by Gene Curry
Butch should have been a politician. Hell! He was a politician. Except that this bunch of voters would mark their ballots with bullets. He was damn good, playing on their fear and their greed at the same time.
Then he got onto the new bank in Mansfield. No credit was given to me, and I didn’t want it. The whole thing was Cassidy’s idea. They weren’t sure they could believe him, but they liked the sound of the plan. I was proud of it myself.
“Nobody’s going to be guarding an empty bank,” Butch said. “So all we got to do is get in there, stay out of sight and wait for the money to be delivered. The first ones to go in get the banker to unlock the back door. He’s got to unlock that back door ’cause it’ll be made-of iron, barred and double locked. The rest of you come in that way. We divvy up the money in the bank. That way every man has his rightful share before he lights out.”
Ben Kilpatrick said with some astonishment, “You plan to split the money right there in the bank. I never heard of that being done. We never did that before.”
“How much money?” Pearl wanted to know.
“About a hundred thousand.” Butch made that sound as casual as he could.
Now there was real excitement. Harry Tracy’s eyes flickered uneasily. I guess he felt his new authority slipping away from him.
“It’s easy to talk big money,” he said.
“It’s there,” Butch went on. “All we got to do is take it. Now I’m going to tell you something else that ought to please you. This time it’s going to be equal shares all the way. That means I don’t get more than any other man. Same goes for Harry and Etta.”
Tracy looked around. “Butch has turned into Santy Claus.”
Big Nose Curry hadn’t said anything up till now. “What’s this about equal shares, Butch? That don’t sound like you.”
Butch put on a sorrowful face. “I don’t know how you’re going to take it, Curry. How you and the others are going to take it. Boys, I hate to tell you this is going to be my last job. I’m getting out and advise you to do the same. I’m telling you straight, man to man, so no man can say old Butch Cassidy run out on his boys. I’m telling you in time. Maybe Tracy is right about the Bunch not being finished. That’s for you and Tracy to decide. I’m sick and tired of it and want to quit. I just been at it too goddamned long. Can you fault me for wanting to quit the business?”
“We can if we .like,” Tracy said. No one else said anything.
“I think you’re talking for yourself, Tracy.” Butch took another step until he was no more than a few feet from Tracy. “You think you’d like to stop me?”
“First we talk about the money,” Tracy said. “This equal shares bullshit. How’d that get started?”
Butch looked like a kid caught stealing a cherry pie from the pantry. “Might as well tell you the whole of it,” he said, taking in a deep breath. “I’m ashamed of myself, boys. Ladies too. I was fixing to double-cross the lot of you. That’s right. Grab the whole hundred thousand and take off for parts unknown.”
There was a sudden shifting in the gang of outlaws though they didn’t really move. Butch’s confession had caught them completely off-guard. Now they stared at him, not knowing what to make of him.
Tracy sneered. “Maybe you still plan to do just that.”
Butch said, “You tell me how I’m going to manage that. We divvy up the money right there m the bank. That’s about six thousand a man. Or woman. Like I said, after the job we split up and go our own way. You tell me how I’d go about rounding up the hundred thousand. Follow one man south, another west. That leaves north and east and points in between. Anybody here ever know me to work that hard for six thousand dollars? That won’t wash, Tracy, and you know it.”
Ben Kilpatrick looked uncertain. “You sure about the divvy in the bank, Butch? There won’t be no going back at the last minute. That’s kind of important.”
“Ben, after what I just told you I know it is. I tell you, I was sorely tempted to steal all that money for myself. I admit to that now and I’m sorry for it. But there’s more. I made a name for myself and don’t want folks to remember me as a man who would steal money from his old friends. I’m not asking you to trust me, if you don’t want to. There’s enough guns here to blast me all the way to hell. But you folks has got to decide how it’s going to be.”
Butch turned his attention back to Tracy. “You so rich you can pass up six thousand? How much did we get from that last train job? Case you forget, a measly sixteen thousand. How far did that go? It didn’t do shit! But a man with six thousand in his pants can go a hell of a long way. Go a long way or stay here in Wyoming and keep on doing what he’s been doing. Only you got to decide what you want to do. If we’re going to do this job we got to leave today.”
