I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  “Bill don’t want shit from nobody. ‘Cept a set o’ wings to fly his black ass outta here,” the cell mate said.

  Rufus turned back to face the empty hallway. “How you get Trustee?” he repeated as if Wiggins hadn’t spoken.

  Wiggins swigged from his bottle. “You crazy, ain’t you?” he asked.

  “How you get to be a Trustee!?” Rufus demanded.

  Amused at this doggedness Wiggins answered. “Kiss guard’s ass,” he said.

  And Rufus did. He became a model prisoner. He smiled at the guards and thanked them for every action on his behalf, no matter how minor or mandatory. He played the innocent. He walked with a teen’s jaunt instead of a man’s swagger and beamed youthful innocence like a beacon. Otis shook his head in disbelieving admiration at the breadth of his performance.

  “Boy, I seen some ass kissin’ in my time, but this is what they call a symphony. You want somethin’ awful bad, don’t you?”

  “Me an’ Bill gonna change everything,” Rufus declared.

  “Well whoo hoo for you,” Otis smirked. “Ain’t you one big, important man.”

  Rufus beamed with sincere gratitude at the compliment; he considered it a statement of fact, really. The childish innocence of it swept Wiggins’ breath away. This was the strangest boy he had ever seen.

  As the weeks passed, Rufus spied an opportunity. As one of the thinner, more dissolute Trustees swept the floor, Rufus rushed at him, slammed him to the wall and grabbed at his broom. Rufus expected a quick victory, but the wiry old man held onto that broom like it was salvation. Rufus gritted his teeth and yanked for all he was worth, almost swinging that old man like a puppy at the end of a rope, all to the staccato accompaniment of stifled grunts and squeals. Finally, breathlessly, Rufus freed the broom as the old man crashed to the floor.

  “Now you jus’ keep your mouth shut, old man.” Rufus straightened himself up and started sweeping the hall as if nothing had happened. “You be nice to the guards and they might give you another broom,” he helpfully said at the man on the floor as he swept.

  No one questioned why he was sweeping. The guards assumed he was supposed to and they subsequently assumed that he should do other things, too, like empty shitters, or run liquor. Rufus became a self-appointed Trustee. Eventually, someone noticed that his name was missing from the official rolls and this omission was immediately corrected.

  Before long, Rufus extended his skills to the second floor, which housed thieves and brutes whose crimes stopped short of murder or rape. Here again, he became beloved of the guards and a disconcerting curiosity to the inmates. To score points with guards, he ratted on anyone for any infraction. Prisoners soon learned that if a guard warned against drinking and fighting, the next drink had better be out of Rufus’ sight. His bald-faced snitching evoked amazement. How dumb must this boy be, they thought? Rufus, however, simply sought the shortest distance to his goal. Snitching made him especially beloved of the most influential guards, so he did as much of it as possible.

  “Boy, someone gonna stick a knife in you sure as you breathe,” Otis Wiggins told him after his reputation as informant grew notorious. “Folks up here might be whisky runners and pickpockets, but second floor got some hard cases will surely break you up in pieces.”

  This had not occurred to Rufus. They were in jail. Guards were everywhere. It seemed irrational to him that in a house of correction he should fear doing the right thing, even though he did it for all the wrong reasons. After his roommate’s alarming speech, however, he noticed the looks on some of his victim’s faces. He then took to carrying a six-inch truncheon fashioned from a mop handle artfully split, with a dense rock wedged and strung into its end.

  “Look like the Injun got himself a tomahawk,” Wiggins scoffed, drunk, as he hopped unsteadily from one foot to the other chanting “woo woo woo woo” and beating his lips with an open palm.

  Looking at the stunted weapon, Rufus sprouted another of his ear-to-ear grins and completely ignored Otis’ drunken flailing. It was natural and noteworthy, he thought, that the idea for this weapon had suddenly come to him. He considered this—the automatic creation of an authentic Indian artifact—yet another sign from On High that his cause was just and his direction true. As his cell mate stumbled to the floor, giggling through his “woo woos,” Rufus sat on the bed and proudly considered his creation.

