Sundance, Butch and Me
Page 36
Sundance and I shared a tiny room, the space almost entirely taken up by an iron bedstead. The linens looked slightly gray, and the quilt was worn. I stared at it in distaste. The only other furniture in the room was a straight chair and a small, scarred chest of drawers that held a pitcher and a basin.
"I guess," Sundance said, "we won't be upright much in here." Then he began to pace around the bed. Just to get out of his way, I jumped onto it and heard the loud squeak of springs. He looked at me and almost grinned like the old Sundance, but then he said, "It's all falling apart, isn't it?"
"What? The bed?"
"That too," he said, "but I meant you and me." He looked hurt, surprised, uncertain, and in that moment I probably loved him as much as I ever had.
Loosening my hair, which had been bound up under a hat, I said, "I don't know, Sundance. It surely doesn't feel like it did in Wyoming."
His laugh was wry. "Maybe we were Wyoming lovers."
"We did all right in Utah," I reminded him, "but New Mexico was not good."
"What's happened, Etta? I still... I mean, you can still set me on fire."
"And you can me, Sundance. I imagine if we're both around at eighty, it'll still be true. But I don't think that will happen to us."
He shook his head. "I know it won't. But we're here now, Etta. What's happened?"
"I think it's what I told you in New York. I know you can't give up this life."
He was honestly perplexed. "But you... you were the one who loved it, loved the excitement, begged to go with us."
"I guess I've changed." I wanted to suggest I'd grown up, but I knew that was the wrong thing to say.
He tried anger. "It's Butch, isn't it? You're in love with Butch."
It made me weary to think we would fight that battle again, and I rose from the bed and walked to the window. "Whatever I feel for Butch has nothing to do with this. Butch is... well, for me, he's a might-have-been, something that never could happen. You're what happened, and if you don't know the difference, I'm sorry for you."
Instantly he was beside me, and I was in his arms. "I know, Etta, I know.... I just don't want to lose you."
There was no way I could bring myself to tell him that he was going to lose me, no matter what. But I had no need to talk. Within seconds we were peeling off our clothes and jumping into the bed, like old times. In spite of squeaking springs, which I was sure everyone in the hotel could hear, we spent a wild and wonderful afternoon, and when we went to supper—late, because South Americans don't dine until nine or ten—I asked nervously if my lips were red and swollen.
"It looks becoming on you," he said smugly.
Butch was already seated at a table, and without looking at us he shoved the menu across the table. "Doesn't look promising," he said. "Better stick with the beef."
Before I could even look at the menu, I heard a familiar—and unwelcome—voice.
" 'Bout time you all got here." Kid Curry stood before us, as ugly as he'd ever been. Before I could speak, he nodded his head in my direction and said, "The whore even followed you to South America, I see."
"I thought," I said in measured tones, "that you were killed in a Tennessee shoot-out."
"Newspapers got the wrong man," he said smugly.
I turned to Sundance, but he was staring at the floor, his hands knotted in his lap, his expression one of discomfort. "You knew!" I exploded. "You arranged for him to come here!"
Sundance remained silent, and I turned to face Butch.
Butch was honest, but his very honesty forced him to admit that he had lied to me, or at least deliberately not told me everything he knew. "I knew he was coming, Etta. I... I advised Sundance against it."
My thoughts were exploding in my brain. "He's been here a while, hasn't he? That's why you knew there might be robberies other than those you committed."
Now both men stared at the floor, afraid to look at me.
"Why the hell are you lettin' her treat you like this?" Curry demanded.
Sundance suddenly rose to his feet, his fists clenched. "Shut up, Curry!" he said, his voice so loud he was almost shouting. "Get out of here. I... I'll talk to you later."
By then I was shaking with anger. I shoved the menu away from me, pushed back my chair, and rose to leave.
"Etta?" Sundance's voice was plaintive.
"When's the next train for Valparaiso?" I asked.
He looked crestfallen. "You wouldn't."
"I would... and I will." There was no need to tell him that joining up again with the man who had nearly raped me was the ultimate betrayal.
Butch rose. "Sundance, you go see Curry. I'll see to Etta."
I was almost as angry with him. "I don't need 'seeing to,'" I said. "I can take care of myself."
"I'd like to buy your train ticket," Butch said, his voice ever gentle. He led me out of the dining room, while Sundance went in another direction to look for Curry. Sundance had started toward me, and then he apparently thought better of it. I didn't know if he was cowed by my anger or by Curry's scorn, but I wanted to believe it was the former.
Butch went with me to pack the few belongings I still had with me.
"You got a skirt in there?" he asked, nodding his head toward my skimpy roll.
"Why?"
"They might be looking for a lady in breeches," he said. "I think you best wear the skirt."
And so I put on a wrinkled skirt of corded cotton, but I still had my boots, a dirty white shirt, and my gaucho hat.
"You're sure about this, Etta?"
