Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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‘I take it that’s true what you said about you and Bob going your separate ways. It isn’t just a smoke screen?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I could see how you’d profit if you threw certain people off the track.’
Miss Moore crawled down in her coat. ‘Everything became unbelievably complicated. This seemed the simplest thing.’ She saw Whipple smiling stupidly, at the harness and reins, a scour of barn dust high on his neck, blackheads sprayed over his nose: the face of a chimney sweep. She said, ‘I’ll miss Bob very much but I doubt that I’ll ever see him again. I’m telling you this because you’re family. He’s retired the gang and resigned from train robbing. He’s leaving for Tampa, Florida, soon.’
‘You’re a fountain of news, young lady.’ He grinned self-consciously, like they should be pals.
The barbed wire fence to her right was tufted with brown cattle hair. A bunch of white-eyelashed Herefords stood in hoarfrost, staring at her. Steers climbed up on each other.
He said, ‘I’m a meat market proprietor, Miss Moore, and I have an associate in Guthrie I’m trying to swing a deal with. Name is Mundy. Mr. Mundy. Never been married. Lived with his sister for thirty-two years until she passed on to her final reward. He’s looking for a housekeeper and being as you’re looking for work I figure we might just satisfy a whole slew of situations. Now Mundy ain’t young and he ain’t handsome and exciting like Bob, but he’s stable and honest and owns his own house and butcher shop, and I reckon you’d be the most special woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Heh. He’d be beholden to me for many a year if I connected you two up.’
The woman in the shawl smiled. ‘Introduce us at lunch.’
Whipple talked business in the restaurant and wiped his plate with slices of white bread until it gleamed, while Mr. Mundy smiled at Miss Moore. He wore a gray wool sweater over a blood-stained butcher’s apron. He had a nose like a shoe and pouches under his eyes and a thin mustache that made him look Belgian. He paid for lunch and hung his apron on a nail in his shop and walked Eugenia to a scroll-porched white house with a white picket fence and a yard that he cut with a heavy iron push mower. He showed her the dark green sitting room and the kitchen with pots and kettles and skillets hanging over the stove, and the dining room with his cup and saucer and tableware already set out for his supper. They walked up quiet carpeted stairs to the bedrooms. ‘You’ll have my sister’s. The dresser drawers are cleaned out. There may be some dresses in the closet you’ll want.’ He walked to a walnut door and opened it to a bedroom that smelled of pipe tobacco. His hands shook at his sides. ‘And this is where I sleep.’
Eugenia brushed past him and sat on his quilted bed. Three scratched brown window shades were pulled down and the sun was on them like yellow hairs. His combs and brushes and shaving mug and razors were neatly arranged on his mirrored dresser. She looked at the books on his vanity. ‘Oh, you have the Montgomery Ward catalogue!’
‘You may need some household goods. I don’t know about those things. If you want anything just put the order in.’
Eugenia lay back on the bed with her hand behind her head and her dress curled off her ankles. He walked over to the bed and stood there. The black dye he used on his hair leaked from his scalp with sweat. Her left hand dangled against his pants leg. ‘Can I visit you in the night?’ she asked.
His left hand was in his pocket; his right hand reached out to stroke her hair. She kissed it on the palm and gazed into his eyes as she slid his hand over her cheek and down her neck and onto the laced bodice of her blouse. He took a breath and quavered.
‘You can touch me here—’
‘Oh God.’
She moved his hand lower. ‘—and here.’
He dropped to his knees and crushed her dress to his eyes. ‘I don’t. I don’t believe it. I’ve waited so long. I’ve been without companionship—she treated me like a child!’
She put her hand in his hair. ‘We’ll tell everyone that we’re married,’ she said. ‘My name will be Mrs. Mundy.’
