Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  "Your money from Belle Fourche?" I asked.

  He just shrugged.

  The only blessing that I could see was that Curry left with Butch—and I presumed he wouldn't return soon.

  * * *

  Butch was back five days before Thanksgiving, and they decided to have a celebration. There was more of a community in Brown's Park than in Hole-in-the-Wall—families who looked after one another, shared joys and sorrows... and holidays. Sundance explained carefully to me that these people didn't mind outlaws, if the outlaws behaved while they were there and didn't bring the law down on the park.

  "And we never do that," he said solemnly.

  "Just like you never do that at Hole-in-the-Wall?" I asked, thinking of the two men killed there.

  Sundance hung his head. "That was a mistake." But then he quickly added, "On the part of the law, Etta, not us."

  Two days before Thanksgiving, neighbors' wagons began to pull up before the dugout with linens, silver, and dishes. The Johnsons brought two fine trestle tables—dismantled but easily assembled—and linen cloths to cover them. Mrs. Johnson's mother, the elderly Maybelle Waller, gently handed Sundance a silver tray that was, she said, for the turkey—nothing else. Someone else brought five perfect plates of fine English china and a sixth that was badly chipped—"I'll eat off that," I said—and another family arrived with three carefully wrapped water goblets—"All that's left of Mother's set," the man said gruffly.

  There were promises of food. One family had pumpkins to make pies and another promised potatoes. Still another had canned green beans during the growing season and promised to bring enough for all.

  It would, I assured Sundance, take at least three wild turkeys to feed this congregation.

  "Three? Lucky if I get one in a week's worth of hunting," he complained.

  "If you get three," I asked, "how am I going to roast them?" I had but one small oven, heated by an uncertain wood fire.

  "Who invited all these people, anyway?" he fumed.

  "You did."

  It turned out to be fine, more than fine, and in a sense it was my first ever big holiday party. Thanksgiving and Christmas weren't much at Fannie's. But here was a group of people making absolutely foolish merriment over a turkey and dressing and corn bread and canned pickles and relish, and pumpkin and vinegar pies.

  They sang everything from "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" to "Rock of Gibraltar," they danced when someone brought out a fiddle, and they laughed hysterically over things that were barely funny. The walls of that tiny dugout shook, until I wondered if the sod ceiling would fall in upon us, and the party spilled over to the outside, although the November air was crisp, clear, and very cold.

  It was midnight before they all left, and two o'clock in the morning before I crawled, exhausted, into my bed, where Sundance waited.

  Next morning I faced a mammoth cleanup chore, and both Butch and Sundance left early. "Going hunting," they explained. I rolled up my sleeves and settled into it, but the memory of the night before cheered me all day long as I worked. By evening, when they returned, the dugout was back to normal and most of the neighbors had come to pick up their belongings. Thanksgiving was, sadly, a thing of the past.

  Chapter 17

  We went to San Antonio for Christmas. Sundance and Butch decided it was time to get away from Wyoming and Utah. Rustling and bank robberies had pushed the big ranchers too far, and vigilantes covered the area. The cry was out that the Wild Bunch had to be captured, dead or alive. Never mind that half the robbers the vigilantes wanted had nothing to do with the Wild Bunch and wouldn't have known Butch Cassidy or Harry Longabaugh if they'd run face-to-face into them at a bank robbery. Every cattleman from Rock Spring to Salt Lake City thought all his problems—from lost cash to stolen cattle—could be solved with the capture of the Wild Bunch.

  "Narrow-minded, they are!" Sundance exclaimed. "They can't think beyond us. We're getting the blame for things we'd never think of doing." He was genuinely angry at the unfairness of it—at least, that was how he saw it.

  I would never have said it, but somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered an old saying, "Live by the gun, die by the gun."

  "Yeah, things we'd never have done—like beating a jailer's wife within an inch of her life," Butch mused. "It's time to go for a while."

  "How long?" I asked. I didn't want to leave Brown's Park, and I was sure we could outsmart the law if only we put our minds to it. If I'd told Sundance that, though, he'd have reminded me that they were the outlaws, they were the ones that knew what they were doing.

