Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  It didn't occur to me that I didn't see much of Fannie during those days either. I did see Annie—oh, did I see Annie! She was a grab box of questions. "Where did you go? I watched you out the window."..."Did Fannie just kill you when you got back?"..."Did you tell him... you know, about your father?"

  "Where is he now?" Every time I turned around, it seemed Annie was behind me, asking another question.

  "We went for a ride."

  "No, Fannie didn't kill me. We talked."

  "No, I didn't tell him about my father. Why should I?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. If someone cared a lot about me, I'd feel obliged to tell them."

  "I've only known him six days... and only seen him twice. Why should I feel obliged?" I didn't tell her that my heart felt obliged.

  She shrugged again.

  Chapter 8

  Hodge brought me a note that Friday evening when I was studying at my desk. He knocked softly and seemed in a hurry to be out of the room. "Mister Sundance, he sent this.... I sure hope Miss Fannie don't find me delivering this to you."

  "I'll be sure she never knows," I told Hodge as I reached too eagerly for the note.

  It read: "Meet me on the front porch at 6:00 A.M. Sundance." He had, apparently, carefully planned this for a Saturday, when I had no school.

  I was there, of course, dressed in my school clothes—a white shirtwaist and a tan broadcloth skirt. The morning air was cool, and I'd thrown a paisley shawl over my shoulders, but it couldn't stop my trembling, which came, I decided, from anticipation more than from cold. I waited almost five minutes alone on that porch, wondering if I'd been a fool to believe a note that I didn't even know came from him.

  He appeared this time driving a small carriage, with another perfect Thoroughbred hitched to it. "Come on," he said in a sort of shouted whisper—plain enough so that I could hear, but also low so as not to wake the neighborhood—or Fannie.

  "Where are we going?" I asked as I came down the walk.

  He was out of the carriage and ready to help me in. "For a picnic. I'm leaving tomorrow, and I decided we should spend the day together."

  "I haven't seen you in three days." It was less a complaint than a statement of fact that perhaps held a question behind it.

  "Fannie," he said tersely. "She read me the riot act after we went riding. She really cares about what happens to you, and she's afraid I'll hurt you."

  "Will you?" I was seated in the carriage now, next to him, and I turned to look directly at him.

  "Probably," he said. "But we could have some wonderful times first."

  I turned away, and I would have gotten out of the carriage if he hadn't put out an arm to stop me. "Wait. I won't ever deliberately hurt you, but I can't always guarantee what will happen to me... or what I'll do. I'd always try to keep you safe, but I can't always promise to keep me safe or by your side. Do you understand?"

  I didn't. How could I, at seventeen, understand the life of an outlaw? In that idyllic moment, how could I have foreseen the future? Fannie tried to tell me, and Sundance in his own way tried to tell me, but I was blinded. In some senses I was as blinded as Mama had been when she married Pa, but I didn't want to make that comparison.

  "Are we going away together?" I asked. "I... I haven't finished the semester."

  By now we were far enough down the street that his loud laughter wouldn't wake Fannie. "Lord help me," he called. "I'm talking to a schoolgirl, talking about ruining her life by running away with an outlaw, and all she can say is that school isn't out yet!" He reached an expansive arm around my shoulders and pulled me toward him for a quick kiss, planted on my nose.

  Then he was solemn. "No, we're not going away together. Not now. I've some business to attend to, but I'll be back for you. Sometime. Someday. It may be a while. But I'll come back someday."

  I was absolutely uncertain how I felt about that promise, but I said nothing.

  We rode through the silent streets of the city, just beginning to come alive for the day. "Where are we going?"

  "West," he said. "Just west. See what's out there."

  "Hills, I think," I told him.

  There were indeed hills—enough that the horse tired from pulling us up and down. But the scenery was remarkable, and for long periods we rode without speaking, looking at those gray-green hills, the streams that cut through them, the long vistas from hilltop to hilltop.