"Damn sure," I said, still angry.
Butch took my hand and held it but said nothing for a long time. "I don't think he can help himself," he finally said. "I think the lure of it is too much for him.... Curry isn't the only one of us who is that tempted by it, so tempted that common sense goes out the window."
"I thought you were going along with them."
"I will, for a while. But I'm like you. I don't want to die. They won't quit until they do. And you're smart to leave us. I only hope I can leave at the right time, before it's too late."
I literally threw myself into his arms, right there in that tiny hotel room. "Come with me now," I begged. "We can go back to the States, start over as new people—we'll be together." For just a moment, I lived that wonderful fantasy.
"You know I can't do that to Sundance, Etta." He disentangled himself from my arms and put a brotherly arm around my shoulders. "I'll get there sometime."
It turned out that the passionate afternoon I had spent with Sundance was our farewell. I didn't see him again before I boarded the train. "Tell him," I said to Butch, "that I love him, and that I'm... Oh, never mind, don't say any more than that. Anything else sounds stupid."
"Were you going to tell him you're sorry it turned out this way?" He was leaning against a bench at the train station, and I sat just a bit apart from him.
"I guess so, and it would be true."
"Then I'll tell him."
And so it was Butch who kissed me goodbye—only the second on-the-mouth kiss I'd ever had from Butch, and this a lingering one that made me want to pull my bags off the train and stay.
"I'm sorry, Etta," he said. "As sorry for you and me as I am for Sundance."
And then he was gone, and I was looking frantically for him as the train pulled out of the station. In the dark shadow beyond the lit area I saw him slouched against the wall, his hand raised in farewell.
Epilogue
In 1911 the newspapers carried the headline, "US Bandits Killed in Bolivia," and I knew before I read further that Sundance was dead. The article said that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang that had "terrorized" Wyoming for many years, had been killed in a shoot-out in San Vicente, a small rural community in Bolivia.
"Robbing the bank," I thought, "and it probably didn't have a thousand pesos all told!" I wept for Sundance, wept that he had died in a hail of bullets, and then gave thanks that he had not died on t
he gallows or spent long years in prison, which would have killed his spirit. He died, I knew, the way he wanted to.
But Butch? Just as surely as anything, I knew that it was not Butch who died with Sundance. It was Kid Curry, who deserved, to my mind, a much worse fate than a quick death by gunfire. I also knew that Butch was alive and well someplace and that someday he would come to find me. I just didn't understand how long him.
* * *
Butch came to see me yesterday. Oh, the girl who announced him called him Mr. Phillips—William T. Phillips—but I knew it was Butch the minute I set foot in the parlor. Sixty-something—the year is 1937—he still had the round, innocent, baby face he'd had in his twenties when he first started robbing banks and trains. Now, though, his hair is streaked with silver, not the sunlit brown I remember, and yesterday he wore a proper business suit, not the denim and flannel of our days in Wyoming. The only other times I'd ever seen him in a suit were when Sundance made him wear one to pose for that picture in Fort Worth.
I stood in the doorway for a minute, fighting for self-control. "You didn't die," I said.
He grinned lopsidedly in a way that I remembered so well. "No, I didn't. Didn't you know that?"
I nodded. "Sundance died," I said.
"Yeah. You'd have heard from him if he hadn't."
And then I was in his arms, my face pressed against his shoulder, my tears dampening that good suit.
"Etta, Etta." He spoke gently, stroking my hair, calming me as he always had done.
"It's Eunice now, Eunice Parker," I said, regaining my senses and backing away from him a few inches.
"You'll always be Etta to me."
And he would always be Butch. "Why did you wait so long?" I asked, and my anger flared.
"I thought if I found you, they'd find both of us."
There was no need to identify "they." It was the law. Probably even to this day there were warrants out for both of us—and for Sundance—across the West. I just hadn't thought about that for a long time.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"Long story. I knew that business about you dying of appendicitis in Denver wasn't true. You were as healthy as ever when you left us in Bolivia. Lately, I been thinkin' about how you always wanted to live in Fort Worth, and I knew you'd be running a house. Been here a few days poking around."
"This isn't a whorehouse," I said, my voice suddenly cold.
He grinned again and shrugged. "You've changed, Etta, but you haven't. That quick anger—it's still there."
"If you'd been Sundance and said that to me, I'd have picked up the nearest vase and thrown it at you."
He laughed aloud. "You may still throw it at me," he said.
We sat on the sofa, companionably close and yet not touching. Slowly Butch told me that he'd married and had a son. They lived in Seattle, where he was a respected—and honest—businessman.
"Then why," I asked, "come looking for me now, when it's all some twenty-five years over?"
"It was time." Then he grinned again. "I... well, I had to find you once. I promised Sundance, you know."
"Sundance doesn't stand between us anymore." My voice was almost harsh. "Neither does Mary Boyd."