  "Depends on how long Fannie can stand us," Sundance said lightly, and then added, "and how long we can stand it there. Get out your finest wool dress," he commanded.

  "I can't," I told him, almost angrily. "It's at Hole-in-the-Wall. Butch didn't pack all my fine dresses."

  He looked startled for a moment and then began to laugh. "We don't any of us have good clothes," he said. "We left them behind. Denver it is."

  "Salt Lake City is closer," Sundance pointed out, but Butch vetoed the idea as too dangerous.

  The day before we left, Kid Curry arrived again. I left the room when he came banging in the door, but his voice filled the dugout and I clearly heard what he said.

  "Gettin' too close out there," he said. "Ain't no place safe, it seems. Them vigilantes are everywhere."

  "They're not close to here?" Sundance asked nervously.

  Curry muttered something, and it struck me that it would be a great irony if the vigilantes found us just as we prepared to leave for Texas.

  "Where you all goin'?" I heard Curry ask suspiciously, apparently seeing the preparations under way.

  When Butch muttered "Texas," Curry announced he'd been thinking of going down there himself. "Haven't been to Fannie's in a spell—the girls there, they miss me, I know they do!" For the rest of the evening, he bounced around the dugout in high spirits, crowing about the good time he'd have in San Antonio.

  I stayed in the curtained-off bedroom, coming out only to offer a supper of cold biscuits, canned tomatoes, and jerky. When Curry frowned at the sparseness of the provisions, Butch said tightly, "She ain't cookin'. We're leavin' tomorrow "

  That night Sundance tried to kiss me into silence as we lay in our bed, but my whispered anger echoed through the dugout. "Why," I demanded, "didn't you simply tell him he couldn't come with us?"

  "Can't do that," Sundance whispered back, making his whispered voice as soothing as possible. "He's one of us, no matter what he's done. And we... we swore to look out for each other."

  Honor among thieves again! "Well, I didn't swear any such thing," I retorted, turning my back on him.

  I tossed and turned and slept fitfully that night, dreading what had once seemed a bright Christmas and now seemed an impossibly long journey. Once during the night Sundance reminded me, "We can't stay here, Etta."

  * * *

  And so we rode horseback to Denver, a long and difficult ride, with cold camps at night that left us shivering in our bedrolls. It was, Butch said, not a good idea to light a fire. Fortunately, early December that year was milder than usual, but the three of them watched the sky each day with worried looks. "Bound to snow soon," Sundance muttered.

  "Naw," Curry said, staring at the sky to the west, "color's wrong. It's just colder than blazes."

  Days we rode slowly in single file. Butch led a packhorse, but the rest of us had only bedrolls and a few belongings. We generally rode without speaking, which gave me a lot of time for thoughts I'd just as soon put aside.

  "Been shorter to cross the mountains," Curry complained one night, rubbing his hands together to warm them. We had gone the long way round, skirting to the north of Brown's Park so that we crossed east in Wyoming rather than going diagonally in a straight line across the Colorado Rockies to Denver.

  "And easier to get snowed in," Sundance said.

  Curry just scoffed, and I saw Butch watching both of them from beneath lowered li
ds, silently assessing the potential for trouble.

  Even Sundance and I barely spoke during those days, though he would occasionally reach out to touch me, as in reassurance. I always smiled at him, and I never knew if he recognized that my smile was forced. The comfort of Fannie's seemed a long way away... and maybe not worth the trip.

  But then I'd remember Sundance's words: We can't stay here, Etta.

  At last we turned south, following the eastern slope of the mountains, and here Butch declared it would be safe to have a small fire at night. "Colorado," he said, "isn't as up in arms as Wyoming."

  I never realized till then what a blessing a small fire was. One day with the sun warm on us, the men shot four squirrels, and I stewed them at night. With full bellies, we sat around that flickering fire, warming our hands on cups of coffee to which Sundance had added just a little whiskey. For the first time in days I felt warm—inside and out.

  Sundance sat next to me, and we all stared at the fire without saying anything. Occasionally he would turn to look full in my face.

  "Sorry you got into this?" he asked once.

  "No," I said truthfully. "But I've been happier... and I will be again."

