Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  Passenger train Number 2 was then about three miles away and men who’d boasted after Pryor Creek about having repelled the Daltons and made us turn tail now sat stony on their cushioned green seats, swaying with the coach, sweating and smoking and letting the scares crawl all over them. A man vomited into his hat. Reports indicate that at least three of that crew walked out to piss and flung their rifles away, and the cowards crashed through coach doors to the rear of the train where they slid down into safer passenger seats with their badges in their pockets.

  The engineer pulled the whistle cord twice and saw the Adair way signal flash red and he threw up the long throttle valve lever and turned the valve cutoffs that let air pressure escape from the drive cylinders. Steam rolled out white and unribboned in the air and the boiler gauge arrow swung left and fell while the air pressure gauge arrow climbed and they were coasting with the bell ringing loud and the engineer hanging an elbow out the cab window while the fireman drank the last of his vacuum bottle of coffee, what trainmen call crank, and fastened a sweaty suspender strap on his overalls. The engineer pushed the valve levers for the drive cylinder brakes and the steel tires screeched on the rails. The fireman said, ‘There’s two men in black raincoats at the depot. That would be the railroad guards, I suppose.’

  ‘Oughta be more than two.’

  The fireman leaned out to see and got swacked in the neck with Grat’s bleached axe handle. Then the ladder clanged under Grat’s boots and I was hooked on the left ladder with a dangling leg and my pistol was cocked in my hand, the grip seated on the board floor next to the ash-pan damper handles so the gun was pointed mostly at a tallow can they used for oiling cylinders.

  There was a purple mouse under the stoker’s hand at his neck. The engineer asked his buddy if he was all right. ‘Neck’s just a little scratchy,’ he replied.

  I was still making an effort to climb into the cab. I shouted at the two crewmen, ‘Hey! Look down in this direction!’

  The engineer looked down at me, at a burly boy with steel-colored eyes and a blue mask over his nose, while the fireman touched the welt on his neck and backed away from Grat who was then large in that hot square of space. Grat poked the engineer against the furnace with his handle and heaved against the air-brake lever and momentum jerked us a little off our boots. The engineer leered at my brother’s exposed pistol, which waggled in a holster near his watch pocket. Grat noticed and said, ‘How would you like your nose broke? I just discovered a talent for it.’

  The engineer smiled. ‘Could I still drink whiskey?’

  While the train was still rolling, Kinney had lifted a window shade in the club car and seen the depot platform and Bob and Broadwell solemn at the elbows of the ticket agent. Sid Johnson, a man with prominent cheekbones and squint wrinkles around his eyes, peeked under the shade on the left side of the train and saw Doolin pass below him, stroking his red mustache and staring toward the caboose. Johnson raised his pistol and whispered, ‘Bang.’

  LeFlore stood at the front connecting door waiting for Kinney’s go-head. All the other volunteers were sunk down in their seats with their hats off, revolvers cold in their hands, fear of us recruiting them man by man. Kinney said, ‘Okay, this is it,’ and stood in the aisle like a boss politician. ‘Well, boys, shall we go out and fight them?’

  I guess his boys didn’t answer.

  Johnson, LeFlore, and Kinney braced on the seesawing iron platform, hearing the slow click of the wheels and some words in the engine cab and the abrupt extra whine of brakes when Grat muscled the air-brake lever. Then Kinney leaped from the stairs into a sprawl of soot-black ivy that was taking over a coal shed to the left of the train. LeFlore and Johnson hung waiting a second for the train to stop, then scurried inside the coal shed’s open door. That’s when I saw them, when they ran from the club car like children playing let’s pretend. I thought they were frightened passengers and didn’t pay them proper attention.

  Kinney maneuvered into the shed and the three of them stood there in silence for several minutes, smelling coal dust. A black cat skipped across some crate tops and dropped to the earth and rubbed against Kinney’s pants leg. They quietly listened to the cinder crunch of Dalton boots on the roadbed and heard Bob shout for Grat to bring the stoker and a coal pick back to the express car. Sweat blotted through their shirts. LeFlore had his pistol cocked and next to his ear and his eye kept sliding toward J.J. Kinney. Finally, Sid Johnson said, ‘Should we get them now or wait for the suspense to build?’