  He used it only once. There were no preliminaries to the attack. As forewarned prisoners watched from inside and outside their cells, a thick brute of a second-floor inmate waited. When Rufus passed, he wrapped his thick arm around the boy’s neck.

  “You like to talk, do you niggerinjun? Talk now.”

  Unable to breath, Rufus didn’t make a sound. He reached into his pocket and pulled the truncheon. Inmates either shook their heads from side to side in disappointment or up and down in anticipatory approval. Rufus swung the truncheon wide and brought it down on the brute’s knee. The big man swallowed a scream and fell to the ground. Free, Rufus felt his neck as if to make sure it was still there, and then turned his attention to the man on the ground. He stared at him as if shocked and betrayed by such behavior. He then brought the truncheon down on his head. Blood spilled down the man’s face.

  “What’d you wanna go do that for?” Rufus asked in all sincerity, and then hit him again with the truncheon. Seeing the blow coming, the man turned in time to take it on the back. He fell to his knees but struck out and grabbed Rufus’s ankle. As if swatting a large, persistent fly Rufus swung the truncheon down again and again and again until only breathing moved the big body lying on the ground. Rufus perplexedly eyed the inmates watching, as if to ask why he was forced to face such injustice and inconvenience. As he did, they slowly turned their attentions elsewhere.

  With no guards in sight, Rufus grabbed the big man’s hands and dragged him toward the steep steps. The other inmates watched, rapt as if seeing a particularly unpredictable animal go about its business. At the top of the stairs, Rufus sat on the ground, pressed his feet against the body’s mass, and kicked at it. Inch by inch, the body slid across the first step. One final kick and it went tumbling down, hitting the bottom with a decisive thump. The guards came running and by the time they got there, Rufus was trotting down the steps. The inmates rushed en masse to the top to see the rest of the show. Rufus stared down at the body with impassive curiosity and proceeded to tell the guards most of the truth. He failed to mention the weapon—the only lie, and that by omission. The audience opened their mouths and almost imperceptibly nodded their heads in appreciation as they disbursed, amid mumbles, to their various posts on the second floor. Soon, multiple versions of the event swirled around the prison. Rufus Buck had earned himself a reputation.

  ~

  After Rufus Buck’s trial and removal to the Ft. Smith jail for a 90-day sentence, Marshal John Garrett stood from his seat and nodded to a few of the men and jurors as they left the courtroom. He shook a congratulatory hand or two as he made his way toward the judge who stood at his desk accepting compliments from a coterie of respectable townspeople.

  “I just wanna thank you, Judge,” Garrett mumbled, head low to telegraph humility. “It was mighty Christian of you to stand up for me like that.”

  “I would have done no less for any of my Marshals,” Judge Parker proclaimed. “I just hope that I’m able to do a service for that young man.”

  ‘“I sure hope so too, Judge,” Garrett replied. “He wouldn’t be the first man you put on the righteous path.” Garrett sincerely hoped that Rufus Buck would rot in hell. From his authority as a Marshal, Garrett made his place in the world and the money in his pocket. He would let no white man challenge it. He’d be damned if he’d let a half-breed Creek do so. As he watched the Judge leave, Garrett shoved a pinch of tobacco in his lip. He chewed a while and spat the juice on the courthouse floor.

  John Garrett’s trials with Rufus Buck began indirectly—when Luckey Davis approached him with a dream of selling liquor. Garrett knew L
uckey from the Negro Freedmen town.

  “How you gonna sell liquor?” Garrett asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Luckey replied, his tall, moon-faced Indian friend looking on like a hungry pup. “That’s what I’m askin’ you for.”

  “I don’t sell no liquor boy,” Garrett knocked Luckey’s hat off. “And you go tellin’ anyone that I do and I will shoot you stone dead.” Garrett looked at Lewis. “And him, too.” Lewis took a step backwards. Garrett scrutinized both, shifting the tobacco plug from one cheek to the other. He was a big man, and a Marshal. He could kill without excuses. It was known that he had done so.

  Neither boy dared moved. They knew they were being studied.

  “Go see my brother Joshua,” Garrett finally mumbled.

  Lewis and Luckey stood frozen as Garrett walked away. “I know where Joshua lives,” Luckey sputtered once Garrett was out of earshot. Despite his fear, Lewis nodded softly.