She cooked pork sausage and four eggs for him every morning and washed the breakfast dishes. Then she window-shopped in a bustled dress and veiled blue hat and drank tea across the dirt street from the office where Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen worked at a rolltop desk with his files and newspaper clippings—he’d lost Bob and he’d lost Daisy Bryant; there was a rumor they’d left for Tampa. Tall Heck Thomas, who had a harelip scar from a pistol shot by the outlaw Sam Bass, was Madsen’s closest buddy and he’d carry in jars of banana peppers or chili; Deputy Marshal Ransom Payne would stop by to chat and rock back in a chair with his white sombrero on his boot toe; or dignified Bill Tilghman, later Oklahoma City police chief, would pull a miscreant handcuffed to him across the street planks to the office so Chris could copy a statement about us: we were planning a bank job in Carthage, Missouri; we’d stolen twenty-six cases of dynamite from the Army; Bob and one of the gang had fought and Bob’s eye was poked out with a spoon. Chris Madsen checked out every lie. And Mrs. Mundy would note all that and, wearing chaps and sheepskin and a ten-gallon hat, Bob’s red woolen scarf over her nose, she’d meet my brother Bill at cold feed stores in Stillwater, Vinco, or Agra.
Sometimes Doolin was with my brother, smoking his corncob pipe in a ladder-back chair and turning away when they talked about Bob. In Stillwater, in a snowstorm, she sat with my brother Bill and Powers and Broadwell in a wagonbed with a potbelly stove bolted to it. They roasted corn and drank to the holidays with grain alcohol and made coffee from snow in a frying pan. Then they decided to visit Bitter Creek Newcomb at the close-by ranch of Bee and Rose Dunn. She was Rose of the Cimarron; pretty and dark-haired and convent-schooled, for several years the sweetheart of both Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Doolin, but eventually the wife of a prosperous man whose name I won’t divulge. Her brother Bee Dunn was a badman himself so he made every kind of rapscallious outlaw welcome on his place; he even constructed the famous Rock Fort on Deer Creek, as lodging for men on the scout.
My brother Bill took Eugenia on a tour of the property. Their horses broke through snowdrifts and the two riders ducked their heads from the sleet; then Bill, in his fur-collared greatcoat and three-piece suit and galoshes, jumped from his saddle and waded through snow and tore away some stacked tree branches until he’d revealed a dirt cave. Eugenia nudged her horse to the entrance.
Bill stood inside grinning, his hands on his hips, tarps thrown off frozen kegs of water, cases of food, a wooden box of shotguns and rifles. His voice had an echo to it. ‘What’d’ya think? Pretty fancy? You give me time, Miss Moore, and I’ll have hideouts in every county. We’ll have the best escape and intelligence network the West has ever seen. I’ll have every sheriff paid off, every circuit judge bribed, every banjo-assed politician running scared for his job. They might even make me director of a railroad.’
Eugenia touched a handkerchief to her nose and lifted the woolen scarf up again. ‘Maybe you ought to go slow on this, Bill. Bob and I really do want to quit for Argentina.’
Bill blew on his hands. ‘My little brother isn’t the only train robber in the world. I’ve been talking a few things over with Bill Doolin. We may just reach agreement one of these days.’
Snowflakes were dissolving on her face. She brushed them away from her lashes. ‘Shall we go back?’
‘We could wait out the snowstorm in here. I’ve got a stash of food, mattresses, blankets.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Bill pulled the tarps back over his provisions and propped the dead trees again. He lifted an overshoe into a stirrup and swung on and slapped the snow from his pants legs. He reined his horse southeast towards Ingalls. ‘We’ll have a toddy at Old Man Murray’s saloon.’ He turned in his saddle. ‘Or doesn’t that meet with your satisfaction?’
She spurred her horse past him. ‘Sounds fine.’
He followed and for three miles never lifted his eyes from her deep tracks in the snow. When they tethered the horses
at Ingalls, he said, ‘I’m not really such a bad guy, Mrs. Mundy. I’m liked by most who know me.’
She slouched in a saloon chair drinking whiskey with Doolin, Newcomb, Broadwell, and Powers. Bill hung his greatcoat on the hall tree and walked from table to table in his chalk-striped suit, the buckles jangling on his overshoes, shaking hands and finding anything in the world to laugh about and paying for drinks with bills he snapped from a silver dollar money clip. Eugenia wore greased wing chaps and a nappy coat and her tall hat was canted down to her nose so that she looked like a male hired hand. She said, ‘That’s Bob’s money Bill’s throwing around.’
Doolin looked over his shoulder at my parading brother and back again at Eugenia. His voice was sweet with sarcasm. ‘Now how could that be? Bob didn’t get but a measly few hundred bucks from the Katy holdup in Leliaetta, same as the rest of us. And mine’s already gone. What about you, Bitter Creek?’
