The Return of Henry Starr, page 29
“No,” said Henry Starr, “the Land Office on this side. There was money here too, lots of nesters coming in to buy up that Cherokee land as fast as the government took it away.” He leaned over to peer into the dirty window. Behind the foggy glass a white-shirted shape moved, the ghost of a plump white man who had taken Tom Starr’s Strip money, who had made Tom Starr eat the shame of having had and not being able to hold on to it, like the shame of eating C. N. Walker’s bread and C. N. Walker’s words, Look at him, for Chris sake, what’s a thing like that gonna do with a piano? “Some of them never even got their money out into the street so the stores and the rodeo touts could get it. They had debts, and the bankers was right there, all of ’em come to town that day to collect everything all at once.”
“Did you plan it out,” she said, “carefully like you did the others?”
“No. I just walked in and did it.”
“Why?” She waited. Why? she thought. Please say why, I need to know why. “How did it…?” she started but he hadn’t waited for the question, he kept on telling it, glancing across the street to where no more Cherokees were waiting in line for their Strip money, then looking into the gray dirty screen of the window of the Katy Land Office.
“Because it’s what my Grandfather would have done, what he would have expected me to do if … if he had expected me to do anything at all.” He wanted to look at her but couldn’t, and spoke instead toward the small blurred ghost she made next to his on the gray screen of the window. “He was Tom Starr, the biggest man for size in the Cherokee Nation. He fought Andrew Jackson and John Ross both; he fought the Civil War with Stand Watie and he rode with Jesse James. He was the only single human individual ever to force the Cherokee Nation and the United States of America both to make a treaty of peace with him, personally. His brother was Sam Starr, who married the woman they called Belle Starr, who the dime books called the ‘Outlaw Queen,’ and she had a child named Pearl by Cole Younger of the James Gang, and Pearl hid out the Dalton Gang on her ranch at Younger’s Bend while they was planning the double bank robbery at Coffeyville. His son was Hop Starr, who was my father, and he was with Jesse and Frank James and the Youngers the day they robbed two banks in the same town at the same time, and nobody ever got away with doing that again.” His mouth made a grim line and he added, “Not clean away.” Now he looked at her directly again, and he saw that unfocused look in her eyes as if he had gotten too big somehow for her to see all of him up that close, and he regretted having made that look come there even while he felt himself glowing with it. “That’s who Tom Starr was,” he said. “That’s why I robbed the Katy Land Office.”
Her eyes sharpened suddenly, surprising him with their concentration and clarity. “Because Tom Starr was your grandfather?”
“Yes: and because they took his land first, and then the money they were supposed to give him for the land, and then …” He waved his hand vaguely at the empty street.
“So maybe,” she said, “maybe you wanted a little justice here too.”
“Ha!” he said, “maybe. Or maybe more than justice again, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what I got. I got to rob the Katy Land Office and ride out of here shooting out every light and window on Main Street. I got three hundred dollars out of the strongbox, split three ways for the boys that rode with me makes it a hundred apiece, and it cost me every cent of that to get away and hide out at Aunt Belle’s ranch. But let’s say three hundred. Put that next to what they took from us the day before, for debt and for …” Starr clan or Cherokee blood, it ain’t my money I ain’t got that coming. “They got two hundred and sixty-five dollars and seventy cents each for me, my mother, her no-account husband and Tom Starr. Hell, I’d have done better to take my cut of the Strip … Well, like I said, a hundred dollars minus expenses was what I got, so you tell me what kind of justice I took out of Tahlequah.”
“You can’t value justice with money,” she said.
“Money don’t die,” said Henry Starr, “it don’t smell, and it don’t get old; it don’t get droughted or weeviled out, and it ain’t guilty because you can’t ever prove what a dollar done.”
“Justice dies?” she said. “It gets old? It…?”
“It’s hard to count it. It’s hard to know when you got it or if, and so how can you hold on to it?”
“So that’s why you went back to robbing banks, after you’d got your pardon and were free and clear with the law? Because you could make more money at it than you could keeping a store?”
