Another smattering of applause, this one much more subdued after Judge Sutton’s threat to clear the room, quickly rose then died.
Ritchie smiled. He could not help himself but to fan the flames. “Well, it seems at least a few good bystanders of Omaha here today don’t appreciate a man lying under oath any more than they do being robbed every time they put a piece of his meat in their mouths.”
The courtroom cheered again, and some of the audience members were standing and hollering with their hands cupped over their mouths to amplify their voices. There was no stopping the pandemonium. The wick had been lit, and there was no smothering the spark. Judge Sutton rose in his giant robe and pounded his mallet like he was trying to bolt down a coffin lid. Over and over he whacked his gavel while the shouting continued. A few of the spectators in the gallery were throwing down coins from their pockets in the direction of the witness stand, aiming their pennies and nickels at Cudahy.
“That thief wants all of our money!” somebody yelled from the balcony. “Well, boys, let him have it! Let him have it all!”
More coins flew through the air. They rained down from the gallery and from across the room. The crowd was at a fever pitch, ready to break into riot. I turned in my chair to look back at the erupting audience. I sat stunned but could not stop grinning. I’d been separated from the world for so long. And yet I had never been alone. I had company all along. I was among the many, and stood for the many. Someone cheered my name.
“Hooray for Pat Crowe!” one man hollered.
“Let him steal that boy again for double the price!” screamed another.
Then a chorus broke out: “Hooray for Pat Crowe! Hooray!”
Judge Sutton rapped his gavel ceaselessly. “Order! Order, I say! I want this entire room cleared now! Bailiffs, remove the witness and the jury. Clear this room! I will have order! Bailiff, get Mr. Cudahy out of here now, I say. The rest of you, get that jury out of here!”
Ritchie dodged coins like hail with his arms raised over his head and sat next to me at the defense table with a contemptuous smile. With coins still raining down and even a couple of shoes thrown in the air and people waving their hats and screaming madly, the hysteria pitched all around us both, we two sat together quietly.
Ritchie touched me on my knee.
He said, “Come tomorrow it’s you who will run for governor.”
XVI
SIX WEEKS AFTER nearly burning to death in Chicago, I was almost reduced to ashes again in Oklahoma. Without a map and having to stay off the roads both night and day, I soon found myself much farther south than I’d originally planned. I was hoping for the cosmopolitan swag of the eastern seaboard. Instead my route, trimmed on all sides by a country frenzied at the possibility of my capture, led me into Indian Territory.
The country of southwest Oklahoma was very little under plow, and I rode lazily over a tall grass prairie for two weeks before I found a settlement of five sod blockhouses on the edge of the Wichita Mountains. Distant rain like piping along the horizon. Fields of dead blue corn and huckleberry brush and jointed sand grass. Creeks as skinny as lodgepoles. Ancient ponds untouched by man, as perfect as if painted on canvas. The entire damn territory the color of a cemetery in winter even though spring days were well at hand.
I was near starving and my horse was worse off yet. I’d retreated so far from the eye of the world that I felt I might never see another sign of man for the rest of my days, until I came across a collection of crooked huts at the base of the Wichita range. I set up camp a half mile away from a snug little farm covered with pear and apricot trees. I took my utensils and bedroll off my mare, and let it drink from a spring to its heart’s content. The sky was gold, and the sun still well in the sky when I set out to stealing some of the unripe fruit, using my shirt like a basket to collect as much as I could manage.
That night I slept on the ground without a fire and rose early to see if any of the folks in that sad conglomeration had anything worth bartering. At the last house on the edge of a wide arroyo, I was greeted by a man who called himself a traveling preacher. He was side-whiskered with a shaved lip and wore a big wooden crucifix around his neck like an albatross.
“Come on inside, son, and bask in the light of the Lord,” the man said.
I thanked him with a silent nod. Before I was five paces into the cramped house, I learned the man had been as far south as Georgia and as far west as Oregon and ran his church out of his traveling bag.
“Ain’t so many like me no more,” the preacher said. “Folks that live near steeples have got God easy. It’s the ones out here in the rough that need faith more urgently than all the rest and so is why I’ve committed myself to making sure that neither hell nor high water nor drought nor blight of any devil-kind keeps folks from being able to worship the Lord appropriately.”
I was so rot from my travels I could smell my own horrible odor through my flannel suit. I took off my hat in the scullery and sat down at the table.
“Can you speak English, son?” the preacher man asked.
I tossed a gold piece on the table. “By the dollar full.”
The preacher perked up. “That’s a handsome coin.”
“I trust you have a hot breakfast on the boil.”
The preacher put his lower lip over his upper. “This ain’t no restaurant.”
I tossed another coin on the table.
“Well, I was done full myself already. I got coffee and chicken tamale and the works, yessiree,” the preacher said. As soon as he scooped up my two coins, he transformed from a man of the pulpit to a man of the apron and served me a plate of everything he had on the stove: fried taters, a mess of beans, flour tortillas, and chicken tamale. He poured me a cup of undercooked coffee from a granite pot, and gave me a glass of goat milk. I devoured the food and asked if the man had any eggs.
“Ain’t seen a chicken in these parts for some time,” the man said.
