I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  “You killed any?”

  “Ain’t sittin’ on Murderer’s Row for violent knittin’.”

  “They gonna hang you?” Starr looked around at the condemned men lounging and spitting against the backdrop of black bars. He inhaled their stink. He hadn’t thought about dying that day.

  “That’s what they want.”

  Rufus shook his head. “It ain’t right.”

  “White folks like killin’ Indians.”

  “My Mama said they want what they want.”

  “Always listen to your Mama, son,” he said absently, “unless she married a white drunk sonofabitch.”

  “No, sir. My Daddy’s all Creek.”

  In the mindless prison routine, Starr sometimes let himself forget. ‘They gonna hang you?’ the boy had asked. It should have been impossible to forget—that they wanted to snuff him out, to squish him like a fly on glass, a splat of blood and wiped away. At that moment, he was glad he had killed that deputy. An act of preemptive revenge. He thought that he should have killed more, done more damage to warm flesh instead of cold cash. Right then, he regretted that he had not been born a killer. Were he more like Cherokee Bill, there would have been more right in old man Parker trying to kill him. As it stood, it was just another white man’s malevolence, this time dolled up as justice.

  He saw his scowl reflected in Rufus’ face. “Ignore me, boy,” Starr said. “Just musin’. How long you in here for?”

  “A little over fifty more days. I got ninety for liquor.”

  “You know they plan to hang Bill, too.”

  “Not if I got something to say on it.”

  Starr smiled. “Then let’s see what you got to say. Come ‘round tomorrow and meet Bill.”

  Starr abruptly turned and left. He didn’t want to see the unfettered elation on the boy’s face. He didn’t know why he felt guilty. Buck was getting what he wanted—even more… to serve Bill’s interest. He’d achieve his dream and then some. ‘If something happens… if he dies in the process, well...’ Starr thought somewhat unconvincingly, ‘at least he’ll die happy.’

  ~

  When Henry Starr walked Rufus into Bill’s cell, the great man was pissing in his bucket. When finished, Bill turned, tucking himself back into his pants, shook some drops from his boot and walked toward Rufus. He stretched out his hand. Rufus sighed with relief at the great honor. He took the hand in his and fought the urge to envelop it in both to feel its warmth and significance. He nodded frantically in affirmations of everything and nothing… of the moment. He looked at Starr as if to ensure that there was a witness and ensure himself that it was real.

  “I read all about how you shot and killed your first man when you was twelve,” Rufus said. “They say you killed more the law don’t even know about by the time you was fifteen.”

  “White men, too,” Starr added.

  “How do you like our white Indian,” Bill said, pointing to Starr.

  “A man is more than what’s on the outside. You remember that, boy.”

  “Hates white men with a passion. Too bad he is one. One day he’ll have to blow his own head off.”

  “The judiciary is doing all in its power to make that unnecessary.”

  Bill sat down on his cot while Starr leaned himself comfortably against the cell bars. Rufus stood alone in the middle of the cell. Bill spat chew against the wall.

  “What you want with me?” Bill asked.

  Taken aback, Rufus looked to Starr for assistance but got a sly grin. After a moment of panic, he conjured the grit to answer.

  “I wanna know what it’s like.”

  “To be me?” Bill smiled.

  “A real Indian, not doin’ with white folks.”

  Bill looked at Starr, a bit impressed. He thought about it for a moment. “I ain’t thought of it like that,” Bill said. “I guess it’s true that I don’t ride much with the herd.”

  “I told you,” Starr interjected. “I told you.”

  “I just done what I done,” Bill said. “Never thought much about it.”

  “Didn’t you know early on that you was gonna be a great outlaw?” Rufus asked.

  “When I was twelve years old, I shot my brother-in-law ‘cause he was a jackass liked to knock folks around. Just happened. My parents left when I was seven. Happened. That’s all. I did what I did an’ what I wanted.”