Henry Starr said nothing, because the air had stiffened in his throat. He stood in the darkened store, the air dense with the odor of cloth and herbs, grain and smoked meat, and Cora stood opposite, the orange light of the lantern on her face, her body framed by the shelves of unsold canned and boxed goods. Her grief scratched lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but something strong inside her smoothed her face again. “So you let him,” she said, “you let him drive you back to it. You couldn’t hold on just a little …”
“Maybe he didn’t have to drive me to it. Maybe I’m just not cut for a storekeeper.”
“Nor a husband. Nor a father.”
“I have the name, Cora. I might as well have the game.
“Where’s all that money then,” said Miss Woodly, “that doesn’t die or smell or get old, all the money from all those banks you robbed?”
“Injuns: they can get, Miss Woodly, but they can’t hold. My Grandfather couldn’t as big a man as he was, and neither could I.” Her blue eyes were serious and straight, and he felt a cruel urge to mock her seriousness, her taking him so seriously—to turn her eyes aside. “It is enough,” he said in a rumbling guttural. “The anger of the Manitto is not done. The pale faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again.”
Instead of bridling at his mockery, she grinned and answered solemnly, “In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet before the night has come have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.”
“Ha!” he said. And then he couldn’t say anything.
“What is all this?” said Esterhazy with his head inside the viewfinder.
“James Fenimore Cooper,” she said, smiling and smiling at Henry Starr, “The Last of the Mohicans.”
Henry Starr cleared his throat, “I didn’t think girls read Hawkeye kind of books.” My book, he thought, my redskin book, she knows my book.
“You didn’t think girls knew how to drive a team either, did you, Henry Starr?” she said, shaking her head.
“Ah!” said Esterhazy, standing up and looking at them. “Cooper! The American Karl May!” They looked at him blankly. “Karl May?” he said. “Old Shatterhand? With Indian companion, Winnetou?”
“No,” she said, “I never heard of any of them. But Hawkeye, Chingachgook …”
“And Uncas,” said Henry Starr, “the last chief of the noble race of the Mohicans.”
“I would play with my brothers,” she said happily. “I had two brothers. One was Hawkeye the Long Rifle, and one was Chingachgook, his faithful Indian companion. Guess who I was, and don’t say the treacherous Magua or I will … I will scalp you.”
He shook his head, grinning. “If I judge you by your hair, then you are the fair Alice—sweet but with a tendency to wilt in the sun.”
“Ha!” she said.
He looked seriously at her, cleared his throat and said, “Maybe Cora, set aside the coloring …” He seemed embarrassed again, but she just said, “Ha! Better, but still not close enough,” and she smiled and smiled at him till Esterhazy was nearly frantic, understanding not the least bit of what was happening except that he was not meant to understand it.
“Uncas,” he said, softly and strangely and she nodded happily, and he went on, “you were Uncas, the son of Uncas.”
“Yes,” she said, “for as long as my brothers would let me be. And that was longer than they wanted to. You see, I was the only one who knew the book, and knew how the game should be played. Without me they had no story, they didn’t know what to do next, how to play …” Suddenly she looked bleak. “Till it finally came to the point where even that wasn’t enough to keep me in the game.”
Henry Starr looked at her and shook his head. She kept being a surprise to him. Just when you had written her down for one thing, she showed another: she came on like a woman who had seen the elephant and knew what the world was and how to handle herself in it, who knew what she needed and where to get it and don’t need no help thank you. And then again she’d look young enough to make you want to warn her to take care, skittish and run-away in the eyes as an unbreached doe. But just when you decided she needed careful handling she’d show enough catamount in the eyes and teeth to make your hair rise and your back hunt a corner.
Then suddenly he felt real easy inside, because he saw what she was thinking as clearly as if he was behind those blue eyes of hers, and he knew just what to say: “Let’s go take a look inside the bank.” He glanced at Esterhazy. “Why don’t you watch things out here. See how we look going in … and coming out.”
