Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  Carey Seaman stood in the alley not twenty feet behind me with both hammers cocked on his shotgun and a bead on my back where he figured my heart was. The shotgun kicked and I was blasted into my horse. His mane straggled across my face. It was hot from the sun. I was sliding from the saddle and I saw Julia in a white dress and it was only a second later when the shotgun kicked again and I took all the double-ought shot in my shoulder blade and shoulder and when I dropped to the ground it was like slamming into a board of eighteen nails, for I had eighteen black shot two inches under my skin, ruining muscle and bone.

  I stared at my brother Bob but he was slunk down and his cheek was in his vomit and his eyes were rolled back in his skull and a fly crawled into his open mouth.

  21

  I couldn’t hear anything. Nothing at all. Then the dogs barked, maybe fifty dogs all over town, and there were boots rasping in the alley and Kloehr was yelling, ‘They are all down!’

  He nudged Bob with his boot and squatted by me stern as Melchizedek, his hot rifle against my temple. ‘Put your hands up, you no-good-for-nothing!’

  I was stupid with shock and awfully woozy but I lifted my left hand as well as I could, then dropped it down. He grabbed the money sack. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Charlie McLaughlin.’

  ‘I got something to tell you: you’re dying. I bet you never believe it is possible.’

  I turned my head. About twenty men were already in the alley and others were running through the side lots with their rifles clenched, hollering the news. Only twelve minutes had elapsed from Cubine’s first shot to Seaman’s last. Henry Isham turned around in the middle of the alley and saw four dead horses, four dead men, and me. He said, ‘We got ’em, by God, didn’t we? We put ’em all down!’

  They tenderly lifted City Marshal Connelly but his head flopped back and his soul departed before Dr. Wells could see to him.

  Carpenter stood at the Condon bank’s southwest doors, his fists on his hips. Ball had the discarded silver in a tin box. He sat with it in a chair. Carpenter said, ‘I guess we’d better board up these windows.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ball. ‘That should be the first thing.’

  Teller W.H. Sheppard of the First National Bank had ambled through Kloehr’s barn and paddock to collect the money sack, and he tilted back to the bank counter with it, escorted by three men. Women carried blankets out of Boswell’s store and spread them over Lucius Baldwin, George Cubine, Charles Brown. Children ran everywhere, dogs hopping up at them and nipping at their ankles. Some boys stood in the front of the Condon bank counting over three hundred bullet holes in the plate glass windows.

  Aleck McKenna knelt by Grat and peeled the whiskers off his face. He stood and slapped his hands clean. ‘That’s Grat Dalton all right.’

  Grat’s .38-.56 caliber Winchester was taken by Dr. W.C. Hall as a souvenir.

  Carey Seaman had wiped his shotgun down with a handkerchief and bragged about himself to all the men. He straddled me and stuffed the handkerchief in his shirt pocket. ‘I thought I’d introduce myself. Name’s Carey Seaman. I’m the one who shot ya.’

  I said, ‘You’re going to be famous, Mr. Seaman.’

  ‘Yes. I believe I am.’

  An ugly man in a derby hat had carried a rope out of a barn and he squatted near me tying a noose and spitting through his teeth in my direction. I could hear a lot of talk about lynching. It didn’t faze me one way or the other. Colonel David Stewart Elliott, editor of the Coffeyville Journal, walked up the alley with Tom Callahan, sheriff of Montgomery County, who was to take custody of the outlaws. Some men lifted Grat’s body to a sit and Colonel Elliott agreed about who it was. Callahan recognized Powers as Tim Evans but most of the newspapers put down Tom Hedde and spelled my brother’s name Grot. Elliott strolled over to where the men were bunched and heard the talk about hanging me off a rope and he declaimed it like a stage actor. ‘We won’t disgrace our community by lynching a dying man!’

  A boy sat cross-legged near my head, fanning me with the Police Gazette; then Elliott stood tall over me in his long cloak. ‘Emmett Dalton,’ he said sadly. ‘How many years has it been, and who would have thought it would come to this?’

  ‘Take my guns from me, Colonel.’

