Sundance

by David Fuller

  Night had swept in around them. It was time to go.

  “This is the part you’ll like. Go tell them I’m here.”

  “You want me to tell them? Won’t they catch you?”

  “No, they won’t. I’ll find her, Mina. I don’t think you’ll be bothered again. Go on now, tell the posse.”

  She snorted, amused.

  “I can see why she loved you. I suppose I always could. But you’re a bad man, Harry Longbaugh. You don’t mean to be, but you’re a bad man. Maybe for the first time I’m actually glad of that. Whatever she’s gotten herself into, I’d wager that that’s what she needs right now.”

  She opened the front door to the fresh night breeze, stood on her porch, and called out to LeFors’s men and told them her brother-in-law was there. Every one of the posse members did the opposite of what he had been told and came bumbling out of the bushes and trees and scrambled to get close to the house to be the one to grab him in case he really was the notorious outlaw he was rumored to be. In the commotion, Longbaugh slipped out the same window he had used to get in and was past them, walking into the stand of trees along the edge of the property and out to where he had tied his horse, by their parked vehicles.

  He stopped to listen to the disturbance back at the house, then turned, and was face-to-face with the lawman Joe LeFors.

  LeFors stared at him but did not draw his gun.

  Longbaugh realized LeFors did not recognize him. He had only ever seen Longbaugh from a distance, and in between Longbaugh had aged and shaved his mustache. He was also making no effort to run.

  LeFors prided himself on his looks and on his clothing, a fussy little dandy, tailoring his wardrobe to simulate the brilliant lawman he thought he was. But LeFors’s reputation, like his wardrobe, was self-promotion. If he knew the other lawmen did not respect him, he did not show it. LeFors had chased Cassidy’s gang after they had engaged in a bit of cattle rustling, and had bragged to anyone who would listen that he had put a stop to it. In reality all he had done was ride around in circles while Butch laughed at him.

  “They got him surrounded at the house.”

  “So where you going?” said LeFors.

  “I was coming for you, Joe. Didn’t think you’d care to miss it. Heard you’d gone to town.”

  LeFors nodded and looked over his shoulder at the sound of the commotion. “So they got him. So now he’s mine. Siringo thinks he’s the one, but when I bring him in, they’ll know it was me all along.”

  At the sound of Siringo’s name, Longbaugh went cold. He knew Charlie Siringo, had even, at one time, considered him a friend. Unlike LeFors, Siringo was a damn good lawman and a dangerous adversary. Siringo had been a Pinkerton, but unlike most Pinkertons, he worked alone and on his own timetable. He loved the chase and had been known to spend months on individual fugitives. Someone must have forced Siringo to include LeFors and his posse, which was a lucky break for Longbaugh—if Siringo had been at the house instead of LeFors, Longbaugh could never have slipped through so easily.

  “Where is Siringo?”

  “He’s the one went to town.” LeFors laughed, merrily, complacently, arrogantly, exultantly. “He misjudged our boy. Said he wouldn’t show up here for another day or two. And now I’ve got him!”

  “I’ll ride in and find him. By the time he gets here, you’ll have your prisoner.”

  He looked at Longbaugh, and for a moment he thought it was all over, that LeFors had identified him. Longbaugh’s hand moved closer to his holster.

  “Did you see him?” said LeFors. “Is it really him?”

  “Probably not.”

  “No. You’re right, probably not. Guess I got excited. I didn’t really believe he was still alive. Couldn’t be that lucky. By the way, what’s your name?”

  Longbaugh simply could not help himself. He had so little respect for LeFors that he said, “Alonzo,” and smiled.

  “Much obliged, Mr. Alonzo.”

  • • •

  AT THE LIVERY by the train depot, he watched a stableman from a distance to see how he was with the horses. When it became clear that the horses trusted him, Longbaugh approached him. He offered the stableman the horse named Felon as long as he agreed to not use a spade bit, in fact to use no bit on him at all for at least a week so the horse’s mouth could heal. He left his saddle behind as well, now empty of coins with the seam restitched.

  He knew that after LeFors told Siringo about the man named Alonzo that LeFors would again be exposed for exactly what he was. He did not expect it to make Siringo mad. He thought he was leaving all of that behind when he went to catch a train going east.

  4

  The train traveled out of the light into a blackness that seemed endless. Longbaugh suspected they were not just in a tunnel but burrowing underground. The other passengers, however, were passive to the point of cataleptic. He asked a conductor, who then bragged on his own personal connection to the modern marvels of the industrial world, explaining they were in a tunnel that had been dug directly beneath the Hudson River. Longbaugh glanced up at the ceiling of the passenger car and pictured water over his head.

  As there was nothing to see out the windows, his thoughts turned to the journey she had taken to get here, years ahead of him. She had traveled by train as well.

  Etta had lived in Rawlins and taught in the school so she could visit him in prison regularly. But he knew she could not keep her life in stasis to wait for him.

  Their conversations would follow a pattern. She would sit opposite him on visiting day, and inside he would rejoice. But he would try to appear solemn.

  “You have to stop coming,” he would say.

  “I will,” she would say.

