“Wait!” I yelled—I ran to my room, hooked my pants and shirt, ran back to the window where I could watch them while I dressed—“Wait for me!” I banged on the glass, but they couldn’t hear. I shouted again: “Wait up!” What were they doing out there in the new snow without me? What a rotten deal! Then, surprise, I had to lean quick on the windowsill. All that yelling had used up my air. It wasn’t like earlier, with the skin bag, but the truth is I had to sit down. I was sweatier than I’d ever got taking down Mr. Layton’s corncrib, and here I hadn’t even got my pants on. Outside I heard the barn door screel open, and Swede’s outcry of wonder and pleasure, and Roxanna laughing. I tell you no one ever felt sorrier for their sorry lot than I for mine there in that empty house. I crawled back in bed under the weight of the sun and joy and adventure happening outdoors, and I thought dangerous things to myself. Back to mind came every hurt I’d endured for my defect, every awaited thing I’d missed. It seemed to me such wrongs were legion in my short life. It seemed that I’d been left alone here by the callousness of my family; that should the man with the skin bag return I might not fight so hard next time; that this house was so empty even God was not inside it. He was out there with the others, having fun.
Late in the morning Swede came in red-cheeked with the news that we would stay at Roxanna’s another night.
“Dad walked out on the road—there’s drifts up to his chest! Roxanna says she never saw this much snow at once in her whole life. She says a couple years ago it snowed a foot and it took the county two days to plow the roads! For one foot, Reuben—and we got four or five!”
It was plain nothing could’ve pleased her more. Nor me under other conditions. But I’d lain the morning in a sump of self-pity, and all I could see of Swede were her blazing oxygenated cheeks, and all I could hear of her was speech gusting forth without constraint.
“We’re not gonna find Davy sitting around here,” I told her.
“Well, we don’t have a choice. We couldn’t get out if we tried.” Swede was wearing a hat of Roxanna’s, a fur hat with a narrow brim. Snow was stuck to it and turning to water. She’d wear it all day if she could. “Reuben, you’ve got to see that barn! There’s the billy goat, and six sheep, one with a black nose and black ears, and a bunch of roosting chickens, we picked eggs, and there’s a rope in the hayloft—I swung around like Tarzan!”
I said, “You tell me what good it does, staying here. Tell me one way it helps Davy.”
She glared. “You don’t care about Davy, you’re mad on account I went out to the barn!”
“Who cares about the barn? Tell me one way.”
Of all facial expressions, which is the worst to have aimed at you? Wouldn’t you agree it’s disgust?
“You fake,” she said. “Lying there all sorry for yourself. You weren’t thinking about Davy, you were thinking about poor widdow Woo-ben.”
So dead center was this that I leapt up and tackled her at the waist and landed half on top of her on the hardwood floor—a consumptive effort and strategic mistake. We scuffed around a little, she getting me twice on the jaw—fist then elbow—before the energy leaked out my muscles. She wiggled away and stood over me, and I was a gasping ruin.
“I win!” she hollered. “Ha, look here!” She took a gigantic, wrathful, chest-filling breath. “Look what I can do!” She blew out the breath and snatched another. She did frantic jumping jacks. She ran in place. “See? I could do this all day! I could do it all year! All my life!”
I couldn’t speak. I rolled my eyes up at her like the betrayed steer at slaughter. I could hear my heart, boy, blacksmithing away in there.
“I win!” Swede shouted. “Come on, Rube, say uncle!”
I shut my eyes and by main strength hauled in air and said uncle.
“Uncle?” she demanded. “What’s that I hear?”
“Uncle.”
She squatted down and looked in my face. I drew back instinctively—she couldn’t have known, but this was exactly what the spooky fellow in my dream had done. Anyway, I didn’t want to look at Swede. It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in this world.
Swede said, “Reuben?”
“Please,” I whispered.
She got hold of my shoulders and made me look at her. “What’s the matter with your lips—Reuben?”
