The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “But now a bank is a most certain thing. You boys ever hear of a bank that didn’t have no money in it?”

  Little Dick shook his head.

  “No, sir, I never did. What would be the point?”

  “Exactly.”

  Blackbird continued to sit and say nothing at all, giving away nothing of what was inside his head or otherwise. Belle continued stealing glances. He’d never seen a woman with violet eyes before, white woman or any other kind. Not only would Jane slit his throat, if she knew what he was thinking at present, but Gypsy Davy would shoot him through the eyeballs just for looking at Belle. He had heard stories of Davy’s wild rages. A rumor had even been afloat that claimed that Gypsy had killed some of his own gang members.

  “Well, I get your point,” Little Dick said. “But robbing a bank can prove a tricky endeavor. I mean the whole dang’ town will get after you for stealing a bank’s money. Look what they did to Jesse and Frank and the Youngers up there in Northfield. Shot ’em to ribbons.”

  “Bigger the risk, bigger the gain,” Gypsy said with a devilish grin. “Ain’t that so, Belle?”

  She nodded her pretty head, but was more enamored with the prospects of bedding a man the size of Blackbird than of robbing a bank. The tallest man she ever bedded was Ben Poker who was a full head shorter than Blackbird, at least, and that was with his boots on. Ben was a sapling next to the oak, Blackbird. She was feeling a mighty need to climb that tree and swing from it.

  “I got it all planned down to the minute,” Gypsy continued. “You and me and Blackbird and Belle here makes for a force to be reckoned with. We’ll come in armed and dangerous and nobody will stand against us.”

  Little Dick was still a bit uncertain and spoke his mind.

  “I never been in no gang with a woman in it.”

  “Oh, Belle can shoot the eyes out of a piss ant. She is deadly and her aim is true and she does not quail in the face of danger.”

  “I do believe I read them same words in a dime novel,” Little Dick said. “Spoken from the mouth of Lil’ Bess, Queen of the Plains. A DeWitt’s.”

  “Well, if so, then it was stole from me,” Gypsy said.

  “I could use another shot of this high-price whiskey.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Little Dick helped himself, then rejoined the group.

  “You boys want to throw in with me and Belle?” Davy asked.

  “What’s our end of it?” Little Dick said.

  Gypsy looked at Blackbird, but Blackbird remained quiet, just minding his own business, listening, taking it all in.

  “Give you boys twenty percent each of the haul. A fine sum for less than twenty minutes of work.”

  “I’d like it better was I to hear fifty percent come out of your yap,” Little Dick said, the whiskey making him bolder.

  “You’ll be waiting a long time to hear that amount come out of my yap or any place else,” Davy said. “What say you, Blackbird?”

  Blackbird turned his eyes on Davy, but he was still thinking about the trouble he knew he had already let himself in for by what he was thinking about Belle. He knew what it said in the Bible about the mind being willing but the flesh being weak. His flesh was feeling mighty weak.

  “Fifty percent sounds good to me, too,” he said in response.

  “No damn’ way. Twenty percent is high as I go. I can always buy other boys with guns.”

  “But boys ain’t men, are they, Blackbird?” Little Dick said. “Not like us ’uns.”

  “You get what you pay for,” Blackbird said.

  Gypsy looked consternated. He had not figured on trouble from these two.

  “Twenty percent of something is better than fifty percent of nothing. It sounds fair to me for the labor required. I got all the details worked out. All you have to do is walk in and hold your pistolas on them clerks and have ’em fill the sacks and ride away.”

  “Still,” said Little Dick, “there is every chance somebody will take it in their heads not to let us get away so easily and will aim to shoot us dead as garbage rats.”

  “Well, yes, that is part of why I’m offering you boys the twenty percent. You might have to shoot back at them if they try. After all, if it were a waltz, I’d invite women.”

  “Women!” said Little Dick with a snort.

  “Take it or leave it,” Gypsy said with finality.

