The Return of Henry Starr, page 26
“Is business investment!” said Esterhazy. “Only, in style of Robin Hood. Like Mr. Rockefeller’s little charities, he steals oil company and for charity gives beggarman one dime. Ha! I like it! Is system, very neat, very elegant—like our little photoplays with cast, with story, with script …”
Henry Starr didn’t like that, it put a twist on what he said that made it all seem too neat, as if robbing banks were as easy as keeping accounts in them. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “There’s always something you can’t keep control of, something that gets away from you. Something you bring with you, or that takes you by surprise—or something you call down on yourself somehow. Something: there’s always something like that.”
“You don’t like that way of looking at it,” she said, her eyes brilliant, “because you weren’t any dime book Robin Hood, what you did was real, all of it—who you took from and what you took for, and how you did it—the bullets were real, and so was the prison, and that poor woman from Bentonville …”
“Coffeyville,” he said softly, and Esterhazy gave him a wink, damn him—they had him in a spot, these two, between Esterhazy who wouldn’t see anything at all in what he said but just trickery from start to finish, and all for the money; and Miss Woodly, who saw too damn much and too damn little, made him out a Robin Hood one minute and a dime book bullyboy the next—so that to answer her he had to figure out whether he was gold certificates or greenback shinplasters, Last of the Mohicans or Jesse James’s Double Daring by Colonel D’Artagnan Arbuthnot.
Henry Starr looked even more uneasy at that thought: because he had just remembered that his perfect plan for robbing a train, with everything timed to the tick and even that speech about Henry Starr don’t rob women or men that works with their hands—all of it had been taken word for word from the pages of Jesse James’s Raid; or, the Scourge of the Union Pacific by Colonel D’Artagnan Arbuthnot.
“Stroud!” called the conductor, “passengers for Stroud!” and he was glad of the distraction.
So was Esterhazy: “At last!” he said. “We arrive at scene of crime.”
The small passenger depot in Stroud wore sun-battered Gothic ornaments along its roofline. Malodorous stockyards stretched southwest-ward along the tracks and an ugly brick jailhouse flanked the station to the north. The townward side of the depot looked at the rear of a row of one-story cotton warehouses, built of rough round country stones mortared sloppily together and plastered over with cement that the weather had cracked and windowed. Wooded hills lifted a little to the southwest, but otherwise the country round about was flat as a billiard table. North, a rusty water tower rose on spindly stilts into a cobalt sky.
They walked a block up to Main Street. Esterhazy could take the whole town in in two looks, left and right, but he’d be damned if he knew how to frame a photograph that would show the place. Its architecture was senseless, the buildings mixed as if one had taken two unrelated decks of cards, shuffled them together and dealt them just as they fell. The most imposing structure at this end of town was the telephone office, a two-story building of incompetently whitewashed brick whose roofline made a crude W shape, in the central apex of which “1903” was inscribed in raised stone letters. It looked like it had been cut out of a photograph of some suburb of Chicago and pasted into a collage with the cotton warehouses, Wild West saloons, brick and gimcrack storefronts that alternated for seven blocks out to the three-story redbrick bulk of the “Opera House”—after which there was just a slice of empty road rising up an imperceptible slope to the blank cobalt sky beyond it.
They stood in front of a two-story building whose plate-glass windows in fluted cast-iron frames seemed entirely too fancy for the establishment—which a sign proclaimed to be STROUD PAWN.
Then Esterhazy noticed the stone plaque over the door that said FIRST NATIONAL BANK and the street seemed to swirl and suddenly sharpen as the world did when he focused his lens. There ahead of them, across the street and on the corner a block away toward the Opera House, was the second bank, the Stroud State—yellow bricks and a red tile roof, and large arched plate-glass windows.
“This is place? That famous place of two banks at once?” Esterhazy was annoyed, he was being cheated again.
“It’s come down some since I was here last.”
“Tell us about it,” said Miss Woodly, “tell us how it happened.” The place puzzled and repelled her too, but maybe if he helped them to see how it was …
“The idea,” said Henry Starr, “was to take the two banks at the same time.”