  Rufus smiled and rushed toward Bill’s cot. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Doin’ what you want. You and the Cook brothers and Ned Christie and Apache Kid…”

  “What he means, Bill,” Starr said, “is Indians livin’ as free men, right? In our own Territory, right?

  Rufus nodded vigorously.

  “Men in their own Territory in the open land,” Starr clarified.

  “No one like Callahan whuppin’ you for speakin’ Creek or readin’ about folks like you.”

  “Who’s Callahan?” asked Bill.

  “He ran the Mission School I went to. I took his whip from him and hit him with it. He said I was damned.”

  “Join the crowd, boy,” Bill said with a wave of the hand indicating all of Murderer’s Row. “They didn’t think much of my salvation at my Indian school neither.”

  “All damned by white men,” added Starr.

  “It ain’t right,” said Rufus.

  Bill was surprised at a soft note of anger inside him. A bit of outrage. He’d been listening to Starr too long, he thought. But nonetheless, there it was. White men had chased him for most of his life. His Daddy ran to Indian Territory after the war to escape a lynching for siding with the Union. When they wanted to hang him for protecting his colored soldiers from white hunters and cowboys, he went AWOL. Alone with his mother, Bill bounced from here to there, mostly raised by an old Negro woman when he wasn’t imprisoned in some Indian School full of God and white men. He looked at Buck and wondered if he had lived a similar life. He felt a sympathy for the boy and a little sorry for himself. He literally shook his head to free himself from both.

  “No, it ain’t right,” Starr reiterated.

  “You shut up white man.” Sympathy for the boy and sorry for himself. Both annoyed him. Of late, he had suffered these sentimental intrusions. Scheduled to die in a month’s time, he felt weakened. He doubted himself. He had never feared anything because he knew without thinking that one thing happened and then another and another and there wasn’t a damned thing a man could do about any of it. Now, he lost the only shelter and comfort he had ever known: the firm knowledge that it was all a series of unrelated, unmotivated and random happenings. He now put one event before another and they seemed to tell a story, leading here. It had started with, “if I had done this, then maybe that,” which made it seem as if he had control and it was all his own doing as opposed to events that heaven and earth conjured with the whimsicality of Spring weather. Inside the shelter of seeing it all beyond his power, he had floated above fear; and fearlessness let him do what he wanted and take what he had to. In a world of infinite indifference and utter randomness, nothing mattered. Not his Daddy, not his Ma. Killing didn’t matter. It happened, like lightning. Men died. A bullet was no different from falling off a cliff. Men were no more or less dead either way. But now he felt fear, and he couldn’t tell if it welled up from wanting to live or horror at dying. Starr should not have convinced him to talk to this boy. It was May 17th and he would hang on June 25th. At this point, escape plans only embellished his desperation.

  “I got my own gang now, outside o’ Tulseytown or Okmulgee,” Rufus spoke into the long pause. “If you all escape you can join up with us. We only done liquor so far, but there’s five of us an’ we can do a lot more.”

  “I don’t want to die here,” Bill said as he lay back on his cot and turned his face toward the wall. Fear had changed him. Acknowledging it was hateful to him. It diminished him in his own eyes.

  “Amen,” Starr added to Bill’s first full-throated affirmation of his plan. Starr placed his arm around Rufus’ shoulder
and accompanied him from the cell. “Let Bill rest,” he said. “Bill’s been doin’ a lot o’ thinkin’. You and me,” he added as he patted Buck’s shoulder, “you an’ me got things to talk about.”

  4

  How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life and of one organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.

