Desperadoes

by Ron Hansen

  ‘Nope,’ said Brown. ‘And ain’t that a cryin’ shame?’

  Young T.C. Babb peered in the window of Mitchell’s restaurant and saw Charles M. Ball push an unfinished bowl of oatmeal away and put a dime on the table. Babb was crew-cut and twenty years old and worked only part-time at the Condon bank. Ball was the cashier. They walked across Walnut Street to the bank and Ball opened the southwest front door with two keys. ‘What was it again you had to get done?’

  ‘Oh, those government checks to the Indians. What a pain.’

  Ball kept the shades drawn and walked to the vault room and stood there watching the hands on his pocket watch until the safe’s time lock clicked off at 8:30. Babb slammed record books down on the counter. ‘That time lock’s quite an invention,’ Ball said. He snapped his pocket watch closed.

  A stout man with a handlebar mustache, Henry Isham, crossed the Santa Fe tracks at Tenth Street. He could see his clerks Louis A. Dietz and Arthur Reynolds standing with lunch boxes on the loading dock of the hardware store owned by himself and his brother and son-in-law. Dietz had a rusty monkey wrench he’d discovered by the tracks. He rubbed it on his pants and dropped it into his shirt pocket when Isham walked up the stairs to the dock. Isham shook out his keys. ‘Sun feels good, doesn’t it.’

  At the country road two miles from town, we turned east on what is now Highway 166. The horses were skittish and surly and showed their long teeth over the mouth bits like they’d been gagged. Their tails swung at flies; their shoes skidded on pebbles. I could make out the scaling red paint on a barn a quarter mile to the right. In the shaded backyard of the house a woman was hanging bed sheets on a clothesline. They billowed suddenly white in the sun. To the left of the road I could only see a boy turned around on the seat of a mule-powered high-sided wagon while two farmers in straw hats and rolled shirtsleeves, one of them William Gilbert, quickly shucked husks of corn and tossed them against the bangboard.

  Bob had his horse in a swinging trot and his woman was riding next to him, with wisps of long hair squiggling out over her eyes in the breeze. I rode up beside her but she didn’t look in my direction. I said, ‘Autumn is my favorite season; because the colors are so radiant and the air smells like apples and you can reap the bounty of the hot weather’s toils. If there was a country where it was autumn all the time, I believe that’s where I’d go.’

  Eugenia said, ‘It’s autumn every day in Argentina. That’s why so many Germans inhabit the place.’

  I said, ‘I don’t like Germans and they don’t like me.’

  My brother complained, ‘Why don’t you two go over what we’re about to do instead of prattling about foreign countries? Do you know what your jobs are, and where and when they have to be done? Ask yourselves those questions.’

  Eugenia smiled at me. ‘Do you feel chastened?’

  The gang passed a dairy barn of mortar and stone and the cheese factory where a boy was shrugged under the weight of two sloshing milk cans. Soon thereafter I could see white church spires over trees piled with colored leaves and rattling under them was a maroon carriage with fancy gold trim containing Mr. and Mrs. R.H. Hollingsworth, who later swore that we were six, not five, that our appearance was peculiar, and that we were heavily armed. Grat and Broadwell swept off their hats for the missus and bowed low on their steeds. Two brothers,. J.M. and J.L. Seldomridge, approached in a weathered gray wagon with crates of white hominy and onion they were trucking to Sedan. J.M. was blowing his nose in a brown handkerchief and did not recognize me because of my beard. He stuffed the hankerchief in his pocket and knelt on the box seat to stare backwards at us. He shouted, ‘Hey, which posse you with?’

  Powers turned in his saddle and glared and J.M. sat down in his seat facing front.

  They too claimed there were six.

  It was only when we got to what was known as the Hickman property on Eighth Street that Eugenia kissed Bob on the cheek and wished us good luck and skirted her horse south through yellow bars of light in the trees. The sixth man has ever since been a mystery, becoming at various times Bill Doolin, whose horse at the last minute came up lame, or a Coffeyville hoodlum named Alley, Ogee, or a gabby liar named Buckskin Ike, or Caleb Padgett, who made that confession from his deathbed in 1934. The sixth man was a woman named Eugenia Moore, who stood her horse at my brother Frank’s grave in the Elmwood Cemetery and walked down the rows reading headstones with her hands in the pockets of a man’s sheepskin coat.

