“Bill,” he roughly whispered. Then realizing the absurdity of whispering in this inferno, he shouted “BILL!”
“That you Henry?” he heard back.
“Whatchu doin’ Bill?”
“Shootin’ at folks.” Starr had been right. Bill was in high spirits.
“They gonna kill you, Bill.” Starr ducked as stray shots grew uncomfortably close. For a moment he feared that Bill might be shooting at him until the wrong wall exploded.
“Ain’t dyin’,” said Bill. “It’s killin’.”
The guards stopped shooting. Bill let off a couple of rounds before he realized, then he too stopped. The air still hummed from all the blazing noise. From within the smoky void, a voice called out.
“Bill, this Cap’n Berry. We got men in here an’ at least twenty more outside. You ain’t gettin’ outta here.”
“I ain’t expectin’ to Cap’n,” Bill cheerily replied.
“No need for no one else to die is all.”
“You gonna keep me alive so you can hang me? Men die from that Cap’n.” Three shots burst from Bill’s gun.
Henry Starr tore a piece of white from his shirt. Lying on his side he stuck a hand through his cell bars and waved the white rag to get the guards’ attention.
“Hey. Hey!” he called hoarsely. He didn’t want Bill to hear, but it was too late.
“Whatchu want, Henry?”
Starr took a deep breath. “I wanna talk to the guards.”
“Talk fast,” Bill replied. “I plan to kill some of ‘em.”
A guard’s rifle shot exploded down the hall. Starr covered his head with both hands.
“Wooo hooo!” Bill cried. “That’s what I’m talking’!”
“Cut that out!” Captain Berry hollered at his trigger-happy man. Intrigued by Starr’s desire to talk, Berry sent a guard crawling on his belly toward Starr’s cell.
“Whatchu got?” the guard whispered as his head pierced the smoke.
“I can get him out,” said Starr.
“Bullshit.”
“I’ll get his gun. But Berry has to promise me—on his word of honor—that he will not shoot Bill when he ain’t armed. He’s gotta promise on his honor.”
“What makes you think he’ll come outta there?” The guard ducked lower as Bill’s bullets sang overhead.
“He’s a friend o’ mine,” Starr replied. “Go on an’ tell Berry,” Starr insisted, ignoring the man’s dubious looks. The guard disappeared back down the corridor.
Starr crawled to the corner of his cell, thinking what he’d say to convince Bill to surrender. He had no idea. Then, too late, he considered what he should have asked in return. “Damn!” he mumbled smacking a fist on the cell wall. This friendship business did upset a man’s priorities, he thought.
The next face Starr saw on the floor near his cell was Captain Berry’s. Starr joined him by the bars.
“You get him out,” Berry said, “unarmed, and we don’t shoot him.”
“That’s it,” Starr said. “And I get somethin’, reprieve, somethin’.”
“I can’t do none o’ that. Judge Parker’s off in St. Louis. I promise to do what I can… a good word for you, what I can, but that’s it. You want more we got nothin’ to talk about.
Starr didn’t have to think about it. “Alright,” he said. Berry nodded.
“Bill,” Berry called over the din. “This is Captain Berry. All my men hold your fire!” he yelled. The shooting stopped.
“Bill,” Berry repeated, audible now.
“Yeah…”
“Got someone wants to talk to you. I’m lettin’ him come down there so if you shoot, you’re gonna be shootin’ him.”
“It’s Henry, Bill. I’m comin’ in.”
Silence.
“Whatchu say, Bill?” Henry called.
“Alright.”
Berry stood slowly. Equally slowly and looking warily down the hall, he unlocked Starr’s cell. He nodded assent and Starr emerged.
“I’m comin’ now, Bill,” he said with his hands outstretched and visible. “I’m comin’,” he repeated.
When he reached Bill’s cell, he saw no one. He grasped the bars and swung them open. Walking inside, he found Bill sitting in the corner reloading his revolver. He looked very small hunched down in all the smoke. He looked up at Starr and smiled.
