by Ron Hansen
He whispered, ‘You better skedaddle, Em. I bet the law is trackin’ me.’
‘I already checked. There’s a boy with field glasses in a cotton wood tree staring at us right now. Don’t turn around.’ I gave my brother a big-bore Colt Dragoon wrapped in a gun belt and said, ‘You’re supposed to ride north to a train depot and use the ticket to California I stuck in your saddlebag. Bob sent telegrams about you to Littleton and Bill, and here’s fifty dollars expense money, but that’s the bottom of our funds.’
Grat legged up onto his saddle. ‘Where will you boys be?’
‘We’ve expanded operations, Grat. We got ourselves a gang now. Newcomb, Bryant, McElhanie. We’re traipsing off to Silver City, there to recover our lost kingdom.’
Grat smiled with all his brown teeth. ‘Kiss me an octaroon whore if you can.’ Then he throttled horse and mule into a jog.
So Grat left the state unscathed and the Dalton gang rode the railroad tracks through Arkansas and the badlands to the New Mexico Territory, stepping our horses off the roadbed and down into bramble to watch the big locomotive engines and the smoke-blackened cars pass by, waving our hats at the passengers in the windows.
The gang moped into Silver City hunkered over in our saddles, our slouch hats yellowish with the dust and brown about the sweatbands. We all wore big red neckerchiefs and hide chaps and slickers that used to be white. A boy who was pumping water in a horse trough ignored us and I knew it was my kind of town.
Some cowboys were slumped in chairs on the porch of a hotel and not doing anything else at all. Four hatless old men sat at a picnic table outside playing nine-point pitch, a nickel a game. A woman in a pale gingham dress and a sunbonnet crossed the street with a market basket. Bob kicked his horse up to a walk beside her but she said she didn’t talk to strangers.
‘Maybe I could find someone to introduce us,’ he said, but she hustled inside a dress shop.
Bob crossed over to a man in a bowler hat and a suit coat that was only buttoned at the lapels so that his checkered vest and watch chain showed. Bob told him he was looking for lodging in the town and a place to get a tub bath and a smith who could doctor the horses. They wanted new oats and new shoes, he said, and they were badly fistulowed.
The man directed Bob without taking his hands from his pockets and the five of us tied up at a boarding house where the widow had a sign up saying, NO COLOREDS. NO CHINESE. NO MEXICANS. NO IRISH. We heaved our saddles up her varnished stairs to a room of six single bunks and a dresser and a China washbowl and pitcher. There was a thundermug under each bed. We each paid a nickel and the widow fried up tomatoes and bread, put on a pot of coffee, and brushed down our coats and hats with a broom. We slept in our clothes until three in the afternoon and sat in iron tubs while a girl poured steaming water from a bucket. Then we sat in the widow’s parlor in our wrinkled black suits, watching the brass pendulum clock until Bob descended from the bedroom with envelopes of spending money that he parceled out at the door. Thereupon we split up, each to his separate pleasure.
Blackface Charley Bryant knew the place and he left us without so much as a good-bye, and he walked the plank bridge across the arroyo with his head sunk down and the lapel collar up on his coat. He bought jars of green peppers and Chile Colorado from a Mexican and squatted down in the dirt to eat them. A dog came up to sniff and Bryant gave him a lick of a pepper he held by the stem. The dog grimaced as much as a dog can and Bryant got a big kick out of that. He ate the pepper and wiped his hands on his pants. The Mexican was staring at the ugly blister on Bryant’s face.
‘Do you sell peyote?’ Bryant asked.
The Mexican frowned.
‘How about tobacco? Do you have it?’
The Mexican sold him a pouch for a dime and they both sat in the dirt to roll it in papers and smoke. Bryant said, ‘What do you think of my scar?’
The Mexican squinted and smoked.
‘I believe I’d rather be harelipped,’ Bryant said. ‘Came about when I planted a woman with child in San Antonio. She hunted me out when she got ripe and found me in a flophouse with a six-fingered whore. Tried to shoot me in the ear with a cap-and-ball pistol and burst the pillow I had my head on. Powder burnt my face like hot tar. The woman that deformed me lost every one of her teeth to the butt end of her pistol. I was careful not to miss one.’
Bryant didn’t move for a minute or two, then stood and brushed off his pants. ‘You have a sister or something?’
