Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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I said, ‘It’s too soon to bushwack a train again, Bill.’
‘Says Bob.’
I licked the last seeds out of my palm and slapped the dust from my hands. ‘Well, he’s the executive.’
‘You’re his favorite; you suggest it. You tell your pampered hero to hold up that Pryor Creek train and he’ll have travel fare to Buenos Aires or Vancouver or Hartford, Connecticut. Then he can couple with that blond bitch in Woodward and raise himself a whole board of directors.’
A raccoon trundled along the bank and stopped to smell a fish head. I untied my line and reeled it in on my fist. I said, ‘You must need the money pretty bad.’
‘I’ve got four kids who barely remember me sleeping on the front porch of my father-in-law’s farmhouse. I’ve got a crippled girl with a leg brace that pounds and squeaks when she walks. I’ve got mice in the sofa and toads in the well and right now my financial affairs are a thousand percent more dismal than Dad’s ever were. I’ve spent all my loans and borrowed still more and if my mule dies I’ll be bankrupt. So yes, I need money. I need money bad. Emmett, I’m on my ass.’
I stood up and walked to the sod house where the three braying prostitutes were squirming out of their dresses. ‘When, Bill?’ I asked.
‘July.’
Miss Moore had repaired to the Woodward bungalow and Bob rode up there to quench himself. He sat on the porch swing at evening with her, shelling green peas into a tarnished pan, his boots hooked like ears on the back of a spindle chair. The pea vines laced an arched trellis that gated the backyard where he’d tied his horse to a picket ring stamped in the earth. Baked rhubarb pie was cooling beneath a white dish towel that flies were crawling over. The split pods were dropped to a newspaper that was soaking gray at its folds.
‘Bleh,’ she said, and dropped her paring knife into the pan. ‘I feel so middle-aged.’
Bob smiled. ‘Can’t allow that,’ he said. ‘Let’s play a quick game of kick the can. Let’s have a spelling bee.’
She plucked the brown hairs of his arm. ‘Do you think we could brazenly stroll down the street, like normal people, like lovers?’
‘I reckon.’
They took their socks off and walked in land blue grass to the Woodward depot, then teetered on rails still warm from the sun. They clutched each other and swayed down a road and Eugenia giggled when Bob whispered. An old man with his shirt off snapped hedge clippers at a forsythia bush while his wife watched them, screened by the door, her hands in the deep pockets of her apron.
Eugenia asked, ‘So when is Pryor Creek.’
‘Don’t know exactly but it’s been passed down from higher-ups that it might be July 15th.’
She flipped her loose hair back away from her ear. She felt his biceps flex when they turned to the house. She smelted the soap in his shirt. She said, ‘I’m going to Silver City on the premise that I’ll be cured of a malady there. Scarcely will I have arrived before Eugenia Moore succumbs to a hideous death. I think I can get Ben Canty to fudge on the certificates and whatnot. Then this winter Bob Dalton can drown in an undertow in the Gulf of Mexico whilst casting for albacore. We’ll have a South American resurrection.’
‘That would be dandy,’ said Bob.
Eugenia worked in the kitchen while Bob ate rhubarb pie and sugar. Then Eugenia sat with him and wrote a last letter in blue ink. She’d stare out the window, thinking of words, and then her pen would scratch. He licked the crumbs from his plate.
She screwed the cap on her fountain and flapped the letter dry. Bob rocked back with folded arms. She read: ‘Dearest Bob, My affliction has overtaken me despite my return to the health-giving climate of New Mexico; indeed, I now write you from this, my final bed, with the fervent hope that you are well and that I shall be at least a little remembered after my death by the one who meant so much to me in life. How curious it is that my malady of the heart cannot be healed even by the surfeit of love for you that is the cure for my pain, the consolation for my loneliness, and the only condolence I require as I now yield up my soul. I fear I shall draw my fatal breath soon, and soon begin that voyage toward our heavenly Father that is everyone’s last grand adventure. I pray, my love, that I shall forever imprint your heart just as you have mine. Yours, Eugenia Moore.’
Bob leaned across the table and kissed her. ‘That was nice, Honey. It really was. Dang. Every time I turn around you’re doing something else to impress me.’
