by Gene Curry
“I got nothing against the colored people,” Cassidy declared, wanting to let us know that he believed in the brotherhood of man. “Next time I’m down in El Paso I’ll drop in on him.” He winked at Etta. “For piano lessons and a few other things.”
Etta flared up again. “You and your poxy whores!”
“Nothing wrong with being a whore, my love,” Butch said. “We all have to make our way in the world. You, me, everybody. Especially you.”
I was getting sick of Cassidy’s grinning cruelty. “We could have another go at the piano,” I said. “Just for a while, anyhow.”
Butch sensed what I was up to, and he gave me the same kind of grin he’d been giving Etta. “A minute ago you didn’t want to go on with it. What’s it going to be? Make up your mind, Saddler?”
I was of no mind to be shot. “Anything you want to do is all right with me.”
“That’s true, ain’t it,” Cassidy remarked. I think he was pleased with me for reminding him that he was the boss.
So he forgave me, too. “Always agree with me and you’ll do fine,” Butch Cassidy said.
Five
We were all sitting around the table listening to the rain. After thumping his way through the old song a few more times, Butch joined us. Tom O’Day was forking the last of the steak and eggs into his big mouth. Smoking a thin cigar and drinking coffee, Sundance looked like a man with no problems.
Etta looked out at the rain falling from a gray sky and said, “Cassidy, why don’t we leave this goddamned place?”
The words came suddenly, but I could see she’d been thinking about the idea for a long time.
“Where would we go?” Butch asked.
“Away from here,” Etta said irritably.
“We could go down to the place in New Mexico.”
Sundance had been paging through an old Farmer’s Almanac. Now he looked up. “Too hot down that way, and I don’t mean the climate. It was all right for a time. By now I think they’re on to it.”
Etta said, “I’d like to go someplace.”
Butch looked at me. “You look like a man that’s been all over, Saddler. Where would you go if you was me and you decided to leave your happy home?”
“Australia,” I said. “They tell me it’s a lot like the West, some of it anyhow. Big and free and hardly any people. Got deserts and mountains, cattle and sheep country just like here. I once knew a man who found a lot of gold there.”
The conversation was taking an interesting turn, one I liked. If Butch went to Australia, I could manage to duck out along the way. I sure as hell wasn’t going to play the piano at the bottom of the world.
“They got banks in Australia?” he asked.
“They got banks everywhere.”
“How about trains?”
“I thought Etta’s idea was for you to give that up.”
“I’ve thought a few times about Canada,” Butch said. “Canada is too close. If you think the Pinks are bad, try tangling with the Mounties. No way to buy off the Mounties. They’ll stick to you closer than a dirty shirt.” Butch said, “So I been told. Must be funny law that can’t be bought with enough money.”
I said, “Not funny law, Butch, the best in the world.” Butch had been rummaging through his mind for a few facts of geography. “I don’t know about Australia. Saw a boxing kangaroo one time in a traveling circus. I don’t like the thought of going to Australia.”
Tom O’Day patted his belly and set his knife and fork in the middle of his empty plate. “Australia is where they hung Ned Kelly,” he stated.
The name wasn’t familiar to Cassidy. “Who the hell is he?”
“They called him the Robin Hood of New South Wales,” the Irishman answered. “Robbed banks for a living, was related some way to my mother. Wore a suit of armor he had some blacksmith make up. Bullets just bounced off it like rain on a shed. Then one day he rode into some town to rob the bank. He fell down and couldn’t get up. Kept on firing till all his bullets were gone. That’s how they got poor Ned. Like I say, they hung the boy.”
“Never heard of him,” Butch said.
O’Day went on. “Near as famous as you, Butch. To this day they sing ballads about him.”
Butch didn’t want any thunder stolen from him. He was vain about his notoriety. “I don’t want to hear any more about Australia.”
“Then where?” I said.
“Mexico might not be so bad.”