When he hesitated Esterhazy prompted him, “Yes, good plan, you get twice as much money for same hours.”
“Yes,” said Henry Starr, “I guess that was the idea. Twice the money. It’s more than twice as hard to do it, though. Because of the timing—you’ve got to make sure everything happens at the same time, so you need people with you who you can trust to follow a plan and keep to a timetable. It’s a different kind of trust from just knowing a man will stick by you when it gets rough. You’ve got to be able to trust them out of your sight, too—” Cherokee Bill would have sided me to the death, hell: that’s what he did do, isn’t it? But I could never have sent him into the second bank alone. “It’s a different kind of trust.”
“I thought you said banks were better because they were simple,” said Miss Woodly.
He looked at her with a sudden caution that she liked, because with him it was a mark of respect. “They are,” he said, “unless you want to make things complicated.”
“And that’s what you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“I thought so,” she said. “But I don’t suppose you’re able to tell us why,” and she smiled at him, happy as a bobcat grinning at a cornered grouse.
Complicated or simple? I could never have done a job like Stroud if Cherokee Bill wasn’t dead. But if he wasn’t dead, maybe I wouldn’t have had to do it at all.
Esterhazy was peering through the dusty glass of the pawnshop. They could never shoot inside, it was too dark and the only remnant of the building’s banking days was the long counter, now heaped with all sorts of junk taken in pawn that looked as if it had been sitting there for years. “When you rob this place,” he told Henry Starr, “it stays robbed.”
“Huh!” said Henry Starr, startled, taking the joke seriously. He looked around the dilapidated Main Street with a sadness that seemed like a kind of remorse.
A voice behind them made all three startle and turn: “Pawnshop’s closed, probably permanent.” A young man in a white apron had come out of the grocery store—Brogan’s—two doors back from the pawnshop. “Mr. Pike asked me to keep an eye on it till he can sell the place.”
Henry Starr recovered quickly, and his eyes took on a snaky look.
“Mr. Gurry,” said Henry Starr, “I believe you do not remember me. But I remember you very well.” When Esterhazy glanced at him, the outlaw was grinning that white-toothed smile of his, a young smile that sorted as oddly on a face with his history as the telephone company building did with Stroud’s board-front saloons and dry-goods stores. Something in the outlaw’s manner seemed to have caught Miss Woodly too: she was focused on Starr now with sharp attentiveness.
The young man let his jaw swing just a little. He thrust out a large roughened hand, gritty in the ridges of nails and skin, then broke into a grin as Henry Starr took the hand and shook it. “Well I … Well I,” he said and you could see he was grateful that Henry Starr had been willing to shake his hand.
“Miss Woodly,” said Henry Starr with a slightly evil look, “Mr. Esterhazy, this here is Mr. Paul Curry. He and I go back a ways.”
“Old associate?” said Esterhazy dubiously. He knew that criminals started young, but this boy would have been about sixteen at the time of the Stroud robbery.
“Well, not exactly,” said Henry Starr as Curry blushed furiously. “Mr. Curry did his Christian duty one night, sitting up with me when I was feeling poorly.”
“Well I,” said Curry, “well now,” grinning at Henry Starr’s funning these city folks but not sure if he was invited to join. “It was the least I could do considering.”
“Considering I was feeling so poorly ’cause you’d shot me down with that hog-killing gun of yours.” Henry Starr shook his head, the world was a damn funny place. “Shot down by a boy with a hog-killing gun. A man of my years and experience. Teach a man that crime don’t pay.”
“You…?” said Esterhazy, his eyes running around the street, trying to see how and where it might have happened, and he saw Miss Woodly suddenly go white and still like a heron freezing at a twig snap.
“That’s what you tried to tell us,” she said in a queer voice. “Something always happens, either you bring it with you, or it comes on you by surprise, or you call it on yourself.”
