by David Fuller
The four men surrounded the vehicle. Not one of them looked around to see if their quarry was near. After an exchange, two went to the front and two to the rear. The grunting posse scraped the vehicle around on the driver’s door until the wheels aligned with the bottom of the slope. They converged on the slope above the vehicle, all four grabbed the roof’s edge, counted to three, and lifted. Longbaugh watched the roof brought to their belts, to their chests, then over their heads, where, arms fully extended, they stalled. A moment later, they heaved in unison and for an instant the automobile touched four wheels, but the momentum sent it leaning the other way, onto the far wheels, where it wobbled, almost going over onto the passenger’s door. There it paused, groaned, then slowly came back to four wheels and rested.
The men whooped and shook hands. Two returned to the second vehicle, while the other driver went and helped the limper back to his position on the front of the lead vehicle. That confirmed what Longbaugh had come to believe, that the man had been perched on the motorcar’s hood, attempting to track him, his face near the ground to follow Longbaugh’s trail. Sobering to see them track from an automobile. He missed the old days, when his pursuers were knuckleheads on horseback. With the knuckleheads riding Fords, there was always a chance they could get lucky.
They came on again, more slowly. They had proved themselves amateurs, and at that moment it hit him, a delayed reaction to his release from prison. He was free. The air was warm on his skin and clean in his nose. He was free and he felt good, he felt . . . better than good. He was on a horse, watching profoundly stupid men attempting to track him, and they had no chance whatsoever. He abandoned all caution, remembering the feeling as similar to the first time he took a bank. He decided to have a little fun. He headed in their direction until he intersected with their future path, then took the horse through a series of maneuvers. He made his trail so obvious that even they could follow his curlicued flight.
He stayed out of their sight, keeping half a mile’s distance between them, judging their location by the sound of their engines. He noticed a thicket of nettles with a space in between, judged the opening wide enough for the horse but not the vehicles, and saw a way to torment them. After carefully negotiating the horse safely between the bushes, he guided it to shelter in the rocks ahead so he could watch. The vehicles came up the trail following his tracks and drove directly through the space between the nettles, scraping any arms and legs that happened to hang outside the car’s profile. The men yowled in pain, and Longbaugh knew if they did not soon apply creek mud, they were in for a miserable night when the rashes blistered.
They quit the chase early as the afternoon aged. Any decent tracker could have guessed where he was, but none of these men were that tracker. They switched off their engines and waited for night, lighting their kerosene lamps, and making a small fire. Longbaugh moved in on foot and listened to their conversation, but he went away bored as they discussed not their strategy as a posse but the stinging itch of the nettles. He paused by one vehicle, on the side away from the campfire, saw a holstered gun hanging there, but finally did not trade his sad revolver for the better piece.
He left them behind in the setting sun. He rode across rocks and hard ground where, even if they bothered to follow, they would struggle to track him. Eventually there would be others on his trail, real men with knowledge and wisdom to supplement their modern tools, and he would need to be clever.
He had hoped to find tepees in the next valley, and was not disappointed. Another part of the old life that remained unchanged; when the natives traveled between reservations, they still made camp here. He rode in slowly, with his hands visible on the horn of his saddle, a caution left over from earlier days. He dismounted and approached an older man, recognizing the series of small circular tattoos on his neck as Arapaho. He was an elder, a medicine man, once a proud killer of whites. The Arapaho pretended to know him and offered a warm greeting. The man and his family had come north by way of Arizona. Longbaugh was surprised to hear Arizona had been made a state the year before. The Arapaho spoke of the changes to the land over the past decade, and Longbaugh revised his plan of escape based on the Arapaho’s particular account. Longbaugh was anxious to move on, but the man’s woman invited him to join their family for a meal, and he ate rabbit meat with corn tortillas. He luxuriated in the pleasure of decent food well prepared, and thought of how Etta was a terrible cook, and how badly he missed her burned casseroles. Whenever possible, he had tried to get to the kitchen ahead of her to start a meal. He smiled to himself as he ate the Arapaho woman’s food, thinking that if Etta knew he thought he was saving them from her cooking, she never let on. It was, of course, possible that she considered him the poor cook and had been humoring him. After the meal was over, Longbaugh refused the offer of white man’s whiskey, as he had many things on his mind and he didn’t want an intoxicant to distract him.
