Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  I nodded, and we rode off. Curry was still asleep.

  Sundance and I rode together, companionable as though we were riding off for a day of target practice in the mountains. "Butch has been there," he said. "To Montpelier. Says there's plenty of money in the bank. It's a prosperous town."

  I wondered if he really knew that, or if this would turn out like the baggage car at Malta.

  "We got the getaway all figured—where the creeks are for water, holes we can hide in. You'll hold the horses at the first relay, about fifteen miles out of Montpelier."

  Fifteen miles! I wanted to be part of the robbery, not miles away. I bit my tongue, though, because at least I was allowed to go along. Next time I wouldn't hold the horses.

  "That's the most important stop," Sundance said, seeing the look on my face and reading it easily. "That first change of horses can make the difference in whether we get away or not."

  We rode north and west, across the Green River Valley, then the Wind River range of mountains and down into the Sweet' water country. Always we were leisurely, and often we rode far apart from each other—Butch and Elzy some miles ahead.

  "Four of us might be suspicious," Sundance told me. "Folks might remember seeing four men riding together."

  "But not a man and a woman?" I asked.

  He laughed aloud. "You don't look like a woman right now, Etta. You look maybe like a fifteen-year-old boy."

  I looked down at myself and joined him in laughter. I wore a pair of his pants—tight-fitting on him, they were baggy on me—and a denim shirt. My hair was tucked up under my hat. But my face was smooth and had, I knew, the look of an unshaven youth—and my features were far too delicate to have fooled anyone except at a distance.

  "That," Sundance pronounced, "is one reason you're not going in the bank with us."

  I didn't explain that my mind had been working for weeks on ways I could take advantage of being a woman to help them.

  We camped three nights, and the last night we made a cold camp. In the morning, I gave them each cold biscuits wrapped in paper and watched them ride off. I was left alone in a thicket about a quarter mile off the road.

  "You be all right all day?" Sundance asked, giving me a quick peck.

  "I brought a book," I said, retrieving a copy of a Charles Dickens novel from my bedroll.

  "A novel! You go to rob a bank and you take a book? Etta Place, you are purely original." He kissed me again, this time more soundly.

  "You want to ride with us, Sundance?" Butch asked, the patience in his voice clearly ironic. And then, to me, he said, "Remember to be ready when the sun is about a third of the way down. We won't have seconds to spare."

  It was a long day. The sun took forever to climb to its height, and I thought it never would go down. I had no appetite for cold biscuits and no taste for reading. I paced, watered the horses in the nearby creek, paced some more, stared at that blasted sun until I saw spots. Gradually, though, it began its descent, and I unstaked the horses and held the reins, two in each hand.

  I heard them long before I saw them, a noise in the distance that gradually grew into the roar of pounding hooves. Then suddenly they were before me.

  "Everybody muffle two horses—no whinnying, no stamping... and no talking." Butch spoke low and fast, and we did as he said.

  It seemed to me we stood that way forever in silence, but Sundance later told me the posse was only three minutes behind them. Then it came again, that distant noise growing into a roar. Only this time it went on past us and gradually grew faint, and then we could hear it no more.

  "Mount up," Butch said. "Turn those other horses loose."

  We left the tired horses behind for someone—who, I never knew—to pick up, and we rode silently off through the trees, away from the road.

  After some miles, Butch said we'd split up, Elzy would go to his wife, and Sundance and I to the Hole. "We'll meet there in five days," he said. Before he left, he winked at me and said, "Let your hair down, Etta, and wear that split skirt. You're a lady again!"

  Then he went one direction, Elzy another, and Sundance and I went home by way of Montpelier.

  "We can't ride in there!" I said.

  "Why not?" he asked lazily. "My wife and I, we've been over to Boise to see her family, and now we're heading back to Cheyenne. I had a bandanna over my face and my hat pulled down low. No one will ever recognize me. You just go on and change, like Butch said."

  I did, and that was just the story Sundance told when we stopped at the saloon in Montpelier to order coffee for me and a beer for him.