“That’s right,” he said, as if she had pleased him seriously. “I finished my bank the same time my boys got done with this one here, right on schedule. We come out bringing tellers and cashiers as hostages, and started easing back toward the horses. Everybody else was tucked away behind doors or windows, except for two men popped out across the street there not knowing, and we scared ’em back …”
“Yeah,” said Paul Curry. “I heard the first and seen the second—you practically picked Al Carlock’s pocket watch out of the fob with that one …”
“And that was when you shot me with the hog killer,” said Henry Starr softly.
“Oh God,” said Miss Woodly quietly, her eyes opening just a little, because all of a sudden it was real to her—the talk about trains and plans and methods and reputations and weapons was talkytalk, but here was the man or boy who had shot Henry Starr down with a hog-killing gun while the outlaw was menacing his hostages and firing at citizens, and maybe if it had gone differently some of the hostages killed too and Paul Curry dead at the age of sixteen which was her little brother’s age when she left home, and Henry Starr running from a sentence for murder—no, from another sentence for murder …
Curry looked shamefaced again, a gust of anxiety pulled his face tight, what was Henry Starr doing back in Stroud?—but he’d faced it out before and he’d do it as many times as it took. “Back-shot you, Mr. Starr.”
Henry Starr’s smile was a little bit soft now. “Don’t give it a thought, son. You was the only one with sand enough to try and stop us, and you done it after seeing we could shoot. And you stuck with me afterwards.”
“Ah!” said Curry with something that wrung him worse than embarrassment. “Well I, well maybe I …”
“You stuck till Marshal Tilghman got there,” said Henry Starr.
“What if he hadn’t?” said Curry quickly, and Starr shook his head and said gently, “You can’t figure on things that never happened. The way it come out, you stuck for as long as it took,” remembering:
The crowd downstairs muttering, starting to yell at itself, the doctor kept wiping his hands with the bloody towel and looking at the frosted glass door wondering if there was any point in the gesture of locking it, and Henry Starr looked at the boy and knew he wouldn’t stick much longer, that he wouldn’t be able to stop them or even stay and look but would have to run for some hole he could pull in after him—but he couldn’t blame the kid, hell: if he could feel anything but a great big ice-cold blank below his belly he’d run for it too, any way at all to climb over this.
The outlaw’s gentleness didn’t seem to soothe the boy. “What brings you back here, Mr. Starr?” asked Curry, as if the answer were something fearful he was determined nonetheless to face.
“I’m working for a company makes moving pictures,” said Henry Starr. “These are my partners. We have an idea folks might like to see a movie about a real old-time western badman.”
Paul Curry beamed his gratitude and relief at Henry Starr and his city folks. “Hey,” he said, “why don’t you come in and have some of this lemonade we got. I put some mint in it. It cuts the heat real good …” and they followed him into the store. The lemonade was in a big stone jug with a bung-tap in it, beaded with sweat, and Curry drew three glasses.
“This is a nice store,” said Miss Woodly, looking at the shelves of boxed and canned goods, smelling the slightly rotten smell of the barreled vegetables.
“It ain’t mine,” Curry said. “Mr. Brogan bought my daddy out the year before Mr. Starr here … I just work for Mr. Brogan.”
“Killing hogs?” asked Esterhazy, who was then taken aback by the flare of sudden rage in the young man’s eyes.
“Whatever I have to,” he snapped. “I just do whatever I have to.” His eyes blinked and his fists clenched unclenched, he grabbed back out of his breath what he wasn’t supposed to feel let alone say. The color of the feeling showed in his cheeks.
“What happened to all that reward money?” Henry Starr asked softly.
Curry shot a confused look at Henry Starr, angry and appealing at the same time, as if he wanted very badly to ask Henry Starr for something he couldn’t hardly name, and was already resentful of having his petition frustrated. Then he shrugged his shoulders as if giving all of it up, wish and resentment both. “Well, shoot, you know … Once it come to paying out, there was a lot of people had a claim on a piece of the reward: the bank cashier, the sheriff who wasn’t even in town, Doc Vincent. I never saw but four thousand, and that went right back to the bank to pay off my daddy’s notes. Only thing I got out of it for myself was Brogan raising my pay a buck a week, and keeping me on regardless.” His mouth twisted, and he gestured toward a glass display case next to the counter.