The Mexican showed Bryant to a one-room shanty with a blanket for a door. Inside there were two black girls and a Mexican woman of forty, smoking from a pipe. The black girls sat on their beds and watched him as the woman leaned back against a pillow and lifted the front of her dress.
Then Bryant walked to a Chinese laundry where he bought opium and a small metal pipe, and an ancient woman scraped at his cheek with a bone knife and pressed herb leaves to his face as he slept. Then he returned to the hotel room where each member of the gang discussed his own entertainments.
Bitter Creek Newcomb was calling himself ‘The Slaughter Kid’ in Silver City so everyone would think him a Texan. He spent his afternoon whittling a reed flute and picked up body lice in his evenings with an obese Missouri farm girl. He treated himself with a hot bath and kerosene and from then on indulged in gambling at the green felt tables where a boy from Alabama called him a carping cheat and Newcomb thunked him in the Adam’s apple with a quart bottle of Kentucky whiskey. The boy sat down hard on the floor and would have swallowed his tongue like a fresh trout had the, bartender not gripped hold of it with a pliers.
Newcomb thought that was the end of the altercation and two hours later he was raking in a pot of fourteen dollars when the boy walked up behind him and knocked Newcomb to the floor with one of the tavern’s beer pulls. Newcomb went for his gun but the boy stomped on his hand, splitting the thumbnail with his boot heel.
Newcomb sucked on it and asked, ‘Are you through now?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘I believe I am.’ His mouth quivered and tears slid out of his eyes.
Newcomb just slumped there on the floor for a bit, staring at the bloody tail of the shirt he’d wrapped around his hand.
William McElhanie and I occupied ourselves at the bordellos, though it was only Bill who ever had his pants down. We crossed the arroyo to the cathouses after a twenty-five-cent breakfast of pancakes and four eggs and steak, and we hunched up on the stoops with weeds in our teeth, itchy and hot in our three-piece suits. We’d watch the chippies coming out of the four-holer in the back, or fetching water from the artesian well, or hanging their laundry out on the line. Those who were cursed in the month did the housework in the mornings. They did not dress to entice. Their hair was in strands and their long gray dresses were black about the armpits. They might’ve been farm wives coming back from the hen house with eggs. McElhanie would sit on the chintz parlor furniture at night and whisper to me whatever he’d heard about those available. ‘Word is, she’s dry as pumice,’ he’d say. Or, ‘She stuffs sandwiches in her blouse.’ William McElhanie was sixteen years old in Silver City. I’ve always wondered how he turned out.
My brother Bob spent most of his first week in the city carrying on like a politician. He listened to excess, shook many hands, introduced himself to men of substance as a retired deputy marshal, and he bought shot glasses of good whiskey for the permanent residents though he was stern as a woman from the temperance movement when it came to the subject of liquor.
But he gathered information, he did not dispense it, so there were considerable moments of awkward silence whenever he lunched with strangers. Here I was of some use, for I could extemporize like a bicycle salesman. If a banker was discussing the Chicago Grain Exchange and had his thoughts peter out and got to staring at his fork, I’d get a nod from Bob and proceed to rattle on about Billy the Kid, whose true name was not William H. Bonney but Henry McCarty, of Brooklyn, New York, who’d headed west in a Pullman car and lived in Coffeyville at the a
ge of twelve and became a criminal after escaping through the chimney of a Silver City jail, held there for stealing laundry. ‘It isn’t gaudy,’ I said, ‘but it’s fact.’ The banker would be amazed and Bob would sit back in his chair and consider the banker’s face. I think my brother had a surprise in store for Silver City, but then he was introduced to Miss Eugenia Moore and got distracted from his plans.
It was Thursday evening of our third week there and I was speaking on subjects I knew nothing about to an audience of Bob and City Marshal Ben Canty, when the woman walked into the restaurant. Canty had a mouthful of boiled potatoes but put them out onto his spoon and stood with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar. ‘My, what a pleasant surprise,’ he said.
The woman walked over and smiled. She said, ‘Hello, Ben,’ and that sort of thing, shook the hands of the two Dalton boys, and spoke with me about Cass County, Missouri, where Bob and I were born and where she had her early raising, and where they say she’s buried now. Bob let me talk, as was his custom. He sat back in his chair with a toothpick in his mouth.
