Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

"All right," I said, "now tell us all about everything."

  "Yeah," Sundance said, "where the hell you been?"

  "England," Butch said, crooking his little finger and pretending to hold a dainty teacup. "It was soooo vehhhry... well, it wasn't Wyoming," he finished lamely.

  I laughed. "You needn't have gone all the way to England. They're lots of Brits in Buenos Aires. I've been drinking tea and talking racehorses and all that right here."

  "How do you stand it?" Butch asked. "I got tired of it pretty quick."

  "Oh," I said lightly, "I'm adaptable."

  Sundance had tired of our light bantering. "I found a place for us near Cholila, in Chubut Province," he said. "We'll leave in two days. I got all the supplies, everything we need."

  Butch slept the entire single day he was in Buenos Aires. When I thought about it later, I realized there wasn't a lot I would have shown him, not much that he would have liked. And I didn't want to make farewells to all those ranchers I'd been partying with. Who knew if I might need to call on them sometime? Butch—much as I loved him—might have tarnished my image, for he truly did still look like an outlaw from Wyoming.

  We went by ship from Buenos Aires to Madryn on the Gulf of Nuevo. Sundance was pale and quiet, but never as desperately sick as he had been on the long voyage. Still, he stayed below, while Butch stood with me at the rail, staring at the endless water.

  "You and Sundance been all right?" he asked, his voice too casual.

  "I guess," I said. "He was gone a lot, and I... I was the belle of the ball in Buenos Aires." I gave a little whirl, as though promenading for him.

  Butch grinned. "I can't think of a better belle," he said, "but I don't know how you stood it." Then, seriously, he asked, "Are you ready to go back to living far away from civilization? I mean, after New York and Buenos Aires?"

  "I am because I'm not ready to leave you and Sundance," I said.

  He interpreted my words his own way. "But someday you may be?"

  I nodded. "Someday. Maybe. If you go back to robbing banks."

  "You loved it! You wanted to be part of it, asked me," he protested.

  "I did love it, loved the excitement. But now, from a distance—and it's not been all that long—I see the folly of it. I don't want to see the two of you hang or spend your days in jail... and I sure don't want that for myself. So I'll do what I think I have to whenever."

  "To take care of Etta?"

  "Who else is going to do it? Not Sundance. Not really, when the chips are down."

  Butch put his big hand over mine. "I'll always take care of you, Etta, the best I can. But I can't promise that'll be enough. And I can't offer you what you really want and need."

  The ghost of Mary Boyd of Lander rose between us again.

  From Madryn we went by horseback to Trelew in Chubut, and suddenly I was back in Wyoming—or felt that I was. The three of us rode horseback, leading packhorses. Sundance had had furniture and supplies shipped to Cholila, but we had supplies for the trip—which took over a week—and our personal possessions. We crossed Patagonia from the coast, heading directly west. Endless plains of lush grass stretched all around us, and the sky was clear and cloudless, like a giant canopy cover hanging over us. The wind blew constantly, as it can in Wyoming, and we saw occasional dust devils.

  It was by then early May, the beginning of winter in Argentina, and the nights were cold, the days sometimes damp. I was thankful for the Wyoming woolens I'd packed, and at night I was glad to share my covers with Sundance. Butch always tactfully slept on the far side of the fire, and we never did have to make a cold camp because we were being followed. I'd thought it pure luxury compared to camps I'd known, but in my dreams I often returned to the Hotel Europa. Strangely, Sundance was never there with me.

  Occasionally we saw gauchos, with their funny narrow-brimmed hats that they held on with straps under their chin. They wore colorful ponchos with silk handkerchiefs around their necks.

  "They're like us," Sundance said, "outlaws."

  "I thought they were just cowboys in funny clothes," Butch said.

  Sundance spoke with lofty knowledge gained from his weeks of exploring the pampa. "The cowboys are vacqueros, and they don't look as... well, as dirty. The gauchos, they trade in illegal hides."

  "I'd rather rob banks," Butch said with a grin.

  "We got something in common," Sundance said. "They're disappearing. They can't survive in the modern cattle world, just like we couldn't survive in Wyoming anymore."

