by Tim Sandlin
I said, “Look out yourself, pecker head,” and we lit into each other. He hit me a time or two and I hit him back; then we commenced to roll around on the ground, neither one getting enough distance to land a proper punch. He raked my bad leg with a spur; I stuck a thumb in his eye. It was nothing but boys feeling their oats, the way they do, and I was having a pretty good time until we broke loose from each other and he pulled a pistol.
“What’s this?” I said.
“It’s what I aim to kill you with,” he said. It was a one-shot derringer about the size of his palm. It looked like a toy, but it wasn’t.
“You wouldn’t kill a man ’cause you tripped over him,” I said.
He said, “Like hell I wouldn’t.”
Just then Agatha Cox hollered from behind me, “Bill!” and she ran between us. “You put that gun away. This is my friend Oly. Do Mama and Daddy know you’re here?”
He looked like he wanted to shoot me real bad, but his sister was right in the way, jabbering like we were at afternoon tea. “Mama’ll be happy to see you. The last letter we got you were in Manitou Springs. How’d you get back from there? Ain’t no trains going south.”
“I rode my horse,” he said. The derringer disappeared into whatever hidden pocket where he kept it. “Ain’t that my shirt?”
“Daddy gave it to Oly. His clothes got blown up.”
“Well. I want my shirt back.”
At that point, I became disenchanted with Bill Cox. Agatha had been talking about him like he was Natty Bumppo of the high plains; even Mrs. Cox seemed to think her son was aboveboard, but anybody would try to shoot a man for stopping to look at a firework, then demand the shirt off his back wasn’t no Natty Bumppo, far as I was concerned. In front of Agatha and a crowd of mixed-gender carnies, I yanked Bill’s shirt off and threw it to the ground.
“Take your old shirt,” I said and walked off, doing my best not to show any limp.
He laughed in a mean fashion and called after me. “Them pants look like mine too.”
***
A year and a half later, Christmas, Mr. Cox introduced me to Bill again in the Bluebeard Cafe. Bill shook my hand and asked where my people was from, polite as could be, as if he didn’t recall me from Adam. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he went around threatening to shoot so many folks that he couldn’t bother to remember them. Or maybe he held himself in check ’cause his father was present.
I wasn’t in no position to start trouble with Bill then, on account of my own father was in county lockup that day, and I was vulnerable to insults. A Chinese man name of Hoo Sue Kong had got into a street shoot-out with police and been killed out front of a saloon on Minnesota Avenue. Afterward, the police searched the saloon and found an opium den in the basement, with my father in it. The other hopheads had cleared out soon as the shooting begun, but Dad was not in shape to climb stairs, so he got caught.
They locked him up for three months, which was probably for the good, it being December and all. I doubt he’d of made it through the winter outside of jail, and he didn’t make it through the spring. April 11, my father, Jan, fell asleep on the railroad track out by Coulson and the Burlington Number 41 squashed him. Nobody ever figured out how he come to be out by Coulson. I think maybe he tried to walk home to Sweden.
I was at the roller skating barn when they came to tell me my father had been smashed. I didn’t like skating so much as watching cowboys fall on their rear ends. Their legs aren’t shaped proper for the roller wheels; not a one I ever saw was any good at it. That woman doctor was sent to tell me the news. I don’t know why they sent her. She didn’t have no sympathy for Dad nor me.
I sat on this narrow bench by the skate floor, watching cowboys flail their arms and fall, and I thought about us leaving Dover for the West. As a rule, people go west in hope and east in defeat. On days like that one where Dad died, I think perhaps there is a life on the other side; the rest of the time, I don’t worry myself over it. Mr. Cox gave me an advance for the coffin, and once again, the various Christian groups outdid themselves with cakes and casseroles and such.
***
August of 1911, two days after my birthday, the Anglican Church there had a hayride down to Bitter Creek, where we built a cottonwood bonfire and played charades and roasted up an antelope. There was two wagons full of twenty-five young people, ranging in age from eight to twenty, and some chaperones that snuck off on occasion to nip the bottle.
I rode in the older kids’ wagon where we hunkered under blankets, pretending it was cold but in reality holding hands and carrying on—tame by what young ones do today out in public, but fairly scandalous for the time. You have to recall Montana wasn’t like Nebraska.
Anyway, they were singing “Bishop From Pike,” but I wasn’t; I never had no voice I cared to show off. Instead I pretended to yawn so’s to shift my weight over closer to one of the Pease sisters on my left—I forget which one, they was both somewhat horsey—when I felt soft fingers on my right hand and looked up to see Agatha Cox smiling sweet, right at me.
She said, “You can be my beau.”
Which nonplussed me no end. “You’re a little girl,” I said.
She pouted her lower lip out, and I must admit she was pretty as a button. “I’m thirteen. If I was Arapaho, I’d have three babies by now.”
I had no idea what being Arapaho had to do with holding my hand under the blanket. I tried a new tack. “Mr. Cox trusts me not to take advantage.”
She smiled. “It’s fine. When I’m nineteen and done with school, we’ll get married.”