Within two weeks she was stepping off a train in Silver City. She waited in the steam that hissed from under the wheels, lifting up the black veil of her hat, brushing her velvet-trimmed black dress. Then City Marshal Ben Canty walked up and took her elbow and strolled with her to the end of the depot, nodding as she talked.
Within three weeks, Whipple hurried to Guthrie and visited Mundy’s butcher shop to tell him what he’d just heard from a marshal, that Eugenia Moore was dead. Mundy kept chopping away at a rib roast while Whipple talked; then he sat down at his butcher block table with his forehead in his hand.
16
Forty-two days after the Red Rock heist, we tied our horses in a copse of trees and camped overnight beside the Neosho River, there to wait on Bill’s perfect train, and on the first holdup Miss Moore hadn’t planned. It was unsurprising geography, since most of the Dalton boys grew up in the town of Vinita not too far north. The Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, where Grat had been a peace officer, was about forty miles southeast, and closer than that was Claremore where Bob accidentally shot Alex Cochran’s son and shortly thereafter resigned from the Wichita court. I could hardly remember being on the right side of the law. It seemed like I’d been a criminal all my life.
Broadwell had his cat Turtle along and it slept on his belly in the sun or it pawed at millers and mosquitoes, or it dropped from branch to branch hunting sparrows in the trees. Doolin was full of Arkansas voodoo and superstitions and his eyes would glass as we squatted around the firestones at night and listened to Bob story about the headless horseman or the premature burial. For my part, all I did was sweat and itch and cuss at anybody absurd enough to try to cheer me up. I was weary, weary of my occupation; and Julia wasn’t having much to do with me of late. Her father had put me off-limits.
On the morning of July 15th, we crouched around a blanket mottled with sunlight while Grat dealt out playing cards that would indicate our jobs. But then I looked up and saw a teenaged boy in plow boots and a wide straw hat battering through Devil’s Walking Stick and blowing his nose because of the weed dander. He wadded the hankie inside his sleeve and saw the eight of us grouped at the blanket and the boy just stood there in the heat and dust looking pop-eyed and brainless, with ears as big as butterflies. He had a smile so wide his molars showed. ‘Campin’?’ he said.
Grat would have snatched up a rifle and plugged him but Bob had pressed his toe on the muzzle.
‘Just passin’ through,’ said Broadwell.
The boy didn’t walk out of the weeds. He had stickers of every sort on his shirt and nettle bumps all over his hands. He said, ‘Say, just for shits and grins: I’m lookin’ for some shoats strayed out of the pigsty after sloppin’ time this mornin’. I can’t find hide nor hair of them.’
None of us said anything and the silence was so overpowering that the boy got the message and walked back through jabbing, pocket-high weeds until he got to the Katy railroad tracks. I met that boy once again in 1907 and he told me he then stomped clumsily along the ties, scratching his hands and panting, until he got to the Pryor Creek depot. He jumped three steps onto the platform and leaned against the door. Inside a man in a fedora was drinking water from a ladle.
The boy flopped down on a bench. ‘It’s the Daltons all right.’ He held up eight fingers. ‘Eight men. Camped up on the Neosho.’
The man looked at the telegrapher. ‘Wire that to Kinney in Muskogee.’ He carried the water ladle to the boy who grabbed off his straw hat and emptied the ladle on his head.
‘How do you like being an operati
ve, Loren?’
Loren kicked off his plow boots. ‘Oh, boy. It’s really tiring.’
They’d known about the Pryor Creek raid since the 13th, when the two snipes who’d come by looking for jobs and stayed on to eat angel food cake were caught by federal marshals while bootlegging whiskey at the Watonga reservation. They said they could swap some information if the lawmen would go easy, so they were shoved down into chairs in Madsen’s office in Guthrie.
One of them was quiet and glanced under his eyebrows at everything and he kept squeezing pimples and wiping his thumb on his shirt. The other was a smirker, as doughy and slack-jawed as Billy the Kid. He slumped in the chair and rolled his boots on their heels and told Madsen how my brother had repulsed him because the gang was already too large. But he said he’d stuck around long enough to pleasure one of the whores there and he overheard some talk about the MK&T and Pryor Creek, set for sometime in mid-July.
‘I hear tips like that all the time,’ said Madsen.
