So Brave, Young, and Handsome: A Novel Page 7

  It was a serene night on the river, and Glendon told me of his salvation in some detail. Crealock had described Hell in upsetting similes until Glendon asked what he must do to keep from its torturous flames. There was a grassy stream flowing through the Hole and there Crealock baptized the young penitent, asking his name and receiving Glen Dobie; and Glen Dobie wept along with the preacher, who thanked him for his amenable heart and gave him a paperboard copy of Proverbs, although he could not read. Then the preacher instructed him to rest awhile and implore with God and taught him a short prayer to say. The new convert went to his bedroll rejoicing. He uttered the prayer a number of times and cried several times, feeling the mercy of God pour out like cleansing oil upon his limbs, and late in the day he arose and ate a sustaining meal of frijoles with side pork and rode out from the Hole with his friends and robbed the Union Pacific as it climbed the Wyoming foothills.

  Then “Hold on, Becket,” he said. “Do you hear a noise?”

  He held the oars still in the water for maybe a minute. There came a faint yawp or roar—an alarming, abrasive sound. As we listened it resolved to coarse laughter.

  “Is there a boat?” Glendon asked. “Can you see anyone?”

  The clouds had moved off the waxing moon. It was bright enough that dips in the land appeared as shadows. Looking upriver I saw a yellow light I had moments earlier taken for someone’s cabin window—now I could see it was an oil lamp hung on a black line sliding swiftly downriver.

  “It’s a barge or raft,” I said. “See that light?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” he replied, though between our progress upstream and theirs down, the distance was shutting dramatically.

  “Look more to the left.” It was a big raft carrying the shapes of men. I couldn’t tell how many. They were laughing again, though with more reserve—some new note had entered their revelry.

  Glendon said, “Hang these eyes of mine, what a disappointment they are.”

  “There. Right there. See how close they’re getting?” Because now in the moonlight I could make out three or four men squatting at the near edge of the raft. Another was standing aft—from his motions I judged he was steering with a pole or long oar. “Look,” I said, “there must be a strong crosscurrent. They’re coming straight this way.”

  But even at close range Glendon couldn’t see them, for abruptly their lantern was extinguished. Onward they came. There was no laughing now aboard that raft, nor talking either. The man astern poled hard across the current, and the others crouched at the waterline.

  7

  Violence seldom issues a warning—I saw that raft sweeping down, yet it still didn’t seem possible the men aboard intended us ill. “Hello the boat!” I shouted, only a little wary, when they were perhaps forty yards away, but received no answer. Not until they were within twenty yards and still silent did I comprehend our trouble, though Glendon did—he couldn’t see the raft but, guessing its position, dug in an oar and sent us surging away at an angle.

  His maneuver saved us a ruinous collision. The man at the helm roared a vulgarism and bent viciously to his staff, aiming again to transect our course; the river brought them nearer and the men crabbed forward, one shirtless looking wild as Lear with his hair lashing his chest. Another was bristly and squat as a boar—the others I can’t recall, but with these two I own details because just before the raft swept downstream, missing us by perhaps fifteen feet, Lear and the boarlike fellow gathered themselves and sprang. In disbelief I shouted Glendon, pull! but they were robust swimmers and reached us in seconds. The bristly man clutched the gunwale and the johnboat heeled so that Glendon sprawled in the bottom. That brought cheers from the raft, then more as the bristly man got a leg over the rail—his face was chaos: mucky nostrils, warped lip. I stuck my foot on his eyes and shoved even as Lear came swarming up the opposite side. On his knees Glendon swung an oar but missed and Lear tumbled into the boat, getting a fistful of my shirt. We tilted steeply and something skidded down hard on my ankle. It was the snapper. A claw flailed, there came a blunt report like the one we’d heard at supper, then Lear began to shriek. Where the turtle took hold we will never know but I can tell you Lear dragged himself over the side in the grip of a living bear trap and down they went the two of them, a final shriek burbling up out of the river like the sound of Hell established. The bristly fellow surely heard it too, for in his rush to escape he gave the johnboat a shove that carried us yards upstream. His companions on that wretched raft had drifted down a considerable distance, but I suppose he made it safely back. That devil was strong in the water.

