Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  When she introduced herself, she just said. "I'm Annie Rogers" and never told us where she was from, where she'd recently been, not a thing. She was friendly in turn to each of the girls, but when I was introduced—with Fannie's cautionary "She's not one of the girls"—Annie gave me an appraising look that cut to the bone.

  By now I was seventeen, nearly as old as Cassie had been when she came to Fannie's, I was sure, and I was beginning to feel self-conscious about my protected status. I was literally a schoolgirl among whores, and I thought that perhaps it was a weakness in me, a lack of daring, that I was not in the parlor at night with the other girls. Yet I knew that surely was not the direction of my future. And I also knew by now that Fannie would have never let me make that my direction.

  "Pleased to meet you," Annie said, looking directly at me. "I used to be a teacher. Maybe we've got something in common."

  Maud Walker gave a sort of half-laugh, half-snort, but Lillie said, "What a nice idea. I think Etta's lonely a lot."

  I knew right away that I was going to disobey Fannie: Annie Rogers was going to be my friend.

  For a month or so, Annie and I simply nodded and smiled in the dining room, much as I did with the other girls. But when we'd all eat, I'd see her watching me, her eyes speculative. The girls all liked her, and she talked animatedly with each of them, but it was sort of like she wasn't paying full attention to them. Annie Rogers was a puzzle.

  In spite of Fannie's warnings, I continued to peek at the curtain some nights. I noticed that Annie was as popular with the men as she was with the girls. She soon had several "regulars" who came to visit her, and I'd watch her make each man feel that he was the only man in her life—her eyes laughing at him, her attention focused on him, her posture inviting and yet ladylike. I began to model myself after Annie. Late at night, when everyone's attention was anywhere but on me, I would practice in front of the big mirror that stood in a walnut frame in my room. Annie had, I decided, the air of being a lady, and that was important to me—a kind of self-assured sophistication that dictated slow, controlled movements, an ability never to look flustered, trip over the carpet, or bump into the furniture. And she was just mysterious enough to hint to the men that if they got her alone...

  Annie had been at the house about three months when one night at supper she picked up her plate and glass and brought them over to the table where I sat alone. A silence you could almost feel came over the room as the other girls stared at her, knives and forks and glasses suspended in midmotion.

  "Mind if I join you?"

  "Of course not," I said smiling, glad that at last we were going to be friends.

  Her movements were deliberate as she set her dinner down, arranging the plate and glass to suit her, then seating herself and ever so carefully spreading her napkin on her lap. Fannie always insisted on linen napkins, and each of us had a special napkin ring so that we could save our napkins and use them more than once. A touch of elegance I'd never dreamed of in Ben Wheeler.

  She took two or three bites before she spoke to me, and by then the other girls had gone back to talking among themselves. "Why're you here?"

  "I'm Fannie's niece," I said, repeating the story that was now so familiar that I almost believed it. "She took me in to educate when my father died.... I'm from Georgia. Atlanta."

  Her eyes twinkled. "What if I told you I don't believe a word of that?"

  I thought for a minute, and then I said softly, "I think you best not say that to Fannie."

  Her laughter was much softer than Fannie's roar, but it was just as genuine. "I don't intend to," she said. "But you aren't a niece... and you're hiding something, though I'll be dadblamed if I can figure out what." Fannie's warning echoed in my ears—tell a whore, and it'll be all over the house by morning, the town by the next night.

  "I don't know what you mean," I said distantly.

  She sighed. "I didn't think you would. But can we be friends anyway, without solving my suspicions and your distrust?"

  "Of course," I said, putting aside Fannie's other warning: Make no friends among whores.

  She took another tack. "Do you like school?"

  I looked at her for a long minute before I spoke. "No, not at all. I'm glad to learn, but I'm bored with it. I... well, I feel there's adventure ahead of me, and I'm just putting in time at school waiting for it to happen."