He grinned a little wolfishly as they dismounted, took Miss Woodly’s arm, and Esterhazy watched them cross the street, and vanish into the bank.
The front of the bank was bland and boring, a square window in a square block of a building, thrown into shadow as the sun lifted over the roofline. Esterhazy stood now in the heavy glare of the afternoon sun, sweating. The wait became prolonged, empty like the street. What were they doing in there? Opening an account? Making a withdrawal? He bent to frame the bank entrance in his viewfinder, but the sun slicing in over the building seemed to spit sharply in his eye so that he blinked and flinched, we’ll never be able to shoot them leaving bank this time of day—then Esterhazy snapped to sudden nervous attention as if his thought had been repeated to him with a new and frightening emphasis. Never shoot them coming out of bank with sun in my eyes…?
The bland face of the bank stared emptily at him, like the numbed face of a drunkard who may instantly wake and begin spewing obscenities at you. The horses were restless, and Esterhazy kept taking his head out of the black cell of the viewfinder to glance nervously up and down the street.
“What were you doing in there all that time?” he asked them. It was evening, the sun painted the clearing a deepening yellow and the campfire flickered invisible tongues among the heaped sticks in the firepit.
She looked happily at Henry Starr sitting cross-legged opposite her, then up at Esterhazy—the same silly smile she had worn since coming out of the damned bank and telling him “Wait” when he’d asked the question the first time. “Let me tell you how it was”—she could barely contain laughing and her skin glowed. “We went into the bank. There was a guard to our right asleep in a chair tipped back against the wall. Two clerks in the teller’s cages and the bank president sitting in his office with the door ajar. The vault door open a little bit. It was exactly two fifty P.M.” She laughed, rocking back a little bit on her haunches. “Mr. William Smithers here was thinking about buying some cattle, wanted to arrange for his bank in Denver to transfer funds … That’s how you’d do it, isn’t it?” she said. “That’s how you’d play it if you wanted to do that bank?”
“You liked it,” said Henry Starr blandly. “I told you banks were better.”
“You’re right,” she said, “banks are better. I did like it.” Esterhazy grumbled at his stew, and his jealousy tickled her as much as playing bank robber with Henry Starr had done. She felt warm and close to the men across the fire, as if she were playing Hawkeye and Uncas with her brothers.
“The strange part,” she said, “was sitting there like a pair of ordinary citizens, talking bank drafts and insurance rates, all the time knowing you don’t mean any of it, that it’s all a joke on that little old banker. I kept thinking he would see right through us, but he never did, as if we were wearing masks …”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s how you start. Later it can get complicated …”
He is feeling pretty smug, isn’t he?—having showed off for her, having let her play his game. It made her flash a little bit—did he think he could let or not let her play, when this was her game too?—but she tried to damp her fire down, keep her face soft so that Henry Starr would not be on his guard. “I kept thinking of you talking to Wilberforce the day your movie opened. He was like a mouse, and you were a cat talking shop but thinking dinner.” She grinned, and looked (to Henry Starr) just like that cat. “I kept wondering what you had in mind for … our bank.”
“Well,” said Henry Starr, “now that would be complicated …” and she said, “Simple—I thought you said banks were simple.”
Henry Starr looked at her face, sharp-eyed and with that bobcat grin, glowing with the firelight and the fun of playing outlaw, you could see she was up on herself the way a good rider was up on a good but unbroke horse, and he said inside himself, Well, if she ain’t ready now she never will be, and he tipped her the corner of a smile. “All right,” he said. “If you’re ready for the next lesson.”
He rose and walked over to the wagon, took an iron pry bar from the boot, hopped into the wagon box and began popping slats off the top of his crate of “Agricultural Equipment.” Esterhazy and Miss Woodly came over to watch.
Inside the crate, set into a framework of notched crosspieces cushioned with rags, were three Winchester repeating rifles, of an old model newly refurbished and blued dark so that the iron ate the light; four .45-caliber Colt’s pistols, three of them single-action Peacemakers and one an old hog-leg Dragoon model; and a pump shotgun with a radically cut down barrel. Packed under these were leather scabbards for the rifles, shotgun and pistols, and boxes of ammunition, steel and brass and copper cartridges, red-and-white-topped shotgun shells.
