by Ron Hansen
‘I’ve got wax in my ears,’ I said.
‘My! You’re already churned and clabbered on the issue, aren’t you?’
‘Yep. You’re talking to yellow headcheese. You ain’t gonna get me theoretical about banks, Bob. I’m just gonna sit here and stink.’
‘Dear me, I went and did it, didn’t I? I got you in a snit. I better hide before you start chucking pillows.’ He got off the bed and walked barefoot to the front room where he bummed a cigarette from the owner he’d tied to a chair.
* * *
We stayed in Coffeyville two nights, which was stupid, because somehow word got out that the Dalton gang was headed south from there and a posse of thirty men piled out of wagons for an ambush at the Caney River crossing. They dunked handkerchiefs in kerosene and wiped their skin to keep mosquitoes and chiggers away; then they squatted in high weeds and sweated and itched in their coats, or they sloshed through the river in high rubber boots to sit under the bridge, waving their hats at gnat swarms, staring up at the rotting, moss-green, overhead boards.
They would’ve had us for sure except they’d tried to recruit Julia’s older brother Garrett and he talked about the ambush at supper that night. She excused herself from the table and dressed in Garrett’s overalls and a blue denim jacket. She rolled up the cuffs and snuck out of the house to saddle a gray mustang that she galloped along the hard, moonlit road in the direction of her intuition. I recall that we heard hoofbeats like the wooden block noise they use in radio plays, and the gang trotted our horses into the dark of blackjack trees and sat there with hands on our holstered pistols.
I recognized Texas Johnson’s mustang, then Julia, and she cut from gallop to stop when she saw me ride out of the trees. ‘Emmett, thank goodness I found you,’ she said. Her horse nodded with his exertions and pranced around in a circle and I grabbed ahold of his bridle and walked my horse alongside as she warned me about the posse at the Caney ford.
I saw Bob and the others sitting on their horses in the trees. Newcomb lit a cigarette. I said, ‘It was brave of you to interfere.’
‘Why? Because you’re wanted men? Because this makes me an accomplice?’ I couldn’t see her eyes well enough to know if they carried tears but there was a pitch of anger in her voice, and she chose her words with care. She said, ‘I still care about you, Emmett. I know that doesn’t matter much to you but it’s more than enough for me.’
‘You know what I heard about you? I heard you’d taken up with a farmer who honks when he laughs, and with a cowhand forty-five years old who calls you Daughter all the time.’
‘They just live at the house. They’re boarders.’
I stared at the road and watched my horse twitch his right ear free of flies. I said, ‘What’s that mean when you say you care about me?’
She said, ‘I suppose it means I’m going to be steadfast. I’m going to be the girl you send pictures to and visit when you’re in the neighborhood, the girl who pines away at night and will probably soon be bereaved.’
My brother Bob rode over and she pulled her high-headed mustang around and galloped home in her brother’s clothes. He called hello to her but she didn’t answer; then he signaled the gang out of the trees. ‘You get everything squared away?’
‘Everything is just grand, Bob. Thanks for asking.’
The gang sashayed across the Caney River about a mile away from the posse and we got into no trouble at all. Then we split up. Grat and Doolin went southwest to summer at Cowboy Flat; Pierce and Newcomb returned to Bee Dunn’s Rock Fort at Ingalls. Bob walked his horse off to Hennessey, where Eugenia had set up housekeeping again after her return from Silver City, New Mexico. Broadwell and Powers and I headed south for a bunkhouse at Skiatook, near Tulsa, where we could cover as hired hands and I could salt my money away for my South American fantasy.