He stayed long enough to be polite, and saw they were glad when he was ready to leave. He mounted his horse and rode away from the tepees. The three-quarter waxing moon lit the hillside that carried him out of the valley. He traveled a long time until he was far from other human beings, in a barren place where the moonlight made few shadows. He consulted the angle of the Big and Little Dippers and judged the time to be near midnight. He was close to the canyon walls of an old hideout. The land was stark and silver with moon. It fit his state of mind. He hobbled the horse and left it behind, furthering his isolation. The ground was hard, cracked into puzzle shapes that curled up at the edges and crunched to powder under his boots. He found a tree standing alone, its trunk thick and gnarled, its arms weblike and almost without leaves.
He sat under it. Lightning flashed on the far side of a distant range and exposed its shape against the sky. He waited for the next flash. He was glad to sit alone and think, and he knew exhaustion in his bones. The past simmered and he allowed his mind to wander.
He thought of his time in prison. He had given himself up to protect her and was awarded more years than he had anticipated. Two different times in prison he had been involved in violent incidents. The first came early on and was unavoidable, but it had served to inoculate him for the rest of his stay. The second had happened recently and had surprised him. He had not expected it, a spasm of brutality from deep in his gorge. Old man Orley had pegged it. There was a story there, and in retrospect, it brought him grave discomfort. He had always defined himself a certain way, and now he struggled with his recognition of another side, no matter how he hoped to disguise it.
He was confused as to his true nature. How different was he from the man the world had defined? He was an ex-con as well as the man who had died a myth in South America, perceived as affable by the dead son of a dead sheriff, among others. In the first instance, he had been arrested and served time. Yes, he was changed, but in what way? The authorities used prison as a cudgel to punish a man’s outlaw acts. Had he been punished enough? Or did he still owe? Perhaps twelve years was too long a sentence, perhaps he had been overpunished and was due a peccadillo or two. Interesting thought, he mused. So who was he now? Despite the opinion of the state of Wyoming, he did not believe himself to be immoral. His code was strong, severe in many ways. He had paid a price that the rest of the gang had not. Were they better men for not getting caught? Or did they owe on their debt?
He flashed on the dead young man. Could the moment have been avoided, or did he secretly welcome the violence? He had killed in self-defense, but that did not help him. He grieved for that arrogant boy.
His mind drifted again. Silent lightning struck miles away revealing a foam of clouds on the far side of the mountains, followed in time by a curl of thunder no louder than the growl of his belly. She had stopped writing to him two years ago. The real hard time of his incarceration had begun with her sudden, unexplained silence, impossible to believe from the woman he loved. Sitting under the tree in the moonlight, he heard metal gates clang, clang open
, open to corridors of cells on a steep grade, sucking him back inside, and his brain warned that he was somewhere between awake and sleep, where he could not know reality from illusion. Gaslight flickered between bars, with unseen men taunting him from the far side of a cigar-smoke cloud. He knew he would be tested and a man burst through the smoke, Longbaugh ducking, a fist glancing off his ear, and he grabbed the man’s throat, crushing it to papery flakes, as if it was insect-infested pine under his fingers. He fought to extract himself from the dream, but his arms and legs were leaden, immobile, and yet somehow he was walking, walking a path, a path that brought him to a narrow boy standing in a field of poison purple larkspur, pleasant enough until he saw it was a boy with milk on his mustache raising Longbaugh’s good revolver and firing at his face, bullet spinning through a spew of yellow flame. A dream for sure, as he had time to duck from its path, and in that turn of his head he was facing the other direction and there she was at the chapel with the music in her heart and her infectious smile, slim in her wedding dress—do you take?—yes of course—say I do—all right, I will—laughing over it later in their honeymoon bed, between sheets, a lingering kiss, her smooth thighs cool against him.