  He took the pearl-handled pistol out of my shoulder holster and then the pistol shoved in my pants, and they bulked in the right pocket of his cloak when he turned to someone responsible and shouted, ‘How long must this boy remain here without proper medical attention? I want him removed and cared for at once.’

  Women and children walked through the alley now and men were yanking the boots off Grat and Bob and some teenaged girls walked from outlaw to outlaw cutting snips of hair with a scissors. Squire Davis got Bob’s hat; Peter Sprague got the oil can from his pocket; T.C. Babb unbuckled his cartridge belt and gave it to C.M. Ball; Perry Landers removed the pair of gentleman’s gloves from Bob’s black suit coat; Hiram Smith got his five-point spurs. His trouser pockets were turned wrong side out and when the gawkers came his spent brass cartridges sold for a dollar apiece. A woman crouched with pinking shears and cut a swatch from his bloody left trouser leg. Don’t know what she did with it.

  There must’ve been two dozen people bunched around me by then, spitting, kicking cinders at me, saying how puny I looked. I couldn’t see but two or three pieces of blue sky. Then my bedroll was unstrapped from my saddle and they hefted me onto it and over to an upstairs room and a long bare table in Slosson’s until Dr. W.H. Wells could come over from the alley behind the First National Bank where Lucius Baldwin was dying. They spared me nothing in the carrying. It took the bite of my jaw not to scream. A sheriff’s deputy stood on the second floor landing of the outside wooden stairway and four sheriff’s men sat on chairs inside the upstairs room with rifles on their knees. I said, ‘I used to be an assistant deputy marshal. I bet you didn’t know that.’

  The men just stared at me. One of them tore off a strip of loose wallpaper and chewed it, looking at me. ‘I heard that a long time ago. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  I guess Miss Moore rode out of the cemetery. I guess she wasn’t seen. I don’t know where she went.

  I was sinking into sleep and staring out the rear window at over a hundred men and women inching past blood spots in that narrow alley like people at a backyard furniture sale.

  I was too near dying then to hurt much for my brothers. I wanted Bob alive and standing next to me and whispering instructions, but that was as close to grief as I got, and I didn’t flinch at all when I saw the sheriff’s men handcuff Bob and Grat and stand the bodies together on their stocking feet so Tackett could take a picture. Cyrus Lee lifted one of Grat’s arms up and blood gushed out the hole in his throat, spraying Lee on the shirt front. Somebody whooped with laughter and it became sport that morning for boys to jerk Grat’s arm up and dodge the blood that came squirting out like tobacco spit.

  I woke up to the whispering of doctors and saw my bloody, sopped shirtsleeve being cut up the seam with silver medical scissors. Blood from my wounds traveled twenty-five feet across the floor. Wells had called in doctors G. J. Tallman and W.J. Ryan to assist him in what looked like four hours of surgery, prying out buckshot and tying my lower guts together, and amputating my arm. They had buckets of water under the table to splash their instruments in, and Dr. Ryan walked up the stairs with a bone saw he was wiping with alcohol.

  I said, ‘I’m gonna keep my arm. This arm is gonna stay.’

  Dr. Wells said, ‘It’s badly smashed. You won’t even be able to pick up a pencil with it. And the chance of infection is enormous. The poison will shoot straight up to your brain.’

  ‘If I’m gonna cash in, I want to go to the grave in one piece.’

  The doctor named Tallman continued snipping my shirt away at the collar. ‘Let him keep the dang thing. Let the arm rot off. It’s better than seeing it pickled in a jar at county fairs for the next twenty-five years.’

  I kept sliding i
n and out of wakefulness, but mean, thumping pains, like your fingers slammed in a car door, were with me constantly for a week. I remember hearing the clink of instruments and Dr. Wells’s voice on the wooden stairs as he argued with a shoving crowd that wanted to lynch me. He convinced them that I was already dead and he was just filling out coroner papers, and suddenly it was late afternoon in the room and a cool sheet covered me to my chin and I saw vomit on my shoulder and felt a puddle of it next to my ear on the table, heard it dripping to the floor, and one of the deputies was frowning, a rifle crossed in his lap. He said, ‘You’re making a mess of yourself.’