  I looked down the siding and saw Newcomb and Doolin standing in weeds like signboards, and Powers, Broadwell, and Bob pounding the wooden door of the express car, and suddenly the three lawmen in the coal shed cut loose and a bullet hit the ladder kapang and then a dozen shots struck off the boiler, triangulating inside that steel cab so that not one of us should’ve been spared; deflected slugs that were flattened like mushrooms whizzed close to Grat and me and the crewmen but not even a raincoat was nicked and all we heard was clang and peeyow as the hot lead swiped at our faces. Grat and I were quick with our guns and returned two shots for each we received, letting all fly at the coal bin since the firebox had blinded us to night-seeing and we couldn’t pick out the three bushwackers to draw a bead on them. The engineer and the fireman bellied down to the floor; ricochets sparked off the drive wheel eccentrics, and a wild shot skidded a coal shovel off the tender and it landed bawong in the grass. (If I sound excited, I am; I was.) I rammed six cartridges into my smoking chamber and waited for a pistol flash intended to rip my face off, and I fired everything I had straight at it. I must’ve done that several times. A man traveling from St. Louis later claimed that over two hundred shots were exchanged before the firing lessened. He must’ve been an accountant.

  Then Bob drew his pistol and crouched under a baggage car to see how many were the shooters, and he saw men he recognized: LeFlore sitting down on an abandoned shuttle car that was poked through with weeds, cupping his left elbow, blood bulging out of his coat sleeve. Kinney had been downed by us too. His white shirt was twisted out of his trousers and his pale belly showed, so that he resembled a workingman napping in the grass at lunch hour. Sid Johnson knelt in a coal pile, his right arm out stiff and the pistol smoking out of its muzzle and chamber. The pistol kicked up when he pulled the trigger and then he let his arm stiffen again.

  My brother Bob waddled underneath the carriage until he wasn’t twenty feet from the shed. And he said, ‘Sid Johnson! You old scalawag!’ And the deputy marshal swiveled and then one of his five or six best friends, the one who could turn the pages of a Bible with a bent-sight .22, put a .45 caliber slug into Johnson’s shoulder and knocked him onto his seat in the coal. There were black circles on his trouser knees. (I heard when the doctors pulled off Sid’s shirt, his shoulder flapped loose like a stocking cap. ‘Boy oh boy,’ said Johnson. ‘Bob’ll never let me live this down.’)

  Two or three special deputies were firing from the smoking parlor car, a foot-long blaze with each report, but they didn’t have much for targets. About six volunteers braced themselves at the rail of the smoker trying to muster up courage with their guns in their belts and their brains as slow as cattle and sheep and mud hens. They saw my brother Bob stand from under the baggage car and two of them had the wherewithal to yank pistols from their holsters at least, but Bob potted just one gas lamp over their heads and they withdrew back into the dark of the car like slugs.

  With the shooting from the coal shed stopped, Grat and I clambered out of the engine cab with the hoghead and the stoker, who carried a coal pick over his shoulder. Dick Broadwell grabbed it from him and chopped the pick into the sliding door, wood barking and yelping and flying away in splinters. We heard a key and the padlock clicked open and the door rumbled as it rolled wide. Oven air rushed on us and the messenger trembled there with his hands high and his blue shirt black with perspiration, sweat trickling down off his nose.

  Bob couldn’t figure out why the attendant had opened a door t
hat was secured, so he stood back and asked, ‘Is it just you in there? Are you alone?’

  The messenger swallowed and shook his head from side to side.

  I could hear the Texas badman sit down hard on the mailbags. ‘Shee-oot, Williams! Real flaming smart!’

  Broadwell and Grat jumped up inside the express car and covered the hired man in the corner. Grat hurled the man’s rifle out into the night and I saw it glint once, twice in the moonlight as it wheeled. Broadwell said, ‘You wanted that reward money pretty bad, didn’t you. Would’ve been Christmas in July, wouldn’t it.’

  The hired gun ignored him. He glared at my brother Bob. ‘We ain’t gonna give you squat.’

  But of course they did. They offered the worn-out argument about not knowing the combination and Bob tantalized Williams with a pistol shot that was so close to his brainpan it singed his hair and repeated itself in the messenger’s ear for most of the following week. The safe was opened and we carried money out in a mail sack and threw it down into the clattery springboard wagon that Pierce had driven down from the water tower.

