by David Fuller
“Hell and tarnation!” said the man.
Longbaugh strode past him, picked the man’s gun off the ground, and saw that the weapon was unloaded and a piece of junk. He handed it back so that the man now held two useless shooters. He brought his own lantern close to the man’s cleanly shaved face and recognized him.
“You were the cook,” said Longbaugh.
“And you—hey, holy—it can’t be, but—it’s you, ain’t it!?” The cook’s expression was incredulous. He shivered as if he was talking to a ghost.
“I need to go someplace people don’t recognize me,” Longbaugh said to himself.
“Ain’t this the damnedest thing, I mean, ain’t it? You’re really standing here, breathin’ and all, you ain’t a spirit or nothin’.” He reached out to poke Longbaugh as if to prove he was made of flesh, then thought better of it. “Guess you’re a might older, and I reckon you shaved your mustache. Damn, I thought, I mean we all thought, I mean, everybody, damn, Kid, you’re supposed to be dead!”
Longbaugh moved back to his gear, relieved to see the haversack flap in place, the contents hidden from the cook’s prying eyes. He did not remember the cook’s name. Howard. His name was Howard. No, not Howard.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well, I reckon I followed you. Got a little lost in the tunnels back there before I saw your light.”
He made his question clearer. “What are you doing at the hideout?”
“I guess I live here. How’d you survive Argentina?”
“Bolivia.”
Longbaugh inspected the man’s clothes. Cowboy clothes, but cheap, not made to last. A costume.
“Didn’t see tracks,” said Longbaugh. “No one’s been in that cabin.”
“Not in the front part.”
“No,” said Longbaugh, realizing his mistake. “But no tracks up here either.”
“Got to taking the other way, in case.”
“There’s another way?” Harvey, not Howard. Or Pete.
“Well, I reckon we blazed it some eight years back. Damn, it’s really you. You really are alive!”
Longbaugh put his weapon in his belt and walked past the cook and through the tunnel, carrying his lantern and his haversack.
He grabbed the scrub oak’s trunk to pull himself out, and from this angle, looking for it, he saw the second path. It would have been near impossible to see when approaching from the other direction. The cook came out behind him.
“You said ‘we.’”
“Yeah, that’s, well, you don’t know him. He’s new. Havin’ you here changes everything.” Longbaugh’s presence made the man disagreeably cheerful.
“He got a name?”
“John?”
“Is that a question?”
“No . . . I mean, his name is John.”
“What do you go by?”
“Well, they call me, uh . . .”
“Take your time.”
“You see, sir, we got this plan.”
“You and John.”
“Well, yeah.” He puffed his chest and looked important. “And we promised each other we’d use our new names until we did it. Pulled it off, I mean. And, well, it’s something you know about. We got designs on a train.”
Longbaugh said nothing. The cook’s smile faded until he looked a little ill. The longer Longbaugh was silent, the more uncomfortable the cook became.
“Look, it ain’t nothin’, I mean, you can have your name back. Both names. We didn’t hurt ’em, much.”
“Which one of you is Butch?”
The cook stood a little straighter. “Oh, I am.”
Longbaugh reconsidered him. He was dressed similarly to the way Parker had dressed. At least the way Parker had dressed when everyone called him “Butch.”
“So, John is . . . ?”
“Well, John grew a mustache and there’s, you know, a resemblance. Sort of. Or there was.”
The cook uncertainly pointed at Longbaugh’s clean upper lip with a timid finger. Then a strange expression crowded his face and he looked down at his own clothes. “About Butch. Is he, well, is he alive?”
“No idea. They got it wrong once, maybe they missed him, too.”
“So wait—so if you ain’t dead, who was there?”
“How would I know?”
“Maybe some guy dressed up like you.” The cook looked down at his own clothes, as if he was considering the irony. “Say, I reckon you could teach us. You could show us. No, wait just a minute, I know! You could come along! We could make a new gang.”