  I could see the alley still but now there were two thousand gawkers walking the scene like it was a crowded museum, all of them brought in from Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma on special half-fare railroad excursions. Bob and Grat and Broadwell and Powers were piled on the dirt floor of the city jail with stiff erections and fouled clothes and hundreds of blowflies walking all over them, so visitors could hunch at the barred windows and poke the bodies with sticks and John Tackett was already developing the pictures that would become three kinds of post cards.

  When I woke up again it was morning and I was on the mattress in the Farmers’ Home that Bob had slept on after the Adair train robbery. If I lifted my eyes I could make out strange faces at the mullioned windows behind me and children squealing that they wanted to see. And next to me was Julia Johnson in a black lace dress, a white handkerchief clutched in her hand, and she was like a woman with an appointment; she’d marshaled herself into something as crisp as the snap of a closed pocketbook.

  I said, ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’

  She glanced across the room to where Sheriff Tom Callahan sat in a split-bottom chair reading a stack of newspapers Colonel Elliott had brought in.

  I noticed the headlines and said, ‘I went and done it, didn’t I.’

  She whispered, ‘Emmett, please don’t make me cry.’

  ‘I do love you,’ I said. ‘I mean that. I think you were what I wanted all along.’

  She stared at me without emotion for a minute. She said, ‘A newspaper reporter stopped me before I came in here and asked if I was your sweetheart, and I realized that I was nineteen years old and your sweetheart is all I would really ever be; that’s as important as I’d become.’

  Sheriff Callahan pulled up from his chair with the newspapers under his arm. ‘I think I’ll stand outside for a while.’

  She waited until he was gone and said, ‘I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll stay with you as long as I can and I’ll wait for you, no matter what happens, because that’s what sweethearts do. I love you too but I’m property and I’m not used to that feeling yet.’

  I couldn’t think of an answer. I said, ‘I don’t have anything more comforting to say, Julia. My brain’s empty.’

  ‘You’re very tired,’ she said.

  I closed my eyes and she petted back my hair and I woke with her gone and strangers in plow coats and yarn shawls and bonnets filing past the window, buttons scraping on wood.

  I asked the sheriff, ‘Can you turn this bed around?’

  He saw the people staring down at me and thought it over for a minute. ‘I don’t see why the hell not,’ he said.

  Not only that, he put the bedposts on bricks so I would be raised up a bit, and after that you just had to stand two-by-two in the dining room to walk by, and railroad men would sneer, ‘You’re not so tough now, are ya?’ and glum women would freeze me with scowls and pray that God have pity on my soul, and a man leaned on his fists at the foot of the bed to tell me, ‘This is the Lord’s way of saying, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.”’

  Meanwhile there was talk about forty Dalton sympathizers riding into Coffeyville some night to free me and burn the town down. Someone in Arkansas City, Kansas, wrote a letter that was mailed to John Kloehr and said: ‘Dear Sir: I take the time to tell you and the citizens of Coffeyville that all the gang ain’t dead yet and don’t you forget it. I would have given all I ever made to have been there the 5th. There are five of the gang left and we shall come to see you some day. That day, Oct. 5, we were down in the Chickasaw Nation, and we did not know it was coming off so soon.’ And so on. Some cowhands got a little drunk and condemned the murder of the bank robbers and they were jailed. Some boys from Guthrie called themselves ‘The Dalton Avengers’ and barged through town pushing tourists off sidewalks, shouting cuss words at the defenders, and they made such a nuisance of themselves that they got beat up in a side alley and one boy went home via stagecoach with thirty stitches in his head.

  But Emmett Dalton was still the big show in that town and I hear the line of mourners and curious waiting to gaze at me snaked west on Eighth Street, then down Maple to Death Alley, which it is even now called, and down past the bentpipe hitching rack to the jail, like I was a Hollywood premiere or Jesse James on his white satin funeral bier, and I wished my brother Bob were alive instead of me because I knew that he’d love that; how he’d love that. It would have been a discipline for him not to smile.