  “You’re staying in Wyoming just to see me once a week.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “You mustn’t.”

  “Next week I’ll stop.”

  “I can stay in my cell. I can refuse to see you.”

  “Then that’s what you should do.”

  Then they would talk about anything and everything, but he would become solemn again when it was time for her to leave.

  “Don’t come back next week.”

  “All right,” she would say with a smile. “I won’t.”

  And the next week she’d be there to meet him.

  He’d be solemn again, disguising his absolute delight.

  “You have to stop coming here.”

  “I know, you’re right, and I will,” she’d say.

  “You can’t keep doing this. Get away from Wyoming. Live for both of us.”

  “I’m already making plans,” she’d say.

  Then they’d start talking. Every week she tried to wear something new or do something different with her hair. He’d always see it and compliment her, and it always pleased her that he was paying attention.

  This went on for years. But over time he knew that as important as it was for him, it was no good for her.

  One day she visited and he wasn’t there to see her. He asked a guard to hand her a letter he had written.

  It was a good letter. He had spent the entire week writing it and at the last second had almost not had the will to send it with the guard. But somehow, during what would have been their hour together, he had sat, very still, on the cot in his cell, imagining her reading it, then imagining what their conversation would have been if he’d been there with her when she read it.

  She would have said, “This is a good letter.”

  “Then you’ll leave? You’ll go to New York?”

  “Yes. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “You’ll really go?”

  “Of course I will.”

  And then she would have come back to the prison the next week.

  At the end of visiting hours, the guard came to Longbaugh’s cell with a response from Etta.
Longbaugh read the single sentence over and over: “This time I believe you.”

  It was terrible not seeing her, but the following week a letter came from her, postmarked New York City. She wrote about her train journey across the country, but she hadn’t mentioned riding under the Hudson River. Perhaps she had crossed by bridge or ferry boat.

  The train slowed and entered a station. The passengers found their feet and collected their baggage and belongings. He took his own and stepped out onto a platform. The underground station was large, very large, but he managed to control his reaction. He followed his fellow travelers as they funneled to a staircase. He walked up with the others, each step bringing him closer to a light above his head until at the top of the stairs he was in an enormous room. He blinked to prove he was awake. His mind did not know how to absorb the size of this modern shrine of steel and glass. He leaned on a balustrade, craning his neck. It wasn’t that he didn’t know large spaces. In the West, he rode under expansive skies where he occasionally watched massive weather systems slam together. The desert spread endlessly, ashimmer with heat and mirage, where men and horses were baked into hard leather. Sleepy mountain ranges disguised their vastness and treachery, taking days, sometimes weeks, to cover, their endless beauty driving men to despair. But this space was indoors, man-made, littered with hundreds of tiny walking humans, and he was amazed. He tried to collapse it down into smaller bits, to understand the individual parts so that it might eventually make sense. Dozens of pillars were built on square bases made of a black metal grille with a repeating X pattern that carried up, way up, higher still, until branching out in four directions to flower into metal arches that crisscrossed under a roof that was yet higher with yet another giant series of arches. But then he saw a bird flying up there, which brought his perception back to the whole space. He did not understand how it had been conceived, how it had been designed, how it had been built, but somehow a bird lived in the space and called it home.

  “What the hell is this?”

  He was surprised when a passerby answered, “Appears to be a train station, if you haven’t noticed.” The man slowed after a glance, then came back grinning to look Longbaugh up and down, cowboy hat to boots. “You’re in Pennsylvania Station, pardner. The main concourse. Nothing like the lone prairie, uh?”

  “No.” Longbaugh endured the man’s superior air.

  “You lost? Get turned around?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, you’re going the wrong way.” He paused for effect. “Haven’t you heard ‘Go west, young man’?”

  “We’ve got a western Greeley says, ‘Gettin’ too crowded, go east.’”

  The man nodded at the cowboy’s comeback, but his attitude lingered. “First time in New York?”

  “You worked that out.”

  “You win, pal.” The man smiled genuinely, his tone flirting with respect. “It opened some three years ago. Everybody came then, big crowds.” He looked up at the ceiling as if noticing it for the first time. “Now they’ve seen it, especially with the new one opening, Grand Central.” He again looked Longbaugh up and down and shook his head as he was on his way. “Jesus. Good luck to you, pardner.”

  Longbaugh walked a long way to be out of the grand inverted canyon of glass and steel, found exit doors and escaped to what he hoped would be the safe outdoors.

  He stepped onto a sidewalk in the middle of the island of Manhattan, a man of the West, standing in his boots on the racing, bustling heart of the great eastern city. He stared at the fevered nightmare madhouse around him. Pennsylvania Station was a side attraction in comparison. He was unprepared, despite, or maybe because of, his boyhood in Philadelphia, as he had thought he knew what this would be. Sound. Size. Smell. Everything larger, oversized, swollen, gorged. Modest buildings here dwarfed even the grandest structures of the West. He faltered in the maw of excess. How would he find her here? How was it possible to navigate this place, among so many people? How to start, how to become even functionally adequate in appreciating its nuances so that he could track her journey? In his awe he realized he was searching the face of every woman who walked past, looking for her.