  8

  From first to last the raft incident used fewer than ten minutes of our lives, yet every day I see the faces of those men—the one who went down with the turtle and the feral witless one who escaped. In the minutes afterward I was so glad to be living I could only tremble, but there was no sleep for either of us that night, nor much talk until just before sunup.

  “Glendon, do you suppose he could have got to shore, somehow?”

  As I said it the hinge of my jaw made a gristly cracking sound; I’d been unwittingly clenching it for hours.

  “Now, don’t you waste dismay on that fellow. He invited what he got.”

  “Nobody invites that,” I replied.

  “Well, at least he was bad,” Glendon said. “If a man’s got to die, let him be a bad man.”

  “Good or bad, I’m not sure it matters.” You’ll excuse my dark mood—it seemed I could still hear that last, sodden, faraway scream. I felt culpable and exposed.

  “It matters,” Glendon stated.

  I had no reply. Susannah appeared in my mind—she was probably just coming awake, my nightgowned wife looking out at the sunrise, at caddis flies lifting off the river and Chief grazing in the mist. This idyllic and distant picture heightened my grief. Belatedly it seemed my finest virtue was the distance I had maintained from death; now I had this freight to carry and no place to lay it down.

  On we went upriver. The sun eased up off the eastern prairie and still he kept rowing. He said, “I killed a man once, but he was a good man. God grant he’d been wicked.”

  I didn’t ask but he told me anyway.

  “It was a train job—my last, it turned out. I came through the cars and this stout laddie stood up behind his seat pointing a gun. Handsome, a nice turn of speech. He offered to accept my surrender.” Glendon’s voice tightened. “I guess he worked up at the California legislature. You don’t think of politicians having any spine but this one did. He had a wife, too, it seems.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I shot him. Monte, I shot that brave fellow three times, including once in the face. Yes, I did.”

  He looked at me and I turned away.

  “When the boys asked what happened, I made it out he’d shot first. It was easier to think of it in that way. I tore it down and rebuilt it in my mind, you see.”

  I said, “He would’ve shot you, I suppose,” guessing it was little comfort.

  “I wasn’t scared to die,” he replied. “Truly I wasn’t. It was incarceration that scared me.”

  “Avoiding jail is poor reason for killing a man, Glendon.”

  “Yes, it’s as you say.”

  He rowed on while the sun climbed and the river began to stink of heat.

  “I got incarcerated once,” he said. “It wasn’t a week after leaving Blue. I rowed around the point of Silena and there were six Porfirian guards waiting for me in their epaulets. They broke up my boat and put me in a wood box in a place called La Bestia. Twenty months I spent in that box, before I slipped away. But you don’t need to hear about that, no sir, you don’t.”

  Now we heard a train whistle and the passage of its wheels west to east. We heard the high moan of a steer. It seemed likely a town was around the next bend or two, so we pulled up on a spot where cattle had nibbled the lower branches off some poplar trees. It was cool and mossy under the trees. We rested against their trunks.


  Glendon said, “I ain’t paid for that politician yet. After the wood box I got real hard to catch.” Mournfully he added, “You see how it is, Becket.”

  We sat a long time in the mossy grass. Lost, that’s how I felt. A page had turned and the story was a new one filled with doubtful creatures. I got up and walked away by myself but no solace came, and I drifted back to the shade of the poplars. Glendon hadn’t moved. From time to time he’d sigh like a dandy. He was tender that way; he couldn’t bear discomfort between himself and a companion. Finally he sat himself up and said, “Becket, this won’t do. You have got to go back home.”

  “I came of my own will, you know that,“ I said, but grudgingly.

  “Rubbish, you came under a deceit. I oughtn’t have begged your help. It was weak of me and I rue it.”

