Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  I switched the sack of money to my right hand and ran across Walnut Street, ducking low, and then I was off the bricks and I stopped on the dirt of English Street where I bent to take the pain from my sides. I couldn’t find enough air. The black workmen who’d torn up the street had crawled under a porch floor and they stared at me from the dark, their chins on their fists. Bob jogged across Walnut with his rifle in both hands. He stood beside me and looked along Eighth Street. Each window was like a snap-shot of a face.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Just winded,’ I said.

  Bob grinned like he was having the time of his life. He’d torn off his worthless goatee disguise and now he peeled the dark beard off my face, leaving on the mustache. ‘Take it easy, Emmett. Go slow. I can whip the whole dang town.’

  Miss Moore had sunk to the grass of the cemetery, her forehead against my brother Frank’s cold headstone, when the scary street battle began. And now she could hear too many guns making too much noise in the plaza, as loud in the cemetery as a thunderstorm with shutters banging at every window and shingles tearing off the roof and empty jars at the windowsills crashing to the floor. She sat in the grass rocking back and forth, her knees in the hug of her arms, and tears brimmed out of her eyes.

  Grat bulled out through the bank doors and squared himself on the porch. The money sack bulked under his coat and his rifle was crossed in front of him and a vein stood out on his forehead. His face was a fist and he was as red as a man who’d heard his wife insulted, like he’d just run down a long flight of stairs and crashed into the parlor and was about to break off the neck of a bottle. He hulked on the porch and the shooting stopped just long enough for Powers and Broadwell to dash out into the street in their black clothes and their black hats and the blue neckerchief up on Broadwell’s nose.

  Then Grat took off in a crouch and the three bank robbers rushed west across the pavement and guns started going off again. Broadwell and Powers got into the alley and Grat walked backwards firing across into Isham’s store and a man kneeling by the door shot back and knocked Grat down to the bricks with a bullet that blew part of his stomach into the back of his coat. Grat sat up and another shot struck him so hard in the chest it kicked him back to his elbows. He rolled to his knees and the money sack slipped from his vest and belt but he wasn’t thinking one thousand dollars at all. He saw the horses down the alley at the pipe tie-up and staggered for them. His shirt flopped heavy with blood.

  Bill Powers got hit with a shot meant for Grat. It ripped through his left coat sleeve and stopped inside his bicep somewhere next to the bone. He slumped against the wall of the McKenna and Adamson store and skidded down a little before he leaned a shoulder against the wall of the building and stumbled to a back door and rattled the latch, wanting in. He pounded the door with his fist and then his rifle stock; then he quit to hug the white door frame close so he couldn’t be seen. He crushed his hat in his armpit to slow the bleeding and waited with a revolver in his hand. His coat smeared red on the wood.

  Dick Broadwell made it as far as the oil tanker parked next to the icehouse. The horse team backed up from him and stamped their shoes and their hitch chains clanked when they tossed their heads. There was black oil on everything. Broadwell saw the Long-Bell lumberyard down the alley and scurried to it, cradling his arm. But the defenders were walking out into the street now and a man in a collarless shirt and a bowler hat more than eighty yards away stood still and aimed a buffalo gun and the bullet slammed into Broadwell’s lower back like something five inches wide. He was kicked forward but he kept rockily on his legs. He squeezed the pain in his belly and his boots crossed over each other as he lurched into the lumberyard. He collapsed against a stack of warped two-by-twelves and bunched a handkerchief inside the back of his shirt. He could smell pinesap and sawdust and the urine of children. He closed his eyes. ‘Get me through this, okay? Just let me ride out of this town.’

  My brother Grat was spilling blood from his mouth when he pitched inside a small dark barn the size of a two-car garage. He propped himself on the wood studs of a wall that held shovels and rakes and hayforks. There were packets of seeds on the workbench. The barn doors were open so he could shoot into Walnut Street but Slosson’s outside stairway to the second floor of his drugstore was deflecting whatever was thrown at Grat. He fired southwest at the Masonic Hall and some men standing there dived to the grass. He unbuttoned his shirt and saw how his blood bubbled pink from his chest when he took air. But the pain in his stomach was displacing everything else. He walked over to the workbench where a potato was rooting white in a clear water jar. He picked out the cutting and drank the water, staring west through a four-pane window to the horse tie-ups where Bob and I stood loading our rifles with cartridges from our saddlebags. Grat smiled.

