Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

"I think we ought to go to South America," Sundance said.

  "You may be right," Butch answered. "We ought to think on it."

  "You're damn right, we ought to," Sundance said with a vehemence I didn't expect. "I just am not ready to die."

  And I was not ready for any of us to die.

  Running, none of us knew that the railroad was offering $2,000 per outlaw, dead or alive, and the U.S. government matched that with an offer of $1,000 apiece. And then the Pinkertons got into it. They didn't know about me, and there was no price on my head, but there might as well have been.

  I suppose if we'd known about the reward money, we might have been really frightened. As it was, we were only tired, dirty, and hungry but never frightened. Oh, maybe we were sobered. Of course, we didn't go to South America. We went all over the state of Wyoming, until I began to be grateful it wasn't as big as Texas. We even went back to Hole-in-the-Wall one night, creeping in under a cloud-covered sky. It probably was watched, but it was home to us, and we took our chances. Besides, on a practical level, it was the one place they'd all meet to divide the money Butch still carried in a canvas belt around his waist. It obviously bothered him, for as we rode I'd see him hitch and pull at it. When we finally stopped, I had to doctor the raw places that belt had rubbed in his flesh.

  "Why are we creeping into our own place?" I asked, tired and angry.

  " 'Cause nothin' would keep the law out of here if they thought we'd come back. We're just bankin' on their figurin' we wouldn't be that dumb."

  "We may," Sundance said, "be dumber than any of us thought."

  The cabin was undisturbed, but we hadn't been there ten minutes before Curry approached on foot. "Been waitin' for you," he said. "Got here yesterday. Begun to think I'd got the day wrong—or you'd forgotten." Irony laced his voice.

  "We wouldn't do that, Curry, and you know it." Butch's voice was calm. "Annie with you?" he asked.

  "Out in the woods," he said, nodding his head toward the outside.

  Maxwell and Kilpatrick drifted in a little later. Seems they'd all three been hiding in the woods around, waiting for us to show up—well, waiting for Butch to show up with the money. By then, he had it in a sack in his saddlebags. He brought that sack in and plunked it on the table, and I left. Wasn't my business to make a fuss about my share in front of Curry.

  I went to find Curry's tent and have a reunion with Annie. She looked no different to me than she had in San Antonio—pretty in a sort of hard way, and very much in control.

  "I thought I might see you here," she said, and then her tone took on a bit of archness. "Harry tells me you and Sundance and Butch are inseparable." I detected—what? I didn't know—maybe envy, maybe curiosity.

  "We're close," I said, "but not inseparable. Are you... are you getting along all right?"

  Now her tone was outright defiance, no question about it. "Yeah, I'm fine. Harry's good to me, and he's gonna bring in a lot of money one of these days."

  She had been half facing me, and now, as she turned, hands on hips, I thought there was a bluish mark on one cheek. I looked away quickly, so as not to stare. It struck me that she never referred to Curry by that name—the full name being Kid Curry, his outlaw moniker—but always called him by his Christian name. Was she, I wondered, trying to pretend he wasn't an outlaw?

  We didn't really have much to say to each other beyond that. There were the expected questions: "You heard from Fannie?"

  "No, have you?"

  "Where are you going now?"

  "I don't know. You?" But it was not much of a conversation, and neither the shared experience of Fannie's or life on the outlaw trail gave us much basis for friendship.

  One thing Annie said left me with the impression that she was jealous, less of me than of the relationship between Butch and Sundance. She considered Sundance kind of a second-in-command, and she clearly thought Curry should have that position. All she said was, "Harry's good at planning jobs. Butch ought to bring him more into the planning."

  I didn't tell her that I thought "Harry" was trouble and would be the downfall of all of them. I went back to our tent.

  Sundance woke me when he came in much later. "Almost ten thousand dollars," he whispered in my ear.

  "Good," I said. "That's five thousand for me."

  "For you?" His voice rose into a yelp, like that of an angry puppy.

  I was awake now. "I rode, I did my part, and I should get my share," I said firmly.

  "It's our share, Etta. Ours." He stretched out the last word.

  "Is it twice what everyone else got?" I demanded.