Tracy said, “We’re going outside and talk. About you quitting, the job, a lot of things.” Tracy looked around. “We’ll let you know. You ain’t going no place.”
They went out, stepped down off the porch, and clustered too far away for us to hear what they were saying. Butch grinned. “Tracy’s arguing for them to do the robbery without me. He’s saying with us dead it’ll mean four extra shares to be divvied. Look at old Ben Kilpatrick shaking his head. Ben has some good sense. Little Pearl is talking a blue streak. That sneak O’Day is so scared he’s ready to shit his pants.”
Butch sounded like somebody calling off a horse race for a blind man. “They’re coming back in.”
“Jesus Christ!” Etta snapped. “Will you shut your big mouth. We’ve got eyes and ears.”
I knew there wasn’t going to be any gunplay when they trooped in again. The hundred thousand dollars had worked its magic. Once again, Harry Tracy was in the lead and he seemed to have regained some of his lost authority. The others stood waiting, but you could have cut the tension with a knife.
“We’ll do it,” Tracy said. “Me, I don’t hold with quitters and if I had my way—”
Ben Kilpatrick interrupted quietly, “If Butch wants to get out, that’s his business. He told us, he didn’t just sneak off. We had good times here, but so be it. You ain’t told us all of it, though.” Kilpatrick grinned in spite of himself. “You never do. Who’s going to look over that town?”
“Saddler, that’s who. Saddler will do it right. He knows I’ll find him and kill him if he don’t do it right.” Tracy liked the idea of killing me for any reason. “If you don’t kill him I will.”
Butch shrugged. “What you boys do after the job ain’t none of my concern.” Butch stabbed a finger at Pearl. “You, little lady, will go into town with Saddler to see he don’t get any wayward ideas.”
Pearl hadn’t expected that and her eyes shone with excitement. That girl had a quick mind and there was something else in her eyes besides excitement. Her eyes jumped to me, taking my measure all over again, and I don’t mean my cock. Lord, I thought, won’t it be good to get back where everybody isn’t trying to double-cross everybody else? Or no more than usual, that is.
“I’ll watch him good,” she said.
After that some of the tension drained away. Butch talked on. That man should have been a sideshow barker. The magic words were “a hundred thousand dollars,” and he kept repeating them, beating on the words like a drum.
And then, finally, it was all set, and they drifted off to get ready for Butch Cassidy’s last job. It was getting on toward noon when the boys left and Butch said he was hungry. Etta prepared the meal in utter silence while we sat around waiting for it. Butch grinned at the Kid, who didn’t grin back.
Uncorking a bottle, Butch banged it down on the table and told us to throw our lip over some good whiskey. I needed that first drink, and the second one didn’t hurt either.
“Well, that wasn’t too hard,” Cassidy said, pleased with himself. “You see the look in Tracy’s eyes?”
“We’ll be seeing that look for a long time,” the Kid said. “How many you figure we’ll have to kill after the job? The ones that’ll join up with Tracy?”
Butch used his cup of whiskey as a crystal ball. After he got through staring into it, he said, “Fallon and Reeves for sure—they’re bone-born bastards. The Gundersen brothers—them fucking Swedes never did like me. Pearl, pretty Pearl, wants to take Etta’s place in the gang. And then there’s that broth of a boy, Tommy O’Day.”
Etta turned from the stove with a fork in her hand. “That’s crazy, Cassidy. Tommy’s no killer.”
Butch said she was right about that. “O’Day will join Tracy ’cause he’s no good by himself. O’Day’s fine as long as he has somebody to tell him what to do. You might say the Wild Bunch is the only home he ever had. But that man is a dirty sneaking rat.”
“You don’t think Kilpatrick will try to double-cross you, Butch?” the Kid asked.
“Ben’s a man of honor,” Butch said, hitting the bottle again. “Ben knows he can join any good gang in the country. Ben’s got a good name and a fast gun. No, sir, Ben will take his six thousand and be on his way. Could be Curry and Will Carver will go with him. They was together before they joined with me. Laura I’m sure won’t have anything to do with Tracy. Chicago is where that young lady wants to go.”