I had the alias of Charlie McLaughlin when I worked on that Skiatook ranch; Broadwell was Texas Jack Moore again, and Powers was calling himself Tom Hedde, after a local badman he had a resemblance to. It was unbelievably dull work. I’d be in a saddle under an unpleasant sun sometimes seventeen hours a day, sore in the crotch, perspiring, walking my horse among hundreds of Hereford cattle. Their hides were glossy with sweat and their white eyelashes opened and closed on bluebottle flies, and incapable steers would keep climbing up on heifers until I kicked them off, raking my spurs on their pink nostrils if I could. I’d look across a panorama of heat wave and dust and dry yellow grass and see Broadwell in his dust goggles and his red bandana over his nose, dragging a wide-looped lariat, and Powers would have a brown-stained sombrero off and canteen water dripping from his hair, and the cattle would ruminate and stare as if I were the least challenging example of God’s creative imagination, and I couldn’t hardly believe that I’d ever robbed a train or scared any of the brave, stout hearts of the West. I forgot my fears and my arguments with Bob that quick. And I canceled out everything Julia had said. I wanted to be a dangerous man again.
Bob stayed quiet in the two-storey house near Hennessey. There he and Eugenia had a milk cow and three chickens and zucchini, green peppers, and corn in a garden marked with string. He walked the plant rows in the hot sun, sloshing water from a bucket, a soaked bandana tied to his head, while Eugenia sat in the shade of an elm tree with a wooden butter churn.
Then my brother Bill rode out to visit, bringing along a newspaper he’d picked up at a barber shop. He drank whiskey and water on the front porch swing while Bob read an account of an outlaw gang that had walked into the town of El Reno and robbed a bank in broad daylight. It had been ten in the morning and the streets were crowded with wagons and surreys, and women walked from window to window in their bustles and parasols, but the bandits strode right in and the wife of the bank president fainted and the gang remounted their horses with ten thousand dollars in a satchel.
When the article stated the outlaws were presumed to be Daltons, Bob slapped the newspaper down. Then he and Bill walked with their heads down and threw apples against the barn wall and made plans that they discussed with Eugenia as they washed and dried the supper dishes.
Then there must’ve been an argument about limiting participation, whittling down the gang. Newcomb was too interested in marriage these days and with him went Pierce. That was fine. But my brother Bill couldn’t fathom why Bob would want to cut out Bill Doolin in favor of Grat. ‘Doolin’s tough and smart and dominating, and Graf, well, he’s my brother and I love him dearly but the poor guy is dumb as a turnip.’
They weren’t convinced and I guess Bill left in a huff that night; then Bob and Eugenia collaborated on a letter to Broadwell, Powers, and me at the Skiatook bunkhouse. They faced each other at the kitchen table, reciting sentences and composing. Eugenia poured tea and Bob leaned on his fist and passed an index finger through the lick of a candle flame, formulating tortuous paragraphs that Miss Moore copied down in her perfect school-teacher’s hand.
The gist of the letter was that they wanted a gang of five men to attempt a bank robbery in either Van Buren, Arkansas, or Coffeyville, Kansas. Van Buren, because the Clinton County Bank’s president was Chief Marshal Jacob L. Yoes, who’d been Grat’s boss two years ago and chided him on several occasions. Coffeyville, because we knew the town and the banks seemed easy and the Condon and the First National had both had the gall to deny brother Bill a loan.
Eugenia walked with a teacup reading the letter aloud to Bob. ‘“But our plan is more provocative than it appears, for we choose not just to rob a certain bank in a town, but to rob two banks at the same time! an amazing exploit no other gang will dare duplicate, and awesome enough to overshadow the most famous raids of the James gang and the Youngers and others of that ilk.”’
My brother grinned. ‘Laid it on a little heavy there, didn’t I.’
She shrugged. ‘You need to evangelize sometimes.’
I received the letter a week later and showed it to Broadwell and Powers in the bunkhouse. They’d signed it, ‘Yours affectionately,�
�� but just above that scribbled in, ‘Your comments are solicited.’ I didn’t have many, nor did Bill and Dick, and I didn’t hear another word about banks from my brother, so I figured it was just something he’d worked out on paper because he was peeved.
I remained a cowboy through August and most of September, and Bob and Eugenia vacationed on their stolen money. They watched the sun go down from the porch swing with their coffee cups and saucers in their hands. They lay on top of clean linen sheets and saw the morning sun whenever a breeze pushed the bedroom shade. He told her again about the thousand longhorn cattle they’d have on the ranch in Bolivia or Argentina where pasture grass grows so high it tickles your chin. She told him about the white plaster walls and the red tiles on the floor and the orange flowers in vases of crystal. She told him she’d wear a sun hat and carry an easel down to the beach where she’d paint pictures of the surf and sea gulls and South American fishing trawlers.
