By the time the pie and coffee were served, the gang recalled their latest forays into crime as casually as if they were conversing about the weather. There was no want of conversation once they got enough whiskey in their bellies. They talked on numerous subjects with engorged vocabularies. My mother cringed and offered more coffee. She sent my sisters to bed, but I begged to stay up, and she didn’t have the energy to argue. The kerosene stove warmed the house and the men bundled themselves by the fire with their cups.
I studied George as if trying to memorize his every characteristic. I was enamored. The life of those men galloping off to every new horizon and slapping around their pistols and bringing in bags of lemons for strangers to make them pies seemed as marvelous as the fables I read from my sisters’ fairytale books. After dessert, the rainstorm George had forecasted came in over the mountains sideways. Rain hard enough to bend lampposts and drown night toads. The whole house complained in the wind, ached as if it were weak as pasteboard.
“I canny thank you enough, Mr. Crowe, for your family putting us up and for that fine meal,” George had said after his second slice of pie as he swept crust crumbs off his vest. “We come all the way down from Montana.”
“What was your business there?” my dad asked.
George considered the question and how truthful an answer he might divulge with another swallow of whiskey. He turned the cup in his hands. Truth won out. “Well, it ain’t no secret we’re not merchants. We robbed us a military convoy south of Powder River. Army payroll. It’s all corrupt, you know? The troops never see but a dime on the dollar of what they’re owed and the big Washington fat cats skim from that payroll like it was milk boiling. So we helped ourselves to a little before they could. We was soldiers, used to be. All four of us.”
The man who’d brought in the lemons said, “God, we’ve been running eight days on now without much for sleep or pleasure. It sure is fine to be sitting here in front of this grand fire with a good meal in the belly and a dry roof over our heads.”
He turned to me. “Be grateful always for the small delights, young’n.”
Come morning I was the first to wake. I played with the silver dollar Big Nose had given me the night before, had even slept clutching the coin in my little hand, and went out onto the porch to watch the sunrise. Our goats were still drenched from last night’s downpour. The rain had stopped only an hour earlier. They shivered and bleated and bemoaned their station. Fog hung low in our valley. A damp kind of dawn.
After a short while, George came out from the barn wearing only his union suit with his mackinaw coat hugging his shoulders like a cape. He stopped at the water pump and sloshed some cold on his face and wandered over to the porch with his mustache dripping.
He said, “That sunrise looks like a painting of a sunrise.”
I sat silently.
“Look at all them perfect pinks and oranges,” he continued. “I never seen one quite like it. If that sky was done in oils and hung in a frame on a wall, I’d say that such beauty never existed anywhere on God’s green earth. It’s a damn wondrous thing, kid. Man’s notion of nature is almost always grander than the actual thing. And now here we are staring at it.”
I turned the silver dollar in my hands. “I’ve seen your picture before.”
George chuckled, spat. “On circulars in town, I bet?”
“My dad says you’re an outlaw.”
“Well, your daddy’s by-God right about that.”
I bent my head low.
“Your mama got any coffee boiling in there yet?”
“She’s still asleep.”
“A lollygagger then, is she?” George said and chuckled again.
“Why do you do it?” I asked.
“Do what? Call people names? I was only funning about your mama.”
“I mean rob people.”
“Because I’m good at it,” George said. “The simple, honest life? That game ain’t worth the candle, son.”
I nodded to feign understanding the same way I did sitting at a desk in the back of my schoolhouse, fiddling with the coin still.
George tongued his wet mustache. “That the first dollar you ever been paid?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You obey your moms and pops all the time?”
“Yes, sir. I try to.”
“Well, you get used to too much of that and it’ll be mother-me-do and yes-sir-papa your whole rotten life. I’ll tell you one something I wish had been told me when I was a sprout. Being miserable ain’t the same as being good,” he said as he studied the new day, as attuned to the sunrise as would be a mapmaker upon seeing a new tract of land to cartograph. Not long after, his pals came out of the barn in their goat-hair chaps and galoshes and snap-button shirts, ready to ride out. George dressed himself in a hurry. They saddled their horses and rode up to the porch where I sat playing with his silver dollar.