“Then that makes seven,” I said.
“It’s better than twelve,” Butch said. “I’d be a lot more worried if Tracy had Kilpatrick and Big Nose. Look, I’m telling you it won’t be so bad. We kill the seven of them and that puts an extra forty-two thousand dollars in our kick.”
Etta asked the question I was forming in my mind. “What if by some chance Tracy doesn’t come after us? You aren’t fixing to go after him? Him and the forty-two thousand?”
“Lordy no!” Butch answered, though I knew the thought had crossed his tricky mind. “A deal is a deal, even when you make it with a dirty fighter like Tracy.” Etta pulled the skillet off the fire. “You better honor the deal, Cassidy. This has to be the end of it, I mean it. You try to pull a switch, even with Tracy, and that’s the last you’ll see of me.”
“You mean that, Etta?”
“Damn right I mean it. If six thousand apiece is all we get, it’ll just have to do.”
Butch turned to the Kid. “How about you, Harry?”
“Etta’s right,” the Kid said. “This has to be the end of it.”
“There’s no chance that Tracy will let us go,” I said. “Another thing, you could be wrong about some of the others. There may be more than seven. You still haven’t said how we’re going to kill them.”
At this point Butch played his trump card. “My namesake is going to show us how. That’s right. The original Butch Cassidy. He’s old and don’t look like much. No matter. That old man knows every inch of Wyoming. He’ll show us a place where Tracy and his boys will be like a snowball in the hottest part of hell.” Butch took his steak off the plate and went out, eating it from his hand. “I’ll go and visit the old boy right now.” At the door he turned and looked back at Etta. “Don’t bother washing the dirty dishes, my love. You ain’t never going to see them again.”
A few minutes after Butch left, the Kid said he was going to look at his horse. Etta cleared off the table and I put my Winchester and Colt on it. Etta sat and smoked and watched me while I worked on my weapons. I cleaned and oiled the carbine and the pistol, then reloaded them. Etta got a box of cartridges from the cupboard and I filled my pockets.
“You got some kind of a farmer-looking hat?” I asked her.
“Ought to be one in the slop chest,” she said.
After digging into a mess of stuff she came up with a black hat with a round crown that looked Mormon. I banged it into shape and put it on. Etta got a mirror from the bedroom and held it up so I could look at myself. With that fool hat on, and my beard coming up good, I guess I had a farmer look.
Etta looked doubtful. “That shirt you have on isn’t right for a farmer. Take it off and I’ll find you something else.”
The baggy shirt she dug up smelled musty, but it was homespun. I struggled into it and tucked it into my pants. She stood back and inspected me. “I guess you’ll pass if they don’t look at you too hard.”
“How’s about if I smoke a corncob pipe?”
Etta got mad. “Don’t be like Cassidy, Saddler. This is no time for jokes.”
“No corncob pipe,” I agreed. And for a while we sat without talking.
Etta broke the silence. “You think there’s a chance we’ll get away with it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends what I find in that town.”
I was surprised when she reached across the table and took both my hands in hers. “Forget the threats. Forget everything Cassidy said. I know you could sell us out if you wanted to. You could sell us out and get away with it. Cassidy thinks you’re afraid of him. I know you’re not. I’m begging you not to betray us. I never begged for anything in my life, but I’m begging now. These two men—don’t ask me to explain it—are all I have in the world. I’ll get down on my knees if I have to, Saddler. Give me this last final chance.”
I squeezed her hands and let them go. “I won’t sell you out,” I said.
I went back to my cabin to think. I was up to my neck in trouble. When you set out to rob a bank you have to be ready to get killed. You can plan a bank robbery every which way, until it seems it’s just a matter of putting the money in sacks and strolling out the door with it. It can work that way, but all too often it doesn’t. All the dead bank robbers rotting in markerless graves are proof of that. I felt like a man standing on a gallows and hoping the trap would fail to open at the last moment. I racked my whiskey-sodden brain to find a way to get out of it. Not a right thought came to me. Not one goddamned thought, so finally I gave up on it.