Longbaugh said nothing.
“I’ll pick a different name, of course.”
“Keep the goddamned name.”
They descended to the hideout and on the way down the cook mused aloud about “wasn’t it something” and “he’s alive” and “this changes everything,” but as they drew closer to the cabin, the cook went quiet with something new on his mind. Just before reaching the cabin door, the cook said, “He’s not a bad fellow, sir. And he likes being . . . well, he likes being you. That’s a compliment, right?”
The cook opened one of the back doors of the hideout. Longbaugh held back, looking in. He did not like the cramped mess he saw. Clothes piled and dishes stacked, furniture buried under trash. He did not enter.
“Where the fuck you been, Sandy?” said John, then saw Sandy was not alone. John jumped to his feet.
Sandy, thought Longbaugh. Yes. That was his name.
“This here’s . . . well, this here is . . .” Sandy turned and saw that Longbaugh had stayed outside. Sandy came back to the door. John followed. Better this way. Too many places in the room where a gun could be hidden, just out of sight under trash or heaps of clothing.
“Holy Christ!” said John, then looked at Sandy. “I thought you said he was dead!”
John was not quite drunk, but he was a few yards down the path. Longbaugh looked him over. He didn’t mind that Sandy did not resemble Parker, but this? John was also cowboyed up, every piece of gear one step too obvious, lacking taste and class. Longbaugh was disappointed. Some legacy. Whatever legend he had created now crashed against the image of John in his cheap costume. A pip-squeak imposter with a pathetic mustache.
“Harry Longbaugh,” said Longbaugh coolly, by way of introduction. He did not reach to shake John’s hand.
“Why didn’t you say he was still alive?” John spoke as if Longbaugh wasn’t there.
“Hell, I didn’t know.”
“Ain’t this somethin’.”
John sized up Longbaugh’s stance and demeanor, trying to mimic him, standing straighter, lifting his chin, sucking in his belly, tugging at a too-short shirtsleeve while sucking at the long strands of his scrawny mustache as if to bite them off his upper lip.
Longbaugh watched and waited.
“I was telling the Kid here that we got us some plans.”
“Well, what did he say? He like ’em?”
“Liked ’em fine.”
John tried to whisper to Sandy without moving his lips, as if Longbaugh wouldn’t hear him, saying, What about the split? and Sandy kept his back to Longbaugh, saying, With him along, I reckon we’re bound to get two, three times more, and John saying, They bring extra just ’cause he’s there? and Sandy saying, Glad you didn’t call me Butch back there.
Sandy wasn’t his real name, thought Longbaugh. They called him Sandy because his food always tasted like it had something small and foreign in it.
Sandy turned to Longbaugh as if he had been reading his mind. “You hungry? You want something? Why’n’t you c’mon inside.”
A memory taste of dry grit caught in his back teeth. “No, thanks.”
He thought he had better take this man John more seriously, and he gave him a full look. He couldn’t help but see him as one more j
ackass looking to make a name the easy way. John believed that if he could think of something, it ought to belong to him even if he wasn’t willing to do what it took to earn it. Unlike the young kid in the bar, this one did not have the excuse of a simmering grudge. He was simply built from greed and John was bound to decide at some point that he wouldn’t want to share the name he had appropriated. Near as he could tell, John was unarmed, but if there was to be trouble, Longbaugh wanted it on his terms in a place of his choosing. He was glad these boys did not know what was in his haversack.
“We got big fuckin’ plans,” said John.
“No. You don’t.”
“We do. And we’re willing to share, tell you all about ’em.”
“You don’t want to rob a train.”
“We don’t? The hell you say, I think we do.”
“You do not.”
“Well, then, you say it, what do we want to do?”
Longbaugh said nothing.
“We goin’ to get ourselves in some trouble, is what we gonna do,” said John, both prideful and belligerent. Sandy the cook looked a little sick to his stomach, watching John preen.