  My ox of a brother, Grat, pushed the ticket agent and fireman and engineer back to the front of the train where he told them to hurry it out of town. Then Grat hopped down from the ladder and bumped the ticket agent onto his seat just for meanness.

  Doolin and Newcomb backed along the train with their rifles on the faces of the distraught volunteers; then Newcomb and Broadwell started laughing about something and instead of coming up with Bob and me, they jumped in the wagon with Pierce, and Pierce slapped the long leather traces against the horse team and they barreled down the siding past the coach cars, howling and ki-yiing, shooting their pistols through windows. Broadwell stood on the wagonbox, glamorous as Custer, and shot a man of fifty-five in the shoulder, then plowed a bullet into the vest pocket timepiece of a passenger named Frimbo. Afterward, Frimbo laid the watch out on a sheet of paper and demonstrated for Chris Madsen’s men that it was in so many pieces it could be gathered up and sifted through his fingers.

  Broadwell, Pierce, and little Newcomb ringed the train twice, taunting the volunteers, daring them to shoot; then the train clanked and squealed and strained in its hard pull forward.

  Newcomb said, ‘Why don’t we board her and run through the coaches assassinatin’ the villains? Wouldn’t that be havoc?’

  But they saw Bob fussing and me waving them back and they turtled the wagon over the moon-gleaming tracks.

  I inquired of my brother, ‘Wasn’t that Sid Johnson shooting at us?’

  Bob had on his surprised and mirthful and enchanted-with-life expression. ‘And Charlie LeFlore!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can you beat that! You’ve got to help me think of a way to really rub it in next time I see those coots. Something really humiliating.’

  I saw the brakeman’s lantern on a second-class coach as it rolled past. I said, ‘I bet they’re so danged embarrassed already they’ll shoot ya soon as you walk into town.’

  ‘Naw! Do you think so? Naw. They know the conditions. It’s like a prizefight, Emmett. You don’t go slamming the other guy around after he’s out of the ring.’

  ‘I forget: we’re gentlemen.’

  He looked at me like I was simple.

  Johnson, Kinney, and LeFlore had struggled up the stairs of the smoking parlor car and sat down bleeding onto newspapers in the aisle. The ticket agent had ducked inside the depot and bolted shut the doors and was probably at that moment signaling yet another posse. And the Dalton gang backed down the main street of the quiet town of Adair, taking some last shots from the caboose without reply.

  I was sick of trains and the mulish routine of robbing them and I was frankly a little scared of being shot at, scared enough to make my stomach hurt. Pierce drove the wagon ahead to where the horses were hitched and we walked through town as we had entered it, seven slimy men in noisy raincoats, striding out of Adair under elm trees, except now we were alone in the town, every lamp was extinguished, the doors were shut, and children were crouched down in closets like we were boogey-men. I was as hot as I’ve ever been, and I had to keep slapping at mosquitoes that swarmed at my face and hands. I took the boardwalk in front of the drugstore and saw a shattered window with the two doctors flat on their backs in shards of glass.

  My brother Bob and I stood there, struck mute and motionless by what we saw, which was Dr. W.L. Goff, who’d suffered the freakish accident of a wild pistol shot that exploded his left eye. Blood covered all of one half of his face and slid away from his head with the slope of the floor. He’d die within the hour. The other doctor, who was named Youngblood (according to the newspaper clippings), had been struck in the throat with a ricochet. His fingers curled and uncurled. He saw me staring and turned his head and blood and food surged out of his mouth like he’d spilled a soup pan onto a table. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘Please help me.’ And I ran away as fast as I could while my brother Bob looked on, fascinated, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets.

  17

  The Dalton gang rode northwest toward Kansas and into the Dog Creek hills, while three posses of over a hundred city boys, each a clanking arsenal, strove after us in several wrong directions. At four in the morning, the spoils of Adair were apportioned, Bob doing the mathematics as always, at which he was baffling, fast as a gambler with cards.

  Bitter Creek Newcomb stole twenty eggs from a farm chicken coop and fried them with wild onion in a skillet, talking as he did so about the engagement ring he was going to buy for his fiancee, Rose Dunn. The other men loitered next to the fire or washed their faces in the creek and I napped with last year’s rusty leaves while a daddy longlegs walked over my neck and ear.