She had helped him survive prison, the way she knew and understood him, the way she believed in him, allowing him to keep a grip on his identity. She did it with her words. With her letters. He fought to wake up, as he knew his dream was about to go sour, and he wanted to avoid the darkness of isolation and loneliness, but his exhaustion held him under and drowned him in imagery, and he remembered, remembered a train, train rushing, rushing below in the dark, and they leapt together, he and affable, round-faced Parker, known to the world as Butch, landing in unison on a passenger car, laughing in each other’s faces, Parker, who had escaped that day.
Butch. Longbaugh had been disoriented in prison after reports of his own death in another land, reported in ’09, a year after it was supposed to have happened, and he wondered, was he alive or had he died along with his name? It meant that Butch was gone, and the loss of his friend had carved out a hole in his marrow. But at least back then her letters still came from New York, for another two years they came, and, even more than before, they were his lifeline. If the unreality of his own death cloaked him in heavy moods, her letters were the link to stable truth, even if they were addressed to Alonzo rather than his real name. Her letters had come weekly, reliably, creating a need he did not know he craved, until there was nothing. A silence that had lasted the past two years. He took a step, expecting solid ground, and his foot fell through black space, dropping headlong into the empty abyss of her silence. He had blamed the guards, their one sure method of punishment, but the guards swore they withheld nothing. He continued to send his own letters to her until a visit from the warden, holding those very letters, all returned from New York City, someone else’s scrawl refusing them. From the bottom of the abyss he knew the truth and he believed it, there would be no more correspondence, and in the blackness came a stunning ache.
Bringing on the second incident. The big man had snickered, the big man who thought he was important enough to tease the legend, making his insinuation about Etta public. Longbaugh did not remember reacting, he only remembered his eyes unclouding to find the big man on his knees, bloody and cowering. This shocked him, first that he was capable of it, then that he had lost control. There were no repercussions—the big man did nothing after it happened, the big man’s friends did nothing, and no punishment came from the prison staff—as if no one believed Longbaugh capable of such fury.
The nightmare now let go and he drifted into an easy dream, the boy Harry growing up in Philadelphia, traveling west as a young man, breaking horses, living on ranches, the mind-numbingly dull winters, the first time he and the boys drank themselves stupid and robbed a bank, his favorite gun in his hand, a gun so polite that no one wanted to blame him.
His sleep went deep then, his dreams lost to him, and he rested.
• • •
HE RODE WEST for another two days and turned south near the Green River, heading for the Colorado/Utah border and the Outlaw Trail. He saw no one after him in that time and felt safe riding into Browns Park. He was on his way to an old hideout where he hoped to find certain things that he had hidden.
The way into the canyon was tricky and well disguised. Longbaugh maneuvered it effortlessly and saw no indication of recent visitors. The sun overhead pressed dense, compact shadows from every rock, tree, and bush, as well as one that traveled under his horse. The canyon was eerily empty, not that he wanted company, but he hadn’t remembered the air being quite so dead between the canyon walls. Perhaps because he had so often ridden in with loquacious Parker. In the pressing heat, he felt a cold trickle between his shoulder blades. He had remembered a breeze. Only the air above him moved, bending limbs that were out of reach. He rode with his head on a swivel, ears stretching out, overreacting to the sounds of nature. The noise of his horse’s hooves seemed to come from behind him, the creak of the leather saddle following a second too late. The horse sensed his tension and thought to rebel, but Longbaugh urged him on. Longbaugh thought that even the horse believed they were riding into a trap.