  He stared at me in disbelief. Finally he shook his head. "No, it's not. You... you better take that up with Butch."

  I would, I thought, but not when Sundance expected it. Meantime, I asked, "Can we go to the Brown's Hotel?"

  "Not for a while," Sundance said. "We got to ride early in the morning."

  "I know," I said with resignation. "I wanted to sleep all day."

  "You do that, and we might spend the next thirty years of our lives in jail," he said patiently. "There's still posses out there. We got to get out of this country."

  "All right," I said, "tomorrow."

  "Got some good news for you." He poked me awake again with his elbow. "Curry's gone."

  "He'll be back," I predicted softly, adding under my breath, "and Annie too."

  "Naw, not for a long time. Butch told him we wouldn't be riding together. Said there was no cause to beat that engineer and shoot Sheriff Hazen in the belly, and he didn't want any part of that violence."

  That woke me up again, and a vision of Annie telling me how smart "Harry" was flashed through my mind. "What did Curry do?"

  "Got real mad. I thought, seeing as how Butch is opposed to violence, I was going to have to take his place and defend him. Curry took a stand, like he was going for his gun—only, he wasn't wearing it. But he was... I think belligerent is the word you'd use."

  "Is he gone?"

  "Yeah, he rode out."

  "Good for Butch," I said, and turned over to go back to sleep.

  "How about 'good for you, Sundance'? After all, I saved Butch." His voice had a slight whine in it.

  "I'm sure you did," I said, patting his arm slightly. We both knew Butch would have saved himself, but I didn't want to have to say that. As I drifted off to sleep, I could feel Sundance pouting next to me. I patted his arm again, and next thing I knew he was nudging me awake.

  "It's time to go," he said.

  No coffee, just water and hard biscuits for breakfast. As we rode away, I thought with longing of all the meals I'd cooked in that cabin, all the good food we'd eaten, and I wondered when we'd ever sit down to a meal again, the three of us together and not running from the law.

  Maxwell and Kilpatrick were gone, having left, I guess, earlier than Sundance made me wake up. Once again it was Butch, Sundance, and me. "Where're we going?" I asked.

  "Fellow we know has a ranch on a little creek," Sundance said, "with some great caves in the cliffs above the creek."

  "Caves?"

  "Etta, we can't hardly stay at the Brown's Palace right now. We got to hide out for a while."

  "Where is it?" I asked wearily, hoping it was close by.

  "West," Butch said.

  I stared at the sun, just now rising in the sky—the sun we were indirectly heading toward. "Then why're we heading east?"

  Sundance threw his hands up in exasperation. "We're never going to make a passable outlaw of you. Part of being an outlaw is that you have to do it the hard way. Can't go directly anywhere. Got to go the roundabout way."

  "We're headed east," I repeated stubbornly. "Will we get there tonight?"

  "Nope," Butch said. "Not tomorrow night, either."

  It took us four days, and the only good things I could think of were that it had stopped raining and the weather was pleasant—not so warm in the day to make riding uncomfortable and not so cool in the evening to make me resent the slim bedroll I ha
d with me.

  We finally came to some man's ranch in the foothills of the Big Horns. I never did see anyone there, but fresh horses waited for us. We moved our pitiful bedrolls from tired horses to new ones and rode on. No rest, no food, though we did take with us some meat pie, fresh biscuits, and canned goods that had been left for us.

  "Why was there no one at that ranch to see to the change in horses?" I asked.

  "Man doesn't want to compromise himself. This way, he can always tell the law we rode in and stole the horses while he was gone."

  "Did we steal them?" I asked.

  "Naw," Butch said, "I wouldn't steal from an honest rancher. We paid him good money."

  We stopped for an hour or so twice in the night, but I was so tired that when the horses walked the next day, I dozed in the saddle. Once Sundance reached out a hand to steady me.

  "Thought you were going to tumble right off," he said, sort of apologetically, as though I shouldn't think he doubted my horsemanship. Then, impishly, he asked, "Having a pleasant dream?"

  "Yes," I said, "of Fannie's house and soft beds and clean sheets and Julie's cooking."

  Sundance sobered. "That is a good dream," he agreed.