Nineteen back then was practically an old maid. “Why wait till nineteen?” I asked. See how she switched me around. One minute I’m saying she’s too young, and the next I’m asking why we have to wait. Agatha always did have that affect on me.
“Because I don’t want to be biggered till I’m done with school.” Biggered meant pregnant. I knew that, even though it wasn’t really a Montana word. I’m not certain where Agatha had heard it, probably from a book. Agatha read books, so there was never was any telling what she might say next.
I said, “So, little girl, you’re planning on us courting for six years?”
She took my upper arm with her other hand and said, “We’ll know the joy of love.”
***
I never discovered whether Agatha played a part in my improved prospects or not, but soon after this Mr. Cox raised my position to that of bank steward. No more mopping out the Bluebeard kitchen at midnight. Now I wore a collar and necktie and worked in daylight. At first, I mostly filled inkwells and stoked the furnace, but before long I was numbering checks, posting statements, and taking mail out. Once I was sent to repossess a buggy, but when I got there, the man had burned it up. In the evenings, Agatha taught me numbers and improved my reading skills. She taught me how to talk more like a gentleman. She wanted me to advance in life so we could have a house with electricity and indoor hot water. She said she wasn’t bringing no papoose into my dirty shed.
I applied myself with gusto and soon I was dealing firsthand with customers. I helped farmers fill out loan papers, even though I never got permission to approve loans. I’d of given money to anybody needed it to survive, and in the banking business, you don’t loan money to those that need it.
The first time Mr. Cox turned me loose behind the teller window, he showed me a .36-caliber brass-handled pistol they kept on a shelf under the money drawer. He told me sooner or later someone would attempt to rob me.
He said, “Act meek. Say, ‘Yes, sir, here’s the money, sir,’ and give them whatever they want. Then, when they leave you follow the bastards into the street and kill them.”
“I never shot a pistol. I’m not certain if I know how.”
“It’s simple. Point this end at the robber and pull the trigger.”
“What about the safety?”
“Do you
see a safety on this gun?”
“No, sir.”
“Point it at the robber’s rib cage and pull the trigger. If there’s more than one robber, keep pulling it until six of them are dead. Then you can quit. If you’re not willing to do this one thing for me, I’ll have to find a man who will.”
“I’m willing,” I said, although secretly, I had no such intention. I told Agatha, and she accused me of not loving her.
“If you truly love me, you won’t let a robber take my daddy’s money.”
“I guess not.”
“Someday that money will belong to us.”
My raise in position did not come with much of a raise in salary, only enough to pay for the clothes I was required to wear to the bank, and the Chinese laundry that kept them clean. In point of fact, without access to the Bluebeard kitchen, my added expenses went higher than my added income. I saved almost every penny in a hole under my shed floor—I didn’t trust the bank not to fail—and within three years I was ready to take a loan on a little rock house on West Fifth Street.
But then, before I had time to fill out the papers, as it had so often in the past, my circumstances turned upside down.
***
The winter of 1913 lasted just about forever, with snow covering the window of my shed and wind you got permanently stooped trying to walk against. One day in late March, Mr. Cox and Frank Lesley left me alone in the bank while they took their dinner down at the Bluebeard. That’s how we generally did it, then they would come back at 12:45 and relieve me while I ate out in the alley from a pail. I did not mind this arrangement, on account of ofttimes, Agatha took advantage of the hour when I was alone to sneak into the bank and we’d spark if there wasn’t any customers.
This one day, though, the moment Mr. Cox and Frank Lesley was out the door, old Mrs. Hitchcock come through to root around in her safe-deposit box. She did this three, four times a week. Once, when I was helping her with the keys I peeked in and there wasn’t anything but newspaper clippings from the Civil War and a couple of medals. I guess they mattered to Mrs. Hitchcock.
The only trouble was you had to escort her into the box room and stick in a special key while she turned her key, and that left the cage unguarded, which meant if she come at lunch, I was forced to lock down the entire bank until I had her settled.
I tried to hustle back quick, but this particular time, Mrs. Hitchcock wanted to tell me about a liver procedure she’d had described to her—she seemed to care about my opinion—and when I went back to my post I found someone in my money box.
It was the Cox boy, Bill. I said, “How’d you get through that locked door?”
He said, “How do you think?” And he held up a key for me to look at.
“Does your daddy know you have a key to the bank?”
He ignored that and went on counting my ten-dollar bills, getting them all mixed around, with some Benjamin Franklin’s face right ways and some Benjamin Franklin’s face the wrong ways.
Bill gave me his gunfighter stare-down that I know he practiced looking in the mirror. It wouldn’t have scared a ground squirrel.
He said, “What are your intentions toward my sister?”
I was temporarily thrown off. “Agatha Ann?”
“I only got the one sister.”
“My intentions toward Agatha Ann are none of your affair.”
His left hand crept toward the vest pocket where I knew he kept his little muff gun. “I can make it my business,” he said. “Agatha says you two plan to marry.”
She had not mentioned marriage to me in years, not since the hayride where she first brought us up, and I thought she’d forgot all about that part of the plan, but that’s just like Agatha to tell someone it would upset before she tells the person who’s involved. I said, “What if I do?”