I gathered enough air for a sentence: “You went outside without me.” Which set her off sobbing. She wilted down on the floor next to me. It was hard to fathom after such a fight. She put her arms around my neck, too, which was gratifying, but when it is like breaking cement with a hammer just to breathe, a tight hug isn’t helpful, so I had to shrug her off. We lay there quite some time, a very woebegone set of penitents. At last by lying still and thinking about a brightly lit room made entirely of ice I was able to retrieve basic respiration. I sat up and leaned against the wall. Swede pulled herself over and leaned also. She took my hand and held it while confessing all sorts of things, chiefly related to piggishness, but also the surprising fact that she actually had forgotten about Davy—just for a little while.
“I like being here,” she said, “with Roxanna. Don’t you like her, Reuben? Do you really want to leave?”
“I like her a lot.”
“We really couldn’t go today. Too much snow.”
“How come Dad started the car then?” I’d heard it out there, idling poorly, sounding broke.
“We parked the trailer in the barn. Roxanna thought of it. It’s just a huge barn, Reuben, you have to see.”
I didn’t see it right away, but this was certainly the work of the Lord—the work of providence, for you timid ones. It was a cup running over. Because don’t you think the old state police were ever more interested in us since we’d vanished from pursuit? And wasn’t it fortunate how the blizzard struck before any state cruisers happened past Dale’s Oil? And where else could we have landed, I might ask, that would offer not only gas on Sunday but cheap rooms and warm meals and a hiding place for the Airstream?
“I took that baby goat for a walk this morning,” Swede said, “all around the house. She’s so smart! She followed me all around.”
“Swede?”
“You pretty soon get used to her weird eyes—”
“Where are we gonna go? I mean, when we do leave?”
She looked so blank I knew leaving was way off at the end of things for her.
I said, “Aren’t we going to get arrested as soon as we get back on the road?”
“Say, that’s true! That’s right,” she crowed, “I guess we better lay low a few days! Reuben”—grabbing my arm—“now we’re fugitives too!”
She was so thrilled I feared she might tear off downstairs and tell Roxanna about it. So I hushed her and reminded her how Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry had sworn silence in the matter of Injun Joe, and how running and hiding from the law was a privilege few kids ever had, and how we ought not blow it by bragging to someone we just met.
“Don’t you trust Roxanna?” Swede whispered.
“Well, sure I do. But we just got here yesterday.”
Swede nodded. “Okay. Then let’s sign in blood, like Tom and Huckleberry did. We’ll cut our fingers—and swear an appalling oath.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Swede.” She was already up rummaging for paper, came back with a strip of brown grocery sack.
“Get out your knife.”
I had a castoff Scout of Davy’s—the big blade was only knuckle-long, having been snapped off trying to pry something. I swiped it cautiously. “Swede, it’s really dull.”
“Hm—we’ll use the awl.”
“The awl? No, Swede.” I’d holed innumerable leather belts with that awl; it was blunt as a baby tooth. Also corroded. “We’ll get sick,” I told her. “We’ll get lockjaw and have to go to the hospital, and then we won’t be fugitives anymore.”
So we stuck with just t
he appalling oath. I’ve forgotten the exact parlance, but it was a rare and lofty oath, studded with illustrious and disused old words, such as treachery, and banishment, and leprous.
Roxanna was correct about the county snowplows; they weren’t up to the job. Days opened and filled with work and talk and closed early. My lungs relaxed; I was allowed in the barn and taught to candle eggs. Swede climbed to the loft and pitched down hay for the sheep. Following these modest chores we cinched on scarves and went walking atop snowdrifts so hard they stayed trackless. We walked out above the road and looked down the white horizon. We were good and stuck, and dangerously happy. Late in the fifth day we saw what looked like jets of smoke spurting from the ground in the east. We put back our hoods expecting the chuffs and growls of plow trucks, but they were still too far for sound.
