“I said you needed another one, but no, you didn’t believe me.”
“Fine,” Jesse said. “Cowboy, go get another stick of dynamite.”
“Neal,” Seamus said. “If you do this, there isn’t a road back home.”
I went down the hall, careful to retrace my steps. I found the dynamite where I’d left it and saw that the guard was still asleep. I grabbed a stick and felt its lightness and I realized that even though I’d grown up around miners, I’d never held dynamite before.
When I got there, I looked around, but didn’t see anything until I slipped around the corner and looked at the door and saw a half-dozen men on the street. They seemed to be waiting for the man with the key and I knew it wouldn’t take but another minute for them to get in and they’d see the knocked-out guards and know it was us and we’d be cooked beneath the hanging tree by sunrise; so, knowing what was at stake and unwilling to consider second thoughts, I took out my lighter and lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite until the wick caught and sparked and I threw it at the door, and then I lit another and did the same and they both rolled to a stop about five feet from the door and I thought of running up and pushing them closer but I wasn’t that damned foolish. Instead, I threw a third, which landed perfect, nestled up against the door’s hinges.
I grabbed another stick for the safe and ran back to my uncle’s office and when I got there, my father had a queer look on his face.
“You get lost?”
The explosion shook the museum and I found myself on the floor.
“Fucking Pinkertons,” Jesse said. “Using goddamn dynamite in a fucking museum. The shame of it.”
Mattie looked over at me and she knew what I’d done. “Yeah,” she said. “You two are kin.”
“What did you do, Neal?” Seamus called out. “This is your mother’s museum.”
“There were six of them,” I said. “It’ll hold them off.”
“Or let them in,” Mattie said. She brushed off her coat and then took out her gun. “I’ll go.”
She disappeared down the hall and my father got up and taped the third stick of dynamite to the safe then lit the fuses. He rolled Seamus out into the hall and shut the door and we ran down the hall and ducked.
“Oh, God,” Seamus said, lowering his head. It looked like he was praying, but I could see that he was just cursing us.
Gunfire erupted from the Grand Hall and I felt sick with myself because they’d been generous bringing me along and all I’d done was ruin their heist.
“I’m sorry,” I said to my father.
“Ah, don’t worry,” Jesse said. “She’ll be fine. Can’t fault you for blowing up Pinkertons. It’s inherited, like eye color or flat feet.”
The explosion blew the office door out into the hall.
“You hear that, you old sheep fucker?” Jesse said. “The sounds of revolution. The walls are coming down and you’re looking at Joshua right here.”
“You fools,” Seamus said. “It’s mine. It’s mine. You haven’t got the right.”
We made our way through the smoke and ash and into the office. The desk was covered in steel chips and the paintings were on fire.
“This will bugger that cranky old bastard,” Jesse said. He went to the safe and pulled out a bag and it seemed intact, which amazed me but I guess he’d been doing this long enough to know how to avoid burning the loot.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Christmas oranges for orphans, doctors for whores: dreams, Cowboy. There are dreams in this bag.”
I shook my head. “What?”
“About a hundred, hundred and twenty grand, Cowboy.”
The money for the Shakespeare Quarto.
Seamus rolled into the door way and I could see he was near crying as he looked over the wreckage of his office and saw our hands in his loot.
“Neal, please, you can’t do this. I’ve worked and earned and protected you and this town and now you’re stealing—”
“You want a peek?” Jesse asked.
I went to the bag and looked inside and saw, over and over again like some hallucination, the portrait of an old patriot in a suit, next to the number 500.
“Who the hell is that?”
“John Marshall,” Jesse said. “Chief Justice and a real son of a bitch. You can blame him for a whole host of crimes, but you can trade his face for gold and that’s all that matters to rich bastards like your uncle.”
“And anarchists,” I said.
“What you getting at, Cowboy?”
“You’re just a thief.”
“He is,” Seamus said. “A red thief and a rapist and a murderer.”
More gunfire in the Grand Hall. My knees shook and I looked toward my uncle, whose face, flushed and wilting, stared lust at the cash. Was he right? Was my father just an old crook? Was that it all along?
“Now,” Jesse said. He bent down to my uncle’s eyes. “You’re doing that again. Just because a man holds certain political beliefs that countervail the common norms doesn’t mean he breaks the sins of decency. That’s reserved for old child buggers like you and Vanderbilt and Hearst. Me, I’m just a revolutionary with sticky fingers. But I ain’t keeping the money. Old men like you are thieves. You’re nothing but a pickpocket. I’m Robin Hood.”
“You took my virgin sister,” Seamus said. “You soiled her and abandoned her like a whore.”
“Your time’s done, old man,” Jesse said. “There ain’t going to be no more hanging trees.”
Mattie stopped in the doorway and reloaded her gun. “Should hold them off for a while.” She looked at me. “You blew the whole entrance up. It’s like Pompeii in there.”
“Dear Lord,” Seamus said.
“We should go,” Jesse said.
I looked at my uncle, his eyes lit like a gas lamp.
“Good luck, you old bastard,” Jesse said. “Sure we’ll be haunting each other in the next life.”