  He kissed me soundly, paying no attention to Curry's snort of disgust.

  After a few minutes, Butch stood up, yawning, and said, "Come on, Curry, we'll spread out blankets over yonder. Leave the fire to these two."

  "The hell I will," Curry muttered. "I got a right to be warm as them. They don't need no privacy. Nothing but—"

  "Don't, Curry." Sundance's voice, like steel, cut him off in midsentence, but it didn't take much imagination to finish what had been left unsaid.

  All four of us slept around the fire that night, Sundance's head next to mine, our hands clasped just inside my blankets.

  * * *

  Denver was a flurry of shopping and fine food and comfortable beds—the hardship of the horseback trip was out of mind in an instant. We stayed at the same boardinghouse as before—no Brown's Palace this time—and all three men were greeted like long-lost brothers. The first morning, Butch and Curry disappeared with our horses.

  "Where are they going?" I asked curiously, my head fuzzy from a night of loving with Sundance.

  "Sell the horses," he said.

  My head cleared instantly. "You're selling my horse? The one you gave me?"

  "Etta," he said with a chuckle, "we don't want to board it all the time we're gone. Don't know how long that'll be. We'll buy you a new horse."

  "I like that one," I said stubbornly, and he threw his hands up in the air.

  "Come on, let's go shopping."

  It seemed to me I had just bought clothes I barely wore, left them behind, and then here I was buying more, trying on tailored plaid skirts and dark-colored blouses, daytime dresses of muslin and linsey-woolsey and cambric, elegant evening dresses of satin and silk trimmed in ribbon and spangles with leg-o'-mutton sleeves, and frothy wrappers that made some of Fannie's pink concoctions look downright plain. I bought slippers with tiny French heels and long pointed toes and tiny, feather-trimmed hats with bags to match. And I tried to forget the fine clothes packed away—maybe forever—in trunks in Wyoming.

  "It's too expensive," I murmured over one dress of China silk that I would never have an occasion to wear—I knew that with a certainty.

  "Buy it," he growled.

  When we had taken all my packages back to the boarding-house, it was time to outfit Sundance. "We can't have you looking like a lady and me like this," he said, gesturing at the rough trail clothes he still wore. "Got to be a gentleman."

  Butch went with us—Curry, it appeared, had met himself a young girl who would take him shopping. We had a high time picking suits with vests, shirts with starched collars, a watch for each man to string across his middle from the vest watch pocket, derby hats, even spats and gloves.

  "My, my," I said as they paraded before me that evening, "a pair of... let's see, riverboat gamblers."

  "No, Etta, they wore string ties and funny flat hats," Sundance said in disgust. "We're Denver businessmen... in Texas to look at some investments."

  "If you believe it," I assured him, laughing.

  "You better believe it too," he retorted, but he was smiling.

  We stayed in Denver only two days, and I never saw Curry after the first five minutes. If the same were true in San Antonio, it might be a merry Christmas after all.

  On the train to Texas, Curry sat apart from us and slept, and I was happier with Sundance beside me and Butch, riding backward, in the seat across from us.

  "You pleased to be going home to Texas?" Butch asked innocently.

  The pause that thought gave me must have shown on my face.

  "Did I say something wrong?" he asked, almost apologetic.

  I recovered quickly, aware that Sundance was watching curiously to see how I'd handle it. "Yes and no," I said. "I'm pleased to be going to Fannie's, but there are parts of Texas I'd just as soon never see again."

  "Fair enough," Butch said, and changed the subject.

  But when I dozed off Pa's face swam in front of me. I hadn't seen him for a long time, and I brushed my hand, as though to brush him away. Sundance caught the hand and held it, waking me.

  There were lighter moments, too. Once the two of them got to whispering about how easy it would be to hold up the train, and they looked around at the other passengers, calculating how much cash and jewelry was collected in that one car alone. They got so silly they pointed at this passenger and that, imagining a sack of gold or a diamond stickpin or who knows what.

  "And you," I whispered with a laugh, "have accused me of being indiscreet. I think you both best hush." But the idea of robbing a train had been planted and would take hold sooner than I could ever have imagined.