George considered me one last time.
“Tell your ma and pa we’re sorry we couldn’t stay for breakfast,” he said, nickered at his horse, and the four riders bolted off. I kept the silver dollar safe until I was old enough to spend a little on myself. Later in life, I couldn’t remember what I purchased with the coin and, from time to time, wished I’d kept it still.
III
FOR THE THREE months leading up to the kidnapping, Billy and I had rented a frame cottage on a lane north of Grover Street that belonged to an old German seamstress. The house, vacant for more than a year before our arrival, had fallen into disrepair. The roof was patched up like a quilt with squares of heavy napped cloth that swelled during rainstorms and leaked runoff into pots and buckets. The floorboards were warped. Plaster crumbled off the walls. Wallpaper peeled down in long curls. Once painted white, the house had been stripped of nearly all its color, and the exposed wood had rotted from the elements. There was a good barn at the back of the property that was nearly as big as the cottage itself.
The home sat on a pronounced slope of upland above the southwest corner of the city, just beyond the South Omaha limits. The hillside leading up to the sandy drive was covered in dead wildflower so parched from the winter that it broke apart underfoot like dust. From the main window at the back of the house, we had a view of the Union Stockyards and the Cudahy packinghouses pitched in the valley below. I stared out the window for more than an hour before finally settling on the rent. The cottage was perfect.
“We’ll need to fix it up some,” Billy said.
I disagreed. “Yeah, what this outfit needs is some nice Irish lace on the windows.”
“If I’m to live in a place, it’s got to be livable.”
“Well, it ain’t the penthouse of the Belvedere. I’ll give you that.”
Billy paced the main room and then wandered into the kitchen. I followed him, watched him examine every crack and crevice.
“I guess it’ll do,” Billy finally said.
“I’m guessing it will,” I replied.
For a whole month we set about preparing the house. We pasted oatmeal paper on all the windows to cut out the sunshine. There was a gun rack on the wall to the left of the front door where we could stash our rifles. I brought a few pieces of discount furniture into the hideaway: a wicker rocker, a pair of ladder-back chairs with rope bottom seats, a kitchen table full of knots, a pair of collapsible iron cots.
Billy cleaned out the woodstove, which had been inhabited by a pair of rattlesnakes honeymooning for the autumn. He nearly got bit twice trying to shoo the rattlers with a willow broom and finally unloaded six shots from his revolver into the stove. He missed both snakes entirely at point blank range but made them uncomfortable enough to slither out of their iron nest so he could finally sweep them past the front door. He fired five more rounds as they bellied away into the weeds, and missed again altogether.
I watched with a smile from the front porch, my hands d
ug into my trousers, my pipe crooked in my mouth. “That’s some fine shooting.”
Billy spun around. He didn’t know he was being watched. He nodded at the snakes slithering away. “You go to hell. They’re skinny.”
“I seen kids with slingshots got more accuracy than you.”
“I’ve been domesticated some.”
“Suppose you have. Suppose I’ll just keep you on the scattergun.”
Billy cursed and went back into the cottage to put some wood into the stove to heat up the drafty front room. I set about to the chores of stocking the pantry and barn. Oats and carrots and sugar cubes for our pony we had yet to purchase. Brandy and ham and banana taffy for me and Billy. I made several trips into town to shop for a good horse and used buggy before finally settling figures on a white mare with a silver star on its forehead and an old Stanhope with a collapsible carriage top.
The horse was an agreeable creature with a pearl mane and enough life left in her to pull a good draft. I fell to liking her immediately. Billy was as indifferent about the animal as he was the cottage and everything else.
It seemed he’d lost all sense of wonderment in life. All month long he mooned about in a droll. The man couldn’t even manage the enormity of the moment we were about to create. Nothing I said or imagined could stir Billy’s emotions. There was only the salving of pain with brandy and whiskey and plenty of it until the first thin light creased over the hills and the pain returned harder and more pronounced than it had been the day before.
