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‘This is a hell of a life,’ said Pierce.
I watched the lightning bugs turn green-gold in part of the night and then green-gold someplace else. I remembered what Julia had said about her crying into a pillow, and I wanted to be rich very soon.
For an hour on the evening of September 15, 1891, seven men in black raincoats sat with their horses under cotton-wood trees across from the depot in Leliaetta. Three of them smoked cigarettes; Broadwell
sat on a tree stump cleaning the glass lenses of his dust goggles with the blue bandana he’d wear. I hunched up on my saddle cantle with my ankles crossed over the horn, tapping tobacco into paper. The horses shook their reins and pulled what green weeds they could; then they just stood there with the dumb-animal stares, sliding their jaws, tails whisking from side to side. Powers leaned forward with his calabash pipe to squint down the railroad tracks; then he and Bob chucked their horses and skidded them down to the siding where a black man and woman were walking on the cinders with a pail.
They both wore shawls on their heads and the woman’s right eye was milky with a cataract. The old man stayed two feet behind the woman, touching her coat with his hand.
Bob kept under his coat collar; Powers tipped his hat to the lady. ‘Lookin’ for something?’
She gripped the pail with both hands. The old man slowly looked up. He wore glasses but one of the lenses was gone. She said, ‘This old man and me, we tryin’ to find a little stray coal to warm the shanty up. We be camped over yonder by the sidin’ and the hawk been talkin’ awful bad. Get measly cold in the night.’
The old man asked, ‘You gentlemen be wantin’ a man for a job of woik?’
‘Nothing you could handle,’ said Powers. ‘But you go on up the track to the gantlet and see if you don’t find some coal after the express goes through.’
After they’d gone, Bob said, ‘You did good, Bill.’
‘Thankee.’
I licked a cigarette paper and twisted it tight and struck a match off my stirrup. The old woman stared at the red of my cigarette in the dark as they walked along the tracks. Broadwell lifted his saddletree to ventilate his horse, then tightened the cinch again. Newcomb climbed off his horse, complaining. ‘What’s he doin’, talkin’ to niggers?’ He spread a big raincoat that was long as his heels and unbuttoned his pants and leaned his hand against a box elder. Our saddle leather creaked. Somewhere in the dark town a dog barked. Doolin said, ‘My back hurts.’ My brother and Powers stayed down at the siding. The cinders crunched as the horses picked their shoes up and put them down again. I watched the depot where a man had been bent over a desk all night, turning the pages of a book and penciling in all the closed letters, every a, e, g, o, b, d, q, and p.
Bob stabbed his spurs and his horse clambered over the tracks and trotted along the siding to the semaphore with Powers skirting beside him with a forked branch he’d stripped and whittled on our ride over.
The station attendant glanced at the pendulum clock behind him, then walked from his desk, opened the door, and stood on the loading platform, scanning, three wide boards between his boots. Two mail sacks sat on the trolley. Bob and Powers had their gloved hands clamped over their horses’ noses not fifty yards away but the attendant’s eyes didn’t get used to the dark before he heard the smokestack of the train and started to close the depot door behind him. Then he stopped and saw the five of us in the trees across from the loading platform and he gave us one of the most comical faces of shock I’ve ever seen before he slammed the door and bolted it.
I saw him sidestep around his desk and then he was out of sight. Pierce twittered like a bobolink and Powers shoved up the green blade of the semaphore with his branch and held it there until the train got to the tall white whistle signpost and the steam whistle cord was pulled. Then he let the blade drop and the depot’s air pressure semaphore swung up and the danger blade glowed ruby in front of the lantern. But the engineer had already seen the green and the locomotive started braking.
My brother put my binoculars down and the solemn man beside him said, ‘You got yourself a good woman.’
‘You bet.’
The five of us still in the dark of the trees coaxed our horses down the incline. Mine had tugged the leaves off an elm tree but it didn’t think much of the taste.
Doolin said, ‘Bryant’s dead now. Let’s have no wanton murder.’
My brother urged his horse and it knocked up onto the wooden stairs and across the loading platform to the door. The kerosene lantern inside the depot had been snuffed. My brother got off his horse and stood next to the door, his pistol next to his cheek. ‘Hey? Hey, I’d like you to live through this.’ He heard a desk drawer slide open and closed. He heard the desk chair squeal.
Meanwhile Newcomb and I took positions on the east side of the tracks, Broadwell and Pierce on the west. There we lifted blue bandanas over our noses and backed our horses up as the bell clanged and the whistle went off again and I got the scares like you do when you’re next to monster machines. The locomotive was black and hot and big as a shoe store. The cowcatcher had tumbleweed in it and the front lamp was grimy and spattered with insects. Smoke rolled brown out of the tall stack and tore apart gray in the trees and white steam climbed out of pipes and jets and nozzles everywhere. My horse jerked its head from the steam as from a bad smell. I held my ears at the noise and watched the steel rails squash down on the ties and then lift up spikes and squash down under the wheels again. The tender and express car and baggage car creaked by and the train jolted to a stop with me facing the single Pullman. There wasn’t a dining car or smoking parlor, just three more coach cars and a caboose. I saw a woman standing next to a Pullman window lifting a blue-veined breast with the back of her hand. Her baby lost the long maroon nipple and jerked around until he found it again.
Doolin had crouched down next to the blackened switch with his pistol between his legs. Then he ran gawkily some forty feet until he could snag a boot on the cab ladder and bang on up the steps. Bob just stood on the platform like a passenger, his pistol hanging from his left hand, and stepped out onto a fender, lifting up his mask. The stoker had been about to carry coal to the boiler. He banged his shovel down when he saw Bob’s gun.
I observed that and I saw Newcomb masked and on his horse with the sleeves rolled up on his raincoat, his rifle barrel propped on the open platform between the express and baggage cars. I walked my horse along mostly dark passenger cars and to the empty caboose. In order to demonstrate to God and man what a young tough I was, I broke the glass tail lamp with the butt of my pistol and flame tore away from the wick. When I bent I could see the legs of Pierce’s and Broadwell’s horses. I saw a man walk out on a center coach platform lighting a cigarette. I raised my rifle high over my head and nodded at Newcomb and both of us fired warning shots, as did Broadwell and Pierce, so that it sounded like iron doors banging shut in a house of many rooms. The cigarette dropped off the man’s lip as he jumped back inside the coach. There were yells and screams about holdups and the train being robbed. The lights went out in all the cars. Faces disappeared from the windows. Steam leaked out from under the wheels.
Powers walked out of the darkness like a railroad inspector and he used the handrail as he climbed to the fenced platform of the express car. He tried the handle, then kicked the front door four times with the heel of his boot. ‘This is a robbery! Open up!’
The messenger said, ‘Not gonna and you can’t make me. Every door here is padlocked.’
Powers fired three shots through the porch roof overhead. Strips of tar roof flapped up on top of the car.
The messenger said, ‘You can shoot till doomsday and I ain’t gonna open this door.’
‘Well, I’ve got some encouragement here in the form of dynamite. Says on the label it’ll blow you into the middle of next week.’
Bob and Doolin had pushed the engineer and stoker back to the express car by then. Both of the crewmen wore bib overalls and striped caps but the stoker was shirtless and he smelled worse than sparrows burned dead in a chimney. Doolin had the hammer of his pistol cocked and poked down the front of the engineer’s overalls and he spoke into his ear like a lover. ‘Tell your money escort to please, please do what we say or I’ll blow your sex life to smithereens.’
The engineer shouted something convincing and after a minute of dead silence the broad side door rumbled open on its rollers and the. messenger backed to his desk. Broadwell trotted his ho