  Butch gave his hat an imaginary tip, as though acknowledging a certain brotherhood.

  "There, but for Etta, go you and me," Butch said.

  Sundance looked at him a long minute, then at me, and finally said, "I don't think so." Then, jokingly, "You sure there's no Pinkerton man following us?"

  "Better yet, you sure you know where you're goin'?" Butch asked.

  "I've been here before," Sundance said, and he used that same unerring sense of direction that had taken him safely all across the western states.

  Finally the land began to rise and break into foothills, and I remembered my first approach to the Rocky Mountains when Sundance tried hard to explain to me about distance and foothills and the nature of mountains. Eventually, the Andes, mountains so much higher that they make the Rockies look small, rose before us in all their majesty, and we rode through a region of beautiful clear lakes set amid hills that gradually grew into the mountains.

  "This is what they all talked about! Tierra del Fuego!" I was overwhelmed with the landscape. "It's better than Wyoming!"

  "Heresy!" Sundance said.

  "What'd you say?" Butch asked, and I repeated the Spanish slowly for him. He mouthed it after me, but his pronunciation was awful, and he was embarrassed when I laughed.

  Throughout the long journey, Butch had kept his distance from me. Once in a while I'd see him glance in my direction, and when I caught him he'd smile or wink. But he did not, as he once would have, come to sit next to me at the night's fire, and he spun no tales of England for me, though I longed to hear them. When, twice, I asked, he just shook his head and said, "It was different, Etta, really different. But there's not much to tell." This from the man who'd spun magical tales about being accused of stealing a pair of overalls or jumping off a moving train. I couldn't believe his British trip was as dull as he said. That shared moment of intimacy on the deck of the boat to Madryn was gone as though it never existed.

  In the night, when he thought Butch was sleeping, Sundance was passionately insistent, and I responded—but always with an ear cocked to hear if Butch was still snoring.

  "Quit worrying about him!" Sundance said one night, as he turned away in anger.

  We reached Trelew, a small city, none too soon. Mr. and Mrs. Place soon had private rooms at the Globe Hotel, and Mr. Cassidy was left to entertain himself while we stayed locked in our room for an entire day. I matched Sundance's passion minute by minute, but I did it in a detached way that was analyzing myself even as I responded to his touch, his kisses, his insistent thrusting. A part of me would always love Sundance, there was no doubt about that, and I would not hurt him for anything. Another part of me, the impersonal part, reveled in the pure physical pleasure of our coming together. But the most complicated part of me was that which knew that for the time being I was irrevocably with Sundance—unless I wanted to cross those pampas by myself and head back to Buenos Aires alone—and it was only practical to make him feel I loved him. That I succeeded was testified to by his dazed look of happiness when we sat in the bar with Butch late that night.

  "You have a good day?" he asked Butch.

  With a blush and an embarrassed nod toward me, Butch said, "Probably not as good as yours."

  I kicked him in the shins under the table, and he yowled. "Sorry, Etta, I just couldn't resist."

  * * *

  We stayed at Trelew only long enough to be certain that supplies were being shipped, and then we left on horseback for our estancia.

/>   Sundance played the guide with a kind of superiority that amused me. "It's not like the—what do you call them, Etta?"

  "Estancias," I supplied.

  "Right, estancias"—he mispronounced it—"but it's a substantial ranch. We can raise sheep and cattle, and there's a good solid house. Better than at the Hole."

  With this he shot me a long look, and I knew that no place would be better than the Hole, and the actual building had nothing to do with it. While he and Butch talked about the advantages of our new property and whether or not Sundance had driven a good deal, I let my mind go blank and concentrated on the mountains ahead of me. They almost made me homesick.

  Our ranch was near the town of Esquel, and it was indeed 1,600 miles from Buenos Aires and 400 miles from the nearest railroad. We eventually had 300 head of cattle, 1,500 sheep, eight or so horses—the number varied from time to time—and two gauchos to help with the work. Once settled there, we felt so safe that we used our own names. The people of Esquel were a combination of Spanish-speaking natives and Welshmen who had come farther than we had to seek freedom. All of them welcomed us, and we became somewhat celebrities.