I went toward the Grand Hall, but my father grabbed me and pushed me the other way. “Down the corridor, Cowboy.”
Mattie led us through the dark reaches of the museum and into a janitor’s closet that had a backdoor. We emerged into the eye of the snowstorm. I shut my eyes and the cold swept over me. It took me a moment to get my bearings—we were in a back alley between the museum and Miss Ida’s gallery. I looked up at the gallery window, but I couldn’t see my pictures.
Mattie walked west behind the gallery and over to a small auto barn. She raised her gun, firing. The lock split open and we went inside.
“Which one are we going to steal?” I asked, but they looked at me with shrugs and I realized, once again, I had no idea what I was doing. I followed them to the back of the lot, where, nestled between a Model T and a Packard, awaited my uncle’s two stolen appaloosas, saddled and reined.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “It’s a damned blizzard out.”
“Never stopped Chief Joseph,” Jesse said. “Rode these beauts through Montana in January and Montana in January’s a whole lot colder than this drizzle. Come on, Cowboy—you still remember how to ride?”
It had been a very long time.
Mattie shared Jesse’s steed as we rode down the snow-drenched alley into the dark of the abandoned town. We slowly marched along side streets, while I kept my eye out for cars and Pinkertons and my uncle. Shuttered windows hid crouched families awaiting word of the militia’s next move, while the occasional oil lamp illuminated a lone reader unable to feign sleep. We turned east and trotted through Pioneer Park. All of the animals hibernated and it seemed like we were the only life left on the emptied world.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Train station,” Jesse said.
The militia had roadblocks in all directions and I figured they’d also have men at the train station. I was about to t
ell him this, but I realized he knew it and he had another plan. They rode ahead of me: Mattie held on to my father, resting her head on his back, while the snow coated her shoulders and hair.
“Used to be, in the old days,” Jesse started. “We’d blow the building and march off and think we’d won some sort of battle, but then the banks and the barons just go and build another and pay men poor wages and it didn’t seem to do much good and then this time in Vienna—”
“Munich,” Mattie said.
“That’s right, Munich,” Jesse said. “Well, we got in this bank in Munich and I was rigging charges along the beams, set to bring the big bastard down, when I realized I was short a few sticks and I was awful upset by this because you know how I’m a perfectionist about my work, but then I saw, out of the corner of my eye that steel vault and it cried out to me, “blow me up, blow me up” and so I did and we took near two hundred thousand marks and hightailed it to Berlin where we gave it all away, minus traveling expenses, mostly to some poor Jews and they started a paper and a dance hall and Mattie even taught them how to make their own bourbon, and so, what I’m getting at is we found that liberating the ill-gotten purses of the overlords had better rewards than simple symbolism. Though I still like dynamiting shit.”
“He does,” Mattie said. “It gets awful loud at home.”
We took the back trails, old paths carved by Arapahos, toward the New Sligo railway station. The appaloosa—sturdy as my father promised—seemed to drive itself as if he was navigating by a compass passed down from its sire. The snow began to pick up again and I felt the cold in my hands and my nose. To the south, smoke funneled out of Rahillville. It was nearly burned clear through and smelled of wood and tin.
I checked my watch when I heard the first blow of the nearing Lady of San Francisco coming up from Denver. It was almost midnight.
“Let’s pick up the pace, Cowboy.”
I got my horse cantering along the snowy trail and we ducked under a railroad trestle and came up on a long stretch of road that we galloped down. The horse moved fluidly, sure-footed and I felt the old muscles from my early century youth tightening and yawning as we spurred the horses on toward the station. The Lady cried out in the white night as she pulled into the station. We cut south then east, coming around the back of the station as I heard the familiar sounds of the train coming to a halt. We ran those horses the last thousand yards and the wind in my face cooled my sweat and I felt, for the first time all night, the joy Mattie and my father shared. I’d spend my life searching for that feeling again.
“Over here,” my father called out.
The east gate, which was usually crowded with men moving coal, was abandoned. We got off the horses and my father smacked each on the ass.
“Get on,” he called out and the appaloosas galloped out on to the prairie and disappeared into the shroud of snow.
We ducked under a gap in the gate—one my father had cut himself—and slipped passed some sleeping cargo loaders toward the back end of the train, where a row of freight cars awaited coal that they’d never see. The cars were vandalized by old signatures and drawings from before the war and as the Lady cried out for her departure, my father took out a pen and wrote “El Guapo” on the door.
“You’re such a ham,” Mattie said.
My father and I boosted Mattie on to the train as the sound of a speeding auto and its accompanying siren came around toward the East gate.
“Hell,” Jesse said. “Thought they’d take longer.”
From the low rise of the track, I could see it was Jacob’s car parking at the gate. He got out and Seamus joined him.
“They know we’re here, don’t they?” I said.
“Well, shit, Cowboy. What do you think?”
“How?”
“Well, I imagine someone spotted three people atop two horses running away from the museum. But that’s just a guess. Come on.”
The train edged slowly away from the station. My father pulled himself on to the freight and I handed him the bundle of cash. He reached out his hand.