  If I slept at all it was with a nightmare about that Adair holdup. That was the first time we’d really been shot at during a robbery, the first time I’d ever been scared of dying. I could hear Newcomb sizzle onions at the camp fire but with that I heard railroad detectives shouting and the noise of guns going off and the whiz of slugs crossing the air near my head. I could open my eyes and see Powers tamping tobacco into his meerschaum or tinkering with his alarm clock, but if I shut them I saw running men and muzzle flashes and pistol chamber sparks near a coal shed, or the drugstore and the shattered plate glass window and the exploded left eye of Dr. W.L. Goff. It doesn’t seem exactly real to me now; it seems like cap pistols and chicken blood and dead men who’ll rise up and dust themselves off and eat cafeteria food at the RKO film studio. But that morning in the Dog Creek hills I was pretty shaken and whenever I thought about Dr. Youngblood, I saw Bob lying there. My brother would see me staring and turn his head and blood would brim out of his mouth. ‘Help me,’ he’d say. ‘Please help me.’ And I’d run.

  I wanted to quit but my brother Bob didn’t; he wasn’t haunted at all. He handled Adair like all the other jobs and after distributing the shares he delivered Bill’s percentage to Bartlesville in a shoebox and stayed for a lunch of fried tomatoes on toast with the child Grace in his lap, her steel and leather leg brace hanging from the back of the chair.

  I combed out horse manes with a stolen lady’s brush; then Bob rode in at sundown, breaking through river cane, green circles under his eyes and dust and chaff in every wrinkle of his clothes. He told us to saddle up, so we did. And we walked our horses up to Coffeyville, Kansas, arriving at two in the morning.

  Bob hammered the door to the Farmers’ Home on Eighth Street, a hostel no bigger than a camera store. I could see the owner sleeping with his wife in a brass bed in the dining room, saw him scrape a match and feed it to an oil lantern and spread the window curtains apart. What he saw was a hulking young man with a dark, brooding look and my black pistol cocked and pointed at his eye.

  He opened the door to Bob Dalton, who pushed in followed by Powers and the rest of us, stamping our boots on the rug, opening cabinet doors, letting a water glass roll off the table and crash loudly to the floor.

  The owner’s wife was sitting up in bed, drawing a sheet up over her nightgown
. I’d only seen her before with her hair braided and circled on each side of her head like earphones. Now it frayed long over her shoulders. Bob sat on the bed and bounced it, squeaking the springs. He smiled at her. ‘Am I a figment of your imagination?’

  The woman cooked supper and the cleaner four of us used the bathwater in a single wooden tub, and then we slept on iron bunks in the rear of the place, an hour of nightwatch assigned each man.

  I woke up at noon to see Bob on the striped mattress beside me, the very same on which I would lie dying in something short of three months. He had a tin cup of coffee and the Coffeyville Journal, the Stillwater Gazette, and the Kansas City Star, each spread open to the story of the daring train robbery at Adair. I got up on an elbow and he handed me a small, handwritten, railroad poster that was torn where the tack holes had been. Dated yesterday night and rushed out to every depot in three states, it said the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway Company would pay five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of each of the masked men engaged in the robbery, to an amount not exceeding forty thousand dollars. (I have that poster on file.)

  Bob grinned at me as I read it. He said, ‘Forty thousand dollars. That’s the largest reward ever put on the heads of an outlaw gang, bar none. And that’s not mentioning the offerings attached to us still from California and Wharton, Leliaetta, and Red Rock. I am impressed as hell with myself.’

  I groused, ‘Well I’m plain, flat-out tired of trains. I don’t want to hear one word about them. What would make me darn impressed with myself right now is if I was to interview and land a two-dollar job digging sump-holes, or filing nails to a point, or stacking canned figs in a grocery store. I’ve had a bellyful of excitement.’ I plunked the newspapers onto his mattress.

  He said, ‘I guess most folks would shoot a little higher for the stars, Emmett, but each to his own vista I always say.’ He slumped back on the bed. ‘But let me tell you about our next job. I’ve been thinking that banks are where the money is.’