  He had, as he'd said, brought a picnic lunch. "Julie packed it," he said. "She and Hodge are more on my side than they'll let on to Fannie. Julie said you particularly like chicken. So there's roast chicken, carrots and celery, light bread, and..." He dug into the basket he had pulled from the floor of the carriage. "Chocolate cake! Why that devil! Julie must have baked it special." Then, with a funny look, he admitted, "I asked her two days ago to put together this lunch. I bet she did bake it special for us."

  It was delicious—moist and rich with dark chocolate, the icing even better than the cake.

  We picnicked by a river in a town called Boerne. Sundance had brought a blanket again, and we spread it on the ground and laid out our sumptuous feast. After we ate, he leaned back on the blanket, closed his eyes, and appeared to go to sleep. I sat watching the river and some water birds that landed on it and then quickly took off again. He must have slept fifteen minutes.

  When he awoke, he said, out of the clear blue, "I'm down here because I'm afraid I killed a man."

  There wasn't much I could say except "Oh?"

  "I said," he repeated impatiently, "that I think I may have killed a man. I've never done that before."

  "It's hard, isn't it?" I wanted to reach out and take his hand, reassure him somehow, but I was still shy.

  "How would you know?" he muttered angrily. "I... I didn't mean to. He wanted to arrest me, and I shot—it was self-defense."

  "I understand about self-defense," I told him, though to myself I admitted that was a questionable application of the word.

  "Well," he answered, still almost angry, "you don't understand about self-defense to save your own life. You couldn't."

  It was, I decided, time to tell him. "You're wrong. That's exactly what I do understand."

  "How could you?"

  "I killed my father to save myself," I said, thinking I could not have put it more straightforward.

  "You what?" His voice almost screeched on the last word.

  "You heard me." I wasn't about to repeat it.

  He sat up abruptly, staring at me as though he'd never truly looked at me before. It was enough to almost cause me to forget the confession I was about to make.

  "I killed my father because he tried to rape me. A second time. After the first time, I swore he'd never do it again—and he didn't." In spite of myself, I began to shake with hidden sobs. I hadn't cried when I'd told Fannie, nor when Annie and I talked, so why was I so weak now? I forced myself to a stiff silence.

  Still he stared at me, but one hand reached to smooth my hair away from my face. "I can't imagine... I mean, it's one thing to shoot a sheriff—he was a sheriff, blast the luck—in a robbery, but to kill your own father. How do you live with that?"

  "I see his face every night," I told him, "and I wake thinking he's creeping back into my bed. But that—my secret—is why I feel so tied to Fannie. She made it all right—at least as much as she could—and gave me a chance at a life."

  He was thoughtful for a long time. "She knows," he said. "I... I guess I'm not surprised. But she didn't tell me."

  I wondered why he thought she would.

  We sat in silence for a long time, though every once in a while he would raise his head and look at me. Finally, he asked, "You use a gun?"

  "No. A butcher knife." Why, I thought frantically, would he want the details?

  He let out a long whistle. "Guns are neater. Ever shoot one?"

  I shook my head. "Pa had a shotgun, and I used to unload it of a secret at night when he'd had too much whiskey, but I never shot it."

  He
scoffed. "You don't need a shotgun, but someday I'll teach you to shoot a rifle. Meantime, try this." He pulled his coat aside to reveal the pearl handle of a small pistol protruding from a pocket near the waist of his pants. He pulled it out, cracked it open to check the bullets, and took off the safety. "Here, hold it straight out in your right hand—you are right-handed, aren't you?" He took my hand and fitted it to the gun, index finger over the trigger.

  With his hand over mine, I felt that same tingle again. Afraid I was blushing, I stared intently at the pistol.

  "Now point at that tree. No, wait. Put the gun down by your side for a minute."

  Puzzled, I did as he said. He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and stuffed one end into a crack in the tree, so that the piece of silk hung there like a flag. Instantly he was back at my side. "Now raise your arm, hold it straight out, and shoot at it."

  "I'll ruin your good handkerchief," I protested.

  Dryly he said, "Doubtful. You probably won't even hit the tree."