I didn’t take it.
“They’ll stop the train,” I said.
“We’ve got guns, Cowboy.”
“They’ll have more.”
“Grab my hand.”
On the west side of the track, a radio usually stood unmanned this time of night. It didn’t have much distance, but it was enough to call a train back if it was within a mile or two of the station. But once out of reach, the Lady wouldn’t stop until Grand Junction, which gave a fleeing couple over two hundred miles to jump to the safe anonymity of the Rocky Mountains.
I turned and saw Jacob and Seamus making their way toward us. Each was armed.
“Go on,” I said. “I’ll hold them off.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do.”
My father turned to Mattie. She shrugged. “He’s your son,” she said. “He’ll do what he wants.”
As the train pulled away, my father lowered his hat and smiled. “If they try to hang you, Cowboy,” he said. “I’ll bust you out. I promise.”
I stopped walking and watched my father and his gun girl disappear around the bend and into the snowy night toward their next escape. It was only when they were passed me that I began doubting my plan.
By the time the sound of the train disappeared into the dark, Seamus and Jacob were on me. The fat detective put a gun to my back, and then frisked me, patting the gun in my pocket, before pushing me toward the station.
“I told you he’d leave you, again,” my uncle said.
“Shouldn’t we chase them?” Jacob said.
The question didn’t seem serious, though. Jacob put his revolver in his pocket, then pulled a cigarette from his pack, lighting it, before offering the pack to me.
“No,” Seamus said.
We followed him up to the station, which lay empty and fallow, abandoned except for the breathing pile of cripples huddling together beneath the clock tower. The militia was gone, driving off to the museum when word of a robbery arrived.
It was just a minute past midnight.
Ten minutes, I told myself. Ten minutes and they’ll be out of range.
“Your father has my money?” Seamus asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re going to hang, you know that, don’t you?” Seamus said. “No more forgiveness.”
Seamus got to the radio room but it was locked. He fired two shots into the door, unhinging it.
“All this,” he said, waving his arms about and staring swift justice at me. “All this is because of you. You, Neal. This is your fault. If you’d kept your nose out and done what I said, none of this—hell—I just wanted Pearl to rest in peace. That’s all, but you wouldn’t let her.”
And then it became clear to me: the mystery that had begun it all, the crime that had triggered this mess. I finally had a truth, a single truth. It was Seamus’ truth and it was one rich in binaries, dualities, blacks and whites. It was all notions of honor and Manifest Destiny. In his mind, Seamus had built his own city on the hill, where right and wrong was as clear as the rivers before coal. It was a world with its own version of history. In it, my mother hadn’t killed herself and anyone who questioned this had to die. After dim Clyde O’Leary had discovered my mother’s suicide, he had put the screws on Seamus. So when Seamus found poor O’Leary, bound and naked, Seamus changed history: erasing any trace of my mother’s suicide.
“My father didn’t kill O’Leary,” I said. “But he did steal the files the night O’Leary was executed.”
Seven minutes.
“What did you say, Neal?”
“Jesse was there the night O’Leary was killed. He busted into the jail to get the files for Forest. That part was right. He tied O’Leary up, but he didn’t kill him.”
“Then it wa
s Forest himself or some other Jew or Negro or whomever he hired,” Seamus said. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Neal.”
“But you shot him, Seamus.”
My uncle froze.
“Stop it, Neal,” he said. “You’ve really gone mad like your father. After all I’ve done for you.”
“O’Leary was blackmailing you,” I said. “He knew my mother killed herself, but she couldn’t stay buried Catholic if it came out and you couldn’t let her be put away like some sort of heathen, not with the whole town watching you.”
“Jesse killed your mother.” Seamus flipped on the radio and it began warming up.
“It makes sense,” Jacob said, his voice even, mildly curious like he was talking about the ball game. “You had a motive, Seamus.”
“What motive?”
“Vengeance,” Jacob said. “Biblical reason if I’ve ever heard one and I’m a preacher’s son.”
“You’ll hang too.”
“You found him tied and naked,” I said. “Even had a note on him, from El Guapo, and you knew that was my father and O’Leary let him get away and he had my mother’s file. O’Leary had put a play on you because that was the type of man he was, so you shot him because that’s the type of man you are, then you hung Forest for it. It took care of everything. It would make things right for you, but it isn’t right, Seamus. It isn’t.”
“Your father murdered Pearl.” Seamus reached for the receiver. “And you’ve helped her killer and I’ll sit there and watch you hang.”
I raised my revolver. Five more minutes.
“Sit down, Seamus. You’re not calling anyone. Not until they get clear.”
Seamus grunted like I’d sold him out to the Romans. He looked at Jacob. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“Don’t see anything worth doing.” Jacob slipped his hands into his pockets. “Just a man exercising his right to bear arms.”
“Sit,” I said.
Seamus raised the receiver to his ear, and dropped his other hand toward his gun, unfastening his holster. Four minutes.
“Sit.”
“Son, put it down,” Seamus said. “Do it for your mother.”
The Trench Angel Page 21
