Desperadoes

I could see the alley still but now there were two thousand gawkers walking the scene like it was a crowded museum, all of them brought in from Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma on special half-fare railroad excursions. Bob and Grat and Broadwell and Powers were piled on the dirt floor of the city jail with stiff erections and fouled clothes and hundreds of blowflies walking all over them, so visitors could hunch at the barred windows and poke the bodies with sticks and John Tackett was already developing the pictures that would become three kinds of post cards.

When I woke up again it was morning and I was on the mattress in the Farmers’ Home that Bob had slept on after the Adair train robbery. If I lifted my eyes I could make out strange faces at the mullioned windows behind me and children squealing that they wanted to see. And next to me was Julia Johnson in a black lace dress, a white handkerchief clutched in her hand, and she was like a woman with an appointment; she’d marshaled herself into something as crisp as the snap of a closed pocketbook.

I said, ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’

She glanced across the room to where Sheriff Tom Callahan sat in a split-bottom chair reading a stack of newspapers Colonel Elliott had brought in.

I noticed the headlines and said, ‘I went and done it, didn’t I.’

She whispered, ‘Emmett, please don’t make me cry.’

‘I do love you,’ I said. ‘I mean that. I think you were what I wanted all along.’

She stared at me without emotion for a minute. She said, ‘A newspaper reporter stopped me before I came in here and asked if I was your sweetheart, and I realized that I was nineteen years old and your sweetheart is all I would really ever be; that’s as important as I’d become.’

Sheriff Callahan pulled up from his chair with the newspapers under his arm. ‘I think I’ll stand outside for a while.’

She waited until he was gone and said, ‘I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll stay with you as long as I can and I’ll wait for you, no matter what happens, because that’s what sweethearts do. I love you too but I’m property and I’m not used to that feeling yet.’

I couldn’t think of an answer. I said, ‘I don’t have anything more comforting to say, Julia. My brain’s empty.’

‘You’re very tired,’ she said.

I closed my eyes and she petted back my hair and I woke with her gone and strangers in plow coats and yarn shawls and bonnets filing past the window, buttons scraping on wood.

I asked the sheriff, ‘Can you turn this bed around?’

He saw the people staring down at me and thought it over for a minute. ‘I don’t see why the hell not,’ he said.

Not only that, he put the bedposts on bricks so I would be raised up a bit, and after that you just had to stand two-by-two in the dining room to walk by, and railroad men would sneer, ‘You’re not so tough now, are ya?’ and glum women would freeze me with scowls and pray that God have pity on my soul, and a man leaned on his fists at the foot of the bed to tell me, ‘This is the Lord’s way of saying, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.”’

Meanwhile there was talk about forty Dalton sympathizers riding into Coffeyville some night to free me and burn the town down. Someone in Arkansas City, Kansas, wrote a letter that was mailed to John Kloehr and said: ‘Dear Sir: I take the time to tell you and the citizens of Coffeyville that all the gang ain’t dead yet and don’t you forget it. I would have given all I ever made to have been there the 5th. There are five of the gang left and we shall come to see you some day. That day, Oct. 5, we were down in the Chickasaw Nation, and we did not know it was coming off so soon.’ And so on. Some cowhands got a little drunk and condemned the murder of the bank robbers and they were jailed. Some boys from Guthrie called themselves ‘The Dalton Avengers’ and barged through town pushing tourists off sidewalks, shouting cuss words at the defenders, and they made such a nuisance of themselves that they got beat up in a side alley and one boy went home via stagecoach with thirty stitches in his head.

But Emmett Dalton was still the big show in that town and I hear the line of mourners and curious waiting to gaze at me snaked west on Eighth Street, then down Maple to Death Alley, which it is even now called, and down past the bentpipe hitching rack to the jail, like I was a Hollywood premiere or Jesse James on his white satin funeral bier, and I wished my brother Bob were alive instead of me because I knew that he’d love that; how he’d love that. It would have been a discipline for him not to smile.

That night Eugenia Moore sank the springs of my bed when there was only a kerosene lamp in the room and the sheriff was gone somewhere. She still wore her greased wing chaps and a sheepskin coat that smelled of leaf smoke and horses. Her face was streaked with dirt and her hair strayed over her eyes as she reached to remove a cool washrag she must have pressed to my forehead.

‘How’d you get in here?’ I asked.

She smiled briefly. ‘I snuck in. I thought I wanted to talk to you but I guess there’s really nothing to say.’ She folded the washrag and dropped it into a white ironstone basin and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I just wanted to know that you were all right,’ she said, and then she got up from the bed and walked out of the room, spurs clanking.

A man named Alfred Kime who never did anything in his life worth retelling, is here remembered by me for digging a common grave in the potter’s field of the Elmwood Cemetery. The stiff bodies of Broadwell and Powers and my two brothers were dragged like heavy mahogany doors from the jail to a dining room table in the parlor of Lang and Lape’s furniture store where Bob and I carried the corpse of Charley Montgomery that December night in 1888. Little boys would rush up and slap Bob on the sleeve and a crowd followed with handkerchiefs cupped to their noses. There was a toe hole in Bob’s left wool sock and his mouth was open so that his teeth looked bucked and he was no longer the blue-eyed boy. The dead were white except where the blood had sunk green on them and they were frozen with rigor mortis exactly as they had been when Tackett propped their heads up against a board front for photographs, so that they seemed to be raising up in their sleep; and they smelled worse than you’d think it possible, like the blast of bad air you’d get if you opened a junkyard icebox that was rank with spoiled chicken wings and vegetables and a rotting cat near the milk.

Undertaker W.H. Lape did some simple embalming and stole my binoculars off Bob. And some fortune hunter snuck in at noon and stripped every stitch of clothing off my brother. Then two clopping draft horses with mud-clumped hair at their fetlocks pulled a box wagon to the graveyard on Thursday afternoon. Orange kernels of corn jittered on the box planks and the spoke wheels crunched over gravel and the Dalton gang jostled with each bump—four dead men in buttoned shirt collars and blood-caked coats squeezed into four pinewood coffins.

A dozen men, including Chris Madsen, Henry Isham, and Colonel Elliott, stood with hats in their hands at the burial while scoops of shoveled earth flopped black as Bibles on top of the coffins. The bent pipe we’d hitched our horses to was what they had instead of headstones until I purchased a simple granite slab with some of the income from my first movie.

I don’t recall anything of October 7th and only snatches of the 8th when my family arrived by train from Kingfisher. Mom could only pat the bed covers near my sore leg and my brothers all were red-eyed but for Bill

. Bill was hospital good cheer. He asked, ‘Where does it hurt the worst, Emmett?’

‘It’s miserable pain almost everywheres,’ I said. ‘I really can’t separate it. The ache in my crotch, I guess.’

He winked toward my brothers and laughed, saying, ‘Hell, that’s just normal biology, Emmett. That’s gonna bother you till you die.’