  She laughed again. "Lots of girls would think living in a whorehouse was adventure enough. But I guess we all feel that way, as though something great was just around the corner."

  I was a little deflated to think that my sense of impending adventure was not mine alone but shared by all the others. Oh, I knew Lillie expected to be swept away by a dashing stranger and Cassie expected to ride away with an outlaw, but I dismissed those fantasies as childish. My own undefined dream was more true.

  After that Annie ate with me frequently, and we traded guarded confidences. I never told her about Ben Wheeler and Pa, though I talked often of my mother and my brother, and she never told me where she was from, but she talked of a lost love who had been life itself to her and had died tragically. We didn't trade details, but we shared feelings.

  Fannie came to my room late one night. "You're taking a real shine to that Annie, aren't you?"

  "She talks to me," I said, "like I am a real person. The others... they resent me, because of the way you treat me."

  Fannie was in one of her kind and generous moods, rather than her businesslike-madam stance. "I know that," she said, "and I'm glad you have someone to talk to. Just remember what I said: Don't talk too much."

  "I know," I said, with just a trace of annoyance creeping into my voice. How, I wondered, could I resent someone who had done for me all the things Fannie had done. And yet, childlike, I resented her authority over me.

  Maud Walker was so full of her big news at dinner one night that she forgot she usually didn't talk to me and included the whole room in her conversation. Excitement was rare for the usually silent Maud, and I listened with interest. Thank heaven Fannie was eating alone in her room.

  "Got a telegram," Maud said. "Kid Curry's comin'. Says he pulled a big job."

  Lillie was on her in a minute. "Shhh. You know you're not supposed to say that."

  Maud shrugged. "Everybody here knows." Lillie cast a significant glance in my direction. "All right, except her. But you know Fannie's told her. Anyway, he's comin' and he's bringin' Will Carver with him. How about that, Lillie?"

  Lillie blushed, of all things. "I guess I'd like that," she said.

  "Who are these people?" Annie Rogers asked unbelievingly. "You'd think the Crown Prince of England was coming here."

  Lillie giggled. "I guess he probably wouldn't stop on San Saba Street if he ever did come to San Antonio. They're outlaws from Wyoming, Utah... up that way somewhere."

  "Now who's talking too much?" Maud asked sharply. "I bet you best shut your mouth before Fannie hears what you've been saying."

  It was Lillie's turn to shrug.

  Annie lingered in the dining room after the others left. "You know these men?" she asked.

  I shook my head. "Fannie makes me stay in my room when they're here. That is, if they're the ones I think they are."

  Annie wrinkled her nose in distaste. "Doesn't sound like fun to me."

  Without meaning to, I stared at her. Whoever these men were, no matter if she found them disgusting, she would have to sleep with one, two, or three of them—more than once. I wanted badly to ask why she did it, how she could make herself do it. Memories of Pa floated before me, and I remembered my sick disgust. Inanely, I said, "Well, back to the books."

  Instead of leaving, Annie sat down in the chair next to me, just as I started to rise. I sat back down. "You're amazing," she said. "You live in a whorehouse, and yet you manage to remain somehow free from it. What are you hiding... or hiding from? I don't understand it." She shook her head in puzzlement.

  I studied her face for a minute and found nothing there but h
onesty. So I said what had been on my mind for a long time. "I think there's a story behind you that I don't understand. I've thought so ever since we first talked."

  She raised her shoulders just a bit and turned to stare out the window. "I don't mind talking about it now, not like I used to. My father raped me almost every day for several years. Started when I was ten. My mother... she knew, but she didn't do anything."

  "You didn't kill him?" I asked. Having tried so hard to think I was justified in killing Pa, I came to believe it was the way everyone acted.

  She looked astounded. "Kill him? Of course I didn't. I just ran away from home."