  Bob and I had trotted down the middle of Eighth Street until we reached Wells Brothers’ store where the south-running alley was. We walked down that way looking for snipers in the buildings. I rubbed gunpowder off my face with my sleeve. We’d guessed Grat and the other two were out of the bank and shooting from their saddles by then but it was not yet so; Ball was still shoving currency into the sack and raking the cumbersome coins away.

  Bob stooped at the Wells loading dock and was as careful as an assassin with his shots. One struck a butter churn directly in front of Henry Isham; another just missed two cases of dynamite next to the stoves. A shot fired at Louis Dietz struck the monkey wrench in his pocket and veered off into a roll of Isham’s brown wrapping paper. The shock of the blow knocked Dietz out but he was only sore in the chest for a while. Bob had as good an eye as there was in the West. Whenever he missed he meant to.

  Then Grat was on the porch of the bank and Broadwell and Powers rushed out to the plaza bricks like outlaws in the dime novels. The sun flashed off their rifles and Grat backed across the street shooting everywhere. I fired nine times, quick as I could, at the wagons and window and rooftops. I saw Grat stagger back but then I lost him because of the buildings. Bob pushed away from the loading dock and pulled his Brisley Bulldog out of his shoulder holster and took off for the alley. I heeled after him and ran for the horses and fired whatever I had into the plaza while Bob loaded and walked straight into the guns.

  I tied the money sack to the saddle horn and laid my rifle on the bedroll to fire east over the considerable distance to Isham’s hardware store where they had us good, had the notorious Dalton gang walking in front of their guns in an alley as open as a main street in early morning.

  Bob was by then crouched against the barn where Grat was, jamming cartridges into his rifle. He pushed his hat down on his head and ran down to the Consolidated oil wagon where he leaned on the bench seat and fired into a plaza that was screened blue with smoke. There were sparks red as cigarette ash whenever they fired back at him.

  I saw Carey Seaman standing with the German, John J. Kloehr, on the corner of Ninth and Walnut. Seaman broke open a twin-hammered twelve-gauge, shoved in two shotgun shells, and snapped it closed. I could see this because of Munn’s vacant lot which was to my right and overgrown with Russian thistles. But then Kloehr nudged the barber and they walked west on Ninth Street and it was too late when I saw them again.

  City Marshal Connelly was walking up the sidewalk of a house to borrow a weapon when he saw Kloehr and Seaman stalking us. He opened the gate and crossed the street. ‘I left home this morning without a pistol.’

  Kloehr pointed to Swisher Brothers’ machine shop. ‘You ask Swisher, professor. I think maybe he keeps there a gun.’

  Seaman trotted toward the lumberyard; Kloehr unlatched the door to his livery barn and walked inside. A sick horse slept on its side in a stall. Kloehr opened the bottom half of a Dutch door and ducked out into a paddock where two horses he rented out leaned for a bale of brown hay. He could hear the gunfire from Isham’s but couldn’t see anything but our horses tied to the pipe. That was enough for him. He waited.

  Connelly came out of Swisher’s with a ca
rbine and loaded it as he walked back towards the city jail and the alley as if we’d tremble and throw down our guns once we saw him. He shook out a key and used it and the jail door’s Scandinavian pig lock clicked open.

  Grat was slumped against the barn wall with his eyes closed. He hung onto a nail and spit a mouthful of blood at his boots and then opened his eyes to see Marshal Connelly step out into the alley like a man at a railroad siding who has a ticket for the train. Connelly saw me loading and steered in my direction, neglecting to look in the barn not ten yards away. Grat tried to raise his rifle but couldn’t. He pushed away from the barn wall, saw Connelly’s back, and let the hammer snap from his thumb.

  I saw the marshal coming at me; I saw his vest button fly; I saw him stumble and pitch forward with Grat’s bullet. Connelly groaned and tried to swallow and rolled over to his back. He’d lift his knee and drop it down every so often; dirt caked on his vest where the blood was.