  "Etta," Sundance said one day in a tone that was only half jest, "do you have to wear breech pants and show everyone how you can shoot a rifle? It's not the way ladies behave here."

  "Makes people notice me," I said. "I like that."

  "We spent a lifetime trying not to be noticed," Sundance said, now speaking in exasperation to Butch and ignoring me, "and now she's become a... a... what's the word I want?"

  "A showoff?" Butch asked helpfully.

  "An exhibitionist," I said calmly.

  "You are not!" Sundance said. "Least, as far as I know you always have clothes on!"

  I giggled at him. "I'm just having fun," I said, "and the townspeople like it. I'm even teaching some of the ladies to shoot. Can you imagine that their men have never taught them?"

  "With good reason," Sundance said, and even Butch chimed in with "Great! Now we'll be surrounded by armed housewives. I think I'd prefer Pinkertons."

  "Bite your tongue," I warned him.

  Actually, for two years, there was no need for Butch to bite his tongue. We lived in peace with other ranchers, we went to carnival with our neighbors before the Holy Season—I could never get either Butch or Sundance to church, not that I missed it much myself. But I thought it was the thing to do in that community and for that way of life. I was strangely anxious to blend in, to be one of the people. I did learn local recipes from the other women (Butch particularly liked a bean-and-pork stew that was traditional). I danced at the weddings, smiled brightly at christenings and wept at funerals. It was almost like we lived in that rose-covered cottage that I would never have, not with Sundance, not with Butch.

  We lived in harmony among ourselves too. Butch and I, privately and apart, came to some sort of acceptance. We joked with each other, and sometimes we exchanged wry grins, but we kept our distance. I let Sundance fill my life, and he, sensing a change in me, became less testy, more the old fun-loving Sundance, the man who'd captured my heart in San Antonio. Oh, I still longed for Butch, but I guess I learned that life is a series of compromises. And I was ever watchful for change, for something that would force me to move. For the time being, in peace, I was content, if not wildly happy. After all, I had the two men I loved all to myself.

  "Sure is a good life," Butch said one night, seated on the veranda of our small house, his chair tilted back against the wall even though I'd warned him three times that evening alone that he'd break the chair by tilting it that way.

  It was dusk of a warm February night—winter in Wyoming, but summer in Argentina—and we sat sipping coffee laced with just a bit of whiskey, a luxury we still treasured from the Hole days.

  "Yeah," Sundance said from the stairs where he sat smoking his cigarillo so the smoke would go in the other direction. He'd acquired a taste for cigarillos in Argentina and often tried to convince me that the smoke kept bugs away. I had tried smoking one and found it unpleasant, to say the least. Butch had laughed when I spit and choked.

  "It's peaceful. And you know what amazes me? I'm not bored." Sundance sounded purely surprised at himself.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "You know what I meant, Etta. I don't miss the old days, don't miss being on the run, don't even miss the high of robbing banks and trains. Guess I'm getting old."

  "We all are," Butch said. "Sometimes I get homesick"—we knew that meant he longed for Mary Boyd and, probably, for the family he loved but rarely had seen in those last years—"but not enough to go back and take those chances. My running days are over."

  And I began to believe that. I truly thought there would be no bank robberies, no trains to hold up. If they had changed—mellowed?—so had I. I was through with adventure and excitement. I'd had wild and crazy, I told myself, and now I wanted peace and quiet. Sometimes I thought our new life was too good to be true, as if the Lord or someone would reach down from heaven and smite us, not for sins of the past but just because people were not meant to be that happy. And then I'd scold myself. This is the way we'll live the rest of our lives, I told myself firmly.

  I should instead have listened to that warning voice.

  * * *

  Butch came riding hell-bent for leather one day from town. "Sundance!" He was hollering before he ever reined that poor horse to an abrupt stop. "Sundance? Where are you?"

  Sundance came lazily out the door, with me close behind him. "You see a ghost?" he asked.

  "Damn right I did," Butch said, taking the steps two at a time. "A ghost named Apfield."