“They got the rurales down there. Not honest like the Mounties and worse because they’re not. Those boys are the President’s private police. ‘Get rid of the bandits,’ he told them a few years back. The talk is that they’ve been doing a good job of it. When they catch a bandit they don’t just kill him. They cut off his head and put it on a spike at the gate of some town. I saw a few heads last time I was down there. Matter of fact, one day coming into some town I saw a head that looked familiar, and when I got up close there was old Dan Flagg I grew up with in West Texas. He’d done his share of bad deeds in West and South Texas before the Rangers chased him south.”
“He must of lost his head,” Tom O’Day said with a sly grin.
Butch felt his neck, thinking of my story about Dan Flagg. The story was true. I had seen poor old Dan staring down at me with sightless eyes. The head was freshly cut and there were ants and flies all over it.
“That’s not funny, O’Day,” Butch said. Then he laughed. “I guess it is kind of funny. You got any more cheerful stories, Saddler?”
I said, “If you don’t want to go to Australia, how about South America? Living is cheap, land is cheap. Buy yourself a nice ranch and raise cows.”
Butch scowled, something he rarely did. It seemed like I had played a wrong note. “I know a lot about cows, Saddler. Too much about cows. Anything you want to know about cows just ask me. I was punching too long to like cows. Around cows you get cow shit on your boots.” I said, “There must be something you’d like to do.”
“Sure there is. Robbing banks and trains. It’s not just the money, Saddler. It’s knowing I can do it. The fat bastards that own them make millions. Me, I just want a few dollars, more or less.”
I found it hard to fault him for his attitude. I don’t like businessmen either. I don’t hate them, but I can’t like them. Everything about them gets my fur up. But since I don’t have to drop my pants for them I don’t get too excited about it.
“That’s fine as far as it goes,” I said to Cassidy, “but it can’t last. They can’t let you get away with it. You’ve been making them look like horses’ asses. But worse than that, you’ve been hitting them hard in the wallet. You have any idea how much money they’ve been paying the Pinks? Already they’re chasing you with the telephone. Now there’s even talk of trying to find this place here with balloons.”
This last part I’d made up. I wanted to surprise Butch and I did. I guess I surprised everybody at the table. Pearl, being so young, looked excited at the prospect at having Pinkertons flying over her head.
“Where in hell did you hear that?” Butch asked, outraged at the devious ways of the famous detective agency.
“Didn’t hear it,” I said. “Read it in some paper.”
“What paper?”
“Some paper, Butch.”
Sundance cut in. “Maybe it’s true. They got balloons now they can kind of steer. Go high and low depending on the hot air.”
Butch said, “You got plenty of hot air yourself, Harry. Now Saddler, what about these balloons?”
I wondered why the Pinkertons hadn’t considered balloons as a way of finding the Hole. I guess I had read about balloons in some rag. Then I remembered what I’d read. I said, “Over in Sicily a lot of bandits have hideouts in the mountains. The soldiers and police have been using balloons to root them out. They sail over the mountains too high to get shot at and report what they see. Then the rest of the force moves in with mountain guns to batter down their defenses.”
“This Sicily, where is it?” Butch
asked.
“Part of Italy,” I said.
“Saddler’s talking about dagoes,” Tom O’Day said, proud of his knowledge of the world.
Butch glared at the Irishman. “I know what Italy is, O’Day. A country where they sing all the time and make wine with their feet.”
Pearl giggled. “I hope they wash them first.”
Butch didn’t hear her, so wrapped up was he in balloons and mountain guns. “Holy Christ!” he said. “Imagine being chased by balloons.”
“It’s the coming thing,” I said.
Etta got mad. “Don’t listen to him, Cassidy. Whole thing sounds like a storybook tale to me. Who’s going to fly over these badlands in a fucking balloon? If they came down in the badlands they’d never get out alive. You know what I think? They can’t get you out of here, all the ways they’ve tried, so they’ve sent this spy to talk sweet reason to you. You leave here, leave here now I mean, and they’ll be waiting for you.”
Butch said, “It’s a thought.”