‘That don’t mean this ain’t true.’
So Captain J.J. Kinney, chief of detectives for the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad, was notified in Muskogee on July 13th, and when suspicions about us were confirmed by the boy at Pryor Creek two days later, Kinney called for Deputy Marshal Sid Johnson of the Wichita court, and Cherokee Police Chief Charles LeFlore, the cleanest Indian I’ve ever seen, always wearing an excessively white shirt, with his black hair oiled and cut and exactly parted.
Then fifty special deputies, of which thirteen were railway officers, bunched up on the Muskogee platform in muley hats and derbies, leaning on barrel-down rifles, spitting tobacco onto the railroad ties, speaking venom about us in ninety-four degree heat, while women blanched and squeezed their children’s hands and men in celluloid collars stood aloof and talked quietly to each other about the big surprise the Daltons had in store for themselves.
Passenger train Number 2 chuffed in and the volunteers boarded a spanking new smoking parlor car with cushioned green seats and gas jets lit and glass chandeliers on the ceiling. Then the train was rocking north toward Pryor Creek and the volunteers were bragging or hooting at jokes and it was as loud and hale as a men’s club excursion to see a baseball game. Three tubs of warm, bottled beer were carried in, ‘compliments of the Katy.’ The conductor walked down the aisle, idly chatting with the men, showing them a derringer stuffed in his white cotton socks. Johnson, LeFlore, and Kinney sat in facing seats at the front and shouted over the noise about how they’d known the Daltons in the past—first Frank, then Grattan, then Bob and me. Sid Johnson still considered Bob one of his five or six best friends, and one of the profoundest marksmen in the West; he said he’d once seen my brother turn the pages of Amos and Obadiah in King James with a bent-sight .22.
In the Pacific Express Company car, the money attendant fastened a padlock the size of his fist onto the sliding side door. He sat in a chair in the dark with his hands on his knees. Slumped among mailbags in the dark was a boasted badman from Texas recently commissioned by the railroad to escort the safes for seven dollars a day. He never talked to the messenger. The messenger would turn and see the red ash of a cigarette or he’d turn and see nothing at all.
At Pryor Creek, a railway guard knelt at the back of the depot tying his laces over the hooks of ankle-high shoes. On the platform, a man in a derby leaned out and dropped cottony spit onto bed rocks that were blackened by soot. A man sat in a chair with a ten-gauge shotgun in his lap, breathing moisture onto each lens of his eyeglasses. Inside, the cash drawer was gone and the ticket window was closed and two men sat on the varnished bench while a man in white spats walked from window to window. There was a clock on the wall with Roman numerals that said it was 9:05. He said, ‘I bet they’ve seen us and called it off. I bet that’s what they did. They’re not stupid, you know.’
By that time the men in the smoker had begun their preparations. They snapped shotguns closed or pulled up their socks or stood on the platform between the cars urinating onto the couplings. Then the conductor opened the connecting door and said, ‘Pryor Creek, the next stop,’ and they sat like quiet schoolgirls. ‘Sweet Jesus, the Daltons,’ a man said.
But the Dalton gang wasn’t at Pryor Creek. Kinney stood on the iron walkway between the smoker and baggage car and squinted into darkness and cinder smoke, his tie flying wild in the wind. Then his tie settled on his shoulder as they slowed and he saw three railway detectives with legs spread wide on the platform, rifles relaxed in their arms. He saw the fireman swing down and talk with a man in white spats. They waited three minutes and all they heard were crickets and the slow pant of engine steam.
The bandits were at that time striding the main street of Adair, the next stop north, in every variety of wide, scurvy hat and striped collarless shirts and famous black raincoats, blue bandanas loose at their throats. The horses were tied to the town water tower where Pierce sat on a springboard wagon peeling the sunburn off his thumb of a nose. Three-pound pistols in grimy brown holsters sagged from our trouser belts near our front pockets. Doolin had a Winchester crossed over both shoulders; Newcomb, Powers, and Grat had their rifles hugged close, as you’d carry a long loaf of bread.