The passage opened and the inner canyon lay before him. He rode directly to the post office tree, where members of the gang left messages. He found a rolled-up scrap of paper, brittle now and brown-yellow, with a faded message in pencil that had endured any number of downpours to reach this state of illegibility. If it contained a warning, the danger was many years old. He had an ominous sense that he was being watched. He looked up the face of the canyon and was not reassured. He dismounted under the shade of the tree and pondered the surroundings. His eyes ran up the ridge to where the cabin sat. He could not see it, but he knew it was there.
Not a thing felt right to him. The sun was high, the sky a special shade of blue, the smell of sagebrush strong, and all of that made the sensation odder. What could be off on such a fine, clear day?
He remounted the horse and rode slowly for the trail that would eventually lead him up the canyon wall and carry him to the hideout.
He spent more than an hour when the ride would normally take half that, rounded the bend and came in sight of the structure. It appeared unchanged. The immediate area had not been cleared that season or possibly even the year before. That brought him hope. The cabin had been built with a unique floor plan, four rooms, each with its own entrance, and none of the rooms connected inside. He approached the door to the front room and stepped into quiet. Human life had not moved here for months, maybe years. His boots made tracks in the dust on the planks. Stove, kettle, pans hanging on the wall, a couple of chairs, a cot, cobwebs, little else. He took the lantern and a box of matches, and returned to the outside, chased by a shiver.
He left the horse and walked the slim trail that took him up to the caves. He passed a series of cave mouths until he came to one in particular. He lit the lantern while standing in the sun, and was unsure in the brightness whether the wick burned. He held his palm over the chimney and felt the sharp heat. He climbed the boulder that partly blocked the cave entrance and took hold of the base of a small scrub oak bush that was thicker now and grew in a place that worked as a handle so he could lower his weight inside. Once in the dark, he held the lantern up as his eyes adjusted. When he was satisfied he was alone, he stooped and moved deeper.
He remembered the way, and after twenty yards was able to stand, taking a left, a left, and a right, until he approached the hiding spot. It was clean and dry, a thin layer of dirt underfoot that showed no footprints, and wherever possible he walked on smooth rock to keep it that way. He found the place and set down the lantern and reached within a crevice between large rocks, and for a terrible moment thought that either someone had found it or he was in the wrong place. But he reached deeper, his shoulder pressed hard against the cold rock, patting the ground until his fingers touched fabric and he was relieved to pull
out the package. He unwrapped his old oiled canvas duster to reveal the Civil War haversack given to him as a gift by Etta’s uncle. He took a moment to appreciate it. Her uncle had been a high-ranking Union officer, so it was a fine one. The haversack itself was crafted of good leather, and its single shoulder strap was of the same leather. The flap was buckled with a belt-style closure, and he fed the tongue up through the frame of the buckle, pulled the prong from the punch hole, then lifted the flap to reveal the contents. It was all still there, the bills and coins. Fourteen years, undisturbed. The bulk of his share of the Wilcox train job in 1899, hidden in a rare moment of foresight when he had also thought to sew coins into his saddle. He knew Butch would never have touched it, no matter how quickly Butch went through his own share, but the others were less righteous. He thought again of Butch, buried somewhere in the ground of South America, and, being in a place where they had often been together, his heart was hollow with grief. While these moments now came rarely, when they did come they brought on a swift, chest-clenching sadness, and he paused until the ache began to ease. After a time, he went back to his work.
Under the haversack, wrapped in a smaller piece of oilcloth, was one of his guns, a classic Colt Peacemaker. This was the brother to the one stolen from him at Rawlins. He spent some minutes wiping it, admiring it, reassembling it, and loading it. He unloaded the cheap revolver and was about to break it down when he heard a sound and knew he wasn’t alone.
He spun on instinct and underhanded the old gun at the face of the man standing there, calling loudly “Catch!” The man dropped his own weapon and his lantern, and before the gun hit him in the nose, caught it with both hands. The man’s lantern broke and the flame went out, so that only Longbaugh’s lantern gave light.