  “I’ll take it,” Blackbird said, for his mind was on more than just stealing bank money, and he could not stand sitting any longer and having Belle look at him slyly like she was. And if he was going to hell, by God, he’d just as soon do it sooner rather than later.

  Little Dick conceded as soon as Blackbird did.

  “When do we do it?” Little Dick said.

  “Tomorrow,” Gypsy said. “Bright and early. We’ll be the first customers.”

  “Where we staying tonight?” Blackbird asked.

  “Got you boys a room at the end of the hall.”

  “One room or two?”

  “One room.”

  “I want my own room . . . nothing against you, Little Dick, but I’m a private soul and don’t bunk with no mens,” Blackbird said.

  “OK,” Gypsy agreed. “I’ll walk down to the lobby and rent another room.”

  Blackbird threw Belle one more glance and she threw him one back. He felt like he’d swallowed a hot rock that now burned in his gut.

  That night she knocked on his door, just like he figured she would, and he rose up eagerly off the bed, the silvery moonlight like a ghost in the room, and answered the door, letting her slip inside.

  “He finds you here there’ll be some killing going on,” he said, but she’d already shucked out of her wrapper and stood before him fully naked and gleaming like one of the alabaster statues he’d seen that time in Italy when he was with that Wild West Combination of Cody’s a year or two back.

  “Then let there be blood,” she said. “For I have come to tempt the tiger.”

  “Lord, yes, you have.”

  They got to it right away and it didn’t take long to spend their built-up passion. Their fury was such that they looked like the beast with two backs trying to kill something they couldn’t quite see in the moon shadows. There was a rustle and clatter of furniture being pushed all around and bedsprings aching and floorboards creaking. Belle yelped and howled like a she-cat and Blackbird grunted like he was hauling ore out of a mine on his back. They heaved and they thrusted until they were spent as shot birds, then laid there, breathing heavily, hearts pounding like angry fists inside their bosoms.

  After several minutes they were able to speak.

  “What now?” she said.

  “You tell me,” Blackbird said.

  “What are your plans after robbing the bank tomorrow?”

  “Plan is to go to Oklahoma.”

  “Why would anybody want to go to Oklahoma?”

  “’Cause I got a wife and kids back there.”

  “Send them some money and go with me to San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco?”

  “I always wanted to catch a boat to China and that’s where you catch boats to China . . . in San Francisco.”

  “China?”

  “Think of all that money we’d have, the fun times. They say China’s the cheapest place to live, that you can hire a maid for ten cents a week. Why we’d live like royalty, you and me.” She sighed.

  “You mean keep all of that money for ourselves . . . none for Davy or Little Dick?”

  “Yes, all.”

  “That would mean I’d have to kill Davy and Little Dick?” Blackbird mused.

  “Exactly.”

  “You got this all worked out your own way, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first laid eyes on you,” she said.

  “You care to let me in on how exactly we goin’ to do this?”

  So she whispered it to him after straddling his lengthy frame, looking down through her lank hair.
/>   “Well, if that don’t put a knot in the tail of the tiger,” he said when she finished telling him the plan.

  “It does, don’t it.”

  “I’ll have to think on it some.”

  “Don’t think too long on it.”

  And in a moment she was gone, the room empty again, and the places on his back where her claws had raked over him burned like fire, and the places where she had bit through the skin burned like a fire, and all inside his soul burned like fire.

  All that money. San Francisco, he thought. China! He could almost hear the kids squalling back in Oklahoma. He could see Jane, mad and waiting, knew that she’d wait just so long, then go find herself another man.

  The thing was, he still loved her in spite of all the burdens. Love was not so simple a thing to discern the whys and wherefores. On the one hand it seemed to him that life in the pistol barrel had just been repeating itself every day when he was back there with Jane. Whereas life with Belle would be a grand adventure to say the least.