“This plan ain’t no good,” Bill grinned.
“I said it should o’ been Sunday.”
Bill finished loading and snapped the barrel shut.
“What they plannin’ out there?”
“I think they’re shootin’ to keep bad Bill from comin’ down there and killin’ ‘em all.”
“Bullets flyin’ and a jail full o’ smoke an’ you still full o’ shit, Henry.”
Starr sat on the cot. Both remained still.
“Ain’t heard this in here in a long time,” Starr said.
“Nothin’.”
“Yep.”
The two men looked at each other. Bill cracked a smile.
“I don’t know if you’re the last face I wanna be seein’, Henry.”
“Come on out, Bill.”
Bill leaned his head back against the wall.
“Whadda you get if I do?”
Starr shrugged. “I don’ know.”
“But somethin’.”
Again, Starr shrugged.
Bill ran his hand across his face, smearing the dark smudges already there. “You doin’ this for the love o’ Bill?”
“You got one reprieve. Might get another.”
“So…”
“It’s a chance, Bill.”
“They gonna kill me one way or another. I think I like this way.”
Starr smiled. “It’s awful loud.”
Bill had to appreciate that and returned the grin. “I truly thought we’d do it,” he said.
“It was a good plan.”
“If that goddamn guard o’ done what he was tol’, we’d be gone.”
“I hate a fuckin’ hero.”
“Shit. What’s better ‘bout dyin’ tomorrow, Henry.”
“Not goddamn thing,” said Starr. “Jus’ ain’t today. Jus’ not today.”
~ ~ ~
Rufus risked going to Okmulgee. He knew the whole place would be humming with his warning to the Territory. That’s what he wanted to see—the commotion and the fear he’d engendered. He stole a big hat, pulled it down over his eyes and kept his brown hands in his pockets. With his head hung low, he eyed a growing crowd. His elation faded when he saw that it collected at the wrong store. He looked up the street to Big Nellie’s place and no snatch of white hung from the wall. There was such an excitement coming from the growing crowd, though, he moved closer. As he did, he heard the first mutterings.
A thump like a kick to the chest. It skipped a beat, and then his heart raced as if he’d run a mile. Like the jaggedly nauseating smell of skunk the shock stayed in his gut. He gasped in more air as he turned away to be jostled aside by the crowd pushing and scrambling for a closer look at the newsprint dangling in the window. Several simultaneously read aloud from different sections in a chaotic buzz.
He breathed free from the crushing stink of men and women surrounding the posting. It had to be lies. Then he thought of the powers arrayed against men like Bill and himself and yes, he decided, that... yes, this could be. The probability of renewal could be snatched from a brown hand’s grasp. He wanted to kill every man and woman in that crowd. In the back of his head, he heard their screams as if in some distant world he acted on his fury—agonies as melodious as psalms. Bill was caught. He had failed and in doing so he might have condemned the Territories to utter usurpation—his people to a particularly cruel and progressive form of enlightened degradation. As high as Bill had flown in his eyes, he sank equally low. He had succumbed. He should not have surrendered. Henry Starr was a liar and a traitor for convincing him to do it. It was—and Rufus literally spat at the thought—the white man in Starr. All the
high and mighty words on how the Indians lived and died and he condemns Bill to rot in a cage and die at the end of a white man’s rope. Bill had sunk to their level, thinking like them, cowering and mewling for his mere being when all of their blood was at stake. Bill should have died then and there. He killed one guard, but he surrendered. He should have died killing more. There would be no escape and no glory. Not for Bill. Starr would rot in hell. But he, Rufus, could still clean this Territory. It needed to be cleaned—sifted—substance from mush—like horse shit in a pouring rain. His heart still pounded and his head throbbed with the pulse of every beat. But he thought no more of Bill and Starr. Their time had passed. It was his time now.
