind of gives you ants in your pants, don’t it?’

I don’t remember much about that last week in the sod house, only the blankets strung up between the bunks and the whisper of a man and woman behind them and Broadwell walking around like a circus clown, lifting off his tall hat to show his cat Turtle underneath it on his head. I spent mornings in the sun combing out a brood mare’s tail and I watched the white clouds castle in the blue and I lay by a cooking fire at night with an oil can and cotton rags and a handkerchief spread on the red dirt, disassembling a nickel-plated pistol while that shipment of government issue rifles arrived in Coffeyville, Kansas. They were stored in the Isham Brothers and Mansur store which commanded a view of the plaza, and for two days in October too many men spent time at the bins and crates and nail kegs, waiting on us, so that by the 5th there wasn’t much worry anymore and City Marshal Connelly would leave his gun in the middle drawer of his desk as he took his morning walk.

Then Amos Burton hitched a team of four horses to the wagon and left. Grocery boxes squeaked against each other; bottles clinked on the bumps. Broadwell and Powers watered and shoed Dan Quick’s horses while Grat and Bob and I took turns sitting under the freckled shade of a poplar with a bed sheet under our chins and a soap mug, black strop, and razor in our laps. Eugenia rolled up her dress sleeves to give us haircuts with scissors and comb. She brushed the snippings into paper bags she’d lettered with our names and she and Bob sat at a three-legged table out of the sun, gluing hair onto linen for imitation mustaches and beards.

Bob said, ‘We’ll have a hacienda with paddle fans on all the ceilings and hired women to iron the sheets and important men in white suits and Panama hats will wait on the verandah with teacups and secretaries while you and I sleep in the afternoon.’

She smiled. ‘You should see your eyes sparkle.’ She pressed a goatee to his chin, then took it off and trimmed it. ‘I want you to look like Sir Walter Raleigh.’

19

Soon as it was dark enough, we saddled our horses and took a road to Kansas that was baked hard as adobe. The sumac leaves were bright red, the maple trees turning orange, and the farmers were burning firebreaks and weeds and scrub timber so a blue haze clung to the earth. I could smell leaf smoke in my shirt. I rode quite a ways with my arm up to my nose, intoxicated by the scent.

We made the P.L. Davis farm on Onion Creek by middle afternoon of October 4th. Broadwell cut the barbwire fence with nippers and then tied the horses under box elder trees while Powers and I snuck through Mrs. J.F. Savage’s corn patch stuffing husking ears in our shirts.

The gang ate supper on saddle blankets, not saying a peep to each other, and we were still awake at eleven when Bob knelt by a small corncob fire to draw the city streets again for Broadwell and Powers and Miss Moore. Then my brother emptied his pockets and dropped into the fire a bill of sale, a solunar table, and a business card with a calendar on the back. Broadwell had letters from his Hutchinson, Kansas, home in his saddlebag and these he burned one by one so he couldn’t be traced back to them. I used a penknife to pry a locket photograph of Julia from my watch fob and I saw it curl black on the embers. It seemed a solemn occasion until Eugenia performed, amidst guffaws, the dolorous farewell letter she’d sent to Bob via Silver City, which she then tore up and let flutter away from the fire on the wind so it could be found and puzzled together.

Then my brother and his fiancée retired to a blanket by the river. She lay between his legs and scratched her name into his stomach with the fingernails she’d grown for him. And Bob sat up on his elbows in the autumn leaves and said, ‘You know, when you think about the kind of prig I was as a kid, it seems peculiar I ever got into stealing. I wanted to be a saint back then. I wanted to be as great a lawman as Pat Garrett, as noble as King Arthur’s knights. I don’t know where those notions went but I think they’ve vanished forever. Thievery isn’t my vice anymore; it’s my habit.’

Eugenia smiled and drew a valentine heart where his heart was, her chin on her other fist. She said, ‘Same here. I can’t look at a hundred-dollar horse without thinking it’s mine by default. As a girl I used to see handsome men I wanted and I’d wonder how they could possibly consider themselves married to anyone else. Whenever I walk through a store, I see thousands of exquisite things that I’m sure really ought to belong to me, and it’s as if I owned them already.’

They were quiet in the dark. The river moved. She said, ‘Chris Madsen once arrested me and asked how an educated lady could ever involve herself with rustling. I didn’t really have an answer.’

My brother said, ‘You should’ve told him the temptation was very strong.’

I don’t think they slept a wink that night because the two of them were walking in the trees when Broadwell shook me awake for the dogwatch at four. I cooked some coffee and hunkered down in the chill under the sickle moon and I shivered there with my rifle against my cheek until I could hear the roosters crow on the farms.

I walked among the men in the bedrolls, kicking them in the feet. Powers jerked up with a gun in his hand and looked around at the morning. I cooked bacon in an iron pan and made another pot of black coffee and observed Eugenia kneeling in front of Bob sticking a brown mustache and fancy goatee to his face, and holding a mirror up. ‘I look Shakespearean,’ he said.

‘At least you don’t look twenty-two.’

My brother Grat kept scowling and chewing his bacon as she worked on him and he merely glanced at the mirror and scratched his face when he saw the dark mustache and side-whiskers they call muttonchops, which, Colonel Elliott later claimed, ‘gave him the look of an ancient pirate.’

Powers knelt near the fire and shoved a pipe cleaner down his pipe stem. Broadwell lifted back his long top hair and looked at his baldness in the mirror. ‘Do you think if I cut my hair it would thicken? It does that for grass you know. Only thing I’m afraid of is that I’d be short and sparse at the same time.’

Powers blew air through his pipe stem and screwed it onto the bowl. He said, ‘The trouble is you’re too brainy, Dick. Your brains cut off the blood supply to your scalp.’

Because I was a mere twenty years old, Eugenia gave me maturity with a dark beard that blew in the wind and showed the linen underneath. The mucilage stuck so hard it burned my skin later when John Kloehr bent over and ripped the mustache off.

She said, ‘Do you know where I was five years ago, Em? I was in a dinky Missouri town putting makeup on schoolchildren for a play about Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. I was Eugenia Moore, the schoolmarm, and I was convinced the rest of my life would be no more exciting than a Sunday piano recital.’

I said, ‘This is kind of a change of speed for you then, isn’t it. You’ll knock on the pearly gates a dang contented woman.’

She finished with my disguise and I stirred the fire out with a stick and poured coffee onto the hissing coals. Last night’s eggshells were scattered on the ground. Bob stood at his saddlebags and put an oil can and a pair of gentleman’s gloves into the pockets of his black suit coat. He wore a six-button vest and a blue wool lumberjack shirt and a tall, bell-crowned hat that was duplicated by William S. Hart in his movies. I could’ve been my brother’s twin that day because I dressed exactly as he did except for a white shirt with a celluloid collar and a fantastic wide tie that resembled blue-veined marble, Grat had the stain of chewing tobacco on his chin as he surveyed me. ‘You gonna curtsy to the queen?’