So Brave, Young, and Handsome: A Novel Page 10

  In cold relief I fell asleep, only to wake before dawn with Glendon himself this time squatting beside the dead fire.

  “He came back,” I told him, while Hood slept on.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “What did he expect to find? Does he know you’re with us?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “But he came back,” I repeated.

  “If he hadn’t come back, he’d be a fool,” Glendon said. “That’s something Charlie never was.”

  The Hundred and One

  1

  Now a cloud appeared in the south and east. We didn’t understand what it was right away—coming out of the Flint Hills we saw a dark line scribed over that horizon as though the land itself were an inky color there—and we drove toward the Hundred and One raising dust over the abruptly windless plain, each of us glancing left now and then without knowing why. I can tell you we didn’t talk much that day, though Hood kept bringing up his artful misdirection of Charles Siringo. He loved praise and pursued it with as much delicacy as any five-year-old. It’s true we enjoyed the prospect of the old predator moving quickly in the wrong direction—we congratulated Hood until he began to seem a little too large, whereon we changed the subject.

  The Packard functioned smoothly and we stacked up eighty miles in one day while the cloud remained a nearly imaginary presence to the far southeast, like an army or a rumored sea. In this way we traveled several more days while the heat rose in the afternoons along with the spectral dust of the road.

  The horizon meanwhile grew darker.

  Nearing the Oklahoma line we encountered a cool breeze—the cloud’s advance guard, its annunciation. The wind was a relief after the heat but we looked askance at the approaching weather, which seemed to crawl over the continent with calculated stealth. We passed towns where people leaned from their windows or stood in the streets looking into the eastern sky, ranches where children hurried to empty clotheslines and penned remudas nickered and tossed their manes. My own fear registered as a tendency to run the Packard at high speeds. Hood buttoned his shirtsleeves and hunched in the auto. Glendon alone seemed unafraid of the fetid yellows and violets atwist in that appalling cloud. Attaining a height of land we stopped the car and stood in the noontime sun to watch it come. Only miles away fields lay under nightfall. Trees caught the sunlight then were extinguished. It was as though we looked across at another country and it was night there.

  Hood asked Glendon whether he’d seen any such thing in nature and Glendon stretched and told, in a bemused voice, of a dark fog that swallowed his boat for four days. This was immediately after he fled capture and left Blue standing in the surf of the Sea of Cortez. The fog next morning was so heavy he could stand at the tiller and not see the mast. He tied the dripping sail along the boom and so flat was the sea that the dripping was all the sound he had in those four days. Hood wanted to know if the porpoises came and kept him company—he had heard of porpoises and their famous goodwill toward men—but Glendon said no, it was just him and God, and God not saying a word. The story didn’t do much for me, but Hood seemed to feel more cheerful. In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

  Hours later we drove out of sunshine into cold and stagnant gloom. It seemed impossible there was no rain. Immediately Hood began singing to himself, simple schoolyard tunes along the lines of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” He was apt to hum when he was ruminating or couldn’t sleep; it did no harm. The country under the cloud smelled of damp lime and the colors were dark and mossy. We were all of us uneasy—I’d have sung too, if it would’ve helped. As it was, the only helpful thing I could do was drive, so I turned on the Packard’s headlights, which seemed naïve and petite against this occupying night, and I drove. We seemed the only thing moving. Hood moodily produced the penciled directions to the Hundred and One his former employer Lewis had given him. We went through the silent town of Ponca City in which bats dropped out of eaves everyplace you looked. We crossed a bridge over the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. Hood called out to me to turn at this barn, at that painted house; one of the landmarks was a bison ranch and we glimpsed their arcane humped profiles behind a fence built against giants. Now the Salt Fork appeared on our right, bending close then turning away. Ahead were lights—and now a familiar weighty shape reared up suddenly; I braked hard and Hood Roberts threw himself with a yelp to the floor of the Packard.

