Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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Bob got up from the bed and squatted by the fireplace to pour more coffee into his cup.
Eugenia said, ‘One morning I looked in the mirror and saw lines around my mouth. It didn’t take any more than that.’
6
The Dalton gang stayed in Silver City all of that summer and as long into the fall as our money held out, and Bob and the woman known as Eugenia Moore were together everywhere. They stood in front of the grocery store with the children and watched the circus parade and touched the nose of a camel. They sat on the blue lawn to the side of the moveable schoolhouse and heard a piano recital. And they got the photograph taken that is still around today: of Bob looking teenaged and haircut and stern in a smallish pink-striped tan suit and wrinkled white collar; of Eugenia Moore posed standing, her left hand on his left shoulder, she with a nineteenth-century woman’s hat and six yards of blue dress with a white frill of a blouse sleeve and collar showing; and neither of them facing the camera, both a little annoyed, as though the photograph was merely historical documentation and one of the obligations to their biographers they wanted done with soon.
And what of Julia? It worked out that I didn’t see her for over a year, but we kept up a mail correspondence that kindled our affections far better than my clumsy courtship ever had. I have always been somewhat daunted by female emotions, and flat-out amazed at the way they spend love as if it wasn’t something to save and purse away somewhere, so it was probably best that I was gone, for my sweetheart then was undergoing a romantic spell that soon would have exhausted me.
For instance, when the family still lived near Coffeyville, Julia would ride up to visit my mother and chat about me as they baked cherry cobbler. And she’d sit with my sisters on the white iron bed I’d slept in and, while Leonie swiveled in a dress she’d sewn, Julia would close her eyes and try to imagine me sleeping beside her there—the springs squashed down, my brown arm disposing of a pillow, my nose flattened against her thigh. She assumed my perspective and saw the kerosene smut on the ceiling, the plaster chip near the window sash, the crude pencil marks on the wallpaper that spelled, ‘I HATe coLLaRd GReeNs.’ She discovered shirts of mine in the closet and ironed them just for the chance to press them hot to her face.
She stayed with my brother Ben and his family for a week while his wife recovered from their fourth child, and Julia used her evenings to study Ben at the dining-room table as he tacked together a wren’s house, and she’d find me in his eye-brows and jaw. She’d say, ‘You’ve got brown hairs on your wrists just like he does,’ and Ben would look bewildered. And when Charles or Henry stopped by for coffee, she’d bake butterscotch cookies just to hold my brothers there long enough to quiz them.
‘You’re asking the wrong fella about Emmett,’ said Henry. ‘All I remember about him was that he made believe he was Jesse James’s son. This would’ve been when he was eleven years old. I mean he was convinced. You remember that, Ben? He had it all laid out how he was going to revenge his pa by killing Robert Ford. He was a character, even then. He couldn’t talk about a walk to the privy without some embellishment.’
‘He was colorful all right,’ said Ben. ‘Plus he’s got brown hair on his wrists just like I do.’
Julia dug out the Dalton family Bible and memorized birthdays and deaths. Sometimes she’d wake up when her father did and like a good wife have a special breakfast of blueberry flapjacks and sausage patties waiting for him when he returned from his morning chores and kicked off his boots in the pantry. ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ he’d say.
She’d brush her long black hair with my photograph in the lap of her flannel nightgown. She devoted hours to her diary, recording each night the fluctuating conditions of her heart and experimenting with her presumed name: ‘Julia Dalton,’ and ‘Mrs. Julia Dalton,’ and ‘Mr. and Mrs. Emmett Dalton,’ with the afterthought, ‘(and sons).’ Her perfumed letters to me would end in sweet complaint: ‘Why aren’t you here?’ and ‘Will I never see you?’ and ‘What can I promise to spur you homeward?’
It was nice to be revered and sought out but there was little in me to give back, and all I could muster in response to her was, ‘I sure do miss you. Love, Emmett.’
When I saw her again, the spell had worn off.