‘Swiped cash is fast cash, just like they say. I ain’t seen a smidge of my take in six weeks.’
Doolin settled in his chair and his eyes blazed at the woman. ‘See there? You must be mistaken.’
Down the block was Madame Mary Pierce’s whorehouse-hotel, so her chippies walked in, shaking snow from their coats, and stood at the bar reading catalogues and taking sweet gum out of their mouths. Bill sidled up to a girl with green eyes and henna-dyed hair who looked just about sixteen.
‘Do you know who Tom King is?’
‘Does he come here?’ she asked.
‘Tonight he did. He’s a gunslinger from away back. Put many a mean desperado under flowers. That’s him at the rear table.’
The girl looked and saw what she thought was a man in wing chaps with one leg over the arm of a chair, a red woolen scarf lumped up on his face, turning an empty shot glass.
‘The feller with the scarf?’
‘He’s fairly swooned over you since you walked in.’
‘You mean he wants me?’
Bill stripped a two-dollar bill from his clip. ‘Asked me to give you this.’
The chippy dragged her wool purse off the bar top and swung it as she walked over to Miss Moore. There were words and then the woman in the greased chaps glared at Bill and out of spite squealed a chair away with her boot and hauled herself up on the girl’s arm.
Doolin scowled and turned away in his chair. Newcomb and Broad well folded over with their sniggering. My brother shouted, ‘You two love birds snuggle up in this cold, y’hear?’
They slogged through snow and Eugenia heeled off her boots on the newspaper that was spread on the carpet; then they climbed the stairs to an upper room.
Later, Eugenia sat top-naked on the bed pulling boots back on over her wool socks and jeans and the girl lay flat on her back with the sheet drawn up to her neck, staring at the yellow gas lamp next to the door. ‘Some of the others, they said I’d get around to this someday. They said it would be a relief.’
When Eugenia returned to Guthrie the next night, Mr. Mundy was in the dark at the dining-room table with knife and fork in his hands. She was wearing a collared white cotton dress over which she tied on a yellow flowered apron. She carried a candlestick out from the kitchen cupboard.
‘It gets dark so early these days. Don’t you want light in here? Your supper smells delicious. You get along without me very well.’
Mr. Mundy carefully cut up two lamb chops, crossed his silverware on his plate, and sat very still with his fists on the tablecloth. He could hear Mrs. Mundy pumping water into a percolator and lifting the black lids on the stove. She called, ‘Do you want your coffee now?’
He didn’t answer. The candlelight fluttered.
She pushed open the dining room swinging door. ‘I could bring applesauce up from the cellar. Have you had applesauce with lamb chops? That’s one of my favorite combinations.’
His voice was croaky. ‘May I ask where you’ve been?’
She looked at his white shirt, his narrow hunched shoulders, the black dye stain on his neck. ‘Certainly.’
He waited. ‘Where?’
‘A cousin in Ingalls was sick with the stomach flu. I had to stay up with her all night. Mercy, I hope you don’t catch it. I seem to be immune.’
She walked outside and lifted the broad cellar door, letting it whump in the snow. She got a jar of red applesauce from the board shelves and screwed off the lid and smelled it. She leaned her forehead against the earth wall.
14
My brother Bob left Woodward soon after Bill came up with his proposition and he stayed in a sod house until late December with an Osage Indian on Bluestem Lake near Pawhuska. They fished from a rowboat for smallmouth bass and crappie and fried them with bread. They’d sit in the weather in rickety chairs and smoke shredded weed in clay pipes they’d made. All of this is contained in his copious diaries of that period—the temperature varied only thirteen degrees in his entries; there was a skin of ice on the lake every morning; a fish froze near the surface and birds walked around it on the ice, cocking their heads and pecking. Sometimes it would be three hours before the Indian and Bob said anything to each other. The Indian believed that he could fly around the chimney at night; he would walk into the house as Bob made breakfast and say, ‘I have been flapping my arms.’
I guess Bob was bored stiff with that because he saddled a mare and spent a weekend with me in Big Jim Riley’s bunkhouse, pitching pennies, cooking brass for a bullet mold, and stringing Glidden barbwire with me in the cold. I’d nail the wire snug and look up to see Bob shivering with his hat pulled down, his coat collar up, his hands pushed deep in his pockets. ‘We’re going south, darn it. I didn’t rustle and rob trains to end up with sniffles and fingers about to freeze off.’