  “I guess we’re at the ranch,” said I, for the fearsome shape was exactly one African elephant strolling beside the road. The elephant bellowed and stamped; its ears rippled like laundry, its weedy tail slashed about. Poor Hood, he moaned like a sylph, but Glendon wore a bewildered smile. An elephant! I knew right then he was glad we’d come.

  2

  For all Hood’s faith in the Hundred and One, there was no question that storied place had entered a slow fade. I’m sorry to have missed its prime, for it was once the jewel of western showbiz. Hood knew all about it. The ranch was owned by three brothers named Miller who through luck and audacity had amassed more acres and beasts and renown than any six ranches on the Great Plains. For two decades the Hundred and One held every ace. Wild horses bought by the Millers inevitably became the finest cow ponies working; newly purchased land tracts seemed always to reveal deep pockets of oil barely under the clay. Proud entertainers, these brothers built a circus kingdom with its own streets and cafés, with film stages and trick riders, with Arabian camels and lions in cages and gorillas returning the stares of patrons. People traveled from neighboring states to glimpse these exotics and to witness action scenarios from the Vanishing West. The Millers erected a grandstand they boasted would be visible from the moon. At its peak a thousand cowboys and Indians worked at the Hundred and One, and every night at six they had a war.

  In recent years, though, attendance was down. Popular whimsy was in motion and apparently away from cowboys; some people had begun to think if the West was going to Vanish it should probably get on with it. Also, certain favorite performers had departed or died, such as Cyclops Mike, and the Siamese Twins who rode with a binary saddle and could rope two steers at a time.

  “So this is the mighty Hundred and One. I didn’t expect it to look so down at the mouth,” Glendon remarked, as we drove between leaning storefronts under the liver-spotted cloud.

  “It don’t look bad, that’s an effect of the weather,” Hood mumbled—I could barely hear him.

  Still it didn’t rain. Painted signboards stood around advertising that night’s Wild West performance on the parade grounds—the show was canceled, I am sorry to say, so I missed my chance to see a Wagon Train of Brave Settlers, Savage Indians Taking Scalps, Flaming Arrows, and so forth. It would have been nice to have seen that show just once. I talked with a youngster who’d been in the crowd the night a gristly old Mimbreño, aroused by raiding again after long hiatus, forgot himself, scalped a fellow performer, and stood shaking the trophy at the roaring spectators as the cavalry rode in tooting their horns.

  But as I say, the performance was shut down by the ominous and apparently endless cloud. What is more forlorn than an empty carnival? Where does everyone go? We left the Packard on the street and took two rooms at a boardinghouse where the wallpaper slumped and the lightbulbs buzzed and browned.

  “Look, they’re making a picture,” said Hood, peering out our window—I shared a room with him on the second floor. He was looking across the street at a foursquare clapboard with light pouring out the open door. Its windows were bright rectangles past which vivid characters spun. A camera wheeled by on spidery legs pushed by a beefy youngster in a backward golf cap, and a girl stepped out the door lighting a cigarette. A Mexican girl in a dress the color of sunsets. She stood in the street holding the cigarette in her fingers and looking up at the cloud. Hood leaned down so intently his head struck the window glass, then pulled away lest she look up and catch him watching.

  “Oh, gee,” he remarked.

 
“Gee what?”

  “Gee, she is awful pretty,” Hood elaborated. I might’ve expected him to blush with this admission but the opposite happened; his face looked bare and bloodless, as though the mere sight of this señorita had stopped his life and set it in some form of reverse.

  The girl took a few twirling steps down the boardwalk like someone accustomed to an audience. She examined the hostile sky and made, I believe, a face at it—she gave the old cloud an insouciant sneer. She dropped the cigarette on the boardwalk, set her toe on it, and spun round before running back into the building. It was a small but beautiful display.

  “You think she’s a actress?” he wondered, when he found speech possible. “You think they let you stroll in and watch while they run the camera?”

  “Go ask.”

  He rose and went down the hall to the bathroom and returned twice to request my razor and comb.

  “You don’t need to shave,” I said.