  20

  The Dalton gang loped our horses along Eighth Street with our gear slapping and clanking and the road loud as wood under the horseshoes. There were houses to the right and left of us with women in aprons at the screen doors, shading their eyes, and a man in suspenders in a backyard with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, and a small boy in short pants and a lunch box, kicking a tomato can down the sidewalk. We were still two and three in formation, with Bob and me to the front, as we crossed the street where the limestone Episcopal church was. A girl sat on the board sidewalk in a yellow dress, staring at us as she yanked up her stockings. Our coats skirted up off our holsters and the Dalton gang was riding hard to Walnut Street when Bob pulled his horse to such a stop it almost sat down. The four of us stopped with him or circled our horses around until they quit and road dust drifted over us.

  Three black workmen were prying loose the bricks of the plaza where they’d buckled up in front of the Opera House and the Eldridge House, and the hitching rack was torn down in a mess of disrepair.

  ‘Ain’t this a pisser,’ said Grat.

  One of the black men leaned on his pick. I said, ‘I guess we call it a day and go home, huh Bob?’ But my brother was already wheeling around and he kicked his horse back to Maple Street and swung south and our horses jostled to follow him. Left on Maple was the office of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and the Davis blacksmith shop where a man was banging iron on an anvil. He did not look up as we jogged our horses past. We turned left into a wide alley of cinder and dirt that ran east and west between Maple and Walnut streets, with the Long-Bell lumberyard along it quite a ways. An oil tank wagon with a dark brown workhorse team belonging to the Consolidated Company, later Standard Oil, was parked up ahead in the alley and near the city jail halfway up there was a stonecutter who was tilting a rock curb up, examining it, and cracking it back down. Otherwise the alley was empty and it was 9:30 on an autumn Wednesday morning in 1892. The sun was yellow and warm, and leaves were burning not far away.

  Bob tied his horse to the pipe that was the top railing of the hitching rack at the rear of Police Judge Munn’s lot, which was brown with cornstalks and braced tomato plants that had burnt up in the sun. The rest of us got down too and the horses cropped grass as we strode east in the alley, not speaking; Grat, Dick Broadwell, and Bill Powers in front, Bob and me after, five Winchester rifles loose in our arms and the gang dressed in black hats and silk-trimmed black coats and trousers as fine as you wear with tuxedos.

  Aleck McKenna was in a denim apron smoking a cigarette under the rolled-down awning of the McKenna and Adamson store to our left. He looked at us as we walked into Walnut Street and he later claimed he recognized Grat by his slouched walk, but he just stood there then, holding his elbow. Dray wagons were slanted up to the hitching racks of Union Street and a woman in a white bonnet walked down that board sidewalk from Barndollar’s store at the corner to Brown and Cubine’s shoe shop where a bell rang when she opened the door. Cyrus Lee chopped an ice block in the back of his wagon and shouted small talk to a man in Slosson’s drugstore to my right. Lee ceased stabbing his ice pick and frowned at my artificial beard.

  We crossed the plaza and our boots rasped on the brick and I could see the three plate glass windows of the C.M. Condon and Company bank and the porch-shaded glass of the smaller First National on Union Street between Rammel Brothers drugs and the Isham hardware store which sat just opposite the alley. The bank looked green and the wood was dark. Bob said, ‘I made a mistake, Em. It should be the other way around
. You and I should take the Condon.’

  But by then Grat had his hands down in his coat pockets and his rifle tilted down and Powers glanced from window to window in all the second-storey rooms, and when I turned and walked backwards I saw that Aleck McKenna was talking to Cyrus Lee about us and they were shading their eyes to stare. I almost lifted my gun.

  Grat bent to spit a half-yard of tobacco juice; then he stomped up onto the porch of the Condon bank and jerked the closest of two pairs of doors as Bob and I ran across the bricks that were Union Street and ducked unnecessarily under the awning of the First National Bank. I held the screen door open and looked around. My brother turned the porcelain knob on the lettered door.

  Charley Gump sat on the tailgate of his wagon with a toothpick and he soaked up what he’d seen—five men, five rifles, two banks—and when he noticed Broadwell and Powers lift blue bandanas over their noses inside the Condon bank, he limped down the sidewalk leaning big-eyed into the open stores, shouting, ‘By God, it’s true! It’s the Daltons! The Daltons are robbing the bank!’

