World, Chase Me Down

by Andrew Hilleman

  “The money you got from that kidnapping?” Hattie scoffs. “I won’t have it.”

  I help myself to another spot of brandy. I say, “That was thirty years ago and more.”

  “I won’t have it,” she says again.

  “Then it’ll just sit there in the ground.”

  “You won’t go for it, yourself?”

  “No. I reckon not. Unless you wanted me to accompany you.”

  Hattie tosses the map.

  “We could be happy again for what short while we have left,” I say. “It’s not such an extravagant idea.”

  “It’s all extravagance and nothing else.”

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s all it’s ever been,” I say, step forward, and plant a deep kiss on Hattie’s lips. She doesn’t fight me off but doesn’t return the affection either. I linger only for a couple seconds. I refit my hat to a jaunty tilt and go to her door again, ready to leave. We stare at one another. I rub my lips with two fingers. We stare at each other longer before I step out. A farewell smooch for old times’ sake.

  Here’s another thing I will cherish in sadness.

  It’s hard to believe I’ve survived this long.

  I always behaved like I’d be dead before I was forty. Yet, here I am still. It’s kind of cruel to think about. Washing my underwear in my wall sink with blue starch. Heating my pottage over a cookstove that barely gets hot enough to bring water to boil. My skivvies are worn to threading, and from my pottage, I tongue a strand of hair and pull it out of my mouth to see it’s as long as a spaghetti noodle.

  But. I’m not dead. There’s a twinkle left yet.

  Some things must be dug up.

  I book passage on a train to Arizona to get what’s left of the Cudahy gold. A long trip, yes. I have no other program. The railroad goes only so far. I must walk the remaining six miles from the depot to Nogales. Desert heat thrashes the earth. After an hour of walking my socks are as soaked as if I had bathed in them. I might not make it far. The mercury is nearly in the triple digits, and the pounding sun could roast a man half my age.

  I stop to relieve myself. My urine is dark. The odor as strong as brine. My canteen is dry, and I dig for groundwater under a clump of cactus flower, finding enough to wet my swollen tongue and push onward.

  Come nightfall I set up camp along a tiny sliver of forded brook. I manage a small fire with the flint and char cloth from my tinderbox. Dry my wool socks by draping them on the end of a stick and holding them above the fire like bait on a fishing line. For supper I munch on wafers wrapped in wax paper and a can of chicken paste. Drink a little barleycorn and lots of creek water and sleep on a bed of slough grass.

  The brook gurgles behind me. I wash my hands from my canteen and light the end of a green cigar. After finishing it down to the nub, I douse the small fire and sleep the rest of the night next to the smoldering embers with nothing but the stars for covering.

  By the next midday, I reach Nogales. I’m hot and tired, my clothes stick to my skin and my neck is burnt from the sun. According to my wrinkled section of map, the nectarine orchard isn’t more than a mile away. I hurry over to a stone well and drink from a ladle in the bucket until my belly is as full as if I’d eaten two suppers. The water is barely potable. I can taste the iron on my lips.

  At a local apothecary, I purchase a small tin of willow extract pills for headaches, a box of ammunition for my revolver, and two bottles of cream soda. After an hour of sitting in refrigerated air, I’m rejuvenated enough to hoof it toward the orchard where the remaining share of the Cudahy gold is still buried.

  Or so I hope. Who knows what may have happened to it by now. It takes me a while to find the orange river. The Santa Cruz. The water as bright as cinnamon. I follow its moccasin bend to the spot marked on my map. Clouds tear apart and knit back together. Airglow in the gaps of sky. Rakings of desert light, pale as moonbeams, shoot through cloudbreak.

  The ground is as hard as frozen rock and as hot to the touch as cooking stones. I dig and dig until my arms quake. After two hours of working my shovel, I’ve barely made a deep enough hole to bury a cat in a shoebox. It takes my every last energy and every last sliver of daylight before my shovel bangs on iron.

  I fall to my knees and paw away at the dirt. There she is. Our old carriage trunk. I pop open the lid with my jackknife, and the smell hits me first. My heart skips two beats. The hidden gold is right where Billy and I had buried it more than thirty years ago.

  I gasp. Open my mouth to the sky.

  The first time I plunk down one of those gold coins to pay for a glass of brandy in a saloon or a cup of coffee at a lunch counter, the clerk in his funny wedge hat will raise an eyebrow and look me over suspiciously.

  He’ll say: “That’s some curious coin, mister.”

  I will smile. Give him pause.

  Ask him for directions to Sunburst or Shinbone. I’m heading east. Or west. Whatever notion comes to me in the moment. Take a good long look, friend. Telephone my description and destination to the authorities.

  “An old man in a linsey-woolsey shirt riding a blue roan,” he’ll say over the wire.