By that time, Eugenia had put the first and last month’s rent money down on a small, peeling house in vacant Greer County, which was then Texas land, a hundred miles southwest of Oklahoma City and twenty-five from the nearest settlement. The furniture and kitchenware came from the Montgomery Ward mail-order house in Fort Worth, charged to her husband’s account.
Bob took a rag-leather suitcase with him and stayed there through the winter, making ten-hole wren houses. Eugenia would visit Mr. Mundy in Guthrie just long enough to soften him and stuff an envelope with his money and pick up any newspaper that had Bob Dalton’s name in it. Then she’d be back with Bob in the creaking bed at Greer with stories about the jasper and about incidents I would have been inclined to keep secret. For example, Eugenia’s night in Madame Mary Pierce’s house at Ingalls, with the girl of the henna-dyed hair. Bob said he’d heard already, from brother Bill.
‘Does it upset you?’
‘I find it mysterious, that’s all. Maybe I shucked it from my brain.’
He walked outside and shivered in the night air as he stood naked on the soft board floor of the outhouse. He smelled ammonia and lye. He imagined a naked woman kneeling to a woman on a bed. He walked back to the bedroom rubbing the gooseflesh from his arms and he stood behind her as she unpinned her hair in the tall dresser mirror. She said, ‘I wanted to find out what it was like with a woman. It was curiosity mostly. Afterward I was afraid that you’d feel spurned. You shouldn’t be, you know.’
He could see his clavicle, the jut of his hip, how each sinew was tied onto a bone; he saw the sway of her breasts under a collared white nightgown of flannel, and the hidden green veins of her hands. He picked yellow hair away from her brown eyes. He said, ‘I love you; I don’t own you.’
The money was gone, except what Bill had invested, which he claimed was turning profits like a small manufacturing business. We weren’t living that high, as the foregoing should’ve made amply clear, but we had to make payoffs and gifts to every tickbird and sheriff and nose-wipe of a farmhand who could identify us from the REA Express photographs. Bob paid for a four-hundred-dollar pinewood stable for a rancher who’d hinted he needed one pretty badly. Because we kept rustled horses in one farmer’s stalls and his wife wanted their daughter to know the joys
of music, Bob had an eight-hundred-dollar piano hauled out on a wagon that flattened on its springs. Then we had supper of ham hocks and chick-peas and listened to the girl hunt the keys until ‘Lead Kindly Light’ was over. A case of whiskey was dispatched every month to two craving deputies in Kingfisher. And in my study I can see displayed an 1873 Hopkins & Allen handgun given to a Dr. Steaman by my brother ‘for professional services.’ Don’t know what those services could’ve been, but then I wasn’t privy to every blessed thing about Bob.
It cost plenty but we needed the protection because we were hounded as badly then as the more vicious and profitable James gang had been twenty years earlier. A train was robbed in St. Charles, Missouri, on the same night that another was held up in El Paso, Texas, a thousand miles away, and yet we were blamed for both though responsible for neither. A rancher’s steer would turn up lost and he’d claim we chopped it up for flank steaks. A house broken into in Fayetteville; school desks overturned and ink bottles smashed on the blackboards in Durant; a jeweler burglarized in his Pullman coach at a nightstop in Amarillo: all bore, the newspaper said, the unmistakable traces of the Daltons.
And with that came detectives: Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, Bill Tilghman; then more. Book salesmen without sample cases walked door-to-door in Guthrie, looking the closets and living rooms over as they delivered a canned speech about encyclopedias; Pinkerton men sat on the cracker barrels in those general stores and post offices where Bill had received his steamed-open letters from his wife. The Southern Pacific sent Will Smith east to Kingfisher to interrogate my mother. He sat on the stuffed purple sofa with a burlap bag clutched to his stomach and his handkerchief pressed to his cheek, waiting for Adeline to return from the kitchen, while my sister sat leaning on a Shaker chair and touched her ankles together and stared. My brother Littleton stood in the kitchen doorway, drying his hands and frowning. Water spotted the front of his work shirt dark blue. ‘I’m given to understand you’re a distributor of sample garden seeds.’