  We moved from the Big Horn Basin to the Owl Creek Mountains, climbed a steep trail up a side canyon, and dropped down into the Wind River basin, all without stopping for more than an hour at a time but also, thankfully, all without seeing or hearing a posse. It was like we had that glorious land all to ourselves—only, I was too tired and hungry to relish the sensation.

  Finally we came to the Burnbaugh ranch. "Where are we?" I asked.

  "On the Casper-to-Lander stage road," Butch answered.

  I wanted to cry. We had ridden days without food or sleep to go what should have been an easy half-day ride from Hole-in-the-Wall!

  "Etta," Sundance said gently, "there's no one on our trail. If we'd come straight here, they'd have found us sure."

  It was like the first ranch—I never saw the Burnbaughs, never met them, though we ate their food and, in some sense, enjoyed their hospitality.

  Caves aren't half bad for sleeping... and that was all I did, all any of us did. We ate wonderful homemade food that was delivered twice a day by two young boys—one of them told it all to the law later—and we slept and sometimes sat on a ledge looking over Muddy Creek, though it didn't look that muddy to me. We talked softly about the future.

  "Can we ever go back to Hole-in-the-Wall?" I asked.

  Butch shrugged. "Maybe. But we ain't ever gonna live there in peace and quiet. I'm really thinkin' we'll go to South America." A lot would happen before we ever went to South America.

  * * *

  After nearly a week at Burnbaugh's ranch, Butch declared it was time to move on—and to split up. "Our welcome's wearing out," he said. "Can't expect them to feed us forever. Went down there last night, and Burnbaugh tells me Pinkerton's fellow—what's his name? Siringo or somethin'—he was here, nosin' around. He left, but he'll be back."

  I'd noticed that Butch left for a while in the dark of the night and even wondered if he'd dared go into Lander to see his Mary. For all I knew, he might have done that as well as visiting with Burnbaugh.

  "I don't ever want to move—I like living in a cave," I said lazily, for I was rested and well fed and content.

  Then, suddenly, Butch said, "I'm going to Los Angeles... by way of Seattle."

  We both stared at him.

  "Seattle," Sundance said. "You ever thought about going by way of New York?"

  Butch paused to consider the possibility. Then he shook his head. "Naw, not this time. I'm gonna ride over to Montana, take a train to Seattle, and hire on a steamer down to Los Angeles."

  "Why?" I asked incredulously.

  "Never been there," he said with a shrug, "and I doubt Pinkerton's will be looking for me in those places—they'll expect me to be on a horse, not a ship. I'll meet you in San Antonio in... oh, let's say January."

  "January? This is only July," I said in disbelief. Butch gone for six months? "Sundance?"

  He looked at me solemnly. "No, we're not going... for a lot of reasons."

  Later, when we were alone, he explained the reasons to me, the prime one being that this odyssey was something Butch needed to do alone. "Breathing time," he said, "and maybe we need that too."

  I wondered at the two of them wanting to be shed of each other—or was it that they needed not to be together with me? Did they need to break up our threesome? That line of thinking got so tangled, I simply put it behind me and refused to look at it again.

  "Besides," Sundance went on, "I'm not spending our money to traipse around the country. Butch'll be alone, he can work his way. And I've got a different philosophy than he does—I think if we lie low, someplace out of the way, we'll be fine. In six months, we can go on with..."

  "With robbing banks and trains?" I asked.

  "We don't have that many robberies in us," he said, and for the first time I noticed the weariness in his voice. He wasn't just tired from running this time—he was bone-deep weary, the kind that builds over a long time. And this time, it built from being on the outside of the law.

  "No money?" I asked. "We just robbed a train, and by your own admission our share was close to ten thousand dollars."

  "Oh, yeah, but we can't spend it, least not for a while, not around here."

  "Can't spend it?" We had gone through hell to get and keep $10,000 we couldn't spend! I was beside myself.

  "It's in banknotes, traceable."

  "Do you think," I asked sarcastically, "that you can spend them sometime in the next thirty years?"

  He grinned. "Maybe. In South America."

  There it was again—South America, looming ever larger in my future. I knew in my bones that they would go... and I would go with them.