  "Where's everybody?" he asked innocently, looking around the empty saloon.

  "You folks come at a bad time," the bartender said. "Every man in town 'cept me is gone off chasin' bank robbers. Just happened little over a couple hours ago."

  "Bank robbers!" I pretended great alarm. "Harry, we... we mustn't stay here."

  "Oh, it's all right now, ma'am," the bartender said soothingly. "They sure won't be coming back here. Only hope the posse catches them bas—'scuse me, them fellows, and hangs them from the nearest tree limb."

  I hid the shiver that went through me, and what had threatened to well up as laughter was now stilled. Sundance, though, thought it funny and could hardly hold his laughter until we got well away from town.

  "Did you hear him?" he crowed. "'They won't dare come back to town!' If he'd known I was sittin' there with half his bank's money in my saddlebag..." And he was off into great roaring laughter again.

  I looked at him and finally laughed too. It wasn't just the passion that kept me with Sundance: It was his sense of fun. And more than that, it was his sense of adventure, his daring. You couldn't help admire a man who would ride right back into a town where he'd just robbed the bank—and get away with it. At least, right then, I couldn't help but admire.

  We rode lazily through the same country we'd crossed only days earlier. At night we made big showy campfires, cooked small game that Sundance shot, talked late into the night, and made love wrapped in blankets against the early-fall chill.

  The first night as we sat with our hands wrapped around coffee cups, I finally said, "Well, aren't you going to tell me about the robbery?"

  "What's to tell? I 'spect we made about seven thousand dollars. That what you want to know?"

  "No," I said coldly, "that's not what I want to know. Tell me about it, everything that happened."

  He grinned, for he'd known all along what I wanted to hear. "We rode in about one o'clock in the afternoon, and Butch took the lead in the bank. It didn't take any time to line up the customers and cashiers and go down the line, transferring money into the sack. Then it was the vault. The whole thing took ten minutes at the most."

  "Too long," I muttered.

  Sundance was quiet for a minute. Then, "You think you could have done it faster?"

  "Let me try next time," I said, trying to put a joking tone into my words.

  He ignored me. "What happened that was bad," he said, "was that the sheriffs office was directly across from the bank—who would have thought it?—and the sheriff, he looked out and saw all those people in the bank, waving their arms in the air. Didn't take him any time at all to mount a posse. We left with three minutes to spare."

  Three minutes seemed like no time at all. I remembered how close behind the posse had been at the first change of horses.

  "You should have gone into town and checked the location of the bank," I said.

  "And advertise ourselves as coming to rob?"

  "Next time," I said slowly, "I'll be a widow woman looking to buy property, and I'll visit the bank."

  He look appraisingly at me. "Just might work," he said, "it just might work." And then, "I'm tired of talking."

  * * *

  We were at Hole-in-the-Wall three days before Butch arrived. Curry left for a while, and we had a wonderful time that first day, playing in bed until midmorning, eating when we wanted, joking about where Butch was and why he was so slo
w.

  That night, when we went to feed, we played hide-and-seek in the moonlight that danced on the corrals. We snuck around posts and fences and behind bushes and pretended to call like owls—Sundance was better at that than I was. But then suddenly he was gone—there were no more owl hoots, and the silence grew until it frightened me.

  "Sundance?" I called over and over, and each time my call was a little more frantic. Suddenly I was aware that I was alone, miles from anywhere or anybody, in the pitch dark. What if... Stop, I told myself. Nothing can possibly have happened to him. He'll turn up in a minute.

  But he didn't. I waited maybe fifteen minutes, though it seemed like fifteen hours to me, and then I began to feel my way along the corral fence, to head for the cabin and the comfort of a lantern.

  "Got ya!" He jumped from behind a post, scaring me so badly that I screamed aloud and then turned on him in anger.

  "Harry Longabaugh, don't you ever do that to me again."

  "It was a game," he said lamely. "I won."

  "You lost," I said. "And if you ever do it again, I'll shoot you." My voice was cold with anger.

  "I believe you would, Etta," he said.