“Mr. Brogan doesn’t much care what I do or how well. He figures my name is enough to bring in the local trade.”
Inside the glass case, the focus fuzzed with dust, Esterhazy saw a pair of newspaper front pages with a black-framed photo set between them. The photo was of a much younger Paul Curry, with a cut-barreled Winchester rifle across his lap—the rifle itself, its steel lock stained with rust, lay along the top edges of the newspapers, the Democrat: ROBBERY OF TWO BANKS BY HENRY STARR AND HIS BANDITS and the Messenger: HENRY STARR CAPTURED ROBBING TWO BANKS IN STROUD.
“People remember,” said Henry Starr, but Curry snorted, “Remember! They remember it any damn way they please, till they think they know more about it than me! But what do you expect? You robbing them banks was the last thing ever happened in Stroud, Oklahoma. It’s like when that was done, there wasn’t nothing else for us. Oil went bust, cotton and beef went bust, one of the banks went bust. Opera house went bust—she’s the Stroud Trading Company now. Took out the seats and they use her for a warehouse. Hell, you know: I think the picture that was playing here that time you come through, that was the last one they ever showed at the opera house. You can still see some raggedy signs hanging onto the wall out front. Pass the damn thing every day. The Squaw Man. Other towns get Ben Hur and what-all, and all we got is this half of a poster about a picture probably died its own self after it come here.”
Then something else seemed to strike him, and he looked hopefully at Esterhazy (who looked like a gent). “Well but hey,” he said, “you’re in the picture business, ain’t you. Maybe you’ll open her up again.”
Esterhazy nodded noncommittally, but Henry Starr was determinedly straight: “Theaters isn’t our game, exactly. We’re going to make the pictures.”
“Here in Stroud,” said Curry pleadingly, “you could do it here in Stroud. Hell, nothing much has changed since you was here, except the bank becoming a pawnshop.”
“You could be in it with me, if you want to,” said Henry Starr (ignoring Esterhazy, who, out of Curry’s line of sight, was shaking his head No! No!).
“You’d want me in it with you,” said Curry quietly, seeming more solid on his feet than he had since he first surprised them in front of the pawnshop. “Well I guess then that it is all all right,” he said softly, passing a judgment on himself. He looked up at Henry Starr and laid his right hand on the glass display case, as if swearing an oath. “Whenever you say, Mr. Starr, I’ll be ready.”
“Why did you say no when Henry Starr asked the boy if he wanted to be in the picture?” Miss Woodly asked Esterhazy, when—waiting for Henry Starr in the hotel restaurant that night—they had a moment alone. “Poole would like the idea of shooting the scene where it actually happened, with the original participants.”
“Poole! Look, Miss Woodly: nothing has ever happened here. Nothing could happen, not anything you could make a picture of. This … it isn’t even a place. I don’t know what it is. And even if we use scene, that Curry is impossible. Too old to play sixteen-year-old, he moves already like old man who pushes broom thirty years. Plus I don’t like some bit player walks on and shoots my hero, especially shoots him in back, especially in this Stroud, Oklahoma, which I am never coming back to. Trust me: nobody would ever believe anything really happened here.”
STROUD TO FORT GIBSON
May 8–9, 1921
She agreed with Esterhazy that there was something wrong with the whole scene in Stroud—with the whole day. Nothing had seemed to match anything else: beginning with that weird moment in the passenger car when she had looked at the woman with the bonnet and the child and the old man, and at Henry Starr sitting quietly talking about the old days, his words conjuring robbery and murder, blood in the aisles, the child screaming, the woman fending off hands pulling at her, opening her purse and taking everything, the old man with his head broken. She had had the same sense with Paul Curry, that nothing in him or in the town was equal to what had happened there in 1915, when Henry Starr came to Stroud and robbed two banks in one day. Banks are simple, unless you want to make them complicated.
