“Yes,” Dad said, “I expected you would. Did you take the river?”
“Yes sir. We walked over and trotted back.”
“How’d the shelterbelt look?”
I had to be honest. “Kind of scraggly.”
Dad nodded. “The barn?”
“It’s leaning pretty good—there are cows in it, though. At least one cow. And some new kitties, I guess.”
“Uh-huh. House?”
“I saw where your room was.” I was going to say something about the boarded window, and the weathery paint, and how the chimney was coming apart, but Dad looked so skinny and thoughtful I decided not to.
He didn’t ask anything else, either.
“Say, Rube,” August said, after a moment, “tell about the turkey.”
At War with This Whole World
ACROSS THE YEARS SWEDE AND A WHOLE SERIES OF HORSES WERE TO WRING proper use from the Mexican saddle, but for now she had to be content with riding it in the Airstream trailer. Yes, we’d brought it along. Poor Swede had begged not to leave it behind, offering Dad any number of maudlin proofs for its value: As her present from Davy it reminded her to pray for him, it would make an adequate pillow should we wind up sleeping on the prairie, it was Mexican and so longed for the West, and so forth. Nothing convincing, so when Dad at last said, Well, why not? it was purely because he was crazy for Swede and would pay any price to see her happy. The saddle granted, Swede immediately asked to bring one of the sawhorses from the garage, and thus her design began to emerge. Her final and meekest appeal was for the typewriter. She wanted to “document our exploration.” She pointed out that Meriwether Lewis had lugged along cratefuls of pens and paper and India ink—think how tippy that rendered the old canoe—yet Thomas Jefferson himself had demanded it. I’m sure Dad enjoyed Swede’s persuasions, but can you imagine such packing?
Would your father have gone along with all this?
Nevertheless, when we drove out of August and Birdie’s that morning, Swede rode ensaddled on a swaying sawhorse in the Air-stream kitchen, the typewriter before her on a fold-down table. She had her coat on, though Dad had lit the heater briefly and goosed the temp to around 60, and she had paper rolled in and was observing the countryside out the louvered windows:
And so we take our leave. So we forsake the encouraging company of the last friendly outpost, riding alone into a wide cold land in pursuit of our brother. What a speck we are on this vast prospect! How small appear our chances of success!
Plainly this excerpt represents Swede at her happiest, though it made me feel bleak at the time. That part about the last friendly outpost—well, it wasn’t strictly true, as you will learn, but leaving August and Birdie it sure felt so. Once we’d boarded the trailer August came coatless around the Plymouth, where he put a bear hug on Dad a man so thin oughtn’t have survived; then Dad sank behind the wheel and off we rolled, a great drop of tin glinting on the snowy plains. Swede and I hustled to the back of the trailer for a last look, saw Birdie on the front step with her hands on her hips. The hound Ricky stood beside her, wiggling his stub tail. The two of them were watching not us but August, whose face looked strangely slack; his head was tilted and he was banging on it with one hand, like a man troubled by earwater.
We are headed for the Badlands. August called it a big busted-up place and believes our Davy has gone there. However, Davy did not say so. It is a long ride west from here, but we have warm weather. There is a soft wind called the chinook, it is almost 40 outside at this writing, so warm the ditches are dark and the birds are fooled. Some miles ago a ringneck pheasant poked his head out from stubble and watched us go by.
Practically every wanted man goes to the Badlands sometime: Butch Cassidy, Mr. Younger, Sam Bass. The Badlands are as good a place as any.
Swede was to write dozens of pages before we returned to Roofing, which is plenty of typing for someone using only indexes, plus thumbs for the space bar. Reading through them you will find many an allusion to distinguished outlaws of eras past and not one to the fact of motorized travel—always it is a long ride west, always we are proceeding apace through this or that settlement; Davy is surmised to be out front of us by six days’ trail. Though I’ll defend her narrative to the last, Swede’s journalistic technique precluded the attendance of one or two facts—for example, not only was Davy not riding a horse any longer, he was driving a Studebaker, its floorboards rotted to mere embroidery. August for years had kept the old boat for a field car, using it to inspect fencerows, seek errant beeves, and so on. Seeing Davy’s unwillingness to return home with his hands in the air, August decided the Studebaker had been more than faithful to him and needed a change of mission, also of oil. So that freezing sunup found August on his back beneath the chassis, his heart flailing with the loyal and grossly unlawful business at hand. Before Davy finished breakfast, August had affixed old license plates and obscured them with dirt and snow, filled the car up with gas from his scaffolded bulk tank, and placed bread and cheese and a sack of canned goods in the trunk. Taken together it was a good deal better than going by pony, something even Swede wouldn’t have argued with, no matter its literary value.
And will we find our Davy safe,
Along this stealthy track?
And might all our implorings steal
Our outlaw brother back?