The gang congregated for the first time in a long time on a Thursday night in October, clomping up the wooden stairs to Miss Moore’s rented room. We were eager and loud and jovial and walked in like Christmas cheer, McElhanie carrying a brown bag of Congress Water and ginger pop and corked St. Louis Beer. Newcomb had some ears of sweet corn and he stoked the fireplace to roast them. Bryant sat down at the desk after his fashion, with his coat on and a brown wool scarf reaching up for his face. Newcomb opened the windows and the fire pulled the outside cool in and I played my mouth organ, announcing the songs before I commenced them. ‘Shenandoah,’ I said. ‘Oh, Susannah.’ ‘Shoo, Fly, Shoo.’
Miss Moore had been drawing in charcoal pencil on heavy rag paper a picture of fruits on a plate. Bob bent over it and so did the others. ‘Eugenia did that freehand,’ he said. Bryant said, ‘I think you’ve captured it, Miss Moore.’
Bob sat down on the floor next to his woman, tugged off his boots, and wadded his socks inside. Eugenia wore a white nightgown and her nipples showed dark underneath. Bob told McElhanie to blow out the coal-oil lantern, which he did, needless to say, and the only light in the room was orange and thrown across our faces by the fire. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ I said.
Newcomb said, ‘You must have music in ya, Emmett, Syne I sure ain’t heard any come out yet.’
McElhanie snickered.
My brother draped his arm over the woman’s shoulder and put his hand upon her breast. She whispered to him, ‘That’s nice.’
The six of us drank beer and ate hot corn on the cob; then Bob licked his fingers and saw Bryant across the room. ‘How much money you got in your pockets?’
Bryant snuffed and tossed his corn cob out the raised window.
‘What kind of shape you in, Bitter Creek?’
‘I can’t even see the back of my neck.’
Bob turned to Eugenia. ‘Shall I tell them?’
‘If you want.’
He said, ‘Miss Moore and I have been turning over in our heads a major money-making scheme.’
Then he went on to explain that they’d decided to hold up a Mexican cantina located farther south between Silver City and Santa Rita in a town so small he forgot its name. The buildings there were only a half dozen or so and populated by mine laborers and immigrants and conquered people. But Eugenia had reconnoitered and counted more than three thousand dollars on the gambling tables on a typical Saturday night. ‘And here’s the bonus: the house cheats. A gang can grab the cash in five minutes and have almost everybody on their side; all we’d have to worry about is the few scrub Mexicans who want their two dollar winnings back. The only law around is Canty and Eugenia’s going to deal with him.’
There was silence as the others chewed the idea; then McElhanie proposed, ‘How about a “Hip hip hooray”?’
‘Siddown,’ said Blackface Charley Bryant.
The gang rode out of Silver City on Saturday afternoon. Miss Moore was not with us. We did not ride at all hard for it was still blazing hot in the desert and we wanted our animals rested. And we tied up in the town at dusk and sat on straw mats in a Chinese restaurant. We could hear the cantina music as we ate. McElhanie said, ‘The band has a rousing tempo, don’t it?’ Nobody commented. Bob ordered five identical meals for the gang and none of us much complained, being somewhat fearful of Chinese cooking. It turned out to be clear celery soup with amber grease floating in it. Then we had something with bean sprouts and white roots and crumbly sheepshead fish still gritty from the river.
We drank green tea until eight and then crossed the wide street of the mining town, our irons big under our slickers. We opened two wooden doors with leaded stained-glass windows. Inside, the cantina was long as an alley and blue with tobacco
smoke, with waxed board floors and a green tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and a loud Mexican orchestra playing on the stage at the very end. At the mahogany bar were miners in soot-black clothes and cowboys with great mustaches and big-roweled spurs and sunburns up to their eyes. They each had a boot up on the brass foot rail.
The left and rear of the house were mahogany gambling tables at which were seated every variety of gunslinger, most speaking the Spanish language, some rubbing a Mexican whore’s behind through her brownish muslin dress. The whores did not use underwear.