“Sure it’s a thought,” Etta continued. “It’s a thought and leaving here is a good thought, but not for right now. Some of what this so-called piano player has been saying is true, though not from the goodness of his heart. The Pinks have their whole reputation riding on you. If they don’t catch or kill you, it’ll be bad for their business. I can’t see that we’re going to last much longer. We’ve had the luck but no luck lasts forever. So it’s time to make a fresh start someplace far from here. But it’s not for this Saddler to tell you where. If you go where he says, then he’ll know and so will the Pinks.”
I didn’t remind her that she had brought up the subject of leaving the Hole. It wouldn’t have done any good to mention it.
Butch looked around the comfortable cabin. “Be a shame to leave this old place. To leave Wyoming.”
Etta said a very dirty word. “Why don’t you sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ while you’re at it!”
“A good old song,” Butch said.
Sundance looked up from his tattered almanac and grinned. “South American might not be so bad. All them señoritas and such.”
Etta whirled on him with a cup of scalding coffee ready to throw. I wondered if she’d throw it and what Sundance would do if she did.
“Filthy, dirty greasers—spies!” Etta raged. “I’m good and mad at you, Harry.”
Butch grinned at her fury. “She’s mad all the time.” Sundance grinned too. “She wasn’t too mad last night.”
Etta threw the coffee at Sundance, but he was ready for it and dodged it easily, getting no more than a few stains on his shirt and pants. No longer grinning, Butch reached over and grabbed Etta. She squirmed but he held her fast.
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Be nice now, little lady,” Butch warned, and for a moment I saw the killer in him again.
The rain beat down and I wondered again what I was doing there. Even with all the bickering and coffee-tossing the subject of leaving the Hole was being discussed, and even if Etta hated me I had found an ally in her. She wanted to get away from the badlands and to keep Cassidy alive while she was doing it. Sundance was just as important to her, I guessed, but Cassidy came first. Both men were her men. Probably she loved them in different ways and for different reasons: Butch the wild cowpuncher turned bandit; Sundance the New Jersey kid with a price on his head. Sundance knew things Cassidy didn’t know, not that he was an educated man by any means, but he carried himself like a man who had seen much and had done more before ending up in the Hole. Now he came to Etta’s aid.
“Don’t get mad,” he said to Cassidy. “There’s more coffee where that came from.”
“Sure,” Butch said. “But not for throwing at a man.” He let Etta go.
Etta got up and collected the dirty dishes and put them in a basin of soapy water. I felt sorry for her. She was up against a game she couldn’t beat; the deck was stacked against her. She was the smartest of the women—she knew that, and so did I.
You see, there was only one way Cassidy and Sundance could go, and that was to die with their boots on. It’s hell if you have to hang around past your time and past your prime. For when all you know is the gun, then you have to live and die according to its rules. It wasn’t such a bad way though. There are men who lust for freedom much more than they lust for women or money or whiskey. Some of them would have a hard time explaining that, but they know what they want even if they can’t find the words to say it. A man like Tom O’Day would have done his time in jail for cattle rustling and other small potatoes, but I knew Butch and the Kid had never spent an hour behind bars. There was a friendship between them that I find hard to describe. It expressed itself in the easy give-and-take of their words. Etta was a big part of their lives, but she never could hope to be the main attraction in the center ring. Knowing that, I felt sorry for her.
Laura and Pearl went back to their cabin. O’Day left, too, after thanking Etta for the second breakfast. He said he was worried that one of his horses had worms.
“Don’t believe a word of that,” Butch said after the Irishman had gone. “Tommy’s going to see if he can rustle up some more grub. That Irishman could eat his weight in feed if you put it in front of him.”
Irritated, Etta said, “O’Day’s all right, not like some in these parts.”
“I don’t know what you boys are going to do,” Butch said. “I’m going to have a drink. How about you, Saddler?”
Well, it was a dull day, still raining, with the sky low and gray. “Sure,” I said.
“I wouldn’t say no to a drink,” Sundance said, still perusing the Farmer’s Almanac. That tattered old thing must have been his Bible. In the back of the book there were farm remedies and cures for whooping cough and snakebite, as well as a lot of general information, such as that Abe Lincoln grew a beard because some little girl had written and said he’d look better if he had one.