  Later what bothered me most about the whole thing was that fear had made me lose control. I vowed that would never happen again. But then, I'd made other vows....

  Next morning Sundance was gone when I woke up. I finally found him sitting at the notch. Hand shading his eyes, he was scanning the horizon, looking mostly to the north.

  "You're watching for him," I said. Unspoken was the question of why. It could only be that Sundance was worried.

  "I just want to know he's not rotting in some dumb Idaho jail," he said.

  "How long will you watch?"

  He shrugged.

  "What if it's three weeks?"

  He shrugged again, obviously made uncomfortable by my probing. "That'd be too long. I don't know. Guess I'd give up."

  "You wouldn't go looking?" I thought surely he'd trail Butch, find out what happened.

  "There's a whole world between here and Idaho," he said, "too much space to be lost in. Butch wouldn't expect me to do that."

  There it was again: Sundance was loyal, but only up to a point. I remembered that he'd once told me he'd go to the ends of the earth for Butch. Maybe it depended on how far the ends were—or what the odds were.

  He watched for two days. When dusk came and it was pointless to watch from the notch, Sundance would come down to the cabin. He'd eat a silent supper, picking at whatever I fixed for him, and when we went to bed, his lovemaking was fierce, almost desperate. I missed the laughing Sundance and marveled that one man could be so dependent on another, though Sundance would have denied that loud and long.

  Butch was neither jailed nor hanged. Neither was he left for dead, a bullet in his heart, in some hidden draw between Montpelier and Kaycee. He came riding in on the eighth day, jogging across the plains as though he hadn't a worry in the world.

  I saw him first, the tiniest of specks on the horizon. "Sundance?"

  He stared for a long time. "That's him," he said, and his whole body relaxed. "Let's go back to the cabin."

  "We aren't going to wait here and welcome him?"

  Sundance looked astounded. "Welcome him? After I've spent two days of my life sitting on a damn rock waiting for him? I'm going to have a drink, that's what I'm going to do."

  By the time Butch reached the cabin, Sundance was on his second whiskey, while I sipped at the first he'd poured for me.

  "Hello" was all Butch said, slinging his saddlebag into a corner of the room.

  Sundance had put his feet on the table and leaned so far back in his chair that he was almost horizontal to the floor. He tilted his hat back on his head, as though to clear his eyes and see this intruder into his world of peace and comfort.

  "So where you been?" Sundance asked casually, though I knew the real question was. "Where you been while I've been sitting on a damn rock looking for you and worrying about what happened to you?"

  "Well," Butch drew his answer out, "I kinda meandered around, wanting to be sure no one followed me here. And then... I stopped in Lander."

  "That a new ring?" Sundance asked.

  Butch wore an opal ring on the third finger of his left hand. "Yeah," he said, "it's new."

  Sundance eyed him. "What's it say on the inside?"

  "None of your business," Butch replied.

  "Strange thing to inscribe on a ring," Sundance answered, laughing.

  Butch had stopped to see Mary Boyd, and she had given him that ring. And maybe he and Sundance were close, but Butch didn't share anything about Mary Boyd, not even his feelings. I never did know what was inside that ring, though I had a pretty good idea.

  "Want to take Etta to Denver?" Butch asked.

  "Sounds like a good idea to me." Sundance never gave any sign he'd been worried.

  "I've been to Denver," I said.

  * * *

  We went to Denver.

  "You haven't really seen the city," Sundance told me on the train from Cheyenne to Denver. "Remember?" And he leered at me.

  Butch looked away in embarrassment. He knew how we'd spent our time in Denver.

  "This time," Sundance went on, unperturbed, "we'll stay in one of the grandest hotels in all the country. Brown's Palace Hotel."

  "You said," I reminded him, "that hotels were too public for outlaws."

  Butch sat up straight in his chair. "You told her that?"

  Sundance shrugged. "I wanted privacy." He looked completely satisfied with himself.

  "And now we'll be public?" I asked. "Even though there's just been a bank robbery?"

  "Shhh," Sundance said, clapping a hand over my mouth and looking nervously around to see if anyone had heard. Now Butch was doubled over with laughter—anyone else would have been angry.