  The cry carried and women in bustles ran from the streets and dogs took up barking. McKenna walked up to his store and Cyrus Lee hustled down into Slosson’s to borrow a rifle and soon men were crouched behind windows staring out at us. I saw the beginnings of a commotion but I didn’t say anything. I slammed the door of the bank behind me, rattling the glass, and pulled down the shiny green curtains.

  Three customers were already there: Deputy Sheriff Abe W. Knott, J.B. Brewster, the contractor, and C.L. Hollingsworth. They were big men in dark suits and Brewster had his hat off as he did arithmetic. He’d combed about six strands of black hair from one side of his head to the other. Knott had just cashed a four-dollar check.

  The cashier’s cage was seven feet high with walnut up to the writing counter, then grillwork and frosted glass. It had a marble base and one barred teller’s window at which stood Thomas G. Ayres, the cashier. He had sleeve garters on. The teller was W.H. Sheppard who was Bob’s age and polite as you please and always unaccountably happy. He was slouched in the chair of the rolltop desk, his bifocals off and crossed on a page, when tall Emmett Dalton, the one with the fake dark beard of his summer hair, slammed the door and disturbed whatever was going on.

  Sun streaked off Bob’s rifle when he swung it up from his hip. He yelled, ‘Hands up! Everybody! You men stay right where you are!’

  The cashier flinched and the customers frowned like we were spoiling their morning.

  I levered the hammer back on my rifle and shouted, ‘You pay attention to this machine, cuz I can put a chunk of lead in your chin that’ll rip your face off like it was only a washrag with eyebrows.’

  Ayres said, ‘Oh, come now, Emmett.’

  I ignored him.

  Deputy Sheriff Knott kept trying to lower his hand to his vest and I was scared he might have a purse pistol there until I saw he had his four dollars wrapped on his fingers and wanted the money in his wallet. I said, ‘I don’t want your chicken feed, Abe.’

  Knott said, ‘I think—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  I tossed my brother the canvas feed sack I’d pulled out from under my vest and he wadded it and pushed it through the grill and the cashier slowly shoved ones and twos and fives and tens inside, then gathered coins from the tray in both hands and started heaving them in.

  Bob said, ‘Keep that silver out. It’s too heavy.’ He tapped the counter’s marble base with the toe of his boot and smiled at Brewster next to him. ‘Was it a deposit or a withdrawal?’

  Brewster said, ‘I was checking on a mortgage.’

  ‘We leave the papers whenever we can.’

  Brewster nodded. ‘That’s considerate of you. It can be a real inconvenience.’

  Bob kicked the swinging door and walked back to the private office where Tom’s son, Bert Ayres, was standing at a bookkeeper’s desk. He’d pissed his pants with fear and his shirttail was out to hide it.

  My brother said, ‘You go up front and help out your dad. Just your paper money.’

  Bert obeyed and Bob unlatched the spring lock to the irongrated back door and, with his pistol up next to his cheek, leaned out into the back alley. It was sunlit and vacant. Red maple leaves skittered and stuck to the screen. A black dog was leashed to a delivery door and was chewing at itself. A dozen other dogs in the town were barking the same news over and over again.

  I had my rifle at my shoulder and I squinted from Sheppard to Hollingsworth to Knott. The gun turned them all into women. I heard the clomp of boots on the sidewalk and turned to see J.E.S. Boothby crouched at the plate glass peering in while the boy Jack Long watched the Condon bank with his elbows on a railing in front of Rammel’s drugstore.

  I yanked the door. ‘You son of a gun, Jim! Get in here!’

  Boothby was hardly fifteen then. He flung up his hands and his face drained white and he tottered when he walked in. I banged the window with my rifle stock and young Jack Long dashed next door into Rammel’s.

  Boothby said, ‘I sure don’t know what I could’ve been thinking.’

  Then Bob walked out of the back office and took the feed sack and Mr. Ayres with him into the vault room where there was a safe not much bigger than an oven, manufactured by the Mosler Safe Company. Bob slouched against the office door frame and glared over his shoulder at all the Kansans in the front room while Ayres knelt to turn the combination and toss out some currency rolled in rubber bands. He sat back on his heels and closed the vault door.

  Bob frowned. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘You don’t want the gold, do ya Bob?’

  ‘Heck yes, Tom. Every cent.’