  Lord, a mercy, what I goin’ do?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Walter Fick arose at his usual hour, did stretches in his union suit, bathed from a metal basin of fresh, cold, hand-pumped water, lathered his cheeks, ran a stropped straight razor over them until they were clean and smooth as ivory and just as pale, then dressed in a fine dark suit of clothes over a boiled shirt and celluloid collar, ate a light breakfast of toast and poached egg, coffee mixed with cream and sugar, and kissed his wife Dora good bye before heading to his bank. He had turned fifty-one years old the previous January and was a survivor of Gettysburg where shot and shell had shattered his left arm but had not taken it off completely. Instead, the arm hung uselessly in its sleeve like the dead weight of a window sash.

  Walter had learned to adapt to living life with one good arm. He had had to learn to be grateful that it was not his right arm, the one he was accustomed to using, and thus forced to learn to do everything the opposite. Walter Fick had learned to be grateful for what life had given him instead of what it had taken from him.

  His home was a nice fine two-story brick house with lots of oak trim and high windows that let in the Wyoming light, summer and winter. He was most proud of his fine library full of leather-bound books—his passion—and a supportive wife who he could count on for his every daily need. And although she had remained barren, and it was a sorrowful thing for him not to have had a son who he could teach the banking business, he felt fortunate to have been delivered—whether divinely or not—his young assistant, John David Moore, a bespectacled boy who had appeared one day out of virtually nowhere asking for a job—“Doing anything, sir.”—and said he had walked all the way from Nebraska looking for work. And then he had confessed that he could become almost anything but a farmer. It was as if God had heard Walter’s silent grief of being a man without a son and had sent him John David Moore as a replacement.

  Walter Fick was most pleased by the boy’s willingness to learn the business of money from the ground up, thus assuring that what Walter Fick had accumulated over the years would not pass to the grave with him. A fine lad, indeed, was John David Moore.

  The young man had become like a son to Walter, often taking his evening meals with Walter and Dora in their fine big house, the three of them like family gathered around the long polished dining room table with its high-backed carved chairs and chinaware.

  And when Walter entered the bank via a back door, John David Moore was already wearing his eye shade and poring over papers, toting and summing every jot and tittle, leaning over his desk.

  “Good morning, Walter.”

  “Good morning, John.” Their greeting was as warm as between father and son.

  And within minutes there arrived Sadie Bird and Enid Pierce, two of the bank’s tellers who right away began setting up their bank drawers for that day’s business.

  Enid was a bachelor, like John David, and held private dreams of someday becoming an artist, perhaps living in Europe, hopefully studying under one of the masters, saving a portion of his pay every month for just such a trip.

  And Sadie had been widowed from a fairly young age, and for whatever reason had never married again, but instead lived with her good friend, Sally Merriweather, a schoolteacher. The two of them happy as larks, closer than sisters, and occasionally the source of sordid rumors murmured behind the gloved hands of some of the town’s biddies who thought it more than a bit unusual for two women to be so openly affectionate. Once or twice Sadie and Sally had been seen holding hands and a schoolboy claimed to have once observed them kissing.

  So there they were, the four of them, souls of industry, perhaps not as happy as they could be, but not unhappy, either, when the doors suddenly opened and in stepped three masked men, one of them tall as a poplar tree and black as a moonless night.

  “It will do well for you all to not raise a ruckus and put the money into these sacks,” one of the bandits said in a quiet, almost humorous manner. The speaker was standing under a high-crowned sombrero with a big kerchief over his face. The tall black man wore leather britches with coins sewn down the legs—Liberty dimes, Walter was sure. And the third fellow was short with a humped back. The one doing the talking took from inside his coat several burlap sacks that once held onions and still had that onion scent about them. He shoved these through the teller cages, while the short man stood guard by the door, having again pulled the green shades down over the window and returned the sign to CLOSED.

  The tall Negro aimed his pistols at Walter and John David, and said: “You two rascals so much as cough you’ll be eating dirt for dinner.”

  Walter had been robbed once before and had come out of it quite all right. The villains were tracked down, tried, and sent to prison, and most of the money recovered. So he was not overly worried as to the outcome of the situation and told the others: “Co-operate with these men.”