  "I killed my father," I said, shutting my ears to the tiny voice inside me that chanted Fannie's warning about telling secrets to a whore. In Annie I saw the one person who understood, because the same thing had happened to her. I guess I thought if she was that honest with me, I owed her equal measure. I still believed that if I talked about it, the memory would stop haunting me. And Fannie had long ago stopped letting me talk about it.

  "You what?"

  "I killed him. The second time he came to my bed. I... I warned him that he would never do that again. I was sixteen." It sounded more awful in the telling than I had expected.

  She looked at me with a certain wonder. "You were stronger than I was... and older. I... I didn't know I could do anything but run away."

  Surely she didn't admire me for having taken a life. I had to change the subject quickly. "You said you were a teacher?"

  "I was. In Kennedale, Texas. Sort of helped the real teacher in a one-room school, because I'd had lots of schooling. What your father does to you at night isn't supposed to keep you from going to class the next day." Her laugh was bitter. "But I... I couldn't keep on teaching. I felt tainted, dirty... so I do what gives me a reason for feeling that way." Her eyes were out the window again. "But I'm not going to do it forever!"

  "No," I said, "I know you're not. And I'm not ever going to do it."

  "Good for you," she said. "Well, I got to get ready for the night. See ya, Etta."

  "See ya," I echoed. Relieved to have shared my burden, I refused to believe that Fannie was right that I was foolish to confide in Annie. She was my friend, bound to me by a tie stronger even than that by which Fannie claimed my loyalty.

  As I wandered back to my room, I wondered when the outlaws would arrive.

  * * *

  They came four days later, making a lot of noise late in the night. I wasn't sure, but I thought there were other customers there when they arrived—and that the other customers left fairly quickly. There was a lot of shouting and two gunshots. The next day I saw that one of Fannie's crystal chandeliers—the one in the front parlor—was shattered. Two days later, without any comment by anyone, it was replaced.

  I peeked that night for sure, but I didn't have to go far to do it. I was actually asleep when they arrived, wakened by their shouts. But what brought me out of bed, some two or three hours after they arrived, were voices in Fannie's room—loud voices.

  "Curry, you get out of that bed!" It was Fannie's voice at its most strident, raised in a tone that even I had never heard.

  A masculine voice answered, and though the speech was slurred, I could understand the words. "I'm gonna sleep here, Fannie. You wanna sleep here too?"

  "Curry, you go upstairs with Maud where you belong...." Fannie's voice had begun to take on a pleading tone.

  Then Maud's voice joined in. "Come on, Curry, let's go upstairs."

  The masculine voice grew stiff. "You go on upstairs, Maud, and you take whoever you want. I'm staying here."

  There was a kind of muffled talking, a door slamming, footsteps walking away—the disappointed Maud, I supposed—and then silence. Finally I went to sleep.

  Next morning I heard from an excited Julie that Kid Curry had slept in Fannie's satin sheets with his boots, pistols, and hat still in place. All I could surmise was that he had lain very still all night long. I never did speculate on where Fannie slept.

  "They were a mess." Annie had caught me in front of the house, before I got in from school the day after the outlaws left.

  "They were noisy," I conceded.

  She looked sideways at me. "That's not all they were. Too damn big for their britches, that's what! Lord deliver me from any more outlaws."

  "You didn't like them?" It sounded naive even as I said it.

  "No," she said emphatically, "I didn't like them. And that Kid Curry was the worst of them all—mean-spirited, selfish, son of... I can't imagine why Maud hangs on his every move." Her voice trailed off, and something made me wonder if maybe she despised Kid Curry so because he had paid all his attention to Maud, except the night he slept in Fannie's bed—and ignored Annie. I guessed I would never understand whores.

  "I hope they never come back," she said vehemently.

  "Me too," I said, though I realized that our reasons were a little different. But we both agreed that we wanted nothing more to do with the outlaws—and that seemed another bond between us.