Eugenia Moore was her alias; she was baptized Florence Quick. She was five-feet-nine inches tall and twenty-five years old and wore her blond hair in a bun. She was brown-eyed and pretty, if somewhat boyish, with teeth so white it looked like she’d never drunk tea. She had a sultry voice and a sturdy, broad-shouldered body and breasts that were not large; her hands were strong and branch-scratched and calloused; she chewed her fingernails down so close to the quick they looked like cuticle. When she wasn’t in boots she was barefoot, but that evening she was wearing a white calico dress with ties on the sleeves and looked more like a lady than she was. She’d been to Holden College and she taught school for two years and there was a lot of that in her speech; when she didn’t hear what was said completely, she’d say, ‘I beg your pardon?’ She had blond bangs that she kept brushing with a finger as she talked. She said meeting us was a pleasure and glided away to sit at a smaller table by the burlap-curtained front windows. Her face was brown from the sun.
Bob leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of his chair, staring at her. He seemed about to speak and then thought better of it. He stood from the table, bumping it, and to Canty said, ‘Excuse me. There’s something I wanted to ask her.’ Then he walked over and straddled the chair opposite her.
‘Looks like somebody’s in love,’ Canty said.
I said, ‘He’s going to wind up in bed with her tonight. It always happens that way. You wait and see.’ I cut my steak up into forty pieces and then I added, ‘Dang it.’
Bob asked her if he could join her and she nodded her head. He said, ‘You’re really Florence Quick, am I right?’
She said, ‘You may be. Where did you hear it?’
‘That’s the least interesting thing I could say.’
She said, ‘I hate the name Florence. It sounds like I crochet and gossip and succumb in the afternoon to hot flashes.’
‘Whereas I hear you’ve rustled saddle stock and cattle and you came to Silver City after a chase. Some prevaricator even told me you wear chaps of Angora goat hair and pretend you’re a boy named Tom King. That’s the most peculiar thing I ever heard.’
The woman blushed a little and turned a page of the menu before her; my brother snatched up the second menu and glanced at it, rocking back in the chair. ‘Can I eat with you? I’m famished.’
Miss Moore said, ‘Certainly.’
Bob gazed at her. ‘Well, isn’t that the most peculiar thing you ever heard?’
She smiled. ‘Lots of people are famished. Often two or three times a day.’
Bob thumped forward on his chair. ‘I’m talking about the rustling and all the rest of it. They say you’ve busted out of every jail the marshals locked you in. They hint that you kneel for the deputies.’
‘And are you repelled?’
He crossed his legs. ‘I find it mysterious.’
The woman cook lumbered out of the kitchen to the table and listened to each of them order with her red wet hands on her hips and her black hair all in spikes. When the cook was gone, my brother lifted up his water glass in toast. ‘I’ve just been recalling my past and I’ve got to say that you’re the most beautiful and striking woman I’ve ever shared a table with.’
She said thank you like she was bored.
He said, ‘I’m not a flatterer. If you were ordinary I’d just go out to some porch chair and snatch the wings off blue-bottle flies. When I say I’m a true admirer of yours I want it taken seriously.’
‘Serious is a little hard for me, given the circumstances. How would it be if I just winced now and then?’
Bob rocked back in the chair so that the front legs were off the ground. Then the chair thudded down and he sat forward close to the table and said, ‘You’re an available woman in a city stacked high with cowboys who grab at themselves and miners who share sleeping bags and drummers who can’t remember the time the chippy under them wasn’t looking at the clock, and not one of those optimists won’t slide you notes and say how like a rose you are when what he’s really wondering is how he’ll get his hands under your dress. I’ll leave off all of that, thank you. I’m here to say I’m interested; that’s all.’
Miss Moore considered him with some amusement. ‘There’s this suddenness about you.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, there is.’
The cook put their suppers down on the tablecloth like she was irked, slopping beef stew out of my brother’s bowl, ham and split-pea soup out of Eugenia’s, with a basket of hot buttered biscuits between them.
My brother stared and stared at Eugenia’s soup. “Can I have that?’
‘You’re smitten by everything, aren’t you.’
