The Return of Henry Starr, page 15
Esterhazy was about to speak, but Henry Starr was quicker on the draw: “All right,” said the outlaw, “I’ll work with you,” and Esterhazy—flicking a jealous glance at Henry Starr—had to say, “Yes, me too, count me in.”
Miss Woodly grinned, a fierce triumphant flash of teeth and eyes. Her words thanked them both but the look was for Henry Starr, who was watching her too, with a studied coolness.
Esterhazy looked at the two of them looking at each other and felt like screaming, but Foley did it for him: “All right! Let’s get this show going! Places for the Starr Gang, and for Chrissake let’s do it right this time!”
Esterhazy said “Ready,” and Foley pushed at the air in front of him, yelling at the riders milling in front of the bank. Miss Woodly stepped up close enough to the camera so that she could have touched Esterhazy’s knee. He looked in the viewfinder and framed the Starr Gang. Fourth try today, the Starr Gang has robbed the bank and rides out of town. Esterhazy centered the field on Henry Starr—it was easy to pick him up because of the strange pale horse he rode, a “’paloosa” they called it, as weird to Esterhazy’s eye as a zebra: the front three-quarters of its body a lovely marble-mottled gray-white, black mane and tail, and a brilliant white rump splashed with irregular spots like dashes of black paint. It shone like a full moon against the bay mounts of the other riders, and he saw the outlaw turn his horse and ride a little bit toward the camera, flourishing his hat to attract Esterhazy’s attention.
He was grinning. “Don’t stop!” he yelled. “Keep it on me and don’t stop!”
“Ready to roll it, Esterhazy!” snapped Foley. “Start the camera first. You men! On my signal, you go!”
Esterhazy felt a light touch on his knee. “What does he want?” she asked, and Esterhazy answered, “He just said, ‘Don’t stop.’”
“Roll it, Esterhazy!”
“Keep it on him,” she whispered intensely, “keep it on him the whole time and don’t stop till he does,” and Esterhazy had no time to think then because Foley yelled “GO!” and the Starr Gang’s horses reared back and away from the railing in front of the bank, Starr’s moon-rumped Appaloosa pivoting on its rear legs and the other four mimicking its motion just one tick behind as if someone had been drilling them, and then they were firing blanks in the air, at the bank, at the camera and gathering to a gallop across the false fronts of the street as the camera panned after them, Esterhazy fixed on the brilliant black-splattered rump of the horse so that the camera was on the spot when the rider behind Starr reeled in his seat and dropped a sack full of “money”—and who told him to do that? Foley was cursing Cut dammit, cut!—but Esterhazy kept turning the crank, a little faster now because it was all going so fast that the motion would need to be slower in the final image, as Henry Starr wheeled and came back, his crazy zebra-horse flashing brightly backwards against the rush of the dark horses, the outlaw tipping off the side of his horse toward the camera and sweeping the sack up out of the dust, reining the animal back with the same motion and splashing dust back toward the bank as he whirled the horse on a dime, the horse springing back into full gallop in two strides as Henry Starr flashed out of the viewfinder leaving banners of dust shining in the vacated air.
“Did you get all that?” she asked softly, and Esterhazy said “Yes,” glancing swiftly down at her. “He told you what he…?”
She shook her head no, but did not say how she had known or guessed what Henry Starr had in mind. “He just knew you could get all of it,” she said.
Foley was standing off to the side, his megaphone held limply in his left hand. “I don’t believe this, I don’t believe my goddamn luck. The son of a bitch stands around here like a wooden Indian, messes up three takes, then that yokel drops the goddamn bag and he does this stunt … What do you want to bet if we ask him to do that on purpose he falls off the goddamn horse?”
“You won’t need to ask him,” said Esterhazy. He pointed to the camera: “I got all of it.”
Foley glared at him, hands on hips. “I thought I told you to cut.” He shifted his glare to Miss Woodly, then back to Esterhazy. “I still give the orders here.”