Bryant sat down with Mexicans, paid a quarter for a pull of mescal, and lucked out, the bottle worm falling down into his swallow. He grinned happily as he chewed it and made himself no friends.
McElhanie bought one of the two white prostitutes hot beer and talked into her ear for most of a half hour. His tongue would reach out to lick her neck and she’d cringe. Then he made some kind of arrangement and followed her through a green velvet curtain and into a low-ceilinged crib not much wider than a bed and basin. He merely unbuttoned himself for her. And he was back before Bob and Bitter Creek Newcomb could find open chairs for faro.
Faro was the game in those days; you hardly see it any-more. Thirteen spade cards were lacquered onto the tabletop and bets placed on any number of them. The banker would turn over on his left the top card of the deck, which was called soda. On his right he’d reveal the next card, and any match-up between it and the board lost the bet. The next card he’d place on soda, and bets on the spade card like it would win. Idiots could play the game, which no doubt led to its extinction.
At the cantina, the auction for banker went to a professional gambling man who called himself Fancy Jack. He had rings that glittered with glass on his thumbs and a red feather in a white hat. That was the only thing fancy about him. His fingernails were black-rimmed and his dark suit was white-stained with sweat. Bob and Newcomb sat down with him at last and he bothered them with questions as he dealt each pair of cards. ‘Did you vote in the last election?’ he asked. ‘Ever ate fresh water clams?’
I sat with strangers at a corner table and got cleaned out in no time by a Mexican with teeth the colors of maize. He laughed out loud and slapped the dealing box every time he raked my money into his shirt. Whenever others lost he at least made sure to waggle a bit so that the silver coins would jangle.
I posted myself as lookout and stood at the bar feeling queasy at every glance toward the hundreds of guns in the place. Bob bought me a shot glass of whiskey and we jawed about the Remington Rolling-block .50 caliber rifle, also known as the Remington Buffalo Gun.
‘Don’t you think that sweetheart packs a wallop,’ I said. ‘I hear a miner in Creede, Colorado, got shot in the head with one while unscrewing a can of sardines and some of his hair floated as far as the assayer’s office in Pueblo.’
And Bob said, ‘These games are crooked. Nobody’s going to risk anything for this place. I’ve got a premonition about it.’
He left me with the shot glass he’d bought for himself and every fifteen minutes or so I’d take the meagerest sip.
Meanwhile Miss Eugenia Moore was having dinner with City Marshal Ben Canty back in Silver City. He wadded a slice of bread and wiped up the gravy on his plate. He used a small comb on his mustache as he chewed, and she told him the boys were gone to look for work in that unclaimed area of Texas, Kansas, and Colorado referred to as No Man’s Land. She herself was heading north at the end of the week for Denver.
He stared at her. Finally he said, ‘I’m sorry to hear you and Bob are splitting up like that.’
He walked her home and sat on her bed and bent over the drawings spread out on the quilt. ‘You’ve got quite a hand,’ he said.
She brought him coffee in a tin cup and they drank it facing each other.
‘What kind of work would it be they’re looking for?’ he asked.
‘Ranch work, I suppose.’
‘I thought they were free spirits these days. I thought they were doing without regular jobs.’
Eugenia sat next to him and leaned back on a pillow, wrinkling a picture of flowers in a vase. ‘You’re talking about rustling. I’m fairly certain they’ve given that up. But I can understand why life on the scout is so appealing. You take a job like yours. You are hampered and impeded every day by the very laws and regulations it is your duty to enforce.’
He leaned back on his hand, destroying a drawing of tree-tops and a church steeple. ‘There’s something you want me to delay, is that it? What do I get for the trouble?’
She said, ‘This is my last evening in Silver City. I’d like it to be really special.’
Canty thought about that and swirled the coffee in the bottom of his cup before he lifted it and drank. He glanced at her face, then back at his boots, ‘Sometimes nothing important gets done. Sometimes the day just seems to drag by.’