  Many women passed, even in that short breath of desperation. People and vehicles and buildings laid out as far as he could see, block upon block in every direction, until he forced himself to stop and seek perspective. He brought his mind back to the things that he knew. He compelled himself to remember that nothing had changed, even in a city so ominous and imposing. It did not matter that the city overwhelmed, it did not matter that men had looked for her and had threatened her sister. Her trail was still cold by two years. Searching faces on a city street by a train station was idiocy. He had arrived with a plan, trusted it enough to get him here, and with that thought he replaced his anxiety with manufactured calm. The plan began with her old boardinghouse, where he hoped to connect with those who had known her. Small steps would lead to more small steps, all of which would add up, but it wouldn’t happen quickly. The trail was cold. If the man who sent the thugs to frighten Mina had found her, then it was too late anyway and it didn’t matter.

  He gauged the sun and engaged his inner compass. Her last-known location on the return address of her letters was for a boardinghouse that she had described as being on the lower part of the island. He had to go south. He walked to the corner, and the street signs read 31st Street and 7th Avenue. He felt more confident with a purpose and destination and he stepped off the curb directly in the path of a team of horses pulling a dray. He jumped back, the flanks of a horse brushing his shirt, horse wind touching his nose. An automobile came close on behind, steering aggressively to pass the dray. Adrenaline surged, but he sized up the competition and timed his cross. From the middle of the street, he noted the extended wall of tall buildings, a line of them all standing six stories or more, sidewalks bristling with people, streets clogged with streetcars and vehicles. A block away, a locomotive went by in midair, and after a moment he realized it was on an elevated track.

  He was surrounded by words, everywhere words, by way of announcements, advertisements, store names, promises, and reassurances, permanent plaques and temporary proclamations. The city’s walls were covered with words. How could there be so much to say, so much to sell? The germ of an idea began to take shape in his head, something about all the names, all the hucksterism, all the billboards grabbing for attention. There was so much of it, and it was seemingly impenetrable. The words were large and within their assault he was small.

  He looked again at the horses.

  The street endured the creatures, many of them sick or ill used. He watched as a teamster unhitched a horse from his team after the old boy had gone to his knees. Without the support of the others and the traces, he rolled to his side. The teamster led the other horses away to keep his schedule. This one settled in the gutter, chest rising, dropping. Hooves of an oncoming team rained down near his head, very close. A second team came closer still and hooves stomped meat. The old horse whinnied and brought up his nose, but the strength wasn’t there and he fell back to cobblestones. Another hoof landed, and he jolted but made not a sound. Longbaugh looked away, squinting. He understood then that horses were finished here, dismissed as obsolete. Motorcars and cruelty crowded them out.

  He watched locals in their stop-start dance crossing streets, never following a straight line, never getting too far without a compensating step back. The streets had rhyme and meter.

  He was surrounded by true skyscrapers, sharp-edged monsters jutting through the ground to thrust into sky, and he cricked his neck in appreciation. Over time he would learn their names, Flatiron, Metropolitan Life, Park Row, Singer, and the fact of their being named spoke of their peculiar hold on men’s imaginations. Yet it was a building in the distance, glimpsed while crossing a street, that grabbed his own attention. It was unfinished. He was drawn to the visible guts of the skyscraper. The base was finishe
d, a stone façade ran up dozens of stories to a rectangular extension, maybe half the size of the bottom, partially covered with the same façade. Above that was an unfinished skeleton of naked steel beams. Yet another, smaller rectangular skeleton crowned that, the penultimate step to the sky before reaching a framework spire.

  The bones of the beast beckoned and he went, knowing it was a long walk, but at least it was in the same southerly direction as her boardinghouse.

  As he walked, he learned to mimic the city’s beat. He saw men dressed in coats and waistcoats, in top hats or bowlers or skimmers. He saw other men, young, proud, and muscular, in overalls and black slouch hats. He saw women in the sort of clothing that was more revealing than he expected and knew he had been away a long time.

  Reaching the building’s base, he encountered a sign that named it Woolworth. A foreman waved him off. “Back away, buddy, men working here.”

  Longbaugh looked at him and didn’t move.

  The foreman gave it right back. “Nice hat, ‘dude.’” Longbaugh didn’t react to the insult but he felt the challenge. The foreman turned away.

  He angled his head to see the top. Something caught his eye that he initially identified as a swooping bird, but it was falling in too straight a line, coming directly down, and he watched it drop all the way to the sidewalk. It landed a few feet from him, a newsboy cap. He stepped over to it, and looked up to the top of the building, from where it had come. He thought of Etta’s jubilant hat dropping. He picked up the cap, turned it over in his hands and felt himself smiling. He looked at the foreman, who was checking a ledger, then he looked to the outside wall where a freight elevator waited for a final stone slab to be secured. Men smoked there, sitting or leaning on the stone pile in the elevator, waiting to ride. He went behind a stack of concrete sacks by the wall and stowed his cowboy hat and gear there. He tugged the newsboy cap onto his head, lifted a sack of concrete to his shoulder to block the foreman’s view of his face, and followed another worker in his own newsboy cap onto the elevator.