Butch got a quart and three glasses from a cedar chest. Nobody wanted water so he left that out. Butch did the honors and shoved whiskey at us. Sundance marked his place in the book with a match and snapped the drink against the back of his throat and wiped his yellow mustache.
“That Tommy O’Day is a caution,” Butch said. He was still thinking about the walrus-faced Irishman, though he was long out of sight. “First time he robbed a bank he did it in a town called Winnemucca, and he did it by himself, only on the way into town he got waylaid by a skunk. But you have to know, Saddler, that old Tommy is a man of determination and wasn’t about to be put off by a skunk. That Irishman cleaned hisself up best he could and went ahead with his plan. And, mind you—this is gospel—the son of a bitch didn’t even have a horse, having just been released from the state pen for the stealing of a lone cow. I guess you have to be mighty hungry to steal just one cow. So into the bank he goes and there wasn’t no need of caution after that ’cause everybody ran for the hills, the stink being so bad and all. I guess the bankers were only too glad to give him the money, if for no better reason than to get rid of him. Tommy got clean away because of the stink and the fact that he didn’t have a horse. And so began O’Day’s life in crime.”
We drank and Butch told other stories, all of them pretty good ones. The Kid had heard them before but he liked hearing them again. I still had to figure the Kid out. He was taller than Butch and had dark yellow hair. The hair of his mustache was lighter in color than the hair on his head, and in height he was pretty close to me, and that’s tall enough. At the all-night party at the Jackson Hole whorehouse he was the only one of the Wild Bunch who looked at ease in his black suit, boiled shirt and black silk tie. He didn’t exactly talk like a Westerner and yet he didn’t sound like a dude strayed too far from home.
I guess he was very much a tough man, and later I was to discover how right I was. He had what certain lady newspaper writers call languid grace, and some of that was put on and some of it was real. Doing a pose is like that: when you do it long enough it becomes a part of you
. I couldn’t be sure how he took me, whether he was for me, was waiting for the right time to kill me, or just didn’t give a damn. What he gave out to the world was that he didn’t give a damn about anything, not even his life. And though I have known a few men like that, most of them are dead. The only people who didn’t call him “Kid” or “Sundance” were Butch and Etta. To them he was Harry, his given name. It didn’t suit him. To me he’ll always be the Sundance Kid.
Etta didn’t want to drink with us. Long after she washed the dishes and put them away she kept on bustling about the place, listening to what was being said but taking no part in it, angry at everybody, especially me.
Butch told the story about the killer he’d known who was deep in debt to a Mexican moneylender, an old man in Roswell, New Mexico. This killer did nothing but kill men for as much as he could get, and he got a lot because he never missed. He might have been rich, Butch said, except that he liked to gamble and wasn’t good at it. Only in the killing of men was he lucky, and after thirty years there wasn’t a bullet hole in him. Cards and dice were his downfall, Butch said, and to keep pace with his losings he’d had to borrow big from this wizened old Mex whose first business was a cantina. After a few years this killer got so deep in the hole that the old greaser said he’d have to have a reckoning—or else.
“ ‘So what should I do,’ the killer asked this old rascal. ‘I have no money, and no matter how many men I kill I’ll never have enough.’ ‘Then do a robbery,’ said the Mexican to the killer. ‘Stagecoach or bank, it makes no matter to me, just get the money.’ A funny thing, this killer was scared of the old man. I don’t know why, but he was. So he went out to rob a bank and got killed.”
At the end of that particular story, Sundance got up, yawned, stretched and said he was going to get more sleep. The door of the bedroom was open and Etta was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Nothing else to do on a day like this,” Sundance said.
I was wondering where I was going to bunk if Cassidy wanted me as a permanent guest. I was glad to visit Pearl and Laura, but I had to sleep part of the nights or I’d be no good. Besides I wanted some corner where I could sit and think without having to listen to a lot of talk all the time.