Next morning Roxanna and Swede cleaned out the goatpen—in the bathroom, back of the cash register—while I investigated the pictures on the office walls.
“What’s this one of the town?”
Roxanna poked her head out the bathroom. “Main street of Lawrence. That’s Dad’s theater on the right. The Empress, see the marquee?”
Somehow when Roxanna had told about her father’s theater, I’d pictured something more conspicuous. Hadn’t it drawn notables Lee Van Cleef and Mr. Trumbo? But the marquee of the Empress was nothing but a flat storefront sign across which lay CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS in tilty letters.
A toilet roared, startling the goats, yet Roxanna was wise. If you’re going to stable critters inside a house, you can’t do better than right by a toilet.
“How come you’ve got this of the Wild Bunch here?” It was Cassidy and the rest posing in new suits—you’ve seen it, the one with the bullet holes.
“My great-uncle spent some time with Cassidy,” Roxanna called back.
Whatever Swede had in hand dropped to the floor; it didn’t make a very nice sound. “Your uncle knew Butch Cassidy?”
“Great-uncle. They were friends,” Roxanna said. “He’s not in the picture though, so you see they weren’t that close.”
A revelation of this nature might’ve rendered Swede paralytic until the whole story was told, but Roxanna said, “No, you don’t—you said you’d help, let’s keep at it,” so Swede scraped and moiled with a renewed sense of enterprise, no doubt to grease along any emergent history.
Roxanna’s great-uncle had been a gunsmith and doctor, a canny occupational blend for a young man in Casper, Wyoming, at the end of the nineteenth century. Taken to visit him by her father, Roxanna remembered a kitchen table spread always with bits of firearm: trigger assemblies, firing pins, bolts grooved silver for want of oil. She remembered his mounted vises, one large one delicate, and his magnifying lens like a jeweler’s fixed to the frame of his glasses. He had a workshop in the basement but preferred the kitchen; a lifelong bachelor, he baked himself cinnamon rolls almost every morning, setting the dough to rise before going to bed. When you stepped in his door, Roxanna remembered, you smelled pastry and coffee and oilswabbed steel.
Swede asked, a trace impatiently, how the great-uncle knew Mr. Cassidy; the answer was, Same way he knew all sorts of other people. You couldn’t ever visit Uncle Howard without shooing away a man in a suit. They were salesmen from the Remington and Winchester and Savage companies, or they were medical men come inquiring after his particular advice in the treatment of gunshot wounds. Running into Uncle Howard’s kitchen, Roxanna had once banged into the knees of a man wearing a white shirt and black vest and a watch-fob bellyslung as if from the foregone century. The man had helped her up. Tipped his hat. He was a Pinkerton detective and offered to fingerprint Roxanna to illustrate his craft, but Howard chased him away. Howard didn’t believe a person should be printed on a whim. He was an old man by this time and told his receptive great-niece that Pinkertons were honorable, as a rule, but from long habit he considered them to be on the other side of things from himself.
This was how he had met Mr. Cassidy. Arriving home from church on a lovely June Sunday, Howard had been surprised to find a boy propped spraddle-legged on his front step. That’s how the great-uncle described him, as a boy. The boy was leaned back on one elbow like any idler and had a piece of chalk in his hand and he was doodling with the chalk on the broad slabstone Howard used for stoop and entry. On seeing Howard the boy sprang up. He took off his hat and tucked it under his arm, coming down off the step with a warm smile and his hand out, so that Howard had the dreamlike perception of being welcomed to his own home by a stranger. The young man asked if Howard knew who he was. Nope. Disappointment rose in the young man’s face. He had a parcel in his jacket and wondered if Howard might have a look. Howard pointed out it was the Lord’s day. The young man asked him just to look—if he was interested, the parcel could be left till a day the Lord hadn’t claimed.