By ten o’clock the Dalton gang were leaning their elbows on the mahogany bar and muttering to strangers about how the professionals were misdealing the cards, so that it would seem we had an excuse for what we were about to do. Newcomb was the last to lose his stake, being swindled on what they call a cat hop at the last turn. He kicked the chair getting up and stood apart from the rest of us for his drink. He pulled his coat behind his gun butt. The bartender was rounded over, washing glasses in a tub. A senorita was talking to him. Newcomb shouted, ‘Who ya have to punch to get a drink around this place?’
The bartender said, ‘Are you talking to me, runt?’
Newcomb said, ‘Well, I don’t guess I’m talking to the spittoon.’
The bartender reached for a beer pull and Newcomb slapped the pistol out of his holster and the gang brought our Colts up in every direction. We might have been farm machinery—we were that sudden and all-at-once.
Bob shouted, ‘Hands up! Everybody!’
‘Bandidos!’ one of the whores screamed.
The music stopped. The gambler Fancy Jack quickly rolled up his paper money and put it inside his cheek. The truly dangerous in the room just glared and slowly lifted their hands.
‘You do not look much escared,’ I yelled, ‘but I think you ought to be. I have filed the sear down on this machine and have in my hands a hair trigger. So don’t anybody move, understand? Or you’re likely to find a gape in your face you could fit a beer bottle through.’
Blackface Charley Bryant had two guns out—a purse pistol and a Peacemaker—and he kept turning around in the crowd. McElhanie and Newcomb scraped money off the tables and patted down the dealers for their wallets and money belts. My brother Bob was up on top of the bar, kicking hats off heads as he walked, smashing shot glasses and bottles into a shattering mirror. He pinched the folding money out from under the spring snaps in the register.
Little Newcomb took silver and gold from the dealer who’d bilked him, Fancy Jack, then as an afterthought cracked him hard across the mouth with his pistol. Blood and teeth spattered against the oil painting of a sundown on the wall. The dealer knelt on the floor. I could see he was feeling a lot of pain. He spit out a roll of bloody money.
Each of us in the gang had two red wool socks connected with strong twine. We draped these over our necks and the weight of the coins held them in place. We did not bother with jewelry, watches, or gems, or anything the prostitutes might have hidden on their persons. Within four minutes we were backing toward the doors. Bryant’s Texas spurs were the only noise. Bob said, ‘This will teach you hospitality to strangers.’
We sprang onto our horses and blasted out the stained-glass windows. I danced my horse around, firing haphazardly until McElhanie got hold of the lead rein on the pack mule. Then the five of us in the gang galloped off, guns blazing. Shutters banged open in the few houses and men leaned out and only a dozen gamblers ran into the street with guns in their hands. Hardly any shot at us.
We ran our horses into bad shape, ran until we could barely make out the lights of the town; then we risked a walk and counted the loot in our socks and smoked
cheroots that Bryant was handing out. Our horses quivered as they cooled. Newcomb threw all his pennies away.
We were relieving ourselves and watering our horses when dawn started outlining things. Bob climbed up into his saddle and scanned the open geography behind us and spied what he first mistook as a twister, then recognized as the dust of flying hooves. He turned in his saddle and saw me picking cockleburs off my pants leg. ‘Emmett, I think we have a posse contending for us.’ He said it not loudly at all, but like a man might say he believed his son had quit school and it was a terrible disappointment.
Newcomb heard him and clambered up onto his horse before he’d even tucked his shirt in. He stood in his stirrups and yelled for McElhanie and Bryant to saddle up and by then we could hear the thunder of running horses.
The gang of us spurred our horses to speed and rode down into a dry gulch that gave itself to a canyon littered with dead timbers that were washed up flat as railroad ties. Then the five of us turned our horses around and yanked our rifles out from scabbards underneath the saddle skirts. We backed up so close to the steep side of a cliff that the horses brushed their tails against it.
The cantina’s posse was seven men, five of them wearing sombreros. They slowed a city block away and their horses nudged and bickered as the Mexicans reined back to argue the situation. They were so distant all I could see in the morning dark were animals and white shirts.