I have noticed that people who love the whole wide parade will just wing off into verse at any chance; Swede did it constantly. Taking nothing from poetry, which we all know is prized as a conduit of wisdom, these lines again suggest an inaccurate picture. What’s stealthy about a green Plymouth station wagon yanking along a fat Airstream trailer? The truth is, stealth wasn’t an issue. We weren’t sneaking up on Davy, we were just trying to get in his vicinity. Anyway, have you ever been to North Dakota? In good sunlight you can see someone coming eight miles away.
More troubling to me was the question this verse asked—about stealing him back somehow. It seemed a reasonable proposition, and wasn’t it why we were chasing after him in the first place? Yet it niggled. It put a scene before my eyes in which Davy’s return depended on our persuasiveness. I tried to remember a time when I had persuaded my brother to change his mind—not just going along to humor me, which he did often, but coming indeed to believe something different. I didn’t have to think long. It had never happened. It seemed unlikely Swede had done it either. Maybe Dad had, when Davy was a whole lot younger.
Determined not to descend this reasoning alone, I said, “Swede, do you think we’ll be able to talk him into coming back?”
She was quite preoccupied, midstream in something. Yet she heard the question and unstirruped her right foot and swung over to face me sidesaddle. “Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seems not very likely, doesn’t it.”
“Yeah.”
Swede said, “What would you give, to get Davy home?”
The way she asked it warned me she’d been thinking about this.
“Well, most things; I guess anything.”
“And then what if they stick him in jail?”
“Well, I don’t know—knock it off, Swede.” Now that I’d started this talk, I wanted out.
“You still want him to come home if he has to be in jail?”
How’s that for a rotten question?
“Come on, Reuben. You can say yes if it’s true.”
But I couldn’t answer. I feared the outcome of honest speech—that it might reach forward in time and arrange events to come. If I told Swede I wanted Davy back, even at the cost of his freedom, might that not happen? And if I said what I sensed was the noble thing—better not to see him at all than pale and dumb during visiting hours—might that not bring despair on this whole crusade of ours?
Then Swede, who wasn’t volunteering her own answer to the question, asked another. “How come do you suppose August gave Davy that car?”
“Help him get away.”
“Even though they tried
to talk him into giving up?”
“That was Birdie,” I pointed out.
“August agreed, though, you know he did.”
I thought about August riding out front of me on the George River, he and Brit moving through the fog, a picture of freedom as good as any. August may have wanted Davy to turn himself in, yet nothing seemed more natural to me than his gift of the Studebaker. Could a person believe so strongly one way, yet take the opposite route? I wanted to ask Swede, but again, if I posed it aloud, it might become true, and then we were in for all sorts of tangles.
“Tell me what you’re writing about,” I said. Writers can always be distracted this way, I was lucky to learn early in life.
“Nightshirts.”
“What, like August wears?”
“Uh-huh. What do you think of it?”
“Well, how come he wears a nightshirt anyway? A man like him.”
“He has to wear something, Reuben.”
“Well, but it seems like a lady sort of thing. Like a gown,” I persisted. “What’s the difference between a nightshirt and a nightgown?”
“Lace,” Swede replied. She leaned forward on the saddle. “Listen, all kinds of men used to wear them; practically everybody did in Kidnapped. The old awful uncle who sent David Balfour up the ruined stairs and sat waiting for him to fall? He wore one; he was wearing it at the time! Robert Louis Stevenson wore one, and you’re so nuts about him.”
“He didn’t either.” Robert Louis? Yet her declaration rang true—I could almost see the great doomed author, pale as a birch, wafting around his midnight kitchen. “Of course everybody wore them back then,” I concurred. “I don’t suppose they had long johns yet.”
“I believe there was a general shift from nightshirts to long johns a few years after the Civil War.”
This was so much like something Mr. DeCuellar would’ve said that I suddenly recalled the aroma of peach pie—which we’d eaten at the lawyer’s own table, the morning of Davy’s trial. Fresh peach pie. My eyes stung, for some reason, which made me cross. “Well, how do you know that, anyway?”
“I just wrote it,” Swede said, picking up a sheet of typescript. “Listen: ‘In the weeks before the James gang rode into Northfield, every member was wearing long johns except for Charlie Pitts.’ Remember Charlie Pitts, Reuben?”
“No.”
“He was the handsomest of the gang, before he got shot.”
“Oh.” I’d seen his picture in a book Swede got from the library—I suspect it’s the only photo ever taken of Charlie, the one where he’s braced up dead and on display. They used to prop fellows like that in store windows for a week or two, something the Chamber of Commerce thought up to bring customers downtown, though it seems impractical in some ways.
Swede read: “‘Pitts was the best dresser of the gang and vain of his appearance, enjoying the comments and company bestowed on him by ladies. He shaved regularly, carrying with him a strop razor and a sheet of tin for a mirror. He owned more stockings than most in his profession and was fastidious about changing them. He disdained’—Reuben, listen—‘He disdained long johns, believing them to be a contrivance of the lower classes, along with mittens and pull-on boots. Charlie wore lace-ups.’”