“What is all this?” Esterhazy wanted to know. He looked a little frightened. “We are really going to rob bank?”
“Not today,” said Henry Starr. “I just want to show you the tools of my trade, like you showed me yours.”
Esterhazy took one of the Winchesters, Henry showed him how to load and lever it—Miss Woodly seemed to know by herself, or maybe her eyes were quick and her hands cunning enough to pick it up by watching. They set up a row of stones along the top of a flat table rock on the far side of their clearing, and Henry Starr stood at the other side and shot two of them into powder. Esterhazy stepped up next to him. “We had bolt rifles in war, more heavy than these.”
“She’s light but she’ll bite,” said Henry Starr. “Squeeze careful and be ready for the shoulder punch.” The POW-pwee! of Esterhazy’s ricochet punctuated the sentence. He levered the next shell up waveringly. Took his rest, adjusted his aim, and blew a second rock to powder.
Miss Woodly walked off to one side and took her rest with the barrel of the Winchester on the wagon box. Her first shot powdered the rock next to Esterhazy’s, then she lowered the rifle and braced it against her hip to lever it. Took her rest. Aimed. And popped another rock off the ledge.
“Winchester’s too long in the barrel for me,” she said, “I have to rest it on something.”
“Nice shooting any way you do it,” said Henry Starr. So she had been around guns and knew how to handle herself with them. He felt easier, as if that settled some questions he had about her, although he couldn’t exactly say how.
She stacked the rifle against the wagon, then said suddenly—impulsively, with a force that was puzzling—“My brothers taught me how,” and she seemed embarrassed and proud at the same time.
“Same fellas taught you to drive a team?” said Henry Starr, teasing her—but softly, remembering how she had shied and bridled at the remark before, as if in spite of the way she handled a rifle he did have to be careful of her. But this time she just narrowed her eyes at him the least bit and said, “The same,” and the line of her chin dared him to say more.
He decided to change the subject. “Rifles for distance work,” he said, “keeps the sheriff from getting too tight to your tail. But bank robbing gets done close, so you want these,” and he handed them the Peacemaker Colts by the barrel, leaving the old-model Dragoon in its notched rack.
They stood closer to the rocks this time. Miss Woodly had wrapped handle and trigger in one long hand and cradled the weight of the barrel softly with the other. The blue-barreled Colts were a lot heavier than they looked. Henry Starr buckled on an old worn gun belt and holstered the Colt by his right hip. He stood square to the line of rocks, then reached easily for the gun, sliding it smoothly up pointing and cocking in one movement and firing three shorts sharp barking shots, and three rocks popped into the air.
Esterhazy profiled toward the target like a duelist, his right arm squared at the elbow, the pistol pointed straight up; then he slowly lowered it, squinting a little as he extended his arm, trying to sight it like a rifle. He squeezed the trigger, but the pull jiggled the barrel off line so the first shot went right, and the recoil made the second high. He stood, smelling the bitter smoke, staring at the row of rocks. Then squared his stance determinedly, lowered the gun so that it centered in him and his body gave backing to his arm. Two shots, both steadier, the second scoring the rock face and singing into the woods—both misses.
Miss Woodly stepped up, stood square, the heavy revolver on the end of her willowy arm as weird as a prosthetic hand on the victim of an industrial accident. The pistol wavered when she pointed it, but then she reached up and steadied her right wrist with her left hand. It took two thumbs to cock the pistol. She tried to squeeze the trigger, but the action was hard as a rock; she squinted with the strain, the barrel making tight loops almost imperceptibly in the air, k-pow! The recoil threw hands and arms up and back. She took the body of the pistol in her left hand and shook her right. Esterhazy watched her, flushed with heat and effort; perhaps he wished in rivalry that she should fail too, but his mind repressed the thought.