The murder of Larry Keating on the Friday last in the United States jail has been the theme of conversation on the streets nearly all the week, and the general expression is that the people should have taken Cherokee Bill from the jail and hanged him to a limb, for that is the fate that such hyenas as he deserve. Lynch law is to be deplored in any community, but there are cases where the people are justified in taking the law in their own hands, and this was one of them. The government in this instance demonstrated its inability to properly take care of such men as Cherokee Bill, and the people should have taken the job… and put the monster out of the way forever.
- The Fort Smith Weekly Elevator
August 2, 1895
Betrayed, humiliated, Rufus railed aloud at the cowardly malice of Bill and Henry Starr as he walked the Okmulgee streets. People stared at the sight of the raving boy. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t care until he looked up, shocked on hearing what sounded like his mother’s voice. He found himself out back of the mercantile store. From behind a pile of crates he listened.
“John Buck’ll be back here an’ whatchu gonna do then?”
It was his mother’s voice. Rufus peeked from behind the crates and saw Marshal John Garrett towering over her.
“I don’t want nothin’ from that ol’ drunk. I want the boy.”
“He’s gone,” she said.
“Where’d he go?”
“He don’t tell. I don’t know.”
“You in this liquor with him?”
“You mus’ be crazy,” she scornfully replied.
“If you is, then you owe me the money. You tell him that.”
Rufus materialized from behind the barrels. He had his gun in his hand.
A smiling Garrett glanced back and forth between the boy and his mother.
“Shit,” he said. “She mus’ be in it with you. Put that gun down, boy and gimme my money.”
Rufus never glanced at his mother and he never said a word. He stared at a man he hated beyond all others because he was black and did for white ones and did to other black and brown ones.
“You like that Ft. Smith jail, huh?” Garrett taunted, moving forward.
It never occurred to Garrett that Rufus would kill him.
“Gimme my money.”
He was just a boy whose Mama stood a few steps away from him.
“You gone dumb, boy?”
Garrett was a United States Marshal in the middle of his own town. It never occurred to him.
Awe marked his face more than pain. He stared at the blood as if he couldn’t believe it was his. Rufus shot him again and though his body shuddered, he still did not fall. He barely registered the pain as the metal tore through his flesh. Instead he ogled the boy in disbelief and grudging admiration. He had done what so many had tried and failed to do. One so young—one that he had so misjudged had killed him.
He staggered, and then Rufus shot him a third time.
Rufus’ mother gaped as the body hit the ground. She didn’t consider her son, only her fear. She didn’t move to help the bleeding Marshal. The back door opened and a man peered out. Rufus whipped the gun toward him. The door slammed shut. His mother turned and ran into the store, leaving her son outside with the corpse of the man he had killed.
Hearing the door slam a second time, Rufus looked up and realized his mother was gone. He stood alone in an alley with a bloody, bullet-ridden corpse. He hurried for his horse.
Inside, patrons dared not go near the windows at which they obsessively stared from a safe distance. The man at whom Rufus aimed the gun speechlessly pointed at the door he’d just closed as he warily backed toward the proprietor to warn of the danger. Patrons instinctively backed away as the door opened and Rufus’ mother rushed inside, head low, located her husband as if by instinct and pulled him silently toward the exit. He followed without question. They walked in silence to the buggy. He helped her inside and clicked the horse to a trot. Once outside of town, John Buck looked at his wife. The look was a question.
“Rufus killed a man,” she said. “A Marshal. Shot him three times.”
That was all she said. John Buck said nothing more. Both sat mute at their lack of shock—the strange, longstanding predilection, and now the inexorability. The killing seemed a logical step, an inevitable progression but neither knew from what. Its origin was as vaporous as its fruition was slow. It was back there, both knew, but neither could pinpoint it. They just knew, in hindsight, that it could come.
Rufus galloped back to the gang’s camp outside Okmulgee. His speed alerted the others.
“Sam, take it to water,” Rufus said handing off his reins. “The rest get the guns, as many as you can… It’s started.”