  A picture of Susannah arose like a breeze in my face, and excitement at returning to my known world, followed by a bewildering sorrow that my guilty friend no longer wished my company.

  I said, “What would you have me do?”

  “You’ve been good to me. I won’t forget. Go back to Minnesota. Kiss your wife, raise your boy. Why, you can be home in a few days.”

  How the blood beat in my fingertips at that! “But the police,” I said. “Royal Davies. I’ll have to get square with them first.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. He was so amenable I could only picture him as he had always been with Redstart. Yielding, indulgent. Despite everything it reached to my heart.

  “I’d rather not put them onto you.”

  He replied, “If your conscience allows it, I would appreciate if you neglect to mention Blue. Other than that it makes small difference. They won’t get me, Becket.”

  “You seem awfully confident of that.”

  “I’m fairly sure of it. I’m a gifted sidestepper. It’s natural as walking, I’m afraid.” He’d gotten out his briar pipe; packing it fully he leaned back with a match. Now that he’d done right by me and told me to go home, he seemed lonesome and resigned. He said, “What do you dream of, Becket, at night?”

  “That I am at sea, or in a snowstorm.”

  “When I was young I used to dream of escapes, and wake up sweating,” Glendon replied. “Now I mostly dream of captures, and you know what? I wake up calm.”

  9

  The town upstream was confidently named Revival, which fit my mood as we clattered up its boardwalks. Glendon was subdued, but I was thinking of home and Susannah’s embrace. I’d even begun to imagine myself a better individual, one tempered by experience and loss. Talk about your quick recoveries!

  Revival had wide earth streets and a sense of deferred prosperity. The single avenue between water and rail was occupied by livery and grocer and hardware and fine dirt whisking along the ground. I washed at an outside pump, entered the mercantile, and came out wearing a new denim shirt and carrying another in a tied parcel. A mob of boys was flocked by the tracks and I asked them about a barber.

  “Behind the café.” One pointed. The mob was in merry form—a couple of them had a twisting bullsnake between them and were pinning it down head and tail with forked sticks.

  I thanked the boys and Glendon tossed some pennies on the ground. They forgot the bullsnake instantly.

  “It’s a shave for me,” I said.

  “I’ll walk up to the depot.”

  The barber was a cheery gossip boasting two chairs side-by-side before a wide mirror. Entering the shop I was jarred by my reflection in that glass. It was just barely me. I was used to resembling what I was—a well-meaning failure, a pallid disappointer of persons, a man fading. This fellow looked tired and rough, but—if I may say it—capable. Wary, I would say, and of dubious intent. It hit with a thump that people seeing this personage would not guess me for anything but a stranger with a firm grip. It was almost a pleasure to squint at the glass. What would Grace Hackle say, if she happened by and saw me? Nothing at all—but she’d think, The strenuous life!

  “Step up,” said the barber, and I did.

  As he soaped my jaws an old fellow swung into the shop. A straight-up, handsome, slender, leathery brute, he swept off his hat and took the other chair like he’d bought it off the showroom floor.

  “In from Kay Cee?” asked the barber, for the train had rumbled in some minutes earlier; we could hear it panting still.

  “California, by way of Kay Cee,” said the old strap, lifting his chin.

  “You come through the big rains?”

  “Hail on the tracks we had to get out and shovel.”

  The barber wrapped a steaming towel on that gritty face and asked was he here on business.

  “Yes, I’m looking for a man.”

  “You’re with the police, then.”

  “Pinkertons,” was the disdainful reply.

  Now the blood sang in my brain, it hummed in my hands. I felt unaccountably fearful.

  “I guess you’re after the brigands who came off the river,” remarked the barber.

  “What brigands are those?”

  “Bunch of no-accounts—came in on a raft, broke into Lilly Bale’s tavern. She says they took two hundred dollars, but that’s Lilly talking.”

  “Your brigands will have to wait. I am after bigger quarry,” said the Pinkerton, through his towel.