“I’m eating chicken.”
“That’s canned. Been eating it since I passed through Kentucky.”
“Mmm,” I said with a full mouth. “You’re a daisy, Mr. Preacher Man. I’ve been living off cattleman’s gumbo for a month.”
“Cattleman’s gumbo?”
“That’s grass and flowers boiled in creek water. One more teaspoon of that and I was sure my gut was going to burst.”
“You’re a bundle of nerves, son. You need the Lord in your life.”
I twirled my fork in the air. My mouth too full to force in another bite. “I need ham in my belly. A sacred something can only fill the soul if the stomach ain’t empty.”
“That’s desperation talking.”
I shook my head. “That’s biology talking back.”
“What’s your life’s ambition, son?”
“My life’s ambition?” I chewed and chewed and thought on the question. “To live so long I don’t have no regrets for living.”
“That’s the talk of a man with a sinful past. After you eat, you should repent.”
“I was entertaining the idea of a nap.”
“Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“I’d accept the King of Squeedunk as the one true creator and name my horse after your firstborn if you had another plateful to part with.”
The preacher took my plate and refilled it from his giant cook pan over a woodstove that was hot enough to smelt pig iron.
I had the fork in my mouth again. “Thank you, waiter.”
“I’m a servant of God,” the preacher snapped.
“Well, I must be God then because you’re serving me right fine. Now how’s about another cup of that brown water you’re passing off as coffee?”
The preacher snatched the plate away from me and tossed the food back into his pan, scraping it clean.
I rose from my chair like a man ready for a bra
wl. “I gave you two double eagles for that grub. That’s more than I’d pay for a T-bone in a New York restaurant. Now you fill that plate back up you sonofabitch, or I’ll fill it myself and take back my gold and maybe even give you a good backhand for upsetting me.”
“I will not have blasphemy spoken in my home.”
“You’ll have that and more if you want coin to pay for your Bible leather.”
The preacher stood firm. “I won’t have threats, either. Kindly leave, sir, and take whatever devil’s gotten inside you right along with you.”
I strutted right up to the preacher as if ready to strike him but only patted him lightly on the cheek and let out a belly laugh. I yanked my plate back and began piling up beans and tamale with a wooden spoon. “I like your stuff, Mr. Preacher Man. Glad to meet a man of faith that ain’t a wimp like most the rest of your kind.”
“I asked you to leave.”
“And I decided to stay,” I said and went back to the crooked little table with a full plate in hand. “Say, bub, have you got a wash bucket around here? Could use me a good soak. I smell worse than a paper mill on a hot day.”
The preacher frowned but could do nothing to get rid of me. He joined me at the table and, as if studying a wild animal, watched me inhale his food. I paid him for a tub of hot water and a cake of soap and had myself a bath and took a nap on the preacher’s cot. I’d been sleeping out of doors since fleeing Chicago and even that little bit of sackcloth pulled taut on some old laundry poles felt as comfortable as goose down.
I woke late in the evening and listened to the preacher’s sermon for the townsfolk in the center of their makeshift neighborhood. Afterward, I lured a few of the older men into a card game behind one of their huts. One of them kept a little frontier whiskey in a carboy wrapped in rope. We had a grand old time sipping the gunk and worrying our aces and deuces over a pot of nothing more than a few bent pennies as the stars filled the sky. When the rest of the players turned in for the night, I went out into the long grass and sat listening to a quiet so stark I could hear my own pulse.
Come daybreak I said goodbye to the preacher and bought a few cans of his chicken tamale and red beans and dry soda biscuits for the days ahead. I saddled my pony after feeding it some grain and headed north over a piece of high prairie. It was still young in the summer, and soon the air filled with the throbbing sound of grasshoppers. By noontime on my third day of traveling after leaving the preacher’s house, they were so thick that they darkened the sun like a penumbra. In those wild places they arrived by the thousands like a plague of locusts, carried by the zephyrs in the same fashion fish go along an ocean current, thick as rain shadows.
They descended in droves and destroyed whole acres of land in giant disintegrating feasts and floated off again aboard another tide of wind. I’d heard stories about grasshopper clouds so dense they crashed through windows in dizzy clots, had to be shoveled off rooftops and railroad tracks. When in full force, grasshoppers were more destructive than anything else on the prairie. Blizzards and cyclones and grass fires could not contend with their horrible circumstance. I was glad as I’d ever been to be clear of their path come the time I crossed an oxbow lake at the top of Comanche country.
Another week had gone by when I thought myself to be somewhere in middle Oklahoma. I swigged water from my canteen and glassed the region to the north with an old spyglass. Nothing in sight for another day’s worth of riding but more chop hills and soapweed clumps. Scattered among the tall grasses were a few decrepit oaks, sword-shaped yucca, and pink wild onion blooms.
Before riding again, I looked at the horizon behind me to see a line of smoke spilling out in coils a mile away. This was not another cloud of grasshoppers. I could tell from its shape and color that this was the smoke of a prairie fire. The wind was blowing at my back and soon the flames would be upon me even if I were saddled on a thoroughbred race horse. The heavy growth of dry grass under the burning sun was quicker kindling than gun powder. Given the height of the smoke, I knew the fire was spreading at a speed faster than any animal or machine in creation.