“My daddy’s been swell to you over the years, in spite of your line being dope fiends. I won’t have you repaying his trust by taking advantage.”
“Taking advantage is not the way I see matters.”
“You only want Agatha for my father’s money. She’s too homely for anyone to want her for real.”
Now, Agatha was not homely in the least. She had a button nose and freckles acrost her cheekbones. Her hips were a bit slim for bearing children, but like I say, she was not homely, and I took offense at Bill for saying she was.
He went on before I could sock him in the jaw. “You got a soft deal here,” he said. “But if my daddy knew you were dipping Agatha, he’d fire you in a flash.”
“Your sister is a lady. I have not dipped her in any way.”
“Mr. Cox won’t believe that when I tell him. He’ll fire you and put you out of that pigsty you call a house.”
That’s when Mrs. Hitchcock came from the deposit-box room. She kind of trilled, “Thank you, Oly,” as I unlocked the door, but before I could shut up behind her, three men pushed their way through. Two men and a boy, really. The two men smelled like mule skinners, and the boy had a case of nervous hives. You could see his hand quivering on the buckle of his belt there.
One man come over to the cage as I walked around. He said, “We want to make a withdrawal.” I already knew it was a holdup. These weren’t customers with ready accounts.
Bill said, “How much, pard?” like he owned the bank instead of his father, Mr. Cox, and they pulled sidearms. The one who’d talked before said, “All of it.”
The men cleaned my teller drawer, then went to work on the safe. They must have been watching the bank awhile, because they knew exactly how long till Mr. Cox and Frank Lesley would be in from dinner.
The boy—he was nervous and soon I saw Bill was too, and I knew he wasn’t going to let this end with no trouble. I kept behind the cage there so I could either drop when gunfire commenced or reach under the counter for the loaded .36 caliber.
The men came from the safe with their hands full loaded so they’d had to holster their pistols. The uglier of the two said, “Cover us, Shad,” and headed for the door, only Shad was scared so he headed for the door himself. With no gun on us, Bill pulled his and plugged one fella square in the back. The other fella dropped his money and went for his gun. He cleared holster, but before he shot Bill I shot him. The bullet entered at his voice box and exited from the back of his neck. Before long, he was on the floor, gurgling blood.
The boy threw his pistol down and surrendered. He didn’t really have to because Bill was out of bullets and I wasn’t about to shoot nobody else. It made me sick to shoot the first fella. I couldn’t help but think of his mother.
The boy spoke as if resigned to his fate. “They’ll hang me for certain.”
I walked over to view the gurgling man. He stared up at me like a landed trout for a few seconds, then he expired. I said, “They don’t hang for bank robbing anymore. Unless you kill somebody.”
The boy said, “Then they’ll put me in prison for life. I’d rather be hung.”
After Bill’d shot the first one, he turned white as an antelope’s ass, but now, he commenced to recover.
He said, “We’ll tell the sheriff you wasn’t with them.”
The boy and I stared at Bill. I don’t know what Bill’s plan had been in the first place, shooting a man in the back when you only have one bullet and there’s three men. I don’t imagine he even had a plan—just saw a chance to kill someone and went for it.
He said, “We’ll claim you were a customer, caught in the cross fire.”
The boy said, “Why would you do that?”
I said, “Yes, Bill, why would we do that?”
Bill’s brain was working so fast you could almost see it go, like a cash register dinging and binging. “This boy don’t deserve a life in prison. He was led astray by these blackguards.”
The boy said, “Blackguards?”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “Shadrach Pierce. My mama died in childbirth and I had no proper guidance. I fell in with the wrong crowd.” As an example of the wrong crowd, he pointed at the dead fellas bleeding out on the bank floor.
I said, “My mama died, and you don’t see me robbing no bank.”
Bill turned to face Shadrach close in the eye. “Promise to do what I say from now to eternity, and I’ll lie to the sheriff. You’ll be spared a life in prison.”
“What about him?” Shadrach asked, indicating me.
“He works for my dad. He’ll do what I say.” Which wasn’t true, and saying so almost got that boy sent to prison, but I felt sorry for him. Ever’body makes mistakes, and I hoped his partners being dead might scare the meanness out of him. Besides, that thing about the dead mother touched me. If not for Mr. Cox, I could have gone bad when Mom died, just like Shadrach.
All this thought took place in a heartbeat. “I’ll back you,” I said to Bill, “but not because you threatened me. The boy needs a second chance.”
So that’s what we did. Sheriff Nowlin didn’t believe us. He kept asking what Shadrach’s business had been in the bank if he didn’t have money, and which of the dead fellas was carrying the third gun and how it got way over by the door. In the end, though, there wasn’t much choice for him. Shadrach was let go.
8
Lydia flounced out of Haven House in the state of irritation that Oly generally triggered. She found Roger sitting in the car as she had left him. Even the hands on the wheel hadn’t moved. One would have thought he’d been frozen in time while she recorded history, except the BMW had 110 new miles on the odometer, a fact Lydia noted immediately.
“That petrified rock of a human is a complete waste of my time and talents,” she said as Roger pulled away from the curb. “I’d rather be back in the joint than suffer any more of his drivel.”