  “Yes, that’s right, officer. An old man on a blue horse. A linsey-woolsey shirt. You know. One of them old-timey threads with yarn flowers stitched all over it.

  “He said he was headed up Nebraska way.

  “Yes, sir. Very suspicious this coin. Come on down to the store and take a look-see for yourself. Yes, sir. A damn old coin. A liberty gold coin. Issued 1900. He gave it over for a glass of brandy and asked for no change.

  “Yes, sir. He’s probably one of them goddamn highwaymen.”

  Then the clerk will ring off.

  I will be pursued again.

  The bandits of today use petrol automobiles for fast getaways, and the criminals of tomorrow will use celestial flying machines beyond our current imaginations. But for now, for the sake of the past, for that last bit of faraway sun going down behind the ancient hills, they still might give hunt to an old man on a hobbled nag.

  There’s still some promise left in a life lived under moonlight. South has always been a fine direction for a man on the downslope. Florida has a promise particular. State shaped like a gun could use a good gunman. I will cut as many capers as luck will allow by day, and by night, I’ll rumba in Cuban-themed ballrooms in ghostly creole hotels. There’ll be plates of fried plantains and black beans and plenty of sugarcane rum. I’ll slap my guns at bank managers wearing their sleeve garters and hullo to all the dark ladies in the perfumed whorehouses and ride under scudding clouds tracing transparent over the sun. I will hear the summertime coyotes yip loneliness, and I will howl back in my own song and be not remorseful of my time above ground when some lawman from Gainesville or Clearwater in snakeskin boots finally guns me down in a bog.

  There are wonders I’ve yet to see or have only seen in part.

  I will gig my horse and set off to find them.

  And, for one final time, if fate be the same inescapable doxy I’ve always known her to be, this world will be chasing me down yet.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PAT CROWE’S STORY is a true story. However, his story as it’s told in World, Chase Me Down is a work of fiction. In retelling this story, I have tried to stay true to the historical accuracy of the main events as best I could. That said, many elements were changed for the sake of creating a strong plot and characters. I built this story from a foundation of fact, then molded the story and its details to create the fiction. Many names have been changed. Names that were not changed are not representative of their actual, real-life persons, but of my own imagination.

  In creating fiction from history, I relied on many texts centering around, not only the story of Pat Crowe, but also the backdrop of Omaha during the turn of the twentieth century. That list includes Spreading Evil: Pat Crowe’s Autobiography by Pat Crowe; Pat Crowe
: His Story, Confession, and Reformation by Pat Crowe; The Last Outlaw: The Life of Pat Crowe by John Koblas; A Dirty, Wicked Town by David L. Bristow; and Political Bossism in Mid-America by Orville D. Menard. I also relied on the historical collections of the Omaha World-Herald and the Omaha Bee provided by the Omaha Public Library.

  I’d also like to note: Large parts of Edward Cudahy Jr.’s ransom letter and Pat Crowe’s confession letter are taken directly from Pat Crowe’s autobiography, Spreading Evil. Likewise, large parts of the closing argument by Pat’s attorney Albert S. Ritchie were taken from his actual final address to the jury in the book Pat Crowe: His Story, Confession, and Reformation by Pat Crowe. All three historical documents were altered for the purposes of this fictional retelling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY DEEPEST THANKS to everyone at Penguin Books and to my editor, John Siciliano, for his support and faith in this book. I owe a great debt to my agent, Christopher Rhodes, who plucked this novel out of obscurity and took a giant leap of faith on my behalf. His guidance and tireless effort is something I can never repay.

  For all of my writing teachers at both Creighton University and the University of Northern Michigan that have helped me along the way, especially Susan Aizenberg, Katie Hansen, Jennifer Howard, Brent Spencer, and Mary Helen Stefaniak. Without their tutelage and the generous sharing of their knowledge over the years, this book would never have been possible. Also, every city deserves a library as devoted to the preservation of its local history as the good folks at the Omaha Public Library do every day—thank you.

  There are also many others who gave me support through the years: Justin Daugherty, Colin Clancy, Ted Wheeler, Timothy Schaffert, Elizabeth Rosner, Ross Browne, Jane Ryder, Ian Pelnar, Leslie and Jared Birchard, Taylor Brown, Rebecca Johns, Laura Soldner, J. D. Rummel, Russell Prather, Brian James Beerman, Amanda and Kyle Gilbertson, and Michael Burke.

  Finally, to all of my family and friends, I owe you everything. For all your love and support, thank you to my parents, Dan and Nancy. For his friendship and exceptional technical wizardry, my brother Thomas. And, last but certainly not least, for my wife April and my daughter, Cecelia. I love you both more than you will ever know.

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