It wasn’t that I was so much against robbing banks, and it wasn’t that I didn’t have the nerve. That part didn’t come into it. What it boiled down to is that I like an easier kind of life. I like to come and go as I please, enjoy a woman, a card game, and a full bottle of Jack Daniels. Being hunted all the time isn’t much fun. I have had sheriffs after me for small transgressions of the law, and even that wasn’t very entertaining. What a man has to do is find the kind of life that suits him, then stick to it. The life Butch Cassidy led didn’t suit me at all.
There was a knock on the door and the Sundance Kid came in.
“You can put up the gun,” he said, cool as ever. “Mind if we talk a while? We haven’t had a chance to talk while you been here.”
“There’s a chair,” I said. “What’s on your mind? Things have been kind of hectic for talking.”
“You mean Harry Tracy?”
“Tracy and other things,” I said, smiling.
The fad was quicker than Cassidy. “Aren’t those women something though,” he said. “You can hate them at times, but they’re what makes life worth living.”
“Never a truer word was spoken,” I said. If the Kid wanted something, he sure as hell was taking his time to get to it. But he was the best-mannered of the Wild Bunch and I hadn’t noticed him making any hard eyes at me. In that place, that was something to be grateful for.
After putting fire to a cigar, the Kid looked at me through the smoke. Suddenly he didn’t seem so cool after all. There was a hint of embarrassment in his voice when he spoke next.
“Butch and Etta are all the family I have, Saddler. Back in New Jersey, my folks died when I was just a kid. Had to start work at eleven. Worked as a coachman for a minister, a man of God and a real son-of-a-bitch. That old sky pilot gave me some book learning and a lot of whipping. There wasn’t a day he didn’t threaten me with the wrath of God.”
“I know what they’re like,” I said.
The Kid blew a series of smoke rings. “I doubt you do. Be glad you don’t. It’s hell on a kid to be told all the time he’s nothing but an orphan headed straight for the fiery pit, as the old man called it. Every fucking thing was a sin, according to him. I couldn’t go to the outhouse without him coming around to see if I was pulling my prick.”
“What
kid doesn’t?” I said.
“It’s a way to get started,” the Kid said with a smile. “One time he snuck up and caught me at it, not in the out-house, in the cellar. He gave me such a flogging, he drew blood. How I hated that man of God. For years it’s been on my mind to go back and kill him. Only I can’t do that because he’s dead. From the age of eleven till I was fifteen I didn’t have one happy day.”
“You took off when you were fifteen?”
“Like a bat out of hell. The old man had a single-shot pistol he kept in the house for fear of robbers. On the day I was fifteen, I stole that old pistol and robbed the ticket seller at the railroad depot. Didn’t get more than thirty dollars. With that money I bought a better gun, a real six-shooter, and worked my way West. I felt free and wild and, by Christ, nobody was going to give me a bad time ever again. I did my share of robbing. It takes money to pay for women and whiskey. I couldn’t get enough of both once I got started. It was like the whole world was opening up for me. The old man used to tell me I’d get my reward in the next world. Bullshit!”
I smiled at the lanky outlaw. “Then I take it you’re not religious?”
“Damn right,” the Kid said. “This world is all there is, and you got to make the most of it. Once I got a taste for the wild life, I threw off all moral restraint, as that bastard minister would say. I was ready for Butch and Etta when I finally met up with them. I guess you’ve been wondering about Butch and Etta and me?”
“No,” I said.
“Our arrangement must look peculiar to most people. It’s just right for us. Don’t ask me why, but it is. I don’t know why people are so against two men and a woman. For that matter, two women and one man. It’s about the closest family you can have. You had a taste of two women and one man the other night. How did you like it?”
“I liked it fine. I’ve done it before. Never had three women at one time, though. Four in a bed is too many.” The Kid nodded his agreement. “Three is exactly the right number. The times we’ve had, the three of us. Having that third person makes all the difference. When two of the parties involved start getting on one another’s nerve, that’s when the third party steps in and cools things down.”