  Butch left us two days later. Somehow I remembered that outlaws weren't sentimental, and if that was true, I reasoned, their women shouldn't be either. But I was hard put not to cry when Butch put an arm around me, squeezed tight, and whispered, "We'll all three be together again soon, Etta, you watch and see."

  To Sundance, he said, "Don't rob no trains without me... and, Sundance, you take care o' her." He nodded his head in my direction.

  "I thought she was supposed to take care of me," Sundance said, with a perfect tone of bewilderment. "Damn! I got it wrong again."

  "You sure did," Butch said, and rode off without looking back.

  I was silent for three hours, until finally Sundance said, "Aren't you going to talk the whole time he's gone?"

  "I will," I said, "when I've got something to say."

  He chewed silently on that for a long time as we rode south to Robbers Roost, our hideout for the summer. We rode more slowly now, without the sense that we were always outrunning a posse.

  "You sure Pinkerton's man isn't behind us?" I asked, not really concerned.

  "I've been watching our back trail," he said, "and there's no one there. I suspect that Siringo fellow is still combing Wyoming. And he's looking for Butch mostly—and for sure not a man and a woman on a leisure ride."

  "You mean that's all there was to it? We should have left Wyoming right away, instead of riding all over the damn state." I was astounded. All that riding... and if we'd just headed south into Colorado, or...

  "Next time," he said with a grin, "we'll let you plan the getaway." Then he shrugged. "We did what we thought was smart, what's always worked before. Just didn't work this time."

  "Next time," I said, "I'm going to pay more attention to your plans."

  "Good. We can use the help." His voice dripped with sarcasm.

  We rode for days, sometimes making little progress in a day, crossing rocky, barren country, sleeping at night in our bedrolls by the ashes of our campfire. But we felt safe enough to cook over early-evening fires, to stop and wash clothes and bathe in creeks—where we sometimes ended in splashing fights—and even twice to ride into small towns for supplies.

  "
Saw Butch's face on a poster in the general store," Sundance said after one such stop. "Didn't favor him at all. He'd be really angry if he saw how they'd drawn him."

  * * *

  The Roost was the one stop on the outlaw trail where I hadn't been, but I wasn't the least bit curious. It couldn't be as grand as Hole-in-the-Wall, and I wouldn't have my cabin with my spring garden, all my cooking things, my clothes. It wouldn't be home, but it would, Sundance told me, be safe.

  High in the desert country of eastern Utah, the Roost was like Hole-in-the-Wall only in that it had rocky canyons and ridges, but it spread out over a much larger territory. If there were more ways in and out—and there were, it seemed to me, a thousand slick rocks and steep slopes of sandstone and hidden trails—the danger of that was offset by the wild remoteness of the place and the maze of canyons, buttes, mesas, and sandrock slopes. Left alone, I would have been hopelessly lost within an hour. I firmly believed Sundance when he said no lawman could find us once we were deep within and few wanted to try.

  Like Hole-in-the-Wall, it was rugged country and beautiful in its own way, with deep red sandstone colors dominating and sky overhead so clear and bright you could see forever from the top of a cliff. But it was inescapable desert.

  "We'll drop down the rockslide into Millard," Sundance told me, "then follow the Green to Sunset Pass and Poison Springs Canyon.... That's where we'll camp."

  "Camp? In a place called Poison Springs Canyon?"

  "It's the freshest, purest water you'll ever drink," he said, "and yes, we're camping in a tent. I don't know anybody's got an empty cabin there, but there'll be a good-sized tent waiting for us in some trees. You'll like it." He added the last thought almost belligerently, as though daring me not to like it.

  "I'll like it," I said softly. Then, more boldly, "But I'd like to bathe every once in a while."

  "In the spring," he said. "You can bathe every day."

  Curiously I asked, "How do you know there'll be a tent?"

  "I set it up with someone long time ago—outlaw communication, you might say."

  We came, late one afternoon, out of the canyons onto a narrow point of land that seemed shoved out over that maze of buttes and mesas. The canyon walls all around us were shades of red and gold, from deep, sunburned tan to tawny orange and, near the tops of the mesas, bands of creamy white. But beyond us, across the canyons, was purple desert that rose to meet a set of blue mountains, so clear in that high-country air that I thought I could reach them in minutes.