The night train was a summer event in small towns and Adair wasn’t sleeping at all. Lace curtains curled out under a window sash and I could see a girl with her short legs stuck out straight on an overwhelming stuffed chair while her father picked at a banjo and the oil lamp flame grew and lessened in its glass chimney. There was a girl skipping rope with petticoats flouncing and a bent woman weeding marigolds who straightened when we passed. A boy was riding a bicycle in circles with a small squealing boy on his handlebars. Two doctors were in the drugstore reading the label on a brown remedy box. A woman sat on an upstairs windowsill for the breeze, looking on like we were railroad crew and that we must be especially hot in our coats.
I hunched at a back depot window, smelling window putty, and I saw the unsuspecting Katy ticket agent chewing the hairs of his mustache, turning the pages of a Prudential life insurance brochure. Then my brother Bob banged the back door open and the man’s head jerked up and seven giants stalked in, spurs clanking and black raincoats shrieking and boot heels pounding the slivery floorboards like we were stallions in heavy lead shoes: a bad nightmare of meanness, the stuff of night chills and story books, the scariest bunch of desperadoes that ticket agent ever saw.
A coat tree wobbled and little Newcomb kicked it over, a branch snapping off into a dance on the floor. Bob clicked a hammer back on a .45 caliber pistol and stuck it straight out to touch the nose of the agent who was standing up from his desk. ‘You keep those hands up and don’t say a blessed word,’ said Bob. ‘Don’t even think about talking. Back up flat to the wall and sink down until you’re on your butt. If I look over and see your hands at all moved, I’ll lean over this counter and blow a hole the size of a bucket in your crotch.’
I stood there being ferocious while Doolin pushed a castered chair aside and slammed desk drawers over onto the desk top, picking up from the paper ruckus quarters and matches and a white box of Smith Brothers cough drops. Powers sat with his ankles crossed on a quiet hickory rocking chair at the front of the depot, a rifle standing in his lap. Newcomb was in the back room clawing boxes open with a garden sickle. Broadwell unlocked the money drawer and handed some limp paper bills through the grill to Bob. Broadwell pushed the drawer shut with his stomach and I saw the agent staring at the legs of Broadwell’s jeans, which were stickered with cockleburs and foxtail and had yellow seeds in the cuffs.
I wasn’t doing anything. I was the lookout, I guess. There was a calendar on the wall with a long arrow drawn through a week of dates and ‘Harold Higgins on vacation’ printed over it. A glass ashtray cradled a crusty black pipe.
My brother Grat slouched around, smelling like green cheese and fish heads, making noise with a bleached axe handle he’d picked up, striking a bench seat, a sill, a waste can, a clock, like a circus bear with a tin dr
um. He bashed some mahogany wall pigeonholes and a stack of MK&T tickets slewed out. He stood in front of the ticket agent and before I could yell out Grat’s name, he whapped the axe handle bingo into the man’s nose, the sound like a snap of your fingers. The man cried out in pain and blood gushed over his chin and shirt and he fell down to his elbow with his nose skewed over like it was hinged. He kicked out at my brother’s shins and said, ‘You bastard, what’d you do that for?’
Bob stood on his toes to see the man’s bloody shirt. He asked, ‘Was that really necessary, Grat?’
Grat smirked and walked out the front door, and I collected Newcomb and the package loot, and then the whole Dalton gang was gone from the waiting room, there for barely three minutes, leaving behind us chaos and silence and the very first robbery of a depot in American history as far as I know. We stood on the board sidewalks or sat on benches and talked brief sentences to each other. The boy on the bike rattled up to the depot; then he turned his bike around. Mosquitoes whined in the air. I walked the railroad ties and saw a woman shooing her children into the house, her hand latched onto a boy’s wrist, while a crowd of elders stood under an elm tree, talking and gesticulating, and a man in slippers climbed down his porch steps loading a double-barreled shotgun. Don’t know what ever happened to him. I hooked my steamy raincoat over my pistol butt and walked back to the depot, theatrical as they come. I was sweating like sweat was my full-time job. Powers said, ‘Looks like we’re going to have an audience.’
Doolin said, ‘They won’t be around long.’
The station agent stopped his nose bleed with twisted railroad stationery and sat obediently with Broadwell on the front bench. Bob wavered a lit match over the schedule board until he found what he wanted and blew out the flame. ‘Comes at 9:22,’ he said.