‘Can I trade? I suddenly got this craving for split peas and ham. I don’t think I could stomach beef stew. I think it’d just lump up in my cheeks.’
There was such an appeal in my brother’s eyes that she passed her bowl across to him and he grinned around his soup spoon.
She asked, ‘Do these cravings come over you often?’
‘Yep. Usually get my way too.’
I didn’t overhear all of this, lest you think me a sneak. Some of it I got later from Bob and some from Miss Moore’s letters to me at prison. Canty consumed two pieces of apple pie and I slumped across from him with my cheek on my fist. He scraped the plate with his spoon, glancing in their direction. He said, ‘They sparked right off, didn’t they?’
‘I can’t figure it out.’
‘I’ve seen ladies stir for gamblers, pimps, every kind of sinner. Seems to me the best sort of woman likes to be tainted a bit.’
Canty and I left the restaurant and I spent two hours in his office flipping through his brown photographs of outlaws hauled in dead by bounty hunters and leaned stiff as planks against jail-house walls.
My brother and Miss Moore remained in the restaurant until closing. Bob sat back in his chair with a toothpick and listened to her tell all she knew about the Daltons, which pleased him. Her information was substantial. Then the cook yanked shut her burlap curtains and Bob paid the bill and took off his boots and wool socks to walk barefoot with Eugenia on dirt streets as soft as talcum. They sat in deep blue-grass under mesquite trees beside the Mexican Catholic church, drinking rum from a hammered silver flask.
She said, ‘I was a schoolteacher and twenty-four years old and I washed my face with lilac soap and read novels by William Dean Howells. I spent my evenings grading papers on the porch or cooking in the kitchen, spooning melted wax into jars of apple jam. The only man I knew was landlord of what I rented. He was odorous and decrepit and he spoke ever so solemnly of the weather. He proposed marriage to me once and it took me a week to say no. Then I got my senses and knew I didn’t want a wooden ice chest or Chippendale furniture or the crawl of a husband’s issue in me each night in our four-poster bed. I didn’t want to be one of those sullen wives who glare at the camera from the front of a plain sod house.’
‘I can understand
that,’ he said.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty.’
‘How old is Emmett?’
‘Eighteen.’
She rolled her dress up over her knees for the cool night air. She said, ‘I saw your name on a wanted poster nailed to a telegraph pole in Dodge City, Kansas. The picture had not the neighbor of a resemblance to you but I subscribed to unsavory thoughts just the same. I thought of all the sweet favors I’d do this man Bob Dalton whom they’d given five hundred dollars for.’
They talked until the town was quiet and then they walked to her narrow room above the grocery store. They took off their clothes and Bob washed himself in her porcelain bowl, looking into the round spotted mirror. His face and neck and hands were red, the rest of his skin was milk white. He saw her crouched up under a Navaho blanket staring at him with half a smile. He walked over to her with his hand disguising his manly condition. She was wearing a yellow flannel nightgown that she allowed him to push up over her breasts when he called upon her body.
The next morning she cooked coffee in the fireplace, spread biscuits with comb honey, sliced oranges from California, and they ate naked and cross-legged on top of the sheets, discussing their ambitions.
Bob said, ‘We were fifteen kids on a hardscrabble farm near Belton, and then again near Coffeyville. The barns leaned; snakes slithered under the porch; rats went into a frenzy every time I walked in the corn crib. In March the winds would strip off the roof, nine or ten shingles a day. My sisters used to have to walk four miles to town for sale merchandise marked down from three cents to two. My dad was not a good provider. He tended a saloon; he swapped horses for the Army; he worked as a carnival barker and played square-dance fiddle, a nickel a set. It brought in hardly nothing at all. One winter we got so poor I had to wear my mother’s high-button shoes. And I can remember one time watching my dad talk with two livestock buyers at the gate. They wore black wool coats and round-topped gray cropper hats and when they leaned in their saddles their big irons showed. Years later, when the James-Younger gang got shot up on the Northfield, Minnesota, raid, my dad said at the dinner table, ‘Well, I guess now I can say it. Those men you saw were Jesse James and Cole Younger.’ He put his thumbs behind his suspenders and grinned like he was the richest man in the world. I think it was then that I decided I wanted to be somebody people remember, and not some no-account fool sawing a fiddle for nickels or wearing his mother’s high-button shoes.’