  - Charles Darwin

  “The Origin of Species”

  ~~~

  “The first one at the ranch, the colored man… he was acrawlin’ and amoanin’ after he got gutshot the first time. I saw the blood pourin’ out o’ him. I never seen so much. I seen little bits come outta me an’ it stopped so I’d pick the little hard bit off to see some more but that man poured it all over the ground. I wondered if you could plant something in it an’ it would grow and would it be red but I didn’t have nothin’ to plant. I went up to him an’ looked at his face to see what it looked like an’ I laughed. He was all dark ‘cause o’ bein’ a nigger and wet from sweat and he had white patches from the dust that stuck. He was a spotty face. I seen a clown before so I laughed. The others didn’t. I guess they never seen clowns. I kicked him with my foot to see if he turned over like I done with half dead critters I seen but he didn’t so I told ‘em that he wouldn’t an’ they said to just kick him harder and push him over so I did. He was like big bug on his back, his legs all twitchin’. The shirt on his chest was all soakin’ red and he was gushin’ more. I bent down to look close. I tol’ the rest of ‘em to come see, but they didn’t. He gushed blood like someone was pumpin’ the handle… whooshhh… whoooshhh. I think they was chicken. I touched it and it felt warm and good. I put my whole hand there. He moaned when I felt the little hole and the tear in the cloth. Then I felt the hole in his belly ‘cause I wanted to see how deep it was. I put my finger in it and it went all the way in. I pulled my hand up an’ it was red. I showed it to ‘em an’ they all kinda moved away so I chased ‘em. I was gonna brand ‘em with my red hand. They ran and I chased ‘em.”

  - Theodosia Swain

  ~~~

  Having alluded to the subject of reversion, I may here refer to a statement often made by naturalists--namely, that our domestic varieties, when run wild, gradually but invariably revert in character to their aboriginal stocks.

  - Charles Darwin

  “The Origin of Species”

  ~

  Armed with his new and extraordinary mission to free Cherokee Bill and thus give birth to the greatest gang of Indian outlaws that the Territory—or the world—had ever known, Rufus swelled in his own estimation. He drew closer to his heretofore nebulous vision of himself as redeemer of men like Bill, Henry Starr, his father. Redeemer of the hopelessly ravaged and the unjustly damned.

  This was a man’s grave task, but he attacked it with a boy’s buoyant spirits. He determinedly marched about the prison. He worked to hide the fact that he was laden with great secrets. He kept an even temper; but he wore his status proudly nonetheless. Prisoners read his newfound gravitas as recognition of the strange reputation he’d gained for sycophancy gilded with a uniquely carefree brutality.

  “What you all puffed up about?” his cell mate slurred at him.

  Rufus ignored him.

  “You get to your precious Nigger Bill?”

  Rufus pulled the makeshift truncheon from his pants and brandished it.

  “You keep it up,” he threatened.

  The cell mate swigged from his bottle, trying to swallow his fear of a boy he once mocked.

  Rufus was all eyes now. He watched the guards’ and turnkeys’ comings and goings. He noted the inmates’ routines on every floor and the Trustees’ methods of disposing their duties. They had six weeks. Just six weeks. It was the middle of May and Bill would be dead in late June.

  Starr was charged with procuring a gun, the most important and difficult task. He knew that none of the guards or turnkeys would get him one—no matter how much he paid—for fear he’d shoot them with it. Most of the prisoners were drunk or crazy and trustworthy as snakes. He wrote coded letters to contacts on the outside—queries on the imminent death of a sickly relation and the urgent need for hard-to-procure medicines, but he got no response until he learned that a cohort of one of his former cohorts, serving time on the second floor, would be released on June 3rd. Rufus served as go-between. Through Rufus, Starr negotiated a price with the soon-to-be-released prisoner to secure a revolver and some shells. Based on his observations of prison routine, Rufus told the inmate to drop the equipment in the outhouse lime stored near the cesspit. When the buckets were dumped, Trustee’s threw a shovelful of lime on top. A harsh substance, no one touched it, and more importantly, no one sifted it for contraband as they did with piles of dirt, bulk foodstuffs and the like.

  They waited. First they waited a week for the prisoner to gain his freedom. When his release date came and went, they waited for word of the gun. None came. After several days, Starr grew nervous. He started scrambling for another way to procure a gun. Escape plans were like lice in that prison—crawling on every head—and he talked up the remaining candidates, the one’s he hadn’t touched before, men lower on the hierarchy; he felt nervous at his reduction to querying lesser men with shorter chances of success. He never told anyone that Cherokee Bill was part of the plan. The information would have been a surer road to the informant’s early release than any escape attempt.