After the expense of our preparations, including the three months of rent paid for in advance, we were down to our last ten dollars between us. To pass the empty evenings, we cut cards at the small kitchen table and shared slugs from a gallon woodjacket can of drugstore whiskey. Come morning we were both usually ale sick and took turns dunking our heads in the freezing horse trough by the barn before pulverizing some coffee we drank as strong as coffin varnish in tin cups.
For five weeks we studied the comings and goings of the Cudahy home. Billy sat in the carriage with the top raised for cover while I stood in company with our white horse, puffing my clay pipe. We spoke little and, when we did converse, we talked in hushed tones.
In the afternoons young Eddie Junior came home from school around three o’clock. He played shinny with his friends in the street before suppertime and practiced his piano in the front room. The evening hours were spent holed up in his room with his schoolbooks, and the hour before his bedtime was largely employed at his father’s billiards table. We followed him in the evenings on his occasional errands. We lurked in shadows between the flicker of lampposts. I made notes about his routine on a lined pad, noting what times he left the house each day and for how long he was gone.
It was a sullen month of winter that December.
The weather didn’t clear out but for an hour or two at a time. Icy rain fell in nailpoints. Clouds ribbed like needlecord, allowing only for the faintest bit of threaded sunlight. The Missouri froze overnight only to thaw again the next day. Come the middle of the month, on a rare day clear of weather save for a few ragged clouds ghosting in a white sky, Billy and I readied ourselves for what would prove to be our final day of observation.
I fell out of sleep in a mad dash and got into my woolens to start the kitchen fire. I parched coffee beans in an iron pot and chunked out some water from the cistern pump to brew the beans. Billy was coughing himself awake by the time the coffee was ready. I stepped outside into the quivering morning in my long johns and sheepskin boots to peel a mealy apple and have a morning toke from my pipe.
On the downslope toward the river, a huddle of cows stood in a field of dead and snowy clover. A buckboard pitched high with manure passed by on the road below our house, a shovel handle jutting out of the stinking mound. Billy joined me outside, wearing only his skivvies under his long coat and a rabbit pelt for a hat, hacking up the nighttime from his lungs. I sat on the front steps and looked south toward the stockyards.
I peeled my apple bald as a stone. Balanced it on the porch railing and undid the flap of my woolens and pissed off the front porch.
Billy said, “We take the kid tonight.”
I auditioned the idea in my head. “Supposed to snow this evening.”
“I’m not waiting any longer. I wait another day and I might change my mind about the whole damn thing.”
“Getting nervy on me?” I asked.
“Just losing patience is all,” Billy said and spit phlegm. He crammed a plug in his lowers and leaked tobacco from his mouth and stirred molasses into his coffee mug. “We ought to have us a pail of suds. Steady our grit.”
“No grog,” I said. “We need to be clearheaded.”
“You got that letter finished?”
I nodded. We went over the plan step by step for the remainder of the day. After supper we readied ourselves for the crime. I lathered foam on my cheeks with a pig bristle brush and shaved using a broken piece of glass for a mirror. Billy darkened his pitiful mustache with lampblack from the bottom of one of our oil burners. He found a little courage from a few swallows of baldface leftover in an old apothecary jug. We both dressed in laundered shirts and fresh pressed trousers and stitched boots.
New weather filled out over the city: a high batting of snow clouds waiting for sunset, a scarred sky veined with the last light of day. We set out on our buggy down a winding farm road of packed sand. The temperature dropped ten degrees in less than an hour by the time we ambled our coach into the city.
The winter sun pulsed like muscle over the naked trees. Wintery brume traced the streets. Everywhere inescapable angry cold. I pinched a clot of tobacco from my carrying tin and sent pipe smoke up to the heavens in long drafts. Billy wrapped himself in his monkey fur and sat chattering his teeth. Twenty minutes passed and young Eddie returned home from academy on his regular clockwork, his schoolbooks slung over his shoulder by a belt strap as he kicked a stone down the sidewalk.
