Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  Then a fat man in a checkered vest pulled a small caliber pistol out of a shoulder holster and stalked toward the masked desperadoes at the express car, and Doolin groaned. ‘Fools like that just make me tired.’ He pulled his pistol out of his holster and hauled his horse around. ‘Watch me make the hair stand up on his neck.’

  Bob said, ‘You stick where you’re ordered.’

  But Doolin broke away and whooped and hollered and flourished his pistol and fired it. He galloped his horse straight at the frozen passengers, his raincoat sailing, the front of his hat flopped back. The men scurried out of his way. At the caboose he pulled his reins left and turned his horse around and charged down the train again, jousting. The fat man in the checkered vest sat down in the cinders and covered his face with his elbows, and Doolin kicked off the man’s hat with a stirrup. Then he stopped his horse next to Powers, grinning and breathing hard. ‘Scattered like hens, didn’t they.’

  Powers had the heavy money sack on his shoulder. When he tied it to Doolin’s saddle horn, the saddle canted to the side. ‘Bob’s a trifle displeased with you. He said you should carry this.’

  ‘Does he think that’s the dunce cap or something? Carrying away all the swag?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Powers. ‘I didn’t think to ask.’

  Coming from the rear my horse stalled and stepped across the tracks like a sissy, so I was late getting in front of the locomotive. But I managed to raise my rifle up as Bob hustled the engine crew up to the cab. Broadwell heaved the sliding express door closed and Pierce brought Powers’s horse up by the reins.

  Bob said to the engineer, ‘I calculate the MK&T lost about five minutes so you’d better hurry out of here if you want to hit Dallas on time.’ He stepped off the train onto the depot’s loading platform. ‘Oh, and when you get to the gantlet, slow up and have your firemen shovel off some coal. And don’t be too stingy about it or I might introduce you to serious trouble.’

  Steam hushed and I saw the wheel eccentrics drop and then the five-foot drive wheels started to spin, the couplings gripped in a succession of clanks, and the coaches howled into sway.

  Newcomb climbed onto the depot roof from his saddle and jinked along the peak until he found the porcelain insulators and the depot telegraph lines. Don’t know why he bothered about them. Maybe it was just meanness. The wires sprang away from his snippers and Newcomb hung by a gutter and dropped back onto his saddle; then he and Bob spurred their horses down the wooden stairs and along the creosote-painted ties behind the rolling train. The fat man in the checkered vest was shaking his fist from the last coach; the old black woman was stooped over at the siding dropping coal into a pail. It was as sweet a picture as you’d ever want to see and it did us no harm at all in that country to rob from the rich and give to the poor. That shovel of coal kept many on our side unto the very end.

  The seven of us slept under yellow leaves that night. At five in the morning I sat up smelling coffee and I saw Bob walk up to each man and drop a jangling canvas sack into the leaves near his head. ‘You look like Santa Claus,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘I’ll divvy up with you later.’

  I’ve said elsewhere the take was nineteen thousand dollars. I reckon it was closer to ten. Divided seven ways it would’ve come to almost fifteen hundred apiece, but Bob gave the five men of the gang not kin to him wages instead of shares: four hundred dollars for a night’s work.

  Newcomb walked over to the fire and poured a tin cup of coffee and squatted to count the silver coins and paper money into his hat. ‘I can’t believe this, Bob!’

  ‘Believe what?’

  Doolin kept his head on his saddle pillow and stacked the money on the leaves. He glared at Bob. ‘Where’s the rest of it, Dalton?’

  ‘That’s the arithmetic,’ said Bob.

  ‘But I carried that sack,’ said Doolin. ‘There must’ve been three thousand dollars just in silver!’

  ‘There was,’ said Bob. ‘And there’s also the sod house to supply and Bryant’s funeral expenses and implements and tools and payoffs to the local police, plus Jim Riley gets a little something for allowing us his property. You don’t give a thought to that.’

  ‘Meaning you and Emmett split fifteen thousand dollars,’ said Pierce.

  ‘I don’t know where you’re coming up with your numbers. Four hundred dollars times eight—’

  ‘Eight?’ asked Doolin.

  ‘Miss Moore,’ I said.