“You do not have the makeup for train robbery,” said Longbaugh.
“We got to do something; we got to make up a plan and get out there and fuckin’ get into all of it, otherwise we wasted all this time. We got to do something.”
“Maybe you’ll think of it.” Longbaugh stepped backward into the sun and turned without another word and walked quickly to the front. They stood dumbfounded and unarmed, and he figured it would be a few seconds before they caught on that he was leaving, a few seconds more to run inside and grab their weapons, and he was counting on their horses being unsaddled. It would give him a small head start, and he wanted all he could get.
He put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up and turned the horse and headed down the trail. He stowed the haversack in his saddlebag as he rode. Their voices started up behind him. A few minutes later, he glanced up and saw they were following. He kept a deliberate pace, knowing it was unwise to push his horse.
He reached the bottom of the face of the canyon where the land went flat. He figured them eight minutes back. They could catch him if they sprinted, but then their horses would be tired and he’d have the advantage. By now they were thinking, and even imposters would know to follow at a safe distance. He was, after all, notorious. They would be forming some off-the-cuff plan, and as they were less than professional, their plan would be unpredictable. By now, John would understand that Longbaugh had insulted him, and he would be looking to prove his manhood, and maybe lay sole claim to the name in the process.
Longbaugh rode through the passage, leaving the inner canyon behind, then rode out in the open flat of the valley, eventually fording the Green River as he made for a trailhead that would take him up into the Uinta Mountains. He saw them ford the river in a shallower spot downstream. They knew the land and had made up time.
He rode into the mountains and they followed. He listened for them, and every time he thought they had given up, he heard them again. He knew the way, but it had been years, and he encountered natural changes in the landscape that forced him to make quick decisions and, in one instance, to backtrack. Clearly, the cook Sandy was more familiar with this terrain. He stayed on the trail that ran between steep sandstone cliffs, and then he was at the top and began his way down the far side. He eventually came to a road he had remembered as nothing more than a trail, and he turned to follow it, still working his way down. Not long after, he encountered a small camp just off the road, a woman with her daughter of around twelve. He thought they were Cheyenne, although they wore the clothes of white women. A few niceties kept them comfortable, a picnic basket, a blanket to sit on, a white sheet draped between branches to protect them from the sun.
He slowed, wondering about this pleasant scene in the midst of such unwelcome country. The young girl of twelve smiled but her mother stepped in front of her with a protective frown.
“Two men coming,” said Longbaugh. “They’re not exactly friendly. I’d stay out of sight.”
The older woman put her arm around the girl’s shoulder but did not answer.
“Are you alone out here? Is someone taking care of you?”
The older woman turned her daughter away and the daughter now looked at him with alarm, as if realizing she had just tempted a feral beast with a taste for sunny young females.
He watched them pull down the white sheet and stow it behind the tree, and while he still wondered how they had come to be there, he was satisfied they would stay out of sight. He continued on.
He stopped after a short ride, thinking about why the old trail had come to be expanded. While there was no one else on the road, clearly it was in frequent use. He listened for his pursuers and did not hear them. Previously he might have welcomed that fact, but now he thought of the Cheyenne mother and her daughter. He stared back over the road he had just traveled, watching for any sign of the cook and the man named John. He turned the horse to retrace his steps but heard the sound of what was now unmistakable even to him, an automobile engine coming up the rise, from the direction he had been headed. His first thought was that it was the posse, but he set that aside as unlikely. He waited in the road and a motorcar with shovels, rakes, and brushes, as well as suitcases, lumbered around the bend.
A gentleman in shirtsleeves and wearing a waistcoat was alone at the wheel and pulled alongside Longbaugh and stopped. He had a friendly face, but Longbaugh sensed a cool tension that ran below the surface.
“You pass a woman and girl?” said the gentleman.
“Just did.”
“My wife and daughter. Figured it couldn’t be much farther.”