I watched him and scribbled another calculation on my nickel pad. I tamped down my pipe bowl and said, “The kid keeps schedule better than the railroad.”
“I could’ve told you that three weeks ago. I did tell you that three weeks ago. Then two weeks ago. Then last week I told you the same thing.”
“We canny rush it. There’s only the one chance we’ll ever have.”
Billy reached down and took his rifle out of its scabbard. He laid it across his lap to admire its weight and polish before wagging the gunstock at the Cudahy house. “Let’s get it over with then. Let’s take him tonight.”
“Not yet,” I said. “There’s one thing left to do.”
“There’s nothing left for us in the whole world but this,” Billy replied and slid the Spencer back into its housing.
“I need to go see him one last time.”
“The kid?”
“The old man.”
“The old man? Edward Cudahy?”
“Yes. Edward Cudahy.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“I cannot be anything else,” I said and situated myself again on the buckboard. I took the reins from Billy and clucked my tongue to get our pony marching.
Dusk dimmed the earth in a giant fold. Around the corner of Dewey Avenue, wagon traffic clogged to a standstill. A dog had run into the lane only to be trampled under hoof by a string of stagecoach ponies. Three dirty Polish children in black rags were weeping over the stomped bones of their beloved shaggy pet, the mother trying to shoo them back inside away from the horror.
While we sat waiting for the bottleneck to clear, Billy spit tobacco in giant globules. I lit the iron lantern dangling from a rod over my wagon seat. A man, presumably the father of the family who’d just lost their pet, had wrapped the dog in a blanket and was carrying it back toward their house with his sobbing children following him. We finally crossed the avenue where the poor mutt had been tra
mpled, loped over a sopping wet mushroom field in the new snow as the sky pinked.
Seeing the dead dog reminded me of another time long ago when my first horse had drowned in a flash flood. I was thirteen years old and living for a summer on my uncle’s ranch in Shinbone, New Mexico. The desert rains came heavy that night and washed the sky clean of all atmosphere as if it were picture glass. I thought hard on that moment as Billy and I pulled into the lane leading up to our Grover Street cottage.
We’d barely escaped the flood that night—me, my uncle, and two cousins. A rain of such weight it flattened crops into tillage and bent cornstalks at the knees, the floodwaters often places deep enough to drown a horse with a current like a river. And drown my nag it did, an old twenty-dollar California horse as reliable as sunrise. The poor beast carried away on its back with its legs flailing in the air.
How easy it was to be carted off this life. All night I could think of naught else. Be it beast or man, rich or poor, strong or weak, it was all too easy for any of us to be swooped up by darkness in a single whoosh, screaming and screaming.
IV
I FIRST MET Billy almost two years earlier. It was the last summer of the old century, eighteen and double nine. The streets bright with rain from the previous night’s thunderstorm. All of Omaha sequined by sunlight on raindrops still clinging to windows and store signs. Yellow trolleys and dinging streetcars zipped along their routes, carrying full loads of people to work.
Shop doors had opened for business: photography suppliers, confectioneries, a ten-story department store where a person could buy anything from a portable sewing machine to a tub of jelly. A clothier balanced a tower of hats for sale on his head. A woman in a cocktail dress entered a syphilis clinic, last night’s thunderbolts apparently not the only thing that shook the bedposts.
A mangy mutt missing whole chunks of fur lapped up gutter water streaming down from a roof pitch. Youngsters in wash suits and soap-lock haircuts played stickball with broom handles in the street, using manhole covers as bases, between the bouts of passing traffic before the sun was full out and the whole city purple with heat. Another advertisement for Mennen’s Toilet Powder—this one pasted on the side of a bulletin wagon—came to a halt at a sidewalk flag stop. Drying linens garlanded fire escapes. Wash lines were hung between tenement windows. Neighborhood laundry the flags of the alleys.
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