  ‘Is three thousand two hundred dollars. I counted the spondulix three times and only arrived at three thousand eight hundred and forty-five bucks. The rest was non-negotiable securities and I fed them to the fire.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s what you did,’ said Doolin. ‘Well then, my mind’s completely at rest.’

  ‘Heck, when we robbed the Santa Fe at Wharton we hardly got a hundred twenty-five cutting it just four ways. Ask Bitter Creek if you don’t believe me.’

  Newcomb threw a stick into the fire. ‘That’s right. Didn’t last me the summer.’

  ‘It’s not that profitable an occupation,’ said Bob. He picked his saddle up by the horn and jammed his hat down and smiled. ‘It’s just that it beats moving longhorns on the prairie and eating sowbelly and beans.’

  I stuck by my brother, of course, but the others murmured amongst themselves most of the day. The gang slouched in their saddles and rode single file through snatching weeds along the Arkansas, Cimarron, and Canadian rivers until we got to the sod house. I had to break a morning skin of ice to wash in the river; then I shaved in my spotted mirror piece while Doolin cooked a big kettle of whatever food we had left. Bob rolled all his property into his bedroll and tied it to his horse and rode over to the six of us as we squatted with bowls by the fire.

  ‘Adios,’ my brother said.

  ‘Where the hell you goin’?’ Doolin demanded.

  ‘What’s it matter?’

  ‘Well, how we gonna get the next job arranged?’

  ‘No such thing as a next job, Bill. Emmett and I are through.’

  Broadwell swallowed. ‘Through! Are you loco, Bob? Why, I haven’t hardly started yet!’

  ‘You’re full of surprises today,’ said Pierce.

  So another argument went on for most of an hour but I didn’t say a word and Powers just listened with his eyes closed. I washed out my bowl in the river and put on my cleanest dirty shirt and rolled everything else in my raincoat. I heard Doolin say how the express companies were tying money up in pink and blue baby ribbons and that the gang ought to step up and say thanks for it. I pulled a pack mule from the corral and strapped my tools and boots and whatall onto the carry rack.

  When I got on my horse, Bob was saying he didn’t give a dang about all the deputies that were crowding on our heels; he wasn’t talking about lack of nerve when he said he wanted quit of the gang. He said it was plain horse sense though that you can’t keep robbery up for long and get away with it.

  Something like that. I wasn’t listening very close.

  He said, ‘I’m twenty-one years old and I know my mind. You boys and I have always understood each other and there’s no misunderstanding now. This is where Emmett and I call a halt—and you can tie to that.’

  I said good-bye with some real sadness, and I printed addresses and said we should get together for Thanksgiving. Then Bob and I rode northwest for the Fort Supply reservation and the town of Woodward where Miss Moore had rented a house. I saw the five of them sulking and brooding and loitering near the fire like men in a railroad yard; then Newcomb jerked the Indian blanket from the doorway and Broadwell came out of the sod house with his cat Turtle under his red flannel shirt and Powers crouched through the pole gate of Pierce’s corral and saddled up his horse.

  By late afternoon it was very cold for September. The sky was cobbled and the river was purple and red leaves floated on it. The wind ruffed the weather hair of cattle bunched at a fence. Mud hoofprints froze hard by nightfall and the knuckles turned red on my hands. I but
toned up a sheepskin and rode ten yards behind my brother until he stopped at Canton Lake.

  ‘Look yonder,’ he said.

  I saw a four-horse team and a wagon far across the water. The white canvas had U.S. GOVT. painted on it and I could see lawmen leaning on rifles and jolting in the box.

  ‘The manhunt,’ he said. ‘Remember you and I doing that? Seems like a long time ago.’

  The wagon was gone in the trees.

  ‘You know what I wish, Bob? I wish I could get a wet rag and scrub the year 1891 clean off the slate. It’s been nothing but trouble and misery for nine months now.’

  ‘That’ll stop,’ he said. My brother borrowed my tobacco pouch and papers and constructed a cigarette. ‘Did you get taken in by all I said back there?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure.’

  He smiled. ‘There’s three thousand five hundred dollars in each of my saddlebags. Seven thousand dollars, Emmett. How’s that for a yearly income?’