“Yes,” said Esterhazy, lamely. “Didn’t hear you.” He looked back into the square frame of the viewfinder, and felt her moving away toward her buggy, while Foley yelled Starr and the riders back. I’m sorry, he thought to himself, as if being politic were something to be ashamed of.
He watched the outlaw trot his horse back to the set, saying nothing to anyone, smiling a little to himself at a secret joke, moving easily through the air in exact harmony with the motion of the animal. What was working in that criminal intelligence, what did he mean by that little game with the horse? Not just the circus trick to impress Miss Blue Eyes: but that business before, Don’t stop! he says, and she’s in on it, the little Miss Woodly—Keep it on him till he stops.
They were too much for him, these Americans, the men and the women alike—well, perhaps he could figure out the girl, big men and big money, what else? But the Famous Outlaw, who was a grown man obviously capable of making his way by himself, who was neither an ambitious young lady nor a poor Hunky immigrant: what was in this business for him, that he should put himself under the thumb of men like Foley and Poole and Wilberforce?
That was the question that bothered Miss Woodly too, after the first blush of her triumph had passed like whiskey heat—a cold finger touched her in the eye of her chest and made her suddenly tense and watchful. Riding the forward drive of her conquests of Wilberforce and Poole, she had taken Henry Starr’s agreement as the natural response to her own irresistible charge. But on second thought she was not so sure. There were things about Henry Starr that just didn’t add up. He was old enough to be her father, but she found it almost impossible to see that age in him. He had a quality that was more like an older brother than a father, and sometimes—like today, when he had grinned at her and played that trick on Foley and Esterhazy, snatching the bag of bogus money out of the street like Tom Mix—he seemed more like a younger brother, reckless in his play, let the big ones worry about broken necks. But then under the grin and the joking there was a frightening intensity in the way he looked at everything; she had felt it that first day when he came to the set and she had dared him to show her how it was done, and he had showed her … brother, he had, and she grinned a grin that went right down to her feet when she thought of that lard-assed bull-bragging Deputy Price cringing under his arms, yelling “Don’t kill me!”
But how could the man who terrorized Deputy Price, the man whose eyes fastened on you like a pair of hands gripping and lifting you by your shirtfront—how could that man let himself be patronized by Poole and Wilberforce, and accept Foley’s bullying? Did he need so badly just to be in the movies? Maybe Henry Starr’s weakness was vanity; to be a little famous and celebrated, he’d let himself be made to look ridiculous. Men were constructed that way, they could be absolutely shameless about it, overriding their own intelligence and dignity and common sense if they thought you could satisfy the hunger their vanity made in them. It was the idea that Henry Starr had that weakness too that had given her the courage to go forward—although in an odd way it also disappointed her that Henry Starr might be less than what he had seemed the day that he disarmed Price and showed them how it was done in the old days.
But then, just when she and probably everyone else was thinking they had figured the Famous Outlaw out and got him where they wanted him, suddenly he turns it around, shows Esterhazy that he knows how to do pictures, and shows me … what, exactly?
That somehow or other Henry Starr had been waiting there all the time, ready if not exactly for her then for someone like her, with her kind of project to offer—waiting in ambush as she came stalking so carefully (and so proud of her skill!) down his back trail.
It worried her to think that Henry Starr was really that clever; and it also excited her that he was as smart and watchful as herself—although that excitement seemed dangerous to her, it might fog her vision when she most needed to look out for herself. But maybe now she could begin to show him something too—something of the hidden powers of Miss Barbara Catherine Woodly. “HENRY STARR,” she wrote at the head of a big sheet of yellow legal paper: HENRY STARR, by B. C. Woodly. Her nom de plume. Also her nom de cashier—B. C. WOODLY on the wooden plaque on her teller’s cage at Wilberforce’s bank—another of those coverts in which a woman had to conceal herself in order to get her work done in a world of men.
She was a good deal younger and newer to things than she meant anybody to know. She declared herself twenty-seven years old, and when she put on her business clothes and composed her face for the bank she carried it off, stepping out with the assurance of someone who had been somewhere and knew where she was going.