  By all accounts, things were moving quite smoothly with the burlap sacks having been stuffed with paper money and silver. But Davy noted the heavy steel door of a large vault that had remained closed.

  “Open that safe,” Davy ordered.

  “It’s on a time lock,” Walter explained. “It will not open until nine-thirty . . . half an hour from now.”

  “Time lock? Well, set the time to now and open it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Davy, not being experienced at bank robbery, had not heard of time locks and safes that would not open until a certain hour. He saw it as a ruse, a way for the tight-fisted banker to keep all the money.

  “To hell, you say!” He stuck the barrel of his pistol to Walter’s knob of a head, cocking back the hammer as he did so. “Is your brains worth that money?”

  “No, sir. But I can’t open that safe until nine-thirty.”

  “Nine-thirty is too damn’ long to wait.”

  “I’m sorry. . . .”

  Whether he meant to or not, Davy’s finger twitched on the trigger and the pistol shot sounded like the crack of thunder in a summer storm.

  The shot knocked Walter off his feet and to the floor where he lay still as stone. The shooting was so unexpected that John and the others jumped nearly a foot. And Sadie dribbled a bit in her bloomers.

  “We might just as well kill them all,” Little Dick shouted, standing by the doors, “else they’ll identify us and we’ll be hanged!”

  Davy now blamed his gun for the unexpected turn of events. The parts of his gun had become loose over time and use, a condition he was well aware of and had been meaning to have fixed, but hadn’t yet, so consumed had he been with Belle Moon and his own lust for her. It was not the killing that irked him so much as the error and the dead man’s bloody offal splattered over his handsome face.

  He swiped at his eyes with the bandanna, then examined it.

  “Oh, hell,” he said in disgust, and shot John David through the middle, felling him like a young sapling clipped by a sharply swung axe.

  Little Dick stepped f
orward and shot quiet Enid Pierce, whose mouth formed an O at the sight of John David lying at his feet, a ribbon of blood from the body grown as fat as a red worm. Enid stumbled halfway across the room, grasped at wood boxes of receipts, pulling them down with him as he crumpled. Pieces of paper fluttered down around him like wounded birds. His last thoughts were of cafés in Paris, France.

  The only innocent left standing was Sadie Bird who had never done a wrong thing to anybody. Her handsome young husband, Tom, had fallen into an abandoned mine and broken both legs and by the time he was found it was too late. And so she had grieved as any wife would grieve, and was comforted by her friend Sally, the schoolteacher, and their friendship became something deeper than mere friendship in the passage of a single lonely night. And thus Sally had replaced Tom in Sadie’s affections.

  Now Sadie stared into the muzzles of the strangers’ guns, having witnessed the death of all three of her friends and co-workers and could only assume her own time had come. She prayed it was not true, that God would save her, but would He, really, after what had transpired between Sally and her?

  “Somebody shoot this one,” Gypsy ordered.

  But Little Dick shook his head.

  “I can’t shoot no woman.”

  “Then you do it,” Gypsy said to Blackbird.

  “No,” Blackbird said. “I ain’t never killed no woman before and I ain’t about to start this day. You wants her killed, you better get to it.”

  Everyone by that time was nervous: robbers and the remaining victim. Surely others would soon arrive to come see what all the shooting was about, drawn by the sound of gunfire like cats to the scent of fish.

  Gypsy thumbed back the hammer of his iron, aimed it at Sadie, but when he pulled the trigger, the gun misfired. He took it as a sign among signs that it was not meant to be; fate had dealt the hand it had dealt and he’d best play it as it was.

  Looking into those faded blue eyes, eyes like those of his own ma, the only part of her that he remembered, he lowered his piece.

  “Let’s go!” he yelped, and all three turned and slipped out the door and onto their mounts being held by Belle Moon who did not require explanation about what had taken place inside the bank. Belle figured the boys had killed everyone at Davy’s request, because that was how Davy played things: no witnesses.