Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  My sister turned. ‘He’s waiting for Momma to finish cooking the ketchup.’

  Detective Smith shoved the burlap bag aside and stood. ‘You’re Littleton, aren’t you?’

  ‘We’re not informers, Mr. Smith. We’ve had about enough of your kind.’

  ‘I know exactly how you feel. I must’ve lost all respect for myself to try this penny-waste disguise.’ He picked up the burlap bag and walked over to the front door. He saw a robin in the yellow grass of the yard. ‘Looks like an early spring, doesn’t it?’

  When he left he slammed the door so hard a piece of window caulking broke off. Then he turned the knob and leaned in. ‘I pray every night that your brother Grat is not being picked apart by vultures. Out in the desert. Where I can’t see it.’

  All these intervening years of meditation and repentance have not leached away my contempt for that man.

  After his record-making one-hundred-and-seven-day journey over two thousand treacherous miles, my brother Grat rode into Oklahoma and the pole corral that Charlie Pierce had constructed in the cedar brakes near my dugout. A tickbird supplied the directions to it. Nobody was there of course, which surprised Grat; he didn’t know Bob had dissolved the gang. He found tins of deviled ham, sardines, and apricots I’d cached away in the damp earth next to the stove. He flopped back on a bunk mattress and jabbed open the cans with a pocketknife and spooned the food out with his fingers. Then he slept until the next day, washed with a brick of laundry soap in the South Canadian, and sat naked on the warm stones, letting the spring sun bake him dry, waiting to be discovered.

  The same tickbird who’d got him there told us where he’d be and was rewarded with ten dollars, half what he demanded. I rode down to the sod house to see a bearded, gaunt, and pitiful-looking man, all eye sockets, cheekbones, and ribs. The first thing he said to me was how his pal Dangerous Dan could balance a bowie knife on his tongue.

  I rode with Grat to a hotel in Dover and he told me about a woman from the East he may or may not have met on his trip. ‘I told her I’d read all I wanted to about New York. I said, “You got trolleys and art museums and foreigners selling hot pretzels. You got Wall Street and sneak thieves and dandies who wear spats and chew chocolate-covered cherries.” I said, “I’m glad you decided to venture west and discover human beings.”’

  ‘You get anywhere with her?’ I asked like a bumpkin.

  He said, ‘I’ve been so long without, Emmett, I’ve lost the inclination. And I don’t like the way women smell.’

  The family made a whoop-de-do over my brother’s return. Bob hired out a Dover restaurant and the entire clan, including Eugenia, excluding my inamorata, partook of a Sunday meal served by shy black girls wearing bandanas over their hair, bossed to the kitchen and back by the black cowpuncher, Amos Burton. The women were happy, the men ate with rifles crossed in their laps, the girls sang ‘A Frog Went A-courtin’ and ‘Shoo, Fly, Shoo,’ and I stood guard, leaning against the doorjamb with a shotgun in my arms, looking out over puddles of rainwater in the street, worrying about when the massed lawmen would attack and wipe us out. They could’ve had us easy then.

  My mother kept a hand on Grattan’s wrist and just gazed from one to the other of us most of the way through supper. She weighed about ninety pounds then and her weak right eye drooped pretty badly. She smiled and said, ‘Have all my boys come home at last?’

  After supper, Bob walked outside with Eugenia for an hour, discussing a railroad depot in Red Rock she’d visited. Then he stood at the doorway and nodded at Grat and me. I gathered up my saddlebags and my mother followed me. ‘Are you boys going—so soon?’

  Bob sagged against the door frame and said something sonly to her.

  She gave him a pinched look and said, ‘Well, keep your courage, and leave this wild country before you hurt anyone. Seems it’s too late now to do anything else.’ She put a hand on my wrist and Grat’s. Grat seemed hypnotized by a lantern hanging over the door. ‘Promise me you boys will always stick together.’

  Then we pushed out through the door and unhitched our horses. Bob said, ‘I hate that kind of stuff, don’t you?’

  I was almost in my saddle when Eugenia remembered my harmonica for me. She held my horse by the bridle and when I returned to the table for my Harpoon, my mother asked me to pray with her. I took my hat off and bowed my head, sliding my eyes at my younger kin who were snickering at me in the restaurant. She said, ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you and may His light shine upon you, in this world and the next.’