He winced when I said that. "No, but a lot of other things do. Not just my family, but... oh, hell, I don't know, Etta. I didn't come for any big reunion, and I'm no more after your skirt than I was when you was with Sundance." He was at a loss as to how to go on.
"I guess," I said softly, "there's some things you can't ever get back, Butch. And what could have been between us but never was is one of those things."
"I guess you're right," he said, "and it's one of the biggest regrets of my life. I don't worry over the trains and the banks, but I do worry over how I hurt my family... and what I missed with you."
There wasn't much either of us could say. I kissed him quickly and rose from the couch. We talked a little after that, mostly about nothing, but pretty soon he said he guessed he'd better be going. Now that he'd found me, he was going back to Seattle the next day.
"You got a picture of that son of yours?" I asked.
Almost shy, he produced a picture of a boy who looked to be about sixteen, with his father's baby face and stocky build.
"Tell him never to go to Nevada or Utah or Wyoming," I said. "Old-timers will take one look at him and hang him."
Butch laughed and kissed me quick on the forehead. Then he was gone out the front door. I stood on the porch and watched him walk away, and I thought to myself, Damn! There really are things you can't capture ever again. What's that line from Shakespeare? "There is a tide in the affairs of men"?
Butch and I had missed the tide... and the boat.
The End
Want more from Judy Alter?
Page forward for an excerpt from
CHEROKEE ROSE
Real Women of the American West
Book Three
~
"...a memorable heroine [with a] great passion for life"
~Booklist
Excerpt from
Cherokee Rose
Real Women of the American West
Book Three
by
Judy Alter
Award-winning Author
Suddenly he came to me and took me in his arms. "I don't know, Cherokee. I don't know what's the matter with me. Just an itch in my soul I can't seem to scratch. You can rope me anytime you want."
But it was a long time before I ended a show by roping Buck Dowling.
Outside the arena, life went on. Buck and I were still lovers and friends. If the passion between us seemed a little less I attributed it to having passed the first flush of new love—and it seemed to me we'd enjoyed that honeymoon period longer than most people have a right to expect. There were still many nights that we rushed back to our quarters, oblivious of the rest of the troupe, longing to be in our own cocoon.
But more often Buck would say, "I'm going for a beer with the fellows. You be all right going home with the girls?"
"Sure," I'd reply, and I'd be sound asleep when he came home, only to be awaked by his probing kisses and persistent hands.
Sometimes in those months toward the end of the season, I thought Buck Dowling was making love to me in order to prove a point to himself. But I said nothing. I was scared.
Cherokee Rose
Real Women of the American West
Book Three
by
Judy Alter
~
To purchase
Cherokee Rose
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Judy Alter's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/JudyAlter
~
Discover more with
eBookDiscovery.com
Page forward and complete your journey
with an excerpt from
LIBBIE
Real Women of the American West
Book One
Excerpt from
Libbie
Real Women of the American West
Book One
by
Judy Alter
Award-winning Author
I knew that history would make a plaything of Autie, and when that happened, all my battles would be lost again. Autie rarely lost a battle—save that last big one—and his fights were always glorious, painted on a broad screen by the clamoring newsmen if not by himself. My battles were small and silent and private, but oh! they were important to me, and I had managed to hold the line. I would not see it all wiped away with the muckraking cry that Autie's overweening ambition had led him to disaster at Little Bighorn. I would make sure that the world saw the George Armstrong Custer I wanted seen. Only this private journal—to be burned upon my death—records my own wars.
Twelve years is not very long in a lifetime, yet it seemed my whole life was lived in those brief years of marriage. I had fought battles of my own, hard battles, to marry Autie, and once married, I thought myself t
he happiest and luckiest of women—married to the great boy-general, the hero of the Civil War. We would, I knew, grow old together, savoring the best of life, the last for which the first was made, so the poet wrote. I'm not sure when, exactly, that I knew that dream was not to be, that a love as intense as ours could not survive, that two people as willful as we could not be bound so tightly together. And yet, when all was said and done, I would not have traded those twelve years for anything on earth. Were they worth a lifetime? There is no answer, but even to think about it, I must begin earlier, back in Monroe.... I remember yet one snowy night when I was but sixteen years old.
LIBBIE
Real Women of the American West
Book One
by
Judy Alter
~
To purchase
LIBBIE
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Judy Alter's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/JudyAlter
~
Discover more with
eBookDiscovery.com
Judy Alter retired as director of Texas Christian University Press and began a new career writing mysteries. The first, Skeleton in a Dead Space, was published in September 2011 and the second, No Neighborhood for Old Women, in April 2012. More are to come. Alter previously wrote about women of the American West and is a former president of the Western Writers of America. In 1984 her book Luke and the Van Zandt County War was named best juvenile novel of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1988 she received a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for her novel Mattie, and in 1992 a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame for her short story, "Fool Girl." In 2005 she received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from Western Writers of America.