  * * *

  Fannie, forewarned of our arrival, had closed the house, even though there was no financial justification for it—"my" outlaws wouldn't bring her any business. Only Curry would choose one of the girls; Butch would smile and charm them all and walk away, as he always did, though the next morning he might complain about being lonely and cold at night. I was certain his loyalty to Mary Boyd back in Lander was strong enough to turn temptation aside. And Sundance... well, of course he wouldn't!

  The three men made such a commotion getting our luggage from the carriage to the front porch—by now, we had six pieces of luggage among us—that Hodge was at the door before we could knock.

  "Miss Etta, it surely is good to see you. Come on in. Miss Fannie, she's waiting in her room for you." He gave the men a dark look that indicated they were not to follow me. "I'll show you gentlemen to your rooms," he said.

  Fannie waited in a chaise lounge, her hair stunningly piled on her head, her body—which had not grown any smaller—swathed in a wrapper of fine merino wool, her face carefully made up. Her room, always pink and lavishly decorated, had been redone with rose-studded wallpaper, new lace curtains under deep pink valances, and new furniture—a dainty desk meant to resemble a French antique but looking too insubstantial for Fannie, the chaise lounge, and a wing chair with ottoman, both upholstered in deep pink and sort of gray stripes. The latter pieces seemed meant for a man to sit and smoke his pipe.

  Waving a hand in my direction, she favored me with a genuine smile.

  "Lord, child, I am glad to set eyes on you again after all this time and—what was it?—three letters?"

  "I... there wasn't much to tell, Fannie." I stood in the doorway. What, I wondered, would I tell her? Of Belle Fourche?

  She swung her feet to the floor and pushed them into fur-trimmed slippers, pink to match the gown. Then she pushed off from the chaise and came toward me, arms spread, to gather me in a hug that so surprised me I near lost my breath.

  "I missed you," she said, and if I hadn't known better I'd have thought Fannie was fighting back tears.

  "I missed you too," I said, wondering how much truth there was in my words. Surely I had thought about Fannie,
but Sundance had made my life so complete I missed no one—except Butch when he wasn't around and Mama when she crossed my mind fleetingly.

  She held me at arm's length and scrutinized my face, while I tried to smile reassuringly. At long last, she said, "He's good to you."

  "Yes, he's good to me. He loves me." There were a lot of things about Sundance—and Butch—that I wasn't going to tell Fannie.

  "You brought Butch!" Her eyes lit up. "Let me go see him," she said, as though I'd been holding her back.

  "We, uh, we brought Curry too," I said, and then rushed on to add, "I didn't want to, but Sundance said we couldn't leave him behind."

  She shrugged. "I can handle Curry."

  She never, it turned out, had to handle Curry. By the time we got to the parlor—surely we'd only spent five minutes in her room—Curry and Annie Rogers had found each other. Annie, who had always hated outlaws, was hanging on Curry's every word—and on his arm. He was spinning long stories for her, though I stayed far enough away that I didn't have to hear them.

  "Where's Maud?" I whispered to Fannie, expecting a war between whores.

  Fannie shrugged. "She's moved on. Annie can handle him."

  For the rest of our stay, Annie "took care" of Curry, and he, surprisingly, behaved almost as though he was civilized.

  When I finally got her alone, I demanded, "What are you doing? You hate outlaws, and Kid Curry is the worst of all! Don't you remember the last time he was here?"

  Her smile was almost condescending. "You don't understand, Etta. You're not stuck here, with no prospects. Curry wants to take me away with him—and he's behaving better than he did that other time. I... he's kinda cute."

  I gave up, though I ranted and raved to Sundance that night until he put his fingers to my lips and said softly, "Stop thinking about Curry and start thinking about me."

  The best part about our stay in San Antonio was that I pretty much had Sundance and Butch to myself. The three of us toured the city, sometimes bought our lunch from street vendors, shopped in the market, walked along the riverbank, and laughed at our own jokes. Julie packed us lunches on warm days, and we picnicked in the same spots that Sundance had taken me to earlier, watching the sun go down before hurrying home to Julie's best cooking—the things we never had in our campsites, like roast pork or Cornish hen or bread pudding.