  I hung there.

  ‘Say “Amen.”’

  ‘Amen‚’ I said, and soon as I got out the door I hopped on my horse and galloped away as fast as I could.

  I don’t recall the dates for any of that. I only know that it was in May that my brother Bill, sweet-talking and convincing, in brown jodhpurs and tie, rode with Bill Doolin to Ingalls and Stillwater and to a cattle lot in Texas, collecting Charlie Pierce and Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Powers and Dick Broadwell. And it was on June 1, 1892, that the Dalton gang, minus my brother Bill as always, but including Grat at long last, rode to the railroad station at Red Rock on the Otoe reservation.

  It was a dinky town and still is: depot and a section house and a cluttered store with all it sold lettered on its outdoor wall advertisement. Red Rock sat about twelve miles north of Wharton on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe lines that connected Wichita, Kansas, with Guthrie and Oklahoma City.

  We broke from trot to canter at the limits of the town and our horses threw their nozzles up, clicking the bit with their tongues. Grat was so excited about our intentions that he couldn’t bring himself to slow, so he galloped ahead and backed his horse up to the store and waited, his flop hat wadded in his hand. There wasn’t any cover near there, because it was wheat and grass and bicycle country, but we wore what we had at Leliaetta—black raincoats, black hats, blue bandanas—so we were unseen as we stood our horses stock-still on the main street of town about fifty yards from the trestle: eight strong and violent and unafraid men, the largest bunch we ever were. Doolin and Pierce shared a pouch of Bull Durham tobacco and used the same match on their pipes. Newcomb rolled the long sleeves of his raincoat up. Twenty miles west I could see rain hanging from thunderheads. Lightning was crooked out of the purple clouds; then it flashed in threes, each split like divining rods, and all I could hear was the slightest grumble of noise, as if an old boarder were reading aloud in his room.

  At that time in Kingfisher, my brother Bill strolled into a hotel lobby with his hands in his pockets, a green cigar in his mouth. That afternoon a grand jury from the fifth judicial district had questioned sixteen local men regarding the whereabouts of Bob and Emmett Dalton and asked each to confirm or deny the rumor that Grat was back in the territories. The jury got nary a word from those store-keepers and farmers. Bill had a list of every name and he wasn’t shy about knocking on doors and reminding folks of gifts and favors and of how surly and cross we could get. And he’d grin at the witnesses as he was grinning when he plumped himself down on the gold satin couch across from Chris Madsen and the federal judge and the federal prosecutor. He rolled his cigar to a cheek and folded his arms and smiled largely at each man. ‘Well. It’s nine o’clock and we’ve got nothing to do. Why don’t we play charades?’

  At Red Rock, Bob dismounted and gave me the bridle reins, worked the lock on the depot door, and walked around to the side porch. He leaned into the window glass, cupping his eyes, then walked to the rear of the depot and looked hard through that window. He saw an uneven table with a kerosene lamp and four yellowing newspapers, also an oak fence and gate and the telegraph key, another cold lamp, a grilled ticket counter, and the edge of an oak desk. He had a feeling the depot wasn’t vacant, that a station attendant was crouched down behind the grill or in the cubbyhole of the desk. He pressed his ear to the glass and closed his eyes and walked down the road to me and his horse. He forked his saddle and gingered his horse into backing up to the dark of a
cottonwood tree. ‘Let’s be a little secret why don’t we, and not get illuminated.’

  I looked over my shoulder and danced my mare back; the others did the same; and Grat jogged back from his walk along the railroad tracks, scratching the knuckles of his hand. ‘I think I heard the train.’

  Bob smiled. ‘That right? Then it’s early.’

  Pierce said, ‘I think you’re speculatin’, Grat.’

  I asked, ‘Nobody home, Bob?’

  ‘I haven’t figured out just what the peculiarity is. Maybe the attendant is having supper.’

  Bitter Creek took out a tin of tobacco and pinched some under his lip, while left of him Grat took every bullet out of his pistol chamber and pressed them back in again.