They picked green apples from the trees behind the farmhouse and they made love in the cool of the morning and night. And he smoked a pipe of Danish tobacco on the sofa while she read him poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
“‘Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”’
Eugenia closed the book. Bob blew pipe smoke and sat there.
18
I think the informer was Bill. I think he rode down to Cowboy Flat, fifteen miles southeast of Guthrie, and talked with Doolin on the stoop of the Fitzgerald bunkhouse with tin cups of whiskey in their hands. It would have been night and the wind would have smelled like cattle and they’d talk about partnering in an outlaw gang, the Doolin-Dalton gang. My brother Bob’s plans for Coffeyville, Kansas, would be somewhere inside of that. Doolin would glance at my brother and act like he didn’t hear what was said about the two-bank job and he’d stand up to piss into pigweed, but before the month of September was half out, some cowboy with green scales on his teeth and a smell strong as turpentine would tell Marshall Jacob Yoes some of Doolin’s gossip about how it was with the Daltons and banks.
Yoes took it kind of personal that his bank was being considered and he printed the man’s words on yellow tablet paper and mailed a letter to Chris Madsen in Guthrie. ‘What do you make of this?’ he wrote. Three cases of government issue rifles were shipped to the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store in Coffeyville, and a dozen men wasted the last of September and October 3rd and 4th clicking magnets together, picking through plumbing supplies, expanding and closing monkey wrenches, while they stared across a brick plaza at the Condon and Company bank.
When Bill Dalton was reached at his Bartlesville farm on October 5th, he had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and was chopping with a hoe in his garden. A newspaper reporter stood at the gateposts with his skimmer under his arm. ‘Am I the first to inform you?’ he asked. My brother paused and leaned on his hoe. ‘Oh God.’
I think it was Bill.
In middle September, Bob and Eugenia closed up the Hennessey house and sold the animals and Eugenia left to stay a week at the stockman’s ranch of Dan Quick, her father. She said, ‘I’m going to South America. I’ve come here to say good-bye.’
He stood at the stove stirring a cauldron of chili. After a while he said, ‘I thought you said good-bye many moons ago, Florence.’
‘I did. It needed repeating.’
Powers, Broadwell, and I bid the Skiatook ranch good riddance when Amos Burton rode out from Dover and said Bob required us. It wasn’t that I thought yea or nay about banks; Bob assumed I’d be there, so I went. The four of us stayed a week in the dugout, playing Monte next to a bonfire at night or relaxing in the sun smoking cigarettes with the broad leaves of Paradise trees on our heads. And when Bob came in from the west at last, my brother Grat was with him, two crockery jugs of cornmash in his lap.
Bob uncinched his saddle and unfolded the horse blanket on grass where the sun was while the men sat in the shade of the dugout overhang, rolling tobacco in papers and passing the jug. Bob slapped his hat off on his pants and found a curry-comb in his saddlebags and squinted at me over the rump of his horse. ‘You make your proposal to Julia yet?’
‘Nope.’
‘That’s something we’ll have to do then.’
I said, ‘She won’t marry me. I mean, it’s not like she’s some mail-order bride. She’s like Miss Moore; she can have her pick. I’m gonna ask but she won’t elope, not Julia. I think I’d be kind of disappointed in any girl who’d want to settle for me, anyway. That’s true, I would. How smart could she be? Julia’s going to say NO in capital letters. And I don’t blame her, not one bit.’
My brother seemed to think all that was funny. He said, ‘I believe your sales talk could use a little work, boy.’ Dust floated from the horsehide whenever he raked the comb. The mare’s coat was polished with sweat where the blanket had been.
I said, ‘I reckon you and Eugenia had yourselves a good time on her farm.’
‘You bet,’ said Bob. ‘It was romantic as hell.’
I stood there with thumbs hooked in my chaps and a cigarette between my fingers. I said, ‘Women can fix it, can’t they.’
