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“That’s right! So how come it’s me has to rattle his hocks outta town?”
Charley sacked turnips and acorn squash he’d grubbed from the vegetable garden. “If I know Jess, what it is is there’s some real nasty sad-Suzie work that’s got to be done around here and Bob’s the ninny that has to do it.”
“I’m willing,” said Bob. “Don’t know why exactly. I guess that’s the noble and benevolent sort of person I am.”
Clarence commenced coughing until he’d expelled something into a handkerchief. He peeked at it and then wiped his mouth.
Bob said, “He probably would’ve picked Clarence except he was a little jumpy about finding goobers in his soup.”
“Well,” said Clarence, putting the foul handkerchief in his pocket. “He certainly didn’t want you around for your charity toward others.” He climbed into his horse’s doghouse stirrups and rode out of the barn as Charley chaperoned his mare from her stall.
Jesse was at the compost crib, drooling the snake bodies onto the corn shucks and vines. He called, “Clarence? You tell your daddy I’ll be in Kentucky in October and maybe we can hunt some birds together.”
Clarence complained, “But how come it’s Bob who gets to stay?”
“Bob’s going to move my gear to a house down the street.”
Charley winked at his kid brother. “See?”
“I don’t mind,” said Bob, though of course he did. “Sounds like an adventure.” He tore up a foxtail weed and stripped it between his teeth.
Charley jumped onto his mare and said, “If you ever need me to swing the wide loop or, you know, make smoke someplace again, a body can usually find me at my sister’s—Mrs. Martha Bolton?—over to the Harbison homestead.”
Jesse tipped his head and smiled. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Clarence said, “You know where I’ll be.”
Jesse limped over to the bungalow, saying, “It’s been pleasant,” and at the porch door gave Bob an exacting look that implied he was already beginning to suspect his own judgment. “You’ve got some packing to do, kid,” said Jesse, and Bob traipsed after him.
THEY MOVED to 1017 Troost Avenue at night so that the neighborhood couldn’t get a good look at them or their belongings, with Bob carrying single-handedly most of what Jesse called gear. And then he thought Jesse would give him eight hours’ sleep and a daydreaming goodbye; but Jesse forgot to say anything about it that night or the next morning and with a second day in the J. T. Jackson house, Bob thought he might never go but might be brought in as a good-natured cousin to the boy and a gentleman helper to Zee. Bob followed Jesse wherever he went, hawked him in his city rounds, watched him from a barn stall. He curried the horse next to the horse Jesse curried. He smoked a cigar that matched the cigar Jesse smoked. They rocked in chairs on the front porch and made trips to the Topeka Exchange saloon, where Jesse could spe
nd nearly sixty minutes sipping one glass of beer and still complain about feeling tipsy. Bob would rarely vouchsafe his opinions as they talked. If spoken to, he would fidget and grin; if Jesse palavered with another person, Bob secretaried their dialogue, getting each inflection, reading every gesture and tick, as if he wanted to compose a biography of the outlaw, or as if he were preparing an impersonation. One night Jesse and Bob and the boy, Tim, walked down a towpath with bamboo poles and dropped shot-weighted lines into the Missouri in order to snag some catfish. Jesse walked down from the cliff and waded the shallows with tobacco in his cheek and his trousers rolled, cold bottom mud surging between his toes and clouding brown over his white calves. Bob nannied Tim on the steep, damp bank, snatching insects with his shrewd left hand, his swift right. Tim asked the name of the yellow country across the green churn of the river and Bob told him Kansas. Tim pointed northwest. Nebraska. And then Bob crouched so close to the boy his ear might have been a fragrant flower. “Here’s what we’ll do: rifle your arm out like so, keep that finger unbent, and let me turn you clockwise. There’s Iowa above us. Still Iowa. Still Iowa. Illinois. You ever heard of Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“Chicago’s in Illinois somewheres.”
“I mean: no, I haven’t.”
“You haven’t heard of Chicago?”
Tim shrugged.
“Isn’t no such place as Chicago,” Bob said. “I was just making that up.” The boy looked at him strangely but Bob continued. “You’re on a raft on the Mississippi now and that’s as east as the state of Missouri goes. South. South. Quincy. Alton. St. Louis. Cape Girardeau. The Ohio River marries into the Mississippi and ol’ Miss fattens up and then it’s Kentucky for the blink of an eye, maybe forty miles or so, and Tennessee for another forty, and then you’ve got a skirt along the bottom and it’s called Arkansas, Arkansas, Arkansas. And then lookout, child, you better cover that scalp! It’s Indian Territory! Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, maybe a thousand of them yelping and slinging their arrows at you!”
Jesse had sloshed over the bank and scrambled up to the cliff, ripping a maple branch into a stick. He overheard the geography lesson and smiled at Bob with brown tobacco blotting out some teeth. The sun was gone and only an orange glow along Kansas recalled it. Jesse gazed down at the fishing lines and asked if there’d been any nibbles.
“Can’t say I’ve felt even a twitch, Jess.”
Jesse cautioned, “Little rabbits have big ears, Bob.”
“Dave,” Bob corrected. “Could be it’s not night enough yet, Dave.”
Jesse unfolded his pocket knife and whittled with the stick so close his eyes crossed. Blond shavings boated on the water eight or nine feet below them. When the stick was arrowed, he gave it to Tim. “You want to go play?”
The boy slid down the weeds without saying, going down to the water his father had walked in and then flinging the arrow into it. Jesse sighed as he watched the stick navigate the currents out and then he unlidded a mason jar that was not there when last Bob looked. The odor was that of lager beer. Jesse drank and sleeved his mouth and mustache. “You want some?”
Bob swallowed some but tilted the mason jar too much, spilling beer on his chin.