  I suppose I should’ve said something about it not being right to short-pot and steal from your friends, of doing unto others, but the words failed me just then.

  He said, ‘I can see you’re disappointed in your brother.’

  I asked, ‘What’d you do it for, Bob?’

  He smirked and nudged his horse ahead and without facing me he shouted, ‘Greed, Emmett darlin’! One of the seven deadly sins!’

  11

  Grat was still in jail in California. With my brother Bill’s considerable help, he’d written several narratives about the abuse and indignities he’d suffered during his incarceration which the San Francisco Examiner had published. And he was reading the back pages of that newspaper when he noticed two brief articles reporting the September 15th robbery of a train in Leliaetta in the Oklahoma Territory, and a September 16th robbery of another at Ceres, California, two hundred miles from Visalia.

  The Ceres holdup, of course, wasn’t ours. A Southern Pacific employee named John Sontag had been hurt pretty badly at work but the railroad wouldn’t pay him compensation, so he joined with Chris Evans and pulled some smallish jobs all over the state. My hunch is the Alila train robbery which Grat and Bill were framed with was the Sontag-Evans gang’s too. I know that Ceres was. But the Dalton name was famous then and we somehow took the blame for most everything lawless in the forty-four United States.

  Grat folded the newspaper to the ads for ten-dollar suits, ‘made from an honest piece of cassimere.’ A prison trustee leaned on his mop handle to push a sloshing bucket on rollers down the aisle between the jail cells. He was a huge, slow, black man made forever back-sore from chopping cotton in Sarepta, Louisiana. He stopped at Grat’s cell door. ‘You know the law just hauled in your brothuh Bill again? Wants to ax him some questions about those train holdups.’

  My brother licked a thumb and turned a page of the newspaper; then he noticed a hacksaw blade under the trustee’s foot. Grattan slipped it into an inseam of his trousers while the black man straightened the tongue on his high button shoes.

  He said, ‘You don’t have to thank me. I been paid.’ He dragged his mop behind him, streaking the floor wet; then he was gone.

  The jails were not very difficult in those days. My brother sawed the bars at night and covered the damage with lampblack and soap. And after supper on the Sunday evening of September 18th, three days before his prison sentencing, Grat Dalton popped four bars of his window into the gravel outside. They made a pong sound when they hit. He stood on his bed and climbed out; then two other prisoners walked from their cells and dropped into the dirt behind him.

  From a Baptist church hitching rack, the three of them stole a light buggy and a team of gray horses that were powerful enough to pull a beer truck. At Goshen the two jumped a freight train north while Grat drove ten miles farther to the ranch of a gambler he knew named Middleton. This Middleton was a toothless man who constantly wore the same white shirt that he laundered once a week. He gave Grat his mattress for the night and hitched the buggy and horses back in Tulare to throw the detectives off; then he loaned Grat an Appaloosa horse and a canvas tent and half his closet of clothes. He sketched a map of the Sierra foothills above the town of Sänger. ‘I’ll be up in about a week with tobacco and fresh meat,’ said Middleton. ‘A convict named Riley Dean may be around there already. You have any money for the grub?’

  ‘There’s sposed to be a check waiting for me in Visalia.’

  ‘Okay. You stay pitched in this vicinity—’

  ‘Where the X is,’ said Grat.

  ‘So I’ll know where to find you.’

  Grat folded the map inside a blue flannel shirt that had the bacon grease smell of the rancher, pulled down a high round-topped gray hat, and slapped the Appaloosa ahead with the reins.

  After he was gone, Middleton rode down to Visalia to read the wanted posters and collect a fifty-dollar check intended for Grat and mailed care of general delivery by Eugenia Moore. He spent it on a desk of twelve drawers and three secret compartments. Then he rapped on the glass of the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office and a deputy turned in his chair. Middleton opened the door. ‘I wonder if you and me could jaw for a bit.’

  But Grattan was more canny than people gave him credit for. Horse and rider climbed a winding bridle path into thin air, Grat ducking under tall sequoia pine trees, hooking on a mackinaw, cradling a single-action rifle. Then he tore up the map and let it flutter away and swung right instead of left. He said, ‘What’s that fool done to your lungs, horse? You sound just like a freight train.’