7
There had been no scrambling, no haste-fueled clumsiness in the wake of Garrett’s murder. Rufus employed the same stride returning to his horse that he had used to leave it. A buzzing marked the difference. It sang in his ears—a monotonous, steady hum as he left the scene. And the passersby, the townspeople… they were different too. Diminished, like the phantoms his parents had become. He might have walked right through one—each so insubstantial a slight wind might have whisked them away.
He paid the ghosts no mind.
Once mounted, he took solace in the horse’s graceful, metronomic swaying. For a long while, considering that he had just killed a man, he kept a stately, steady walk—appropriate movement for the singing in his ears—before he spurred to a trot and then a gallop. He rode toward the rolling hills of dried grass dotted with crimped, stunted oaks. The sun-scorched landscape bristled beneath him, as if in anticipation.
At the camp, Lewis, Luckey, Maoma and Sam seemed only slightly more substantial than the people in the town. He quickly told them they had to go. He chafed at their chattering inquiries.
“What’s goin’ on?
“What happened?
“Bill come?”
Words seemed unnecessary in this world in which he alone had thickness and substance. He used as few as possible to explain that he had killed a Marshal and that Bill had not escaped. As he did, he saw the bullets enter John Garrett’s body as if for the first time. The memory felt more real than the actual event. He saw the small spurts of blood from the bullet wound and the look on his mother’s face. He saw the finality of the act and the flimsiness of the living flesh he had mangled. Confusingly, he saw both massive import and utter insignificance in Garrett’s—in a man’s—dying. Which was it? Bill had killed men, as had Henry Starr. For a while, that made them grand in his eyes. He wondered if they had heard the ringing in their ears, as if trapped inside the echo of a church bell’s clang? Just a dead colored man—one who’d tried to rob him, but the sound kept on and on, even as the gang’s eyes grew wide with excitement at the wonders and horrors that lay ahead of them.
They tripped over themselves frantically scrambling to roll their bedding and saddle their horses while Rufus listened to the relentless screeching in his head. It had marked the killing and the death. Was it the sound of a soul? Did they scream long and loud? Had Callahan been right—was it the creaking hinges of the gates of hell opening up for him… for Garrett?
Just as his gang sat mounted and ready to ride, the screeching stopped. Once more he clearly heard the sounds around him—horse’s shod fe
et tapping on the hard ground, saddles squeaking beneath their riders—no longer as if telegraphed from some great distance. A bird squawked above him and floated boldly—solid and fully alive. The world snapped back from vapor to substance. And now he knew the force of what he’d done and he felt a smile inside. This had not been fantasy or vanity. He was now as deadly as he’d imagined himself; and only deadly men could get things done. His back legs nudged his horse to a lively canter as they headed toward the unknown.
“What we gonna do?” Luckey asked.
“We gonna rob banks?” Lewis chimed in.
“We jus’ killed a man,” Rufus said as he rode toward the hills, “ain’t that enough for one day?”
“We didn’t kill nothin’,” Maoma groused. “How we know you did?”
“You part o’ the Rufus Buck Gang ain’t ya’?” Rufus demanded.
“Uh huh.”
“You go on back to Okmulgee an’ tell ‘em that. You’ll see what I done.”
Maoma rode on in chastened silence.
They camped that night in the wooded hills north of town. As the sun set, Rufus once again basked in the quiet all around him and the sun’s vast magic as it disappeared behind green and golden hills. Three young deer stood stock-still on seeing him. He didn’t move. He watched them, their fleece-covered racks pointing heavenward. With a bounce the leader leapt into the bushes, the others following. Rufus thought he should have shot one for eating. He’d remember next time.
He didn’t want to hide between the trees and hills. He wanted vistas, so he climbed until he looked into the distance without seeing a single man or anything that reeked of one. As the light faded, it was all his, all the green and gold beneath him on all the hills as far as he could see. He held the power of the land, of life and death and he had exercised it as only the chosen and the blessed could. Starr and Sam had failed, but at that moment, he could forgive them, for they had been right. This was what it meant to be free.
I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang Page 13