  Two days passed during which other tasks demanded the boys’ attentions—like following that hawk or stealing supplies. Neither admitted to fearful procrastination. At night, after hearing Luckey’s soft snores, Lewis practiced cradling his shot-up gut and miming a dying man’s agonies—the fate he feared at the Garrett brothers’ hands. Meanwhile, Lewis dreamed that he was taller and older, that he scared men like Garrett and didn’t have to be afraid.

  On the third day they walked to Marshalltown, where the Freedmen lived. Black faces gradually outnumbered the brown and white ones. Lewis felt big and awkward, like he took up too much room. Luckey felt less wary, but no less out-of-place. He had been born here and his family still lived here, but he had never belonged. He had always sensed a cowering here. It felt like a weight that everyone carried, but nobody mentioned. They were all scared. They huddled here like threatened cows, helpless if a deadlier animal came along. He did not want to live that weakly. It was a chain around them. That’s why he’d left. It’s why he’d joined up with Luckey to live on the lam. With Luckey, no one tied his hands and feet together so that he couldn’t hurt himself—and then asked him to appreciate it, or not to notice.

  They heard the resonant clanging of hammer on iron from Joshua Garrett’s blacksmith shop. He sold the liquor to all of Marshalltown as well as supplying some of the more notorious whiskey runners in the Territory. Garrett ignored the boys as they approached. He continued heating red hot iron over a fire, dipping it in a bucket to smoke and sinister hissings.

  “What you want?” he finally deigned to ask.

  “Liquor,” Luckey replied.

  Bending over his forge, Garrett shot a smile. “I ain’t no saloon,” he said after looking them up and down. He brought his hammer down in smaller taps.

  “We want lotsa liquor,” Luckey corrected. “To sell.”

  “You got lotsa money to buy it?” Garrett asked.

  Luckey looked quizzically at Lewis, who shrugged with equal dismay. Neither had thought of money.

  “We could sell it for you,” Luckey blurted. “Like salesmen. We’d do good,” he added, excited at his quick thinking.

  “Get outta here,” Garrett muttered, no longer amused.

  “We can do it,” Luckey insisted. We done stuff like it. We stolen some pigs and cattle. We make our own way at it. Your brother told us to come.”

  Garrett pointed threateningly with hot orange iron. “Don’t you lie to me, little nigger. My brother ain’t that much a fool.”

  “I ain’t lyin’,” Luckey protested. “Tell him, Lewis.”

  Unable to speak for imagining hot iron cooking his flesh, Lewis nodded his head up and down.

  Garrett slowly relaxed the iron and turned toward his forge. “Get out,” he said.

  Luckey considered further appeals, but the ferocious banging and flying red sparks warned him away. He looked to Lewis for guidance, who shrugged, admitting defeat and turned to leave. Luckey followed. They walked back to Tulsey in total silence. Luckey wondered what he might have done differently to convince the blacksmith that he was more than just another ‘little nigger.’ Lewis silently mouthed self-deprecations on his failure to utter so much as a useful sound in the blacksmith’s shop.

  Soon after, they found Rufus Buck. They stumbled on a vision in the alley—someone not much older than they who sold liquor and managed his clientele with such inspiring professional brutality. As with Lewis and Luckey’s first meeting, as with their names, there was Destiny in it.

  They soon told Rufus about their plan to sell liquor and make enough to buy a farm. They told him all about Joshua Garrett’s liquor operation. It soon fell into place: Rufus would receive money from the recently beaten drunk, which he would use to buy liquor from Joshua Garrett. After some wrangling, it was agreed that all five boys would split the profits equally, though Rufus would be the undisputed leader. Eventually, they agreed, they would take over all the liquor sales in the Territory. All would fear them. None would disobey.

  They would call themselves the Rufus Buck Gang.