  Determined to show him, I aimed the pistol carefully and so slowly that he said, "Speed is usually important. Whoever you're shooting at won't give you time to aim. Hold your arm steady, now."

  I pulled the trigger, surprised at the way the little gun jumped in my hand. But there was a black hole in one corner of Sundance's handkerchief, and he was saying, "I don't believe it. Beginner's luck. You couldn't do it again."

  I raised the gun again, felt it jump, and saw a tear at the edge of the handkerchief. It was a five-shot pistol, and when I had fired all five shots his handkerchief had three holes. When I pulled it loose from the tree, I saw the monogram HL in one corner.

  "Three out of five," he whistled. "I'm impressed. I may take you with me to rob a bank sometime."

  "I'd go, you know," I told him. Even then I knew that our words would become self-fulfilling prophecies, and one day I would ride with Sundance. And I also knew that he didn't hate me for having killed my father. When we returned to San Saba Street, Fannie was less angry than I expected.

  "You've made your choice, girl," she said, "and you're the one who's going to have to live with it." There was real sadness in her tone.

  "I haven't made any choice," I told her. "He's leaving tomorrow, and I don't know when I'll see him again. I'm going to finish school, get a job teaching, and do the things you wanted me to."

  She eyed me shrewdly. "I know you mean that, but I think he'll be back here for you, and then you'll go with him, no matter where he leads."

  I couldn't argue with that.

  Sundance didn't leave the next day. In fact, he stayed four more days, and we had one more long afternoon together. This time we sat in the formal parlor—the girls were all still asleep or busy upstairs, and the house was quiet. Fannie, knowing full well that we were there, left us alone. There was no sentimental parting speech from him. Instead, he regaled me with the story of his outlaw life.

  "Tell me how you got the name Sundance," I said.

  His eyes sparkled with laughter. "I stole a horse, a saddle, and a gun from a man named Craven, up in Montana. Sheriff caught me some four months later and kept me in the jail at Sundance for a couple of months. Then he decided to transfer me to... I honestly don't know where I was going, but we went to St. Paul and then got on another train, maybe to Rapid City in the Dakotas. Anyway, the sheriff—guy named Ryan—went to the bathroom, and while he was gone I picked the locks on my cuffs and then I jumped off the train." He paused a minute, then added, "Of course, I had help. Cassidy was on the train. I expect it was running a hundred miles an hour when we jumped. That was some jump!"

  A hundred miles an hour! "Were you hurt?"

  "Bruises and bangs," he said, shrugging. "Nothing important. Guess rather than being hurt, my ego was inflated 'cause I had escaped from a sheriff. 'Course, they caught me again. I was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months, but they kept me at the Sundance jail because I was under twenty-one. I kept trying to escape, but it never did happen, and I was finally released. I swear, I'm never going to jail again!"

  "If that's true," I told him, "you better change your way of life."

  "Can't do that. Once you've done the things I've done, the world won't let you go straight. They always want you for the last thing you've done."

  "Killing the sheriff?" I asked.

  "And the Malta train robbery. It was three years ago, but those railroad folks are slow to forget."

  "Tell me about it."

  "It was a blundered job, for sure. The work of amateurs. But Madden and Bass and me, we were looking for a little excitement. Weather was so cold everyone was out of work, and we... well, we just thought it was the thing to do. Train stopped at Malta—that's in Montana—early in the morning, about three o'clock. After it pulled out of the station, Madden and I jumped on the baggage car, made our way to the engine, and told the engineer to stop at a fire about a mile out of town—'course, it was Bass who built the fire. When it stopped, we told him to make the mail clerk open the mail car."

  He laughed. "Trouble was, there wasn't anything there. So we went to the express car and told the messenger to open the safe. We got about twenty dollars in cash, two small checks, and a whole lot of nothing. The messenger swore he didn't have the combination of the bigger safe, and we believed him—usually only station agents have it. Newspapers later claimed we missed $25,000 that was in that big safe—damn the luck! We were cold and mad—but then, so were the trainmen. So we all had a drink and then we sent the train on its way.