But she was twenty-one years old when she stood naked and alone in her skin before the mirror in her furnished room: the up-tip and tightness of her nipples exaggerating the liftiness of her small breasts, reminding her of how recently they had seemed like things that had happened to her rather than part of herself. She could still recall as a kind of glow along the surface of her skin the way she had felt as her daddy’s her mommy’s little girl-child, peering out of ambush at her mother in the kitchen wrapped in smokes and steams, the smell of beef and carrots and onions, bread and milk, the funk of cheese and churned butter, her mother lifting her head to look out the window and call, “Barbara! Barbara Catherine!”
—And she ducked outside, she’d rather be playing with her brothers in the ranch yard, they called her Bob-tail and Bobcat and that was who she really was, someone small and fierce and quick and clever, and her real place was with her brothers in the yard or the barns or swimming naked in the thickety pond hidden in a fold of prairie—her place as much as the house and kitchen were her mother’s and the horse barns her father’s. There her differences of size and shape and name were powers, there were people and animals only she could become, and more: her brothers needed her quick mind and tongue to make up stories for them to play—
(Although even then—it occurred to her—she had felt some subtle weakness in her position, because she always cast her brothers in the heroic roles, as if she understood that that might be one of the conditions under which they condescended to play with her.)
They did Treasure Island and she let them be bold muscular pirates or noble sea captains; she was clever Jim or mad secretive Ben Gunn or calculating crippled Long John, whose crutch was a disguised weapon. They did Jesse James and they were courageous Sheriff Timberlake and sagacious Allan Pinkerton, but she was Jesse, whom they could hunt to a back-shotten death but whose name they would sing as they rambled back for supper. They played Last of the Mohicans and she cast her brothers as the tall white captain and the sure-shooting scout: but she was Uncas the son of Uncas, the last chief of the noble race of the Mohicans barechested and in breechclouts, and they would swell up as she laid the plot out for them, pleased that they would be victors in the end, never realizing that I had taken the best for myself, the roles of deeper power and knowing, the hero the martyr the hidden chief and unknown Messiah of the Red Race: that underneath the mask, the hero of the story was always me.
When she looked over her shoulder, back toward the house from the middle of their play, she sometimes saw her mother come from the kitchen to stand in the doorway; and even if she said nothing, there was a suggestion, almost a command in her presence there, that told Barbara Catherine she wasn’t unique at all, was out of place in the middle of her brothers’ play: because her mother could see through her masks, and even through the hidden heroic shape that she dreamed for herself behind the mask—her mother saw that the truth of it was that Barbara Catherine Woodly was a girl, “only a girl,” whose true place was the smell and smoke of the kitchen, whose work was a matter of feeding the men and boys for their exploits and play, arranging the place they would come back to—played out, tired with pleasure, the best of them spent before they put their butts to the bench and their lips to the spoon.
There was a league of her mother and aunts, sister-women, a kind of conspiracy against her play. She was a girl, she was going to be a woman, someone for whom her kind of play was wrong, “regrettable”—not sin, exactly, not the kind of thing that went with talk of hell and falling into a pit, but something for mothers and aunts to shake the head and look sad about. It was time she started acting like a girl, not a tomboy: a girl was someone more interested in finding ways to keep dirt off her body than in inventing new ways to get dirty. It was time she got ready to be a woman: a woman was someone whose body was shaped for weakness, for houses and kitchens—burdened with breasts, hips and legs badly put on so they could no longer fork a horse but had to set together for support, skirts and dresses weakly fluttering in every breeze not hardly competent to the task of covering what women were afraid to let anyone see.