Still there was nothing to do but spur my half-hearted pony into the fit of its life, hollering and kicking her into a fury like I was coming down the last furlong of the Epsom Derby. I leaned low, keeping my head nearly upon the nape of my horse’s neck with one hand gripping the pommel of my saddle as we flew through the grassland that had no end in sight.
The flames were gaining and grew taller than a city skyline. Once more than a mile off, the fire was now less than a quarter mile behind us, and I felt the heat at my back. Birds screamed through the air. Some sailed too low and had all their feathers burned from their bodies and dropped down like stones into the fire to perish.
Just when the flames were so close that I considered shooting my horse and then myself, I saw two Indians ahead of me. A squaw and what looked to be her daughter were running on foot, their tribe nowhere in sight. The afternoon sky as dark as if filled with storm clouds. When I was upon them, I slowed my horse to scoop them both up. The squaw climbed on behind me and squeezed her daughter between us. It was a fool’s errand to take on the extra weight, but I couldn’t have ridden past them knowing that all I was doing was extending my own life a mere few minutes more than their own.
My horse panted severely and was on the verge of collapse when we came upon the oddest and grandest sight: an oasis of short grass bordered on the backside by a rocky cliff. I spurred my pony’s flanks until I broke skin, begging her for one last sprint toward the lowland. We didn’t reach that rough and low chunk of grass with more than seconds to spare. A half a minute later and we would have burned alive. My horse fell over sideways when I finally let up on the reins and dismounted. The ends of her tail were singed and her skin was so warm that some of her fur had turned colors. The two Indian women I’d saved embraced each other and chanted and cried in deep bellows.
I knelt down, resting my butt on the back of my boots. The fire engulfed everything around us but was unable to spread against that stunted oasis. I was as drained as a spent athlete. Like my poor horse’s hide, my back was so warm it was a wonder my clothes hadn’t combusted. The smoke was smothering, and I put my shirt over my mouth, using the fabric as a filter. I couldn’t see more than a few feet around me. The entire prairie as fumy as the afterglow of cannon warfare on a battlefield.
Nausea dizzied my head, and I vomited from all the smoke I’d inhaled. I could not quit puking, and my eyes burned to near blindness. Once my stomach stopped seizing, I crawled over to my pony and rubbed her neck and kissed her as deeply as one might give a goodbye smooch to a dying lover. She was breathing so hard I thought her lungs might never fill. Over and over I whispered into her ear, “Thank you for saving my life,” until I collapsed next to her on the ground from a fatigue so strong it felt like falling backwards into death.
The next morning my horse was dead. The wildfire had finally extinguished itself, leaving behind a wasteland of scorched earth. The oasis of stunted grass, which had saved my life and the lives of the two Indian women, served as a firebreak, the flashover spreading around us in a giant circle. In every other direction, the charred landscape had turned the earth into rock and dust. The prairie was still smoking slightly in some places, giving off wisps from the blackened ground as if the entire range had been doused all at once. Isolated fire bands still flickered in spots. The tall grass was burnt down to the roots so completely it revealed a new shape to the land: pocked and cratered as the surface of the moon and nearly the same color.
I spooned my dead horse, rubbing her along her ribcage.
The two squaws came over and plopped down next to me, their skin and long buckskin breechcloths covered in soot. The older of the two wore her hair short and parted down the middle, exposing a line in the center of her scalp that was painted with yellow clay. Her daughter, or at least what I guessed to be her daughter, wore a single feather and
an array of beads in her long braids. Beneath the ash on their faces, their cheeks were covered in orange circles of grease paint.
They spoke to me in clipped phrases, repeating the words kuuna and puuku and paa over and over while they pointed north. From their gesturing and grunts, I was finally able to figure they were Comanche women and meant to show me to their tribe. How far away their camp was and how long we would have to walk I could not ascertain.
I grabbed up my grub bag, which still contained a few cans of chicken tamale, and took my shotgun out of my saddle scabbard and strapped it over my back and left everything else behind, including my horse.
Without means to bury her, I left her in the same position she had fallen to die. I felt as sorry for the loss as I had about anything else I’d ever experienced and set to crying so hard it left streaks down my ashen cheeks. Once on foot, the mother squaw offered me the buffalo pouch she used as a water bag. A few dribbles were left and I shook them into my mouth, barely enough to wet my tongue.
Together we walked across the smoldering fields. I allowed them to lead the way, trailing by a few yards. Twelve noon and it was still as dark as twilight. A fire cloud seemingly large enough to cover the entire state remained in the phosphorescent sky, as widespread as volcanic ash. I marveled at its size, voluminous enough to produce its own weather.
We trudged over the ash grove at the pace of a funeral march. Wherever prairie dog holes had been smoked out, the dead carcasses of rattlesnakes and owls who had invaded those underground homes overnight were not far away. By and by we came across a brook bordered by trees that had been burnt as thin and limbless as street poles. We washed our faces and drank from our cupped hands, even though the water was full of ash, and kept moving north.
World, Chase Me Down Page 32