  " 'Course, pretty soon there was a big reward out for us—big deal, we didn't get a hundred dollars and they've got a $500 reward offered. The Great Northern hired some detectives, and they found Bass and Madden at a saloon. Then—damn the luck!—they got me as I was getting on a train going east, figuring to get away for a while. I got away finally, but when Bass and Madden came to trial, they apparently said I was with them. Fine friends those—Cassidy would never have done that to me. That's when I went to Hole-in-the-Wall."

  "And the ones who were tried?" It seemed to me that he was particularly unsympathetic toward them. They may have identified him, but, after all, they were caught and he escaped.

  He shrugged. "They served time—still are. That's the chance you take."

  "Was that your first big... uh, robbery?"

  He stared at me and reached a hand across the back of the sofa to rest it ever so casually on my shoulder. "Why are you so interested in this?"

  I never flinched as I looked at him and said, "I figure it's going to be important for me to know."

  He grinned. "It probably is. You're right." And then he leaned toward me and kissed me, ever so gently. Other than the hand that still rested on my shoulder, he didn't touch me.

  "All right. There's the bank robbery at Telluride, four or five years ago. No one knows for sure that I was there. We knew the town marshal, Jim Clark, would be out of town, so we rode in a couple of days before the robbery. Just kind of hung about town, drinking in the saloon, getting to know what was goin' on. Decided to try it about noon one day when there wasn't much going on. Matter of fact, it turned out there was only one teller in the bank—it was the San Miguel Valley Bank—and he had a pile of money in front of him. I held the horses out back—that's how come nobody knows I was there—and Matt Warner went inside with Tom McCarty. Matt held a gun on the teller, Tom watched out the door, and Matt scooped up the money—$20,000 of it."

  "Twenty thousand!" I'd never imagined so much money in my life. "You're rich," I said.

  "Will you marry me for my money?" he asked jokingly, then turned serious. "We split it three ways remember, so it's not all that much. And being an outlaw is like a lot of other things—a lot of your work comes up empty-handed."

  "What do you mean, empty-handed?"

  "Well, look at the Malta train robbery. We didn't get enough to make it worth all the trouble, not to mention the risk of getting caught."

  "Probably you need to plan better," I told h
im, my mind racing ahead, thinking how I could help him plan his robberies. Mama, I thought, if you're in Heaven and you're listening to this, I'm sorry. But I knew nothing, not even Mama's memory, would stop me from being with Sundance.

  "Let me finish about Telluride," he said with a grin. "I told you I never killed a man 'cept that sheriff by accident. But that bank teller—he was such a coward, shaking and trembling and begging them to remember he was the sole support of his mother. Matt said he was tempted to shoot him or at least beat the tar out of him, just for being so scared."

  I pondered a minute. "So it's bravado that does it?"

  He looked at me long and hard, and then he said, "Yeah. But you already know that. Figured it out all by yourself. That's why you scare me, Etta Place."

  * * *

  Next morning, as he prepared to leave, I handed him a folded silk handkerchief, with the monogram HL in one corner. "To replace the one I ruined," I said.

  "Did you embroider it?" He fingered it carefully, shook it out, and fanned it into his breast pocket.

  "No. I can't embroider. Julie did it."

  "Then my thanks to both of you." He smiled at me, those blue eyes looking right through my facade of composure.

  "Oh," he said, as though it were of no consequence, "one thing I forgot to tell you. I have a wife. Anna Maria Thayne. She's in Castle Gate, Wyoming." He put one hand on the back of my head and turned my face toward his for a bittersweet kiss that held the promise of much more to come.

  Chapter 9

  I didn't hear from Sundance for nearly two years. He left in late summer, and too soon the next spring dragged into summer. Wildflowers bloomed around the city—bluebonnets with their purple color and bright orange paintbrush and yellow squaw blossom—and then died in the South Texas heat, which was hotter than anything I'd ever known in Ben Wheeler. Maybe not as humid, but hotter.