  “Whatever you say,” said the barber.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve shaved a short reprobate with white hair and mustache,” said the old strap. “Demeanor I would describe as tranquil.”

  “Be still,” the barber told me, for I had twitched as the blade approached. And to the other he said, “Does your reprobate have a name?”

  “It may be Dobie or Tracy or Hale, though he has others as well.”

  At this all strength drained from me. I peered over at the man’s hands on his knees, hands like rope and harness.

  The barber began to take off my whiskers in long swipes. When he paused I craned out the window, but no Glendon did I see.

  “Have you a photograph of this person?” inquired the barber.

  “I wish I did; the bugger has managed to avoid all Kodaks.”

  A few more swipes and my face emerged in the mirror. My customary face. I was sorry to see it.

  “There you are,” said the barber, swabbing my neck.

  I stood from the chair and put some coins on a shelf. Out I rushed to find Glendon coming up the boardwalk. Taking his arm I said, “There’s a man looking for you.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t hear his name. Tall older man, dark, getting a shave. A Pinkerton agent.”

  “Well, as I live and breathe,” said Glendon.

  “Do you know him? Where are we going?” For we had changed course and were crossing over toward the café.

  “To get some dinner,” Glendon said. “If I have to become scarce why do it hungry?”

  The place was almost empty and we took a table in front with a view of the barbershop. We ordered soup and coffee and had a short wait, during which I was confronted again by myself in the window. Oh, it was the old Monte in that glass. It was who I had been before I left Northfield; who I would be again when I returned. As we waited a kind of illness entered my limbs and guts. The window both reflected me and rendered me transparent. My clothes and skin rippled like the surface of water. There was my shaved and thwarted face, which I looked straight through to the street beyond. Here was my morbid thought: What if I am forgotten already? Suppose I go home, and she does not notice?

  Before our meal arrived the leathery customer came out of the shop and stood a moment blinking in the sun.

  “There is the man,” I said.

  “I don’t see so good from this distance,” said Glendon.

  “Hold on,” I said, for the old man adjusted his fedora and came straight across toward us. I was some thirty years his junior but could only envy the resolve in his carriage, his easy step, his peregrine eye.

  “Well, what about that,” said Glendon, with admiration.

  “Who
is he?”

  “It’s Charlie Siringo, the old badger. I didn’t know he was still working. Maybe the Devil takes care of his own at that. He looks good, wouldn’t you say?”

  He did look good. At that age it’s hard to do better than fire and sinew. He came up the steps at a vault and entered the café. He nodded to me in recognition from the barber’s and I nodded back, wondering that he did not come over to scrutinize Glendon.

  “Doesn’t he—” I whispered, turning to my friend, but Glendon was gone without a sound, like a dived waterbird, like a coyote vanishing into the brush.

  10

  Charles Siringo sat at the counter and ordered a slice of dark bread, no butter, cup of coffee. He took a piece of black chocolate from his pocket and laid it on the counter—he liked it unsweetened, I was to learn. He looked like a stork or Trappist. You would expect a Pinkerton to be inspecting the faces of everyone in the café, but Siringo merely unfolded a newspaper and bent himself over it. I laid a bill on the table and left by the front door.

  Round the building I found Glendon in the alley. He had a loaf of brown bread in one hand and a pie in the other. A cinnamon dog with a big square head was sitting in front of him, tapping its tail and whining.

  “I went out through the kitchen, look what the pleasant cook had on hand,” Glendon said. “Let’s eat. Behave, you,” he told the dog.

  We came out of the alley with the loping dog and went up the street by the post office and seed merchant and blacksmith and finally crossed a dirt lot to a board church signed Revival Baptist. It was the last building on the west edge of town, the usual little white church except they’d run out of paint; half the church was white, the other half plain darkened pine. Also the steeple had never been mounted but was sitting in the yard like an obelisk. You could tilt it back and forth in the weeds. The church door was open and it was cool in there with gray light entering the windows.