  Chapter 7

  Sundance. Butch always called him "the Kid," as though every third outlaw throughout the West were not Kid something or other. For Butch, there was no other Kid. For me, there was no one but Sundance, and I always called him that, even after I found out that the name came not from his magic charm but from the much less romantic fact that he had spent time in the jail at Sundance, Wyoming, when he was younger.

  He appeared at Fannie's one day in the spring of 1894. When I came in from school in the afternoon—I was in my last year at the academy, and Fannie was beginning to talk about teaching positions—he was sitting at one of the small tables in the dining room, talking with Fannie.

  I stood in the doorway a moment and watched them. Fannie was listening intently, leaning toward him, paying him much more attention than she did most men who came to the house. In fact, I'd never seen her look at a man like this, and maybe that's what first caught my attention.

  Slouched back in his chair, casual and comfortable, he looked to be between Fannie and me in age, probably at least ten years older than I was. But the years had not been hard on him, and he looked sort of boyish. He wasn't tall, just medium height, and slightly built, but he had an easy grace about him. His hair was dark reddish-blond and thick, matched by a neatly trimmed mustache. And he was carefully dressed, his suit of dark gray broadcloth—no outdated nankeen for him—and he wore a linen shirt, with a black silk cravat, tied bow-fashion under the collar. Before I heard him talk, I would have told you he was from the East and a city man.

  "Hello!" He dragged the word out into several syllables and added the sound of surprise to it. Then I knew he was a westerner, and suddenly I knew that he was an outlaw, though I don't know how that knowledge came to me. He was certainly better looking and better behaved than Kid Curry, at least according to what Annie had told me. "She's my niece," Fannie said sharply, turning to look at me in displeasure.

  "Of course she is," he answered smoothly as he got up and came toward me, his hand extended. "Harry Longabaugh. They call me Sundance."

  I was almost rooted to the spot, mesmerized by those blue, blue eyes. But I did manage to extend my hand. He bent to brush his lips across it, a kiss that I felt up my arm, clear to the top of my head.

  "I'm Etta."

  He just smiled and held a chair for me to seat myself between him and Fannie.

  She was looking her most severe. "Etta is in school at the Ursuline Academy," she said.

  "Of course she is," he repeated, but he never took his eyes off me, and I, in confusion, looked down at the books I carried.

  "Sundance will be here for a while," Fannie said, and her tone carried a clear warning that she did not expect time to breed familiarity between the two of us. "He'll sleep in that extra bedroom upstairs."

  "Alone," he added with a mischievous grin, staring at me until I blushed. "Where are you from?" he asked, leaning forward and stretching his hand out as though he would
grasp my hand in his. He stopped just short of that, under Fannie's watchful eye.

  "She's my niece, I told you," Fannie said. "Raised outside Atlanta."

  "Georgia?" he asked, incredulous, just the edge of laughter sneaking into his disbelief.

  "Yes, Georgia." Fannie held her ground.

  "Why, Fannie, I never knew you had relatives back there." He said it in mock seriousness, playing with her to my discomfort.

  I realized I had said only two words in that whole long exchange, and now I gathered myself together to ask, "Have you known Fannie long?"

  "You mean," he asked, whirling from Fannie to me, "that you don't call her 'Aunt Fannie'?" His grin was infectious.

  I grasped for words, but Fannie interrupted me in a dry, no-nonsense tone of voice. "All right, Sundance. She's my niece. You don't need to know her life story, because you aren't gonna see any more of her."

  "Why, Fannie... you purely amaze me." Then he turned toward me, almost as if she hadn't spoken. "I've known your... ah... aunt for several years, been a visitor in her house from time to time. Enjoyed the hospitality, I must say." He favored Fannie with a huge grin.

  "Etta," she said sternly, "I think you best go tell Julie you're home and then get to your books."

  "Yes, ma'am." But I rose reluctantly, and as I left the room I turned to look again at him. He was staring at me.

  Outside the dining room, I almost bumped into Annie, who had apparently been peeking around the comer of the door—I wasn't the only one in this house given to peeking.