  That night Eugenia Moore sank the springs of my bed when there was only a kerosene lamp in the room and the sheriff was gone somewhere. She still wore her greased wing chaps and a sheepskin coat that smelled of leaf smoke and horses. Her face was streaked with dirt and her hair strayed over her eyes as she reached to remove a cool washrag she must have pressed to my forehead.

  ‘How’d you get in here?’ I asked.

  She smiled briefly. ‘I snuck in. I thought I wanted to talk to you but I guess there’s really nothing to say.’ She folded the washrag and dropped it into a white ironstone basin and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just wanted to know that you were all right,’ she said, and then she got up from the bed and walked out of the room, spurs clanking.

  A man named Alfred Kime who never did anything in his life worth retelling, is here remembered by me for digging a common grave in the potter’s field of the Elmwood Cemetery. The stiff bodies of Broadwell and Powers and my two brothers were dragged like heavy mahogany doors from the jail to a dining room table in the parlor of Lang and Lape’s furniture store where Bob and I carried the corpse of Charley Montgomery that December night in 1888. Little boys would rush up and slap Bob on the sleeve and a crowd followed with handkerchiefs cupped to their noses. There was a toe hole in Bob’s left wool sock and his mouth was open so that his teeth looked bucked and he was no longer the blue-eyed boy. The dead were white except where the blood had sunk green on them and they were frozen with rigor mortis exactly as they had been when Tackett propped their heads up against a board front for photographs, so that they seemed to be raising up in their sleep; and they smelled worse than you’d think it possible, like the blast of bad air you’d get if you opened a junkyard icebox that was rank with spoiled chicken wings and vegetables and a rotting cat near the milk.

  Undertaker W.H. Lape did some simple embalming and stole my binoculars off Bob. And some fortune hunter snuck in at noon and stripped every stitch of clothing off my brother. Then two clopping draft horses with mud-clumped hair at their fetlocks pulled a box wagon to the graveyard on Thursday afternoon. Orange kernels of corn jittered on the box planks and the spoke wheels crunched over gravel and the Dalton gang jostled with each bump—four dead men in buttoned shirt collars and blood-caked coats squeezed into four pinewood coffins.

  A dozen men, including Chris Madsen, Henry Isham, and Colonel Elliott, stood with hats in their hands at the burial while scoops of shoveled earth flopped black as Bibles on top of the coffins. The bent pipe we’d hitched our horses to was what they had instead of headstones until I purchased a simple granite slab with some of the income from my first movie.

  I don’t recall anything of October 7th and only snatches of the 8th when my family arrived by train from Kingfisher. Mom could only pat the bed covers near my sore leg and my brothers all were red-eyed but for Bill
. Bill was hospital good cheer. He asked, ‘Where does it hurt the worst, Emmett?’

  ‘It’s miserable pain almost everywheres,’ I said. ‘I really can’t separate it. The ache in my crotch, I guess.’

  He winked toward my brothers and laughed, saying, ‘Hell, that’s just normal biology, Emmett. That’s gonna bother you till you die.’

  Bill stayed on after the others left and straddled the splitbottom chair and stared at me and leaned to slap my face. ‘You stupid idiots. What in tarnashun am I going to do for a living? Huh?’ He bit his lip and slapped my head again.

  ‘Cut it out,’ I told him.

  He said, ‘I’m glad they’re dead. I am! You ruined me in California and now you’ve ruined me here and, by God, that’s the end of it.’ He stood up and kicked the chair away and stalked out in his three-piece tweed suit.

  On October 11th, I was slid onto a stretcher and transported in a locked Santa Fe express car to Independence, Kansas, with an escort of six deputies, Sheriff Callahan, Chief U.S. Marshal William Grimes, and twelve railroad detectives. My brother Bill accompanied me and sat on a safe smoking a cigarette that he stubbed out when I asked for a drag. On meeting Grimes, he shook the marshal’s hand and said, ‘Extraordinary job of police work, sir. You had them every step of the way and they knew it. They got just what they deserved.’