The gang made Kansas by dusk of the next day and Coffeyville at midnight. This was practice, a trial run, Powers’s and Broadwell’s first real acquaintance with the town. We broke our horses out of a trot when we entered the Coffeyville city limits and walked Eighth Street past the Farmers’ Home into the downtown business district. The street lamps were lit at the corner of each block and Ozark breakdown fiddle music was coming from the Masonic Hall at Maple and Ninth Street, but it was quiet and black otherwise and Bob had some trouble making out structures. Out of a sock in his saddlebag he got some reading spectacles I’d never seen him wear before and he hooked them on an ear at a time. ‘I can see clear to Nebraska with these.’
He stopped his horse in front of the Opera House and said, ‘We’ll wrap the reins over this hitching rail. That puts us in striking distance.’ Then we followed Bob in a walk around the west side of the Opera House past a short alley that no longer exists, that’s now filled by the Chamber of Commerce office, the side limit of that alley being the rear of the two storey Luther Perkins building which was narrower in front than back because of the angled convergence of the side streets of Walnut and Union, the resulting trapezoid considered as baffling an architectural wonder in the Sunflower State as the Flatiron Building was to New York. It was an 1890 construction, the pride of the town, as fussy and gimcracked as wedding cake, and occupying its front windows and first floor was the C.M. Condon and Company bank.
I sat down on the porch under its tin awning while the other four in the gang walked across Union Street, Bob whispering names and instructions in a voice so low I couldn’t hear him three feet away. I read that the facade of the bank was designed by Mesker Brothers of St. Louis in 1887. The red bricks between my boots were manufactured by the Coffeyville Vitrified Brick and Tile Company, no date. Left across Union Street and hardly a spit away from the Condon’s southeast door was the plate glass window of its rival bank, the smaller First National, which Bob and I would take.
It would happen this way. The Dalton gang would ride in on Eighth Street, park in front of the Opera House, split up to pilfer the banks. We’d return to the animals and cover the exit of whoever was last out and fire some shots to stall a commotion. We’d haul east on Eighth for our getaway, horseshoes sparking on the bricks, and turn south on the dirt road behind the stores, galloping next to the Santa Fe tracks to Elmwood Cemetery where Eugenia would pick us up. Then we’d meet black Amos Burton in a schooner wagon of cotton bales, hiding under them until we got to the Missouri River where we’d board a riverboat south and then a transatlantic steamer.
The two banks did not seem difficult at the time.
I kept a lookout in that midnight town while Broadwell and Powers hunched over to peer at the walnut counters of the First National, while Bob delivered lessons. I saw Grat sag against the doorjamb and stare across the plaza to the Lang & Lape Furniture Dealers and Undertakers parlor which was next to Slosson’s drugstore. Slosson sold medicinal liquor. That must’ve given my boozy brother the notion. I saw him spit tobacco juice between his teeth and amble south along the boardwalk past the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store next door to the bank, then past McDermott’s millinery, Smith’s barbershop, Boothby’s drugstore, and Barndollar’s Dry Goods and Sundries store, where he turned the corner and I lost him.
I learned secondhand that Grat stepped over the white picket fence to the yard of a house owned by Mr. Benson of the Slosson store. Grat kicked at the storm door panel until Benson opened up, and the man was so terror-struck at seeing a Dalton that he later claimed Grat was Bob, and it’s been handed down that way ever since. He even invented two pearl-handled revolvers and swore the ruffian demanded a bottle of Austin Nichols Wild Turkey, a probability. Benson alibied pretty good, however, saying Slosson’s store hadn’t traded in whiskey since the Populists were elected, so Grat stayed thirsty, and he was fuming by the horses when four of the dangerous-looking Dalton gang finally returned to the Opera House.
Our horses were standing asleep at the hitching rail and Grat was watching a jet of tobacco juice squirm down the Opera House window glass. Grat said, ‘By morning this whole town’s gonna know we been here. So don’t count on no big surprise.’
Bob unwrapped his reins from the rail. ‘How will they know?’