  ~ ~ ~

  Like a fretful suitor, Rufus skulked outside Cherokee Bill’s cell on the first floor of the Fort Smith Jail. He would pass the cell as often as he dared, determined to keep his eyes forward and not stare like a child. But as if on its own, his head would whip to the side trying to glimpse Bill’s person. Bill did not notice him. It didn’t help that Rufus hid from him at every opportunity. He even waited until Bill left his cell to collect his shit bucket. When he did, however, instead of holding it at extreme arm’s length to the extent of his ability like he did with all the others, he found himself peeking inside to see if Bill’s was any different; if it was formally more perfect or aromatically distinct. At times, he could have sworn it was. As for the hiding, Bill’s light was too bright, his grandness too ostentatious for Rufus to survive a slight from him. If Bill did not recognize him as kindred, Rufus would be lost. He would be nothing—little more than the image of his devastated father. All of his plans and all the redemption he owed that broken old man with no idea how to deliver… all would be aborted if Cherokee Bill rejected him. He dared not approach.

  Dapper Henry Starr always stood as if shielded inside a pristine cocoon as he sauntered through Murderer’s Row. He never hurried. Screaming matches, fist fights, shit throwing fury, none of it fazed him. However, if someone dared touch him, if a speck of that shit had soiled his clothes, you imagined an explosion of the rageful indignation that sustained his pose as a gentleman bandit. How it would express itself you did not know. It might be anything from lingering butchery to a single, definitive blow. It might be subtle, long-term torture ingeniously devised. You didn’t know. You just knew it would come, and so you did not test him. You did not touch him, for it was obvious that his very self, was, to him, and he believed it should be to others, the most precious of things. To sully it was a capital crime, the murder of a child, the rape of little girl, the kind of crime for which men sat in this shit-stinking hole called Murderer’s Row.

  In his early twenties, Henry had been born in Indian Territory to Tom and Mary Starr. He was nephew to Sam Starr, the full-blooded Cherokee married to Myra Belle Starr, aka “Belle,” the notorious outlaw. But Henry bristled when some suggested that criminality was “in his blood.”

  “I was a good boy,” he insisted. One-quarter Cherokee, he blamed his lawless reputation squarely on white men and their unjust ways. His mother’s second husband, a white man, threw him out of the house for no reason. While working on a ranch, he was arrested for driving a wagon full of whiskey. He swore to the deputies that he was simply driving, as instructed, with no idea of his cargo, but they arrested him anyway. Only sixteen, he was told by a white lawyer that he had no choice but to plead guilty and Judge Parker might go gentle on him. So he did, and got the maximum. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Once free, he took work on another ranch. All went well until Marshals came to arrest him for horse theft, a charge of which he was, he swore to the heavens, entirely innocent. Thrown back in jail at Fort Smith, a cous
in made his bail. To his own mind guilty of nothing, he had been twice unjustly arrested and incarcerated. This was his Territory. He was Cherokee and it was his (although to unschooled eyes he looked just like a white man). He would not rot in a white man’s jail for crimes that he did not commit and even if he had were not crimes because this was his Territory. He failed to show up for trial. He shot and wounded one of the posse hired to hunt him down. He then approached the injured man and put a bullet in his heart at point blank range.

  The sharp-eyed Starr soon noticed a young man often loitering near Bill’s cell, casting furtive glances inside. Day after day, Starr watched, amused. He finally stepped quietly behind Rufus as the boy stole glances toward where Bill was.

  “I see you’re familiar with the exploits of our friend Crawford Goldby,” Starr whispered. Rufus’ broom leapt from his hand and thwacked against the floor.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Starr apologized with ironic sincerity.

  “I ain’t scared,” Rufus rebutted, collecting his broom.

  “Bill is our most famous resident.”

  “I know all about him,” Rufus said.

  “Heard stories?”

  “I read it,” Rufus proudly professed. “Everything they wrote.”

  “A scholar…” Starr enthused, genuinely surprised. “You have unexpected facets, like a diamond. I stole one o’ those once. It was in a bank safe. Prettiest thing. Hard as steel and looking delicate enough to shatter like glass.” He regarded Rufus for a moment. “Like a dirty diamond.”

  With mild exasperation, Starr noticed that Rufus had stopped listening and was trying to eye Bill on the sly. Then he realized...

  “You must be the one I heard about,” he said. “Half Negro, half Creek. Kicked the shit outta some big sonofabitch on the second floor.” Starr laughed aloud. “Many facets,” he said.