Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  Grat decided not to answer. He slipped his stirrup over his boot and jerked his horse around so hard getting on that the whites showed in its eyes.

  Bob asked, ‘How?’ again, and his thirty-one-year-old brother slumped in his saddle, smiling with brown teeth. Grat said, ‘I peed my name against a door.’

  That morning Marshal Jacob Yoes and Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen were sent telegrams about us from City Marshal Charles T. Connelly. And the five of us slept on the autumn-cold earth beside the Caney River. I woke up with a backache and I did nothing all day but watch a woman and two small children dressed in brown walk slowly through the afternoon, shucking corn from the husks. The woman had water in a goatskin. She shaded her eyes once and she must’ve seen us, but she just picked up her bushel basket and lugged it toward the barn.

  I danced around in the muck of a smarting-cold river, washing with laundry soap; then shaved and dressed in a black wool suit and practiced my speech with Bob. Then he and I stood on the porch of the Texas Johnson farmhouse with the sun going down red in his cherry trees. I had rose oil in my hair and a borrowed white hat in my hand and my brother had brushed down my clothes with a straw broom. Julia pushed open the screen and she flustered with the surprise of our visit and poured tea and sugar into two glasses. Bob carried his out to the backyard garden where he sat with a frightened Mrs. Johnson on a peach tree seat and was as pleasant as a seminarian.

  Julia and I sat across from each other in the front room, drinking tea and eating gingersnaps. She’d changed into a blue gingham dress with puffs and bows and her long black hair was coiled and twisted with ribbons. She’d rouged her cheeks with the stain of artificial geraniums and she’d powdered her dark skin with cornstarch.

  I stared at the labels of canned goods and coffee packages they’d tacked up on the walls as decorative art—the practice in those days. On the front of a package of clothing starch was a pinafored girl on a swing. I told Julia she looked pretty as that.

  She blushed at her shoes, then put her glass down on a doily and asked, ‘Would you like me to play some music?’

  I said I would and she moved to the piano bench and I listened with my finger at my temple as she played ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,’ and ‘Jesus, Help Me to Remember.’

  I said, ‘What’s that one they call “Here Comes the Bride”?’

  She kept her back to me and turned the page of a music sheet. ‘That’s not the name of it.’

  I said, ‘Why don’t you play that?’

  She got up from the bench, smiling ever so gaily at her guest. ‘My fingers are getting tired.’

  She had a white kitten that she put pendant earrings on. It clawed at my pants leg and nipped my knuckles and the jewelry waggled from its ears and we spent more time than necessary being amused. Then the kitten got bored with the taste of my fingers and pawed at something under the piano and I said, ‘I’m supposed to ask you to go with Amos Burton in a schooner and meet Bob and Eugenia and me, thence to Joplin and a boat south, posing as immigrants.’

  I think she listened twice to every word. Her face was pained and touched and worried and in love, all at once.

  I said, ‘I’m supposed to ask you to elope.’

  She shook her head. ‘But you’re not going to ask me that, are you. You won’t want to hear me say no to you so you won’t even venture the question.’

  I don’t know what I did then. Maybe I was nervous with my hands. I said, ‘No. I reckon I’ll be too flummoxed and shy.’

  We walked outside and she sat in the swing and we were quiet together for a long time, watching clouds devour and relinquish the moon. I said, ‘I never wanted it to happen this way. I wanted to stop it a long time ago. I guess one thing just led to another. It’s like I fell into a river.’ I threw a stick. ‘That sounds stupid, doesn’t it.’

  She leaned on the ropes of the swing. ‘No. I suppose that’s exactly what it is like.’

  ‘I’m twenty years old, Julia. I got everything still in front of me. There’s a little something I have to do yet, but then I’m going to say good-bye to the past and start my life all over again. And it would truly choke me up if you’d consent to be my company. You don’t have to say anything now. You can just send one word to the telegraph office in Joplin: Yes or No; that’s it.’

  We strolled around to the backyard where one of the boarders sat with Mrs. Johnson and Bob was smelling the Sweet William while they talked about the water on the moon. I shook hands with Julia’s mother but I was sour-faced over my smile, and the man who called her Daughter glowered with suspicion as Julia linked her arm with mine and walked me slowly to my horse. I kissed her cheek and she hugged me and cried into my coat, ‘I don’t want you to leave.’

  I didn’t say anything more. I just petted her hair until my brother came up, and then I rode off with him, pushing the animals pretty hard. Then we let them tarry on the road but I still didn’t say diddily-poop to my brother Bob who always got what he wanted. He knew what there was to be quiet about but he said at last, ‘How was it?’

  ‘She fixed it all right,’ I said.

  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?’

  My horse was a fifteen-hand roan-colored stallion with orange mane and tail, called Red Buck. He nickered when I walked over and fed him a ration of oats in a canvas sack with leather ties sewed into it. Then I slapped the feed sack clean and folded it up under my vest and Broadwell asked, ‘Are we ready?’ and I climbed up into the saddle.

  Bob sat on his dapple-gray gelding with a toothbrush in his hand, rinsing baking soda out of his mouth with night-cold canteen water. In his black holster he had a .45 caliber pearl-handled Colt with floral engravings on a blue metal frame. Snug und
er his vest in a left shoulder sling was a small .38 caliber Brisley Bulldog. They’re now in museum display.

  Eugenia rode out of red and yellow trees in buckskin britches and a sheepskin coat and a dark brown stetson with her blond hair pinned underneath it. She looked like a boy of sixteen. Bob smiled at her. ‘You’re great.’

  Then the Dalton gang jogged along Onion Creek at 8:15, thudding and clanking like cavalry. Broadwell put on his dust goggles. Powers was so quiet you’d forget he was there. Grat gouged out some earwax with a toothpick and said, ‘When I was crossing the desert rattlesnakes struck at my stirrups and spiders drank from my eyes as I slept. I pried a tooth out with a dinner fork. I don’t think I can be scared anymore.’

  ‘That happens,’ said Bob. ‘I saw a soldier who was scalped and left for dead by the Sioux. Nothing else could ever touch him after that. He walked around like he was asleep.’

  I unbuckled my saddlebag and handed my binoculars in their leather case across to my brother Bob. He hung them over his neck and they were later claimed by the undertaker W.H. Lape. Black crows picked their steps in the yellow corn stubble, and freshly shocked corn stood shredding brown in the fields. I heard the hound’s groan of a windmill.

  Just then James Brown’s ten-year-old daughter was riding a barebacked mare to the schoolhouse in Coffeyville, and she saw six horses and riders ladder up the bank under a rickety bridge of curled boards. She followed close after us with her books strapped in a belt but turned east when we missed the shortcut.

  In Coffeyville, Charles Brown, a shoemaker of fifty-nine, rehung the big wooden boot on the signpost in front of his shop. Next to the sidewalk was a bare, twisted oak tree enclosed in a square picket fence that he swept around with a twig broom. The mechanic George Cubine, thirty-six years old, Brown’s partner, stood with his shoulder against the doorjamb, a coffee cup curling steam in his hands. He smiled. ‘See any evildoers?’