In truth, Howard wasn’t in the habit of honoring the sabbath; he was more interested in honoring the pan of cinnamon rolls he’d set to rise just before leaving for church. But the young man was so engaging Howard allowed him into the kitchen, where some cattleman’s hopeless carbine lay dismembered on the table. The young man sat down and unstrung his oilcloth parcel. With great sadness he lifted forth a smashed revolver. The barrel was long enough to seem ungainly and had been flattened and twisted at the base. The grips were walnut; one had been split clean and might be repaired but the other was like a pulped apple. The cylinder had been knocked free and was the lone undamaged component. Howard looked at the young man, who was swallowing repeatedly in evident grief. He said a train had struck it—that he was doing some work near the tracks and must have dropped it and a train came along and rolled right over it. Howard said it was the most heartbroken firearm he’d ever seen. No, he couldn’t fix it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. The young man sat at Great-uncle Howard’s table looking down at his knees. It made Howard ache.
The cinnamon rolls were just browning up and he offered one to the youngster. The roll helped. Roxanna remembered her great-uncle’s rolls. His especial pride was the frosting—he ordered back East for confectioners’ sugar, fifty pounds at a time, and he added melted butter and a potion of strongbrew coffee and a dried vanilla bean ground fine with mortar and pestle. After several rolls the young man’s spirits lifted. He told Howard to call him Butch. He said the revolver meant a lot to him—he’d ordered it for its long barrel because he was a poor shot and wished to correct this deficiency. He had a friend Harry who could walk out at dusk and spook up a dove and drill it in flight right-handed or left. It was important to Butch that Harry respect him, as the two were working together. Moved by Butch’s earnestness, Great-uncle Howard assured him the revolver was an unfixable mess but offered to sell Butch a gun from his own armory. It was an 1860 Army he’d taken in trade from a retired Union captain. The captain had carried it through Antietam and a half-dozen other situations and had kept it in trim throughout. Howard had liked its action but not its dinged barrel and had refitted it with one from a brass-framed buffalo revolver circa 1855. Butch looked it over and aimed down its barrel, which similarly had that ungainly length. The modification had been cleanly done and Butch was interested but strapped. He waged negotiations upon which he was allowed to leave Howard’s kitchen with the gun at half its value, the rest to be delivered upon arrival of Butch’s next pay, which Butch affirmed was coming along soon.
By the time Dad stamped in—bathed in dirty oil and bits of straw—we’d learned that Butch Cassidy had indeed paid off the revolver, that Great-uncle Howard had liked the young man’s company enough to close shop occasionally and dabble in outlawry, and that he’d once had the strange experience of shooting an unruly trainman in the thigh then removing the bullet four hours later at his town practice, having not even changed his clothes. I thought it was odd, the trainman not recognizing him and raising a stink, but Swede pointed out this sort of thing happened all the time. How many times did Zorro gallop magnificently out of town, everyone watching, then show
up five minutes later as Diego, still breathing hard? And no one ever figured that out.
Dad said, “Listen, can you hear the plows? They’ll have us clear by dark.”
“Now that’s auspicious,” replied Roxanna. “I’m out of milk.”
“Also, the Plymouth is running better. Plugs were pretty much a mess.”
Swabbing noises from the bathroom.
“So we’ll be able to settle up, Roxanna. We can leave tomorrow. Get out of your hair.”
I can hear him yet: Settle up. Get out of your hair. In that dread moment I realized some huge, imprecise, and desperate expectation had begun to form inside me. And so swiftly—I’d had no idea! Leave tomorrow. It left me empty and dumb. Swede too; I’ve talked to her about it. She wanted to run out where Dad stood picking straw off his coat and hit him in the stomach.
But clearly Roxanna was thrown for no such loop, for she emerged upbeat from the bathroom, hair kerchiefed back like Aunt Jemima’s, goatmuck thumb-swiped across one cheek, forearms crossed under rolled sleeves—the word majestic comes to mind. She smiled brightly at Dad, saying, “Are you in a hurry to leave, Mr. Land?”