  Afternoons, Grat slept on black earth and blue pine needles, or he fished for trout in a tossed mountain stream that was so cold it made his sinuses ache when he drank it. He whittled forks and spoons out of green wood and hardened them in a fire. In a brand new baking soda can he kept rocks that seemed like animals to him: lion, magpie, buffalo head. At night he lay inside the tent with his hands behind his head, watching cigarette smoke ascend to the canvas and flatten out, or he’d open his trousers up and imagine pasty women and his semen spill would dry crusty on his stomach.

  He fried squirrel for breakfast one morning and saw a greyhound that was just ribs and tail slink out from the trees. Grat threw a squirrel strip in the dirt and the dog snatched it down; she broke a hard biscuit in two and coughed on it and Grat poured water into his hat. Then the escapee named Riley Dean walked out of the trees in torn shirt and trousers, a big stick in his hand. ‘I see you’ve introduced yourselves,’ he said. ‘Do you have food? I’ve been eating cave bats and that’s it. They sit in my stomach like glass paperweights.’

  My brother hid with Riley Dean until the California winter rains came, which was snow at that altitude. A posse used information supplied by Middleton and risked the weather and crags and cliffs to climb Mill Creek Canyon in search of the two dangerous men. They caught Dean as he waded through drifts in his shirt and trousers.

  Grat was with the greyhound hunting a small pocket mirror he’d dropped, when the dog lifted her head and whined. Grat stood and brushed the snow from his knees and heard the creak of a wagon and the cough and rasp of too many horses; and he backed up to the tent as the dog glanced over her shoulder, then back to whatever was down there. Hair stood up on her back as she growled. Grat tied his clothes inside a shirt and shoved what food he had in the pockets and sleeves of the mackinaw, and the dog was barking loudly as he grabbed his canteen and rifle and hurdled over scrub brush and snowcapped tree stumps into a drifted gulley. He heard the greyhound say everything over again to the horses, and he lay on his belly in snow that had yellow grass poking through it. Aspens rattled in the wind; a bird folded its wings and sailed out of the blue sky into the green of the pines. My brother saw the veined legs of roan quarter horses, then heard the springs of a wagon and more horses scrabbling up the stones of the hill.

  The dog was talking to them from the white ashes of the fire. Riley Dean was bound and gagged in the wagon. Soon a deputy sheriff and six other men in derby hats stood around the
tent with shotguns and rifles carried in two hands like they were abnormally heavy. The sheriff yelled, ‘We’ve got you covered, Dalton. Come out of there with your hands up.’

  Grat sat deep in the snow, roofed by a spread oak, and saw the possemen in their dark suits and fur coats and trousers tucked into Wellington boots. A mustached boy with a long muffler let his shotgun blast the canvas flap and then another gun went off and then all of them were firing. The tent pegs broke and the pelted canvas flapped and gunsmoke reached into the trees. It was loud and then it was quiet and Grat slid down the mountain shale dragging his stuff through the snow. The dog chased after Grat, and a deputy in a string tie stood on the brink of a cliff firing down at the dog and the snatches of mackinaw coat that he saw. Grat crashed through snow-heavy bramble and dodged between trees and after he sloshed across a flashing stream he sat against the mud bank and looked up. Aspen leaves were curling with the smoke and the posse was shooting every which way. Then they must’ve lost heart because the shooting stopped and Grat never saw the posse again.

  The dog limped to the other side of the stream. Her front right paw had been destroyed by a bullet. Blood had splashed up on the dog’s face.

  ‘You stay there, you hear? Don’t follow me. Stay.’

  The dog sat down in the snow and licked at her blood. Grat made slings for the rifle and the canteen and walked eighteen miles in cold, squelching boots, through flannel-bush and larkspur and vertical shafts of sunlight, until he got to a flatlands farm in Harmon’s Valley where a man with a neck beard named Judd Elwood was squatted against a fence post peeling the brown skin off an apple and into a paper sack. He had a two-horse team harnessed to traces and a heavy logging chain that was wrapped around an axe-trimmed sequoia. He turned when he heard Grat walk out of the forest and he looked on a mountain man, all coat and stubble and broad hat pulled down on his head, his rifle at slant on his arm.