“Really?”
“Yes—and a nightshirt, to sleep in. ‘His genteel pretensions and particularly his preference for the nightshirt attracted rank comment from his compadres, especially from Bob Younger, whose speech was habitually impolite. When hiding in caves or deep in the woods, Bob would wait until Charlie appeared at the fire in his nightshirt, rubbing his gums with salt to keep them healthy, and would proceed to call him Lovely Man or Lillian Pitts or Sweet Charlie O’Fairy.’”
I didn’t recall this being in Swede’s library book, but then she wouldn’t have used it if it were. Swede has always stood against plagiarism, believing in original research.
“‘At last, days before the ill-destined bank job in Northfield, Charlie Pitts walked nightshirted into a hotel room where Bob Younger sat playing cards. Bob remarked, “Why, if it ain’t the Queen of Sheba. Come sit on my lap, sweetie, I’ll learn you some poker.” To which Charlie responded, “Cole”—for the eldest Younger was playing too—“if I teach your brother deportment, will you shoot me for it?”
“‘“Have at him,” said Cole, whose cards at the moment were unpromising. At once Bob stood, clawing leather, but Charlie in early days had trained as a boxer and danced in before Robert could fire and dealt a blow to his right ear. The revolver thumped to the floor; Charlie in his nightshirt gripped Bob’s hair, set his head back, and deliberately struck the exposed Adam’s apple, causing Bob Younger to gag and his eyes to water and his mind to think hard, and what he thought was that perhaps the Queen of Sheba remark had been poorly timed.’”
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“And that’s as far as I’ve got.” Swede didn’t explain how it connected with anything, but I suppose she’d got a glimpse of August in his nightshirt, and of course outlaws were heavily on her mind. Swede’s journalism had a pretty wide throw.
We stopped at noon. Dad pulled over in a municipal park in Linton, this being midfield North Dakota, and stepped up into the trailer. “Well, amigos? Shall we cook beans?”
We did, Swede ending up with the coveted knob of fat from the can; then Dad cranked the heater again, professing intent to nap. Lulled by warmth I did likewise, going sound asleep to Swede’s noisy typing.
She woke me minutes later with terrible news—that stinker Andreeson was sitting in his car across the park.
“No, Swede, it can’t be him. Go look again.”
“It is him, go look yourself. He saw me watching him—he waved at me, Reuben!”
That sat me up. “Is he coming over here?”
“Wait.” Swede ran to a window, peeked edgewise. “Nope, he’s just sitting there. His car’s running.”
“Is Dad awake?”
She shook no. I slipped to the window. Sure enough, there sat our self-satisfied fed in a clean beige Mercury across the city park. It was just a narrow little park; there weren’t fifty yards between us and Mr. Andreeson. He had a plate of something in his lap, which he kept dipping into, and a cup of coffee in his right hand.
“Look at him,” Swede said, “chewing his french fries. He wouldn’t even eat them in the cafe—afraid we’ll pull out and he’ll lose us.” This appeared to be true, for Andreeson kept looking our way between bites of fry. We had to keep ducking. Swede didn’t want to get waved at again.
“How come he doesn’t just come over and talk to us?”
I gave it some thought. “Maybe he just wants us to see him. To make us nervous, the way the Indians are always doing.”
“We haven’t done anything,” Swede said defiantly. “All we did was go on vacation. People do it all the time.”
“Right.”
“We don’t know where Davy is at all. How would we know?”
“I don’t know.” I sneaked a look and got nailed. Andreeson had his eye on our window; right away, up went his dumb old hand for a wave. I waved back, like a dolt.
“Reuben—now he’ll come over here for sure!”
“Sorry, Swede.” I was wretched, on my haunches. “Here, you look. Tell me if he’s coming.”
But he wasn’t. That must’ve been some plate of french fries, and the longer he ate, the more bugged Swede got. “Smug fathead! He ought to just come over here and talk to us! Does he think we’re getting all scared with him just sitting there eating? Who told him we were here, anyway?”
“Maybe we better wake up Dad.”
“Sure. Dad’ll go talk things over with Mr. Andreeson. Mr. Federale,” she said, nothing expressing contempt like a timely morsel of Spanish.
“Wait a second—he’s done.”
“Done what?”
“With his french fries.”
“Is he coming?”
“Nope, going.” For Andreeson had balled up his paper plate and crept the Mercury
forward to a public trash can. He made his deposit, caught me watching again, saluted this time, and tooled away.
“Chicken!” Swede said. “Shyster! Putrid fed! Gets our attention, then runs off. You know what he is? He’s desperate—following us because he can’t think of anything else to do.”
I admired Swede’s certainty but didn’t share it. For one thing, I’d had a good look at Andreeson when he was looking back. If forced I might’ve described that look as sharp or canny or borderline humorous. Probably not desperate, though—desperate guys don’t salute.
“So where do you think he went, Swede?”
“Probably off to let us stew.”