  Ayres opened the strongbox again and carried out gold coins in his shirt. They jangled when he walked and some got loose and rang across the floor when he poured them into the feed sack.

  ‘Is that everything?’ Bob asked.

  I called from the front, ‘Let’s go, Bob!’

  Bob displayed his rifle to Ayres. ‘I want to know if that’s everything.’

  Ayres said, ‘You bet.’

  Bob slammed him against the frosted glass. I could see the white imprint of Tom’s shirt, then shadow again, and I heard Bob bang open the strongbox. Ayres stood by the swinging door of the counter and shrugged at Sheppard as if it had been a noble effort. Sheppard smiled back. Hollingsworth had his eyes shut. Knott was frowning at me, his hands still high.

  ‘How do your arms feel, Abe?’

  ‘I’d have to say they’re pretty sore.’

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ I said.

  I could see south on Union Street where one of the teamsters was teaching his horses to back up. He got a flatbed wagon and a lumber truck into the middle of the street, barricading it; then he snuck back into Isham’s hardware. Bob came out of the office with two packs of bank notes worth five thousand dollars apiece. ‘What’s this, Tom? Huh? Why’d you lie to me?’

  It was 9:40.

  Bob stood at the depository and angrily dumped a bag of silver coins on the floor. He lifted a box of gold watches but Sheppard told him it was merely fiduciary papers and I told my brother we’d better leave, so Bob left the box and he wrestled Bert Ayres back through the swinging door to stand next to Sheppard, and told the two of them to stay put. Meanwhile, Tom Ayres, Boothby, and the three customers stood at the front door with their hands raised while I took up the feed sack of money. It was heavy as a milk can and my fingers went white with the strain. Bob turned the porcelain knob and pushed open the screen and the five men walked on out like schoolchildren.

  The mechanic George Cubine was hunkered down with a Winchester in the doorway of Rammel’s with the boy Jack Long and Mr. C.S. Cox, who had a Dance Brothers percussion revolver. Soon as Bob took a step out onto the bank porch there was a whang and the door casing splintered. Bob sprang back inside and grinned sheepishly at me. ‘Who was that, Cubine?’ He peered through a gap in the shade to see the three bank customers crawling away on the bricks. ‘He�
��s a shabby marksman, isn’t he. Spose he could hit me with a banjo?’

  I set the sack down and regripped it and picked it up again. ‘Can we get out the back?’

  ‘I think so.’

  But instead he cocked his rifle and walked out onto the sidewalk as calmly as a man looking for a newspaper and a chair. Neither Cubine nor Cox showed themselves but Bob swiveled to see Charley Gump next to the horse collar that hung on Isham’s awning post. Gump was bringing back the hammer on a ten-gauge when all at once there was a blast from Bob’s rifle and Charley’s hand tore apart and the wood stock splintered off at the shotgun’s pinion and Charley cried out with pain that stung clear to his teeth. Then Bob was inside the bank again, shoving past me for the rear. I yanked Sheppard out of his chair as hostage, leaving Bert Ayres behind, and Bob held the iron-grated door for me and then the three of us left the cool of the bank for the heat and dust of the alley.

  As I said, Grat slung his rifle on his arm and spit his tobacco and walked inside the C.M. Condon and Company bank and the yellow shade slapped the window glass when he closed the door. Bill Powers leaned on an outside awning post while Dick Broadwell walked the board porch and then the two of them opened the two pairs of doors, Bill at the southwest, Dick the southeast. Sunlight sprawled across the floor and the bankers wrote in their ledgers and there was the clack of typewriter keys in the office. The bank counter was larger and more ornate than that at the First National. It had pegs instead of nails, the wood was carved walnut made dark with linseed oil, and it cost more than a small farm. Over the teller’s grill was a sign that read: PROTECTED BY NORTH BRITISH AND MERCANTILE INSURANCE CO. OF LONDON AND EDINBURGH, ESTABLISHED 1890.

  T.C. Babb stood at a desk on the east side of the front room, writing out government checks, when he saw Broadwell on the board porch lift up the blue bandana on his face. He picked out Grat as soon as my brother shut the door and Babb snuck into a back room where he hid behind a ceiling-high rack of ledgers and journals. Vice-president Charles T. Carpenter wore a cardboard collar and a striped blue tie and he had a counter drawer open and the spring clasps up, counting twenties and tens when the three robbers entered.