  Bob said, ‘Don’t be too disappointed if we let this opportunity go by.’

  Broadwell questioned Powers in whispers about that, but Powers didn’t react. Doolin bit his pipe and leaned over his saddle horn to glower at Bob but he didn’t say a word. Grat let some brown soup of tobacco cud drop out of his cheek to the dirt. It sounded like marbles hitting the road.

  In Kingfisher, the federal judge had already retired in disgust to his room. The fifth district’s prosecutor swirled Madeira in a snifter and listened to my brother Bill entertain. (Whenever I tune the radio to NBC and hear Jack Haley joke on the Maxwell House Show Boat, I think of Bill and smile. He had real zest with people.) After some stories for Madsen and the lawyer, Bill began rather loudly noticing women: ‘Wow, what about the galloons on that one!’ or ‘I bet her legs go all the way up to her playground. How about it, prosecutor?’

  The attorney banged his snifter down on the coffee table and pulled himself up from the sofa. ‘Marshal, it’s nine-thirty.’ He bowed toward Madsen, glanced some disdain at my brother, and walked across the green carpet of the lobby.

  ‘He’s free to disagree,’ said Bill. ‘He didn’t have to go off and pout.’

  Madsen sat in a corner of the sofa, squinting at Bill, a full snifter clutched in his lap. ‘Maybe he was tired.’

  The prosecutor climbed the hotel stairs, his right hand dragging along the bannister. Bill could hear the slow crump of his shoes in the carpet. My brother smirked at Madsen and shouted, ‘How can you fellas sleep at night with those Daltons running around loose?’

  In the coach of the Santa Fe train, men with rifles sat next to a boy curled up in the wooden seat, a woman resting her brow on three fingers, and a man rattling a newspaper open and reading through bifocals under the light. A white conductor in a blue suit walked down the aisle touching all the seat backs. ‘Red Rock, the next stop. Red Rock.’ Then the men stood up and sidled out to the aisle and followed each other to the smoker. The front man knocked just once and the smoker door wrenched open. It was black as a movie theater inside.

  A railroad detective slammed the door shut behind them. ‘How’s it look?’

  ‘Normal,’ the first man said.

  ‘There’s empty places in front.’

  They ducked low and scuttled forward past windows where men with shotguns were scrunched down, picking shotgun shells out of boxes or squashing cigarettes out.

  The railroad detective went out the front door onto the grated platform and hopped onto the green express car’s carriage. He thumped the door with his elbow as he held onto the ladder.

  When the back door was opened a slide of light bent to the cinder roadbed and the weeds. He stepped in and the door was kicked shut behind him. Three men in suits sat on chairs with shotguns held like pole lamps; a man in a gray fedora sat on an empty safe idly kicking it with his shoe heels. A man in suspenders and arm bands was loading a rifle next to the wooden mail slots; the messenger was braced against the side door, a pistol hanging from his hand. The man on the safe took his fedora off and tossed it onto some mail sacks. ‘How’d you know about this?’

  The railroad detective said, ‘One of our operatives. Madsen put him to work in the area.’

  (Eugenia Moore had gone to the Red Rock railroad station in a pink flounced dress and talked to a boy who wrote shorthand whenever the telegraph signaled. When he next worked the graveyard shift, she had allowed him to take her into a broom closet and she showed him how the French kiss and she asked him questions about trains and money shipments, and when he answered she pushed his hand under her blouse.

  Two or three minutes after she left, a man in a black suit and bowler walked in throwing his badged wallet down on the boy’s desk. ‘I hope it was pretty good.’)

  Then the Dalton gang saw the train, grimy lantern and smokestack and roiling black smoke, a dead robin splayed in its cow catcher. And noisy enough to make you deaf, all steam brakes and bells and steel versus steel as it slacked speed near the station. Over all that, I said, ‘Something’s wrong when a smoking car’s dark. Lookit that dang thing.’

  ‘I only just noticed,’ Bob said.

  Grat nudged his horse forward but Newcomb grabbed its mane hair and jerked it to a stop. ‘The practice is to wait on Bob. He’s the one with the caution.’