  Sundance was unperturbed. "Pardon me? Apfield? I don't think I know that particular ghost."

  Butch threw himself in a chair, his hands nervously twisting the gloves he carried. "Trouble is, he's not a ghost. He's a flesh-and-blood cattle buyer."

  "Oh. That makes sense," Sundance said, grinning.

  "Was a sheriff in Wyoming," Butch said. "Mean and greedy son of a bitch. You know there were a lot of sheriffs I liked real well. He wasn't one of them."

  Sundance was more serious now. "And you saw him? Where?"

  "In Esquel," Butch said, his voice now weary. "He really is a cattle buyer."

  "He see you?"

  Butch nodded his head. "I'm almost positive. I tried to sidle away, but I felt his eyes staring at me even through my back."

  With certainty I knew that I had been right. People were not allowed to be as content as we had been for long.

  Finally, Sundance spoke. "No sense acting in panic. Let's give it a couple of days, see what happens. Etta, tomorrow you ride into town, casual, and shop or do whatever. See if you can find out if anyone's been asking about Butch."

  I nodded.

  Next morning, wearing my breech pants and a gaucho-style hat, I raced into town, coming to a dramatic stop in front of the mercantile store, as was my usual habit. People stared, but then they always did because I was more than a bit of a showoff. Were they staring differently today?

  In the store I asked for cigarillos for Sundance, thread, and chilies. The storekeeper knew we bought such things as sugar, flour, and coffee in bulk, so it was no good asking for those. He was cheerful getting them for me—a trifle too cheerful, I thought. And the ladies who greeted me, weren't they too friendly? Everything struck me as unnatural and posed, and yet I knew my senses were heightened enough to give in to imagination.

  Still, when I arrived back at the ranch I said, "He was asking. Everybody was polite and... it was like they were trying to be natural and couldn't. Something's changed." I was then, and am now, a firm believer that the slightest change sets off a reaction until there is a huge eruption—and that, I knew, was what was about to happen in our lives.

  Butch and Sundance paced the floor, argued and talked and discussed and banged their fists on the table in anger for two days, and never did decide what to do. The provincial authorities decided for them.

  "Visitors,"
Sundance said, rising to stand to the side of the window, as I'd first seen him do all those years ago in Hell's Half Acre. "Police, provincial police."

  "You got your gun?" Butch asked, and Sundance nodded. "Loaded?" he insisted, and Sundance nodded again. Then, to me, Butch said, "Bring that whiskey and some glasses."

  By the time the police—a commissar and three men—rode up to the house, Butch was standing on the porch, welcoming them in his still-broken Spanish. My Spanish was only too good—I understood clearly when the commissar, a man named Tasso, announced that he was here to arrest "Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh." He pronounced the names peculiarly, but I was in no mood for giggling.

  "Would you like a sip of whiskey?" Butch asked.

  The commissar and the three men behind him all shook their heads to reject the offer.

  I stood in the doorway, looking from one to the other, fingering the small hand revolver in my pocket. When I took my eyes off the scene in front of me, I raised them to those majestic high mountains and wondered if they offered as many hiding spots as the Rockies.

  "Why do you want to arrest us?" Butch asked.

  "You steal, in the United States, you rob banks and trains. There is a reward."

  "And who gets the reward?" Butch asked.

  "The man who told us who you were," the police officer said, always most polite.

  "Apfield," Butch spit out. "Dirtiest sheriff ever wore a badge in Wyoming."

  "That may be, senor, but I am not here to judge his competency as a sheriff. I am here to arrest you."

  "Why arrest us?" Butch asked. "True, we did steal, but only from the greedy and powerful, like the people who owned the railroads. We never took a penny from poor people. Sometimes we gave our money to them."

  "That is noble—"

  Tasso, never got to finish the sentence, because Sundance interrupted. "We're not going with you." He said it calmly and quietly, but he left no doubt he meant it.

  Casually, Sundance drew his Colt revolver and shot a couple of bullets in the air. Just as casually Butch, who was now on the ground, off the veranda, picked up a rock and tossed it in the air. Instantly the rock was shattered by a bullet from Sundance's gun.