Bobcat Uncas Woodly at eleven in warpaint and breechclouts was lean and smooth and swift whether covered or naked, and now when she saw or felt her mother’s eyes on her it gave her play a keen bright edge like the blade of a knife, as if she sharpened herself against her mother’s look and expectations. When they learned to ride half-broken ranch horses, her brothers had merely to master their own ignorance and fear and their mounts’ resistance; she had to ride down all three, and then overcome or circumvent her mother’s fear and the disapproval with which she infected Bobcat’s father (whom she called “Mr. Woodly”). The afternoon Bobcat forked Old Addie’s unbroken two-year-old and with her mother looking on in terror rode him bucking and bolting out of the corral and into the yard it felt as if girl that she was she had absorbed the whole strength of the animal through her thighs and crotch and hips and would be mounted now forever, transformed like a girl in a Greek myth into a female centaur, and never go like a woman on foot or in a buckboard again—her mother was watching from the door as the colt tore through the corner of the kitchen garden and kicked the laundry bucket till it rang like a gong and there would be hell to pay, but Barbara Catherine Cowboy would pay it gladly …
Only (now that she remembered it) there hadn’t been more than a little clucking—that and a look in her mother’s eyes that was like fear or physical pain, and her mother’s long fingers had made red marks clutching her own forearms as if she had thought that grip could be magically transferred to Barbara Catherine on her crazy mustang. But all she said was “I never knew you could ride a horse like that.” If it had been her father saying that (her father was angry about being disobeyed and “having the stock ruined”), if it had been her father she’d have said that that was praise: but what was it coming from a soft, breast-burdened woman who had to ride buckboards to church, whose play was feeding men and boys and cleaning up after their games?
She had never asked. She had been afraid that the answer would still be that she had to give up games and boys and horses and heroics, give up her horseback strength and pride and she couldn’t bear …
And then, suddenly, what she wanted stopped mattering to everyone but herself. The shape in the doorway got inside her—the sister-women were right, it had been inside her all along—and now it began to come up in her, her form swelling out painfully into breasts and inward till she bled inside and felt crazy with weakness. It was like her changing body breathed some kind of poison all around that made her father avoid her and brought the sister-women like flies to meat. It made her brothers suddenly serious and rude and cut the strings of their play like a knife, it killed in their eyes the excited joy they had had taking her words and playing them out; putting in its place a sniggering private thing that they had together and she was the butt of. They began spoiling the games with their looking at her, and with looking and laughing they stripped away all her disguises and names (Uncas the son of Uncas!) to make her see herself all new and naked and silly looking, her smooth bare chest broken by tender points, her newly erupted brush flaring against the milkiness of her smooth belly and thighs like the brilliant target flag of a whitetail against its smooth dark fur, the cleft of her sex and buttocks seeming to deepen and darken like a split to expose in her a secret and unsuspected core of vulnerability.
She closed in on herself, curling around that core of what she thought was weakness, as if the inward curve of her sex was a command to be hidden and her brothers’ jaunty outward jut the sign of their rule over everything visible.
But with the shame there was also the gift of a kind of power, which at first she despised, mourning the lost world she had once made of words and peopled with brothers—a power that registered in the changing eyes of boys and grown men too when they watched her pass, their eyes filling with smoke and a hapless thickening in the groin, turning helplessly like mares when a stallion’s scent comes by.
She chose her time for that the same way she picked the time for leaping Old Addie’s wild colt and buck-jumping him out of the corral and through the kitchen garden, letting her edge come up to the keenness she needed for cutting loose, and when she knew it was something she could do: did it. She picked one of her oldest brother’s friends, a big nice awkward blockhead of a boy named Curly Joe—who in the whole crowd that loitered after school, cock-proud and coolly disdainful of the girls whose secret places they were really greedy-mad to get into, was the only one who would just go flat-out red in the face and hopelessly pokey in the crotch of his jeans whenever she walked by. He was two years older in the heat of that June when she turned seventeen, but she had to choose him, and lead him to the hayloft in her father’s horse barn, and tell him yes and show him where and how with her own hands, and she was right about him because he wasn’t proud or cocky (only awkward-blunt, too quick and so a little hurtful), and afterwards grateful and embarrassed for himself.