  “Sure I do—look here.” And leaning up to a lightbulb he pointed out a few dozen brown feelers exploring along his jaw. It occurred to me once again that Hood Roberts wasn’t all that much older than Redstart—neither his face nor his judgment were fully formed, an apprehension that would keep me soft toward him in the coming days, when so many others were howling for his life.

  3

  That evening I asked Glendon whether he believed the fog that encapsuled his boat on the Sea of Cortez was a maneuver of God Almighty to pursue him into the arms of justice. We’d purchased a bag of sugared pastries for Hood and were walking in the twilight toward the vacant parade grounds of the Hundred and One. I thought my question might be a dangerous one—who doesn’t dread what God might be up to in our pivotal moments?—but he answered with a straight yes and we walked on.

  “Do you fear justice, Glendon?”

  “Yes, I do,” he replied, so simply that I realized I feared it too.

  “Do you wish you had gone back, then? Back to Blue?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t do it,” he said, adding, with a wry glance, “fear seems my bedrock principle, wouldn’t you say?” His regret was strong enough he wrote Blue a repentant letter with the help of ruined Crealock, whose Spanish in the heartfelt regions surpassed Glendon’s, yet it must not have been a satisfactory letter since Blue never replied. “One day you will have to go back in person,” Crealock told him, yet Glendon knew that to return anytime soon would likely cost him his liberty. His crimes in the country of Mexico were a horde memorized by authorities. Cattle were only the beginning; trains in those provinces were creaky affairs open to an inventive bandit who took joy in his craft. The performance of theft came to Glendon with such little difficulty he considered it a kind of gift. He was a fastidious bad man who scarcely touched his victims. Spoils appeared as though conjured in his pockets. This talent plus his aptitude for deflection made him nearly untouchable by policia, though he proved quite human the day the Porfirian officers blew his boat out from under him on the Sea of Cortez.

  “They had a short cannon set up on the beach,” he said. “I came around that point not fifty yards from shore and there they were—I gave them a laugh, that’s for sure.”

  “A cannon? For one American bandit?”

  “Well, there was a sporting element to it. They were betting how many shots it would take to hit the boat.”

  “How many did it take?”

  “Seven or eight. When they started finding the range I jumped and swam for it, but they kept firing till they sunk her. That was a little mean, I thought.”

  Reaching the edge of the parade field, we beheld a puzzling sight. Before us stood half a dozen slim wood pedestals. They were elegant, carved like the Doric columns outside libraries, but what caught the eye were the orange glass spheres resting on them. The size of large citrus, they seemed to gather what light there was in that doleful setting.

  “What are these, Monte—are they fine art?” Glendon asked.

  “No idea,” I confessed. Strangely, the spheres didn’t seem out of place, but then the whole ranch under that alien cloud resembled one of Goya’s mesmeric notions.

  “Well, they’re pretty little moons,” said my friend. Something about the unlikely ornaments seemed to touch a disconsolate note, and he added, “I’ll admit something to you, Becket: I am sick of being chased.”

  “Siringo has gone to South Dakota,” I reminded him.

  Glendon laughed as though Siringo were the least of it.

  We stood quietly before the row of globes. I wanted to raise one in my palm. As in a storybook I reached for the nearest bauble, only to have it vaporize before me like an enchanted thing.

  The slap of a gunshot arrived a second later.

  The shock of that sound is with me still—it smacked and prickled as I stood confused, watching an orange cloudlet rain over the grass.

  “Why, they’re targets,” Glendon mused, as another of the little globes turned to a column of steam. In panic I threw myself to the ground. Slap came the sound of the shot.

  “Drat my eyes,” said Glendon; he couldn’t see who was shooting. Neither could I, once I’d gained the courage to poke my head up and look around. As we crouched, the remaining four spheres burst and drifted over the lawn, each followed by its tardy black-powder concussion. Then a distant slack shape I’d taken for a sleeping dog rose and stretched and became our confident marksman.

