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“I already made ten trips and I told you I had to leave—”
“We’re nowhere near done and—”
“I’ll carry boxes.”
My words stopped them both.
Vicky swung around and put the box she held into my hands. “Great. I’m going, Clara. It’s way past when I said I’d stay.”
“Don’t go inside empty-handed,” Clara ordered as she pushed boxes from deeper inside the van toward the doors. “Take a box on your way.”
Vicky took the box out of my hands. “Fine. I’m going.”
As she left, I said to Clara, “I’ll carry boxes if you’ll talk while we work.”
Clara’s eyes narrowed. She jumped down from the back of the van and put a box in my hands. Then she stacked a second on top, watching me with narrowed eyes. When I didn’t object or drop the boxes, she said, “Deal.”
****
I discovered another reason my sometimes cohort Wardell Yardley could be drawn to Clara Atwood.
The woman had endurance. I was huffing and puffing but she kept talking as we went in the museum with one set of boxes and came out with another. Trip after trip.
At the start, I let her ramble over the general top of Wild West outlaws — it was a tactic to relax her. Not just because I was trying to get a rhythm along with catching my breath.
“You know,” she said as we headed back toward the van, “for all the talk — and movies — about Butch Cassidy robbing banks and trains, he was never imprisoned for that.”
“Really?” The boxes heading this direction tended to be lighter, presumably because extraneous material was removed, so my huffing wasn’t as obvious as the inbound trip. “I thought I’d seen a photo of him from prison. Square-faced guy giving nothing away.”
“One of the two most-frequently used photos of him. The other is the one called the Fort Worth Five — Sundance and Butch sitting on either side with Ben Kilpatrick in the middle and John Carter and Kid Curry — Harvey Logan, officially — standing behind them. Curry was the one law enforcement really wanted. He killed around a dozen men, most of them lawmen.”
“But Butch Cassidy never killed anyone?” Sam McCracken had said that.
“Well,” she drew that out. “He and Sundance were said to have claimed they never did. But, if the shootout in Bolivia was their final act, then witnesses who saw the bodies identified as Butch and Sundance said Sundance had a number of wounds, with one to his forehead. While Butch, next to him, had one in his temple — the inference being that, with no means of escape, Butch shot his badly injured partner, then himself. If that’s true, he did kill someone — Sundance.”
“If that’s true? You believe they got away?” Don’t think I was mocking her. From the first time I saw the movie as a kid, I’ve been in the They got away camp.
With those boxes in the van, I took two more. So did she.
“Belief is immaterial. And the evidence is inconclusive, starting with comparing photographs of them from better days to ones taken of the dead gunmen in San Vicente, Bolivia.”
“They have photos of their dead bodies?”
“So some sources said. I’ve never seen them. Not authenticated ones.”
“Non-authenticated? There’s a black market in photos of corpses?”
“Used to be the done thing. There’s a photo of Ben Kilpatrick’s dead body being held upright by the guys who objected to him trying to rob their train and killed him with the proverbial blunt instrument to the head.”
“And people talk about the violence now.”
“They’ve done forensic DNA tests on some bodies in the San Vicente cemetery where Butch and Sundance were said to have been buried in an unmarked grave. At least one set of remains that was supposed to be Butch was proven absolutely to have not been. And no other tests have definitively linked bodies there to Butch or Sundance. But who’s to say one of the many other bodies buried there isn’t one of them? Bodies weren’t interred with a lot of organization,” she said dryly. “They’d have to test every body to be able to say they weren’t there.”
I put my boxes on the growing stack in the storage room and sucked in air.
“Maybe they did make it out. And maybe the reason Etta disappeared from the records is that Sundance — and presumably Butch — made it out of Bolivia. Maybe she went to join them wherever they were, whether back in the United States or somewhere else.”
I liked that idea.