  I don’t know why but the defenders were stunned by that murder and the shooting stopped just long enough for Bill Powers to lurch out of McKenna’s doorway and it was so quiet I heard his boots as he ran for the horses, holding his arm. It seemed for that brief half-minute that we could make it out of there alive; then the shooting was worse than it had been before and my brother Bob defiantly sat back on his boot heels in the middle of the alley and used up his magazine while bricks and wood and clay chipped up all around him and bullets zipped in the air. I saw him wince so they must’ve come close, but my brother had magic then.

  Grat backed out of the barn with his coat buttoned up and his rifle clutched under his arm. Except for smears of blood around his mouth, his face was as white as a bed sheet.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m a little sick to my stomach,’ he said.

  A wayward shot damaged one of the horses hitched to the Consolidated oil wagon and the team went crazy. They broke loose from the icehouse tie-up and stampeded down the alley with the wagon swinging and skidding and banging off the outbuildings. Grat brought up his pistol and put a shot into the white star on the face of the injured horse. It stumbled dead and the other horse tripped to its knees. It tried to get back on its legs again but a shank bone was broken and jagged under its hide. The horse fell down and got up on two legs and quivered.

  I think Bob had ducked next to the icehouse when the horses panicked. I couldn’t see him. Grat backed to our horses, shooting east, and Bill Powers stood next to me with his boots spread wide and his pistol lifted up, his left arm useless beside him. He fired everything in the revolver and shoved it in his coat pocket and yanked another revolver out of his shoulder holster. He told me not to wait too long on Bob and then took off for the horses.

  Carey Seaman unroped the gate of the Long-Bell lumberyard and walked under sycamore trees through high wet grass with his shotgun in two hands. There were stacks of joists and planks and tongue-and-groove and two-bys. A board shrieked off a pile next to the alley and he saw a man’s shadow stutter over a pallet in the grass. Then the man he knew as Texas Jack Moore was cramped over in the alley, untying his horse’s reins from the pipe. Broadwell grasped the saddle horn and fitted a stirrup over his boot with considerable pain and pulled up onto the saddle with his horse already running. Seaman fired a shot that sprayed gravel; Broadwell kicked his horse hard three times and was yanking it north onto Maple Street when Seaman fired again. Broadwell was slammed forward into the pommel like he’d been hit in the back with a hay rake. He jounced almost off the saddle while getting away and he clung there losing blood until the horse threw him a half mile west on Eighth Street, just out of the city limits. Broadwell dropped from the saddle and broke his ankle in the stirrup and dragged and bounced twenty feet before he’d tangled his horse enough to stop it. His skin was scraped and his coat and shirt were bunched up next to his throat when a posse found him dead.

  John Kloehr had heard Seaman fire toward the horses and saw Broadwell pull himself onto the saddle. Kloehr had fired a bullet then but missed him. He saw Seaman raise up his shotgun again and jolt with it and he saw the sudden stain on Broadwell’s coat as he tilted off the saddle. He saw Seaman break the gun open and pry the shells out and grope in his pocket for two others; then Kloehr saw a solemn, mustached man jerk his horse reins loose and slide his rifle into a fleecelined scabbard. Kloehr pressed his rifle stock to his cheek while Powers danced his horse around on the ground, yanking it down to four legs when it reared. Bill was just climbing into the saddle when Kloehr fired a slug he’d split with a penknife into his back. It hurled him over the saddle and his arms and head dangled down and the horse stood off of its front legs and Powers slid off the horse in a heap. The hole in his chest looked like blood worms.

  Bob squatted against the back wall of Slosson’s drugstore with his holster unbuckled and clenched in his teeth. He pushed all the cartridges out of the webs and loaded his rifle and shook the others deep into his coat pocket. He glanced left and saw the pharmacist Frank Benson bend under the rear window sash, climbing out with a gun in his hand. Bob picked up his Colt and a foot-long flame shot out. The window glass shattered and Frank Benson disappeared.

  Bob buckled on his holster staring at McKenna’s roof and walked out into the middle of the alley staring up at all the other roofs. He backed up like a boy hunting pigeons. Henry Isham stood on the porch of his store and slowly raised his rifle. The rifle jerked back and Bob heard a thud and it seemed as if he’d been punched near his lungs with a fist. He sat down hard on the rock curbs piled near the jail, his right hand holding his side. There was a hole the size of a quarter in him and a rib poking out like chicken bone and he must have felt a lot of pain because he just sat there biting his lip.