  A few days later, Starr found his plan B. A half-drunk Trustee named Sherman Vann insisted he could smuggle a gun inside the prison. As Starr assumed he would, Vann insisted that he and his buddy come along. Out of options, Starr agreed. He told Bill, fearing a tirade. Bill hated sudden changes of plan and trusted very few, but Bill glared at Starr, and said nothing. In 13 days he was scheduled to hang.

  On Sunday, June 16th Starr approached Sherman Vann to get the gun. Vann showed up with a rotten-toothed, shit-eating grin instead.

  “I’ll keep ahold of it,” he smirked.

  Starr breathed deeply to maintain his composure. “That was not the agreement,” he seethed as he considered what to do. “But I am a flexible man,” he said steadily after a pause and a moment’s reflection. “And it’s my plan, which you don’t have. Without it, you’ll just get shot before the hangman gets you. So I got nothin’ to fear from you. You can keep the gun until… ,” Starr considered a moment, “… Friday. Then you’ll give it to me, and I’ll share the plan with you.”

  “You want me to get it from him?” Rufus demanded on learning of the treachery.

  “No. You do somethin’ and he’ll just run to the Deputies. Let it lie,” Starr said, secure that he had appealed to Vann’s self-interest. “Just let it lie.”

  Nonetheless, Rufus spied on Vann. He went where Vann went and searched wherever he left; but he never found the gun. He repeated the appeal to beat the hell out of him, but Starr insisted that Bill wouldn’t want it.

  The guards locked the prisoners in their cells each night. Bill’s cell was at the end of the first floor corridor. He was one of the last locked up. He planned to stuff some wadding into the keyhole, making it impossible to lock the cell. When both night turnkeys gathered to fix it, he’d grab the gun and jump them. He’d free Starr and they would run.

  They chose a Sunday. Even the murderers were low-key on Sunday—the turnkeys less alert. “Somethin’ about the Lord does it,” Starr had smiled, “keeps ‘em slow an’ simple.”

  On the appointed Friday, Starr approached Sherman Vann.

  “What you want?” Vann asked irritably.

  Starr did not reply. He knew he
didn’t need to.

  “I don’t know whatchu want,” Vann continued. “I surely don’t know.”

  “You need to gimme that gun.”

  Vann shook his head like an ill-tempered child. “I can’t,” he finally choked out. “It got stole.”

  Starr’s pulse rose. He felt the blood tingle beneath the skin on his face.

  “I ain’t lyin I swear. I been lookin’ for it up an’ down and I can’t find it. I don’t know who took it. I didn’t tell no one.”

  Starr grabbed Vann’s neck, rammed his shoulder into him, slamming him hard against the wall. “Are you lyin’ to me?” He grabbed Vann’s hair and smacked his head against the brick. It left a bloody smear.

  “I ain’t lyin,” Van blurted.

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  Starr smacked Vann’s head against the wall again.

  “You didn’t say nothin’?”

  “I was tryin’ to get it back. I thought I could.”

  Starr gave the bloodied head one more smack against the wall. Vann crumpled to the ground. “You are too stupid to kill,” he said. Starr looked up the corridor. His violence had not attracted much attention and there wasn’t a guard in sight. As he returned to his cell, he knew that he had two days to find another gun. He also knew that he couldn’t. It had taken him weeks to get hold of one he’d found and that happened so quickly and sloppily, it blew up in his face. He could try later, his internal euphemism for ‘after Bill had hanged,’ but he wouldn’t have the much-feared and very deadly Cherokee Bill at his side. With Bill, Starr’s chances of escape increased dramatically. Without him, the turnkeys would be far less cowed and far more aggressive in pursuit. His own odds of escape had diminished, Starr thought with a twinge of unselfish sadness, but due to the lateness of the hour, Bill’s had disappeared.