  Sundance didn't know whether to be angry—and stern with me—or give in to his inclination to join Butch in laughter. He chose the latter, and they were like girls with the giggles: The more they tried to stop, the harder they laughed.

  "You're making a scene," I whispered. "Now people really are looking at us."

  That only set them off again, and it was several long minutes before, panting and exhausted, they sat quietly in their seats. But each avoided looking at the other, and I, angry by now, stared determinedly out the window.

  * * *

  Brown's Palace Hotel was the fanciest place I had ever seen—Sundance had been right about that. It was richer and finer than anything I had ever imagined, and I always thought my imagination was pretty good along those lines, being as reality for so long had been just the opposite.

  The building was a triangle—it didn't even have four sides, like buildings are supposed to. And the corners didn't meet like corners should—they were round, so that the lines of the building seemed to swoop around.

  Inside the lobby soared higher than any room I'd ever been in, and the furnishings were rich and lush—deep red velvet Oriental rugs on the floor, shiny brass spittoons, great tall plants.

  Sundance sauntered through the lobby as though he lived this way every day instead of just having come from sleeping in a tent and eating in a ramshackle cabin. Butch, on the other hand, stood openly staring, taking in every detail.

  "You haven't been here before?" I asked him.

  He jumped, as though my voice had brought him back to reality. "Oh... yeah, Etta, I have—twice. But it's new and wonderful every time. I never thought, growing up poor as I did, that I'd ever see anything like this."

  No, I thought, but I intend to live this way from now on. That I didn't was one of those tricks that fate plays on us.

  We had adjoining rooms, almost identical, with dark wainscoting and, above it, floral wallpaper rich with mauve tones. The bed was mahogany, with a high headboard and a footboard almost four feet tall, and there was a matching marble-topped table, with pineapples carved into the wood beneath the marble. Sundance collapsed into a Morris
chair with blue and purple cushions, while I hung out our clothes. For me, there was a ladies' rocker, with a tufted back in mauve that matched the wallpaper. Lace curtains hung at the windows. It was much grander than any bedroom at Fannie's.

  * * *

  We ate oysters and champagne.

  "What is that?" I screeched as a platter of soft gray things, resting on shells, was set before me.

  "Oysters, Etta. Lower your voice." Sundance spoke calmly.

  "Oysters?" I echoed.

  "Raw oysters," Butch explained helpfully.

  My voice rose three octaves. "Raw oysters?"

  "Put lemon and that sauce on them," Sundance said patiently.

  We were in the hotel dining room, an elegant room with dark paneling, crisp white linen tablecloths, heavy silver flatware, fresh flowers on the tables, and soft music from a string quartet. When the waiter shook my napkin open and placed it on my lap, I almost thought he was being forward.

  Sundance grinned at me. "I'll have to take you out in style more," he said.

  Yes, I thought, he would. I wanted to learn the ways to behave in places like this. "I like the champagne," I said. "The bubbles..."

  Sundance looked at me. "Don't drink too much of it. Remember the chicken salad."

  I lifted my glass to him in a toast, while Butch, bewildered, asked, "What's chicken salad got to do with oysters and champagne?"

  We finished the meal with ice cream molded into the shape of seashells. "Are you sure it's not oyster ice cream?" I asked, and the two of them howled as though I were the funniest person they'd ever met. We had all three had too much champagne.

  "Etta?" Sundance said softly that night when we were in bed. "Hmmm?"

  His hands began to stroke, touching places that ordinarily turned me to fire. I kissed him soundly, thinking I was ready for a night of passion, but then, just as quickly, I fell asleep in spite of his whisperings and soft blowing in my ear. I remember waking once to realize that he was rubbing my back, and I tried to rouse myself, but it was no good. I sank back into sleep.

  "I told you champagne was worse than chicken salad," he said, and there was a touch of anger in his voice.

  "Sorry," I mumbled.

  The next morning I awoke with a great thirst and drank heartily from the water pitcher. Immediately a great wave of nausea came over me.