  I was back with the horses. The legs of Bill Powers jiggled with death and his pants stained black with his water. Grat sagged against a barn wall and pushed away and stumbled out into the alley.

  Kloehr saw Grat stop next to the dying city marshal and drop a hand with a pistol close to Connelly’s head like he was going to put him out of his misery. Kloehr shouted, ‘You there!’ and my brother turned and Kloehr shot him in the throat. Grat’s hands went up like he’d swallowed a fishbone. He keeled backwards over the marshal and his head bounced when he slammed to the ground. His mouth and eyes were open when he died.

  Men in white shirts and suspendered black trousers stood in the plaza and in the north alley by the Wells Brothers’ store. Kloehr couldn’t find me. Carey Seaman used up two shotgun shells on the heads of two of our standing horses to prevent a getaway. Blood splattered Red Buck, my horse, and he screamed and plunged and I had to grab him by the bit ring to unfasten his reins from the tie-up.

  I saw my brother Bob sag back on the rock curbs and stare at his rifle and grope at the rocks to stand up. I saw his face when the pain climbed. Bob saw the sun flash silver off Kloehr’s fancy trigger housing but he couldn’t convince his arms to raise his own rifle up and his shot at the liveryman only ripped weeds. He staggered forward and slid against the north wall of the jail, a kite’s tail of blood on the stone, until he stumbled into the adjoining ramshackle barn and collided with its west wall. Kloehr had a pirate’s eye to his rifle sight. Bob fired but the slug only split a rotting board of the stables. Bob fired again and the grass made a spitting noise.

  Kloehr saw a twenty-two-year-old desperado with sweat on his face and his shirttail out, sagged against a barn wall. The gunpowder was black on his hands and neck. Kloehr fired a cut bullet into the middle of Bob’s dark vest at the sternum. It exploded his chest and hurled him back against a pile of farm implements. Sunlight came through the barn roof and striped him. My brother opened his eyes and lay there and got up on one elbow. He heaved strings and clots of blood onto the straw and he puked again until he was empty and he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He saw men talking to each other on Eighth Street but they weren’t coming any closer.

  I was the last. I had a boot in the stirrup and my left hand on the money sack and the sadd
le horn when someone drew a bead on me and a slug hit my right arm and shattered the bone not two inches from the scar I had collected south of that cantina in New Mexico. It hurt terribly bad. I let my arm hang in its sleeve and swung up into the saddle and the horse skittered around lifting a hoof with every gunshot. Then I got hit again pretty hard with a second rifle bullet. If smashed through the back of my hip like a railroad spike and tore out through my groin and my right pocket. Hot blood streamed down inside my boots but I couldn’t feel my right leg at all so the ache was worse than the hurt.

  I was almost deaf from the gunfire. It was coming from everywhere, snapping branches, knocking things down, singing off anything hard. My horse was cantering and champing at the bit and he was so scared the whites of his eyes showed, but I pulled him back with my one good arm. I wasn’t thinking that a coward would do this, a brave man some other thing; I merely saw that Maple Street was vacant and that I could gallop out like I’d seen Dick Broadwell do and maybe get away, but when I skirted the horse around I could see men in sleeve garters and suit coats and aprons running across the bricks and men were at the back door of every place I looked at, loading rifles or lifting them up, and my brother Bob, whom I’d loved and been next to for twenty years, was sunk down and dying and there wasn’t any question, no, I went after him. I jerked my horse around and he balked at the smoke and I kicked him at the stifle with my good leg. I sat tall as I could, lifting out of the bouncing jog with my stirrups, my Winchester rifle crossed in my lap with smoke still twisting from it, and I frowned for all the good citizens like thirty years of badman and desperado. I leaned for Bob without stopping my horse, bent as far as I could with blood dripping off my fingers and my shattered arm hanging down to help him lift to the back of my saddle. Bob was near dead; I could see that. He had his hat off and his hair stuck out and his neck and face looked blackened with coal dust except where the sweat streaked it white. He saw me and said, ‘Don’t mind me, Emmett. I’m done for. But don’t you surrender, boy. Die game!’