Longbaugh understood. A white man with a Cheyenne wife and half-breed child could not let down his guard.
“On our way to the dig,” said the gentleman.
“Dig?”
“The excavation. Dinosaur bones. My daughter wanted to see the land where they come from. Figured we’d camp overnight.” He waved his hand at the suitcases with an embarrassed smile. “My wife decided to bring everything we owned.”
“You do the digging yourself?”
“Well, some, but mostly my workers. I’m a paleontologist.”
Longbaugh did not know what that was, but the word was long enough to impress him.
“Daughter was a little motorcar sick, so we stopped. Then I realized, after making sure I’d loaded all the suitcases, I’d forgotten my tools. Thought it better if they waited out here rather than endure the back-and-forth.”
Longbaugh guessed they had driven up from Jensen. “Motorcar sick. New industry, new ailment.”
“Yes.” The gentleman smiled. “I suppose that’s right.”
“This road. I remember when it was a trail.”
“Lot of people working in there now.”
Longbaugh nodded. He kept thinking about the two imposters. He should have heard them by now. But with the gentleman on his way back, he thought the women would be all right.
“Better get along, then,” said the gentleman.
Longbaugh tipped his hat.
But he stayed in the road, sitting in the saddle, listening as the sound of the motor was lost in the wind. He waited another minute or more, then rode after the motorcar.
Before he reached the camp he heard a shotgun blast, then a second one. He spurred the horse and rode fast around the elbow in the road and saw it, the result of everything that had happened during the previous ten minutes.
The Cheyenne woman had a swollen eye and a cut lip. She sat on the ground, holding a blanket closed at her daughter’s neck to cover the girl’s body. The twelve-year-old fought to control her weeping, but every other courageous breath was followed by a cascade of sobs. Scraps of torn blue clothing were lying on the ground, and he reme
mbered blue as the color of her dress. The girl shifted when she saw him, and the blanket briefly bowed open and he glimpsed blood on her inner thigh.
He took in what was left of John, facedown, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun blast that exposed his useless brain. John was naked from the waist down. His pants might have been anywhere, tossed aside in his grimy lust. He was unlikely to cause Longbaugh any more trouble. He stared at him, pressed flat against the sandstone that, below him, held millions of years of dinosaur bones, and he thought of how puny and insignificant John was lying there. Except to that girl.
The gentleman was tying off the end of a rope on the rear bumper of the motorcar loaded with tools and suitcases. The rope looped over a stout branch that had earlier held the white sheet, some eight or ten feet off the ground. The rope came down the other side of the branch, where it was noosed around Sandy the cook’s neck. Sandy the cook’s hands were tied behind him. Sandy was gut shot, his long underwear mottled and bloody with dark chunks of something stuck to the fabric. His eyes blinked to a beat, and Longbaugh heard his gasping intake of breath.
How had it come to this? Neither he nor Butch would ever have considered behaving this way, and would never have tolerated it from their gang. He was disgusted, appalled that these two men thought this was the way to emulate their role models.
Sandy the cook saw Longbaugh and knew he was saved. He relaxed and waited for Longbaugh to charge in and cut him loose. The gentleman rolled his eyes over and blinked red at Longbaugh, and he saw the stamp of horror, the ugly thing the man had witnessed that was now branded onto his everyday future. The gentleman snarled at him with boarlike ferocity, but when Longbaugh made no move, the gentleman went on with his nasty business. Sandy smiled, waiting. The gentleman finished and climbed into the front seat and started the motorcar and the vehicle jerked forward. Sandy the cook’s eyes bulged, his intake of breath was cut off, and his feet left the ground quite suddenly, his forehead thumping the branch. The gentleman turned in the driver’s seat to watch him wrench and shudder and kick and slam his forehead again and again against the branch, tongue swelling out of his mouth. His movements slowed, his body sagged, and his sphincter and bladder released.