  Despite a fast gait it took him a long time to reach us. I’ll admit to some nerves at his approach. Among noted riflemen there is reputed to be a predatory quality—the great Crockett is said to have moved like a panther even when going out to get the mail. That’s what this fellow reminded me of, all buckskinned and moccasined, though there was something un-Crockettlike about him too.

  “Why, it’s a woman!” I said.

  Yes, she heard me, for I received a wounded glance.

  “Good day, miss, you are most impressive,” said Glendon.

  The woman stopped where she was—a big supple woman. She said, “Saints above, tell me it ain’t Glen Dobie!”

  “I guess it’s me, all right,” said Glendon, though he was fidgety and plainly had no idea who this woman was now trotting forward in a state of high emotion.

  “Glen, it’s me! Darlys DeFoe,” she declared.

  “Darlys?” he said, as wonder and relief settled on him.

  Darlys DeFoe dropped her long buffalo gun to the turf like a willow stick and leapt upon Glendon forthwith.

  He was staggered a moment by her attention and heft—she was kissing his cheeks and his forehead and mouth. Getting hold of her arms he removed her gently saying, “Darlys, meet my friend—”

  “Jack,” I put in.

  Glendon’s eyes rolled. “Jack was about to lay hands on that globe when you shot it. You gave us a scare, Darlys.”

  “I’m Darla now,” said she, and so she was, on the handbills and circulars we’d seen pasted up or blowing the streets: Deep Breath Darla, Queen of the Long Shot. She was at that time the Hundred and One’s beauteous lady sharpshooter; since Annie Oakley, every Wild West Show in the world had one.

  “I ain’t seen you since the train stopped in Marquez,” said Glendon, as kindly as possible, holding Darlys DeFoe at arm’s length. “All this time I kind of pictured you in Virginia or Alabama—someplace genteel.”

  “Things went otherwise for me, Glen.”

  “Well, you’ve got a job and are famous good at it,” Glendon replied. “Don’t you think I saw the handbills? Darlys, you’re an attraction!”

  Darlys DeFoe blushed, the tragic old moonbeam; seeing that blush I had an urge to pull Glendon aside and warn him somehow, but it would’ve done little good. Glendon was already walking with Darlys toward a lit tavern at the edge of the grounds. The old girl was waltzing along like an ingenue, if you can picture an ingenue with a large-bore buffalo gun in her knuckly hand; but Glendon, I noticed, had his hands in his pockets and was talking with easy rapport, as though she’d been a man.

  4
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  “I married Rory—that’s what tripped me up so bad,” she told us. “Rory Day. I met him in Kansas City just a few days after you put me on that train, Glen. I thought he would be nice to me, but no. The only nice thing about Rory was his teeth.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you—you’d just come from Hole in the Wall,” said Glendon. We sat in a beer-stained booth in what was called the President’s Tavern and overlooked the parade grounds and prairie beyond. “Nice teeth must’ve seemed like enough,” he added.

  She looked gratefully at my friend.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “didn’t I pay for you to go all the way home?”

  “I didn’t go, Glen, I’m sorry. My papa had that cheese shop, you know. If I had gone home it would’ve been a long life of wrapping cheese. Rory swept me up and we got married in a week. He had ideas. He taught me to shoot baubles from half a mile away. It’s harder than it looks.”

  “Where’s Rory these days?” asked Glendon.

  “He got drunk and fell in the river.”

  “Darlys, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, he was drunk most of the time by then. It ain’t like I wanted him to die, but he thumped me around enough. When he turned up in the river I found I could bear the pain.”

  Sudden disclosures of a private nature embarrassed Glendon—he looked so awkward Darlys hurried to change the subject. “There’s another old friend of yours here, Joe Barrera. Have you seen him?”

  “José? Truly?”

  “He’s always down at the stables—you should go look in on him.”

  “He won’t be glad to see me, though,” said Glendon.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Is he a relic from your days in the train business?”

  Glendon smiled. “Far from it. José is a cousin of Blue’s. He had a concertina and could play it like an orchestra. He brought it to our wedding, in fact.”