  Broadwell pulled out of line and nuzzled his horse in next to my brother. ‘Something’s inappropriate, Bob.’

  ‘That’s been a subject of discussion.’

  I could make out the coach windows: a sleeping man, a baby’s hand flat against the glass, a man turning a newspaper page, a gas jet turned down to dim. But that smoking car was black, not even the glow of a cigarette ash, not even a gas jet lit, and the shades up on every window.

  Grat had his Winchester unstrapped and standing barrel up on his thigh. He slapped Bob in the right shoulder with the back of his hand. ‘Come on, Bob! Fool! You’re acting like an old woman.’

  ‘It’s a deadhead, Grat. A setup.’

  Powers sagged and crossed his arms on his saddle horn and moved a toothpick over his teeth. ‘Surely does have that appearance. Looks like a little ambuscade.’

  The front door of the depot opened and the ticket agent stood on the threshold with a rifle in his hands, looking right and left, somehow missing us. He walked out to the siding with his eyes as big as they could be, and he banged twice on the express car’s wall before he returned to the depot brushing sawdust from his knees, his rifle in the crook of his arm.

  As the train pulled out, the conductor peered out the window but couldn’t see us for our black slickers. He broke open his shotgun and extracted the shells. ‘Wharton, next stop!’ he said.

  The men in the smoker got up off the floor, slapping the dirt from their seats, releasing the hammers on their pistols. One said, ‘That was a real disappointment.’

  The men in the express car were breaking open their guns, rocking with the train. The man with the fedora was still alternating his shoe heels against the safe door. His hands were under his knees. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen next? They’re going to stop the second section, hold up the regular train. My goodness, we’re sharp as tacks, aren’t we.’

  Powers got off his horse and ventilated his saddle. Grat said, ‘I need a plug of tobacco. Who’s got a plug of chew they can lend me?’

  Doolin got down and yanked hard on his cinch, making his horse look askance. ‘I think we’ve been buffaloed,’ he said. His raincoat squealed when he moved. He mumbled, ‘Skimpity dinners, heels off my boots; damn scurvy hat makes my hair itch.’ He said aloud‚ ‘Coulda been there wasn’t no smokers on that train. You ever consider that? They mighta been Latter-Day Saints.’

  ‘Maybe we oughta be quiet,’ said Broadwell.

  ‘May I ask why?’ said Doolin. ‘May I ask why we’re sittin’ here? Seems to me the engineer pulled the throttle a couple of minutes ago.’

  Soon as he said that we heard the second train and Bob smiled broadly at each of us. ‘Wheoo!’

  ‘Ain’t that somethin’?’ I said.

  A kerosene lamp was turned up inside the depot and the train came on with gas jets burning in all of the coaches and some of the window shades were pulled down and even Doolin was grinning. ‘Well, la dee
da,’ he said. ‘La dee da.’

  When the train stopped we spurred our horses and Grat banked up to the engine cab alone and knocked the two-man crew into their handles and pull-rods and switches.

  Broadwell climbed onto the caboose and opened the door. It was dark inside but he could see bunk beds. ‘Is anybody in here?’

  A man got up on his elbow. ‘Who is it?’

  Broadwell sat on the guard rail and balanced his rifle on his knee. ‘The next time you’re in this situation and somebody asks you that, you oughta just play dead.’

  The rest of us sat on horses alongside the train. We didn’t whoop or shout or fire guns at all, and some of the people who slept in the coaches didn’t know the train had been stopped by us until the newspapers said so the next day.

  Two Wells Fargo employees have since sworn they engaged in a shoot-out with us but I recall no such thing. I recall that Bob and Doolin and Newcomb rolled the door back while I pranced my horse this way and that on the siding, pointing my weapon everywhere.

  Bob told the money attendant to open the safe door but the man said he didn’t know the combination. Bob had been through all that once before at Wharton and he found it more than a little boring. He pulled his blue bandana down and unfastened the hooks of his raincoat for the cool. The halves of his raincoat swished and dropped to the floor as he sat down on the spindle-backed chair as if just that much drama had exhausted him. Newcomb took over and threatened the messenger with every manner of penalty and discomfort; then Doolin brandished a sledgehammer he’d unearthed.