The Return of Henry Starr, page 45
“And I imagine that he had to go alone like Jesus in the wilderness, and into the prison houses of the powerful to listen and find that call in himself, and answer the Devil’s questions, and see the visions; before he could come out, and choose his chosen men, and go about his work. I wonder what sights he was showed, and what questions he was asked, and how he found his answers without the Book to guide him, and him on the run all the time …
[Strums a chord: sings quaveringly,]
“… They called out twenty posses, and the Fed’ral Marshals come,
With rifles ropes and pistols!—and a great old Gatlin’ gun—
They called out the militia!
They called the Ku Klux Klan.
They chased him for a thousand miles …”
… into the blue distance of his perfect getaway—
TULSA
Winter 1911–1912
… the most perfect getaway there ever was or could be: because his mother’s house in Tulsa, where he hid himself from the Eye That Never Sleeps, was like a tomb into which he had crawled to hide, pulling his name in after him, that name that was like spoor the hunters could follow to run him down. A tomb or a prison, it amounted to the same thing. Every time he took off down the road to make his name or save his life, he wound up back in some place like this.
His mother said, “It all come from hanging around with that murdering nigger half-breed friend of yours, that Cherokee Bill. There is pitch that defileth, and he’s the one, Henry, you got to promise me you won’t hang around with him no more …”
Henry Starr tried to smile, but it was a mask to keep his terror hidden: “All right, Ma. If he’ll leave me alone, I won’t ask him to follow me.”
It was like talking to a ghost, talking to her, she talked about ghosts like they were right there. Her eyes breathed ice when they touched him. It was worse than before, when she came visiting him in Fort Smith Prison. She had been locked up for a dozen years in her own head in this house, listening to herself mumble over and over her old troubles, Tom Starr alive and Tom Starr dead looking his hate at her from his bench in the corner, C. N. Walker taking her land and money and pissing it away, Henry Starr gone bad, it never stopped happening to her: it was like she was frozen in a picture of things as they were that time in Tahlequah in 1892, all of it still there around her in 1912 when she looked at him. It made him feel like he was a ghost himself, a dead man haunting the same cheap bungalow twenty years after he had died.
Alone in the darkness of his mother’s house, Henry Starr gave his mind to studying ghosts. The pantry room was like a cell. He lay in his bed and made the ghosts and shadows come up and speak to him. They never said anything different, that was the way of ghosts: as if a ghost was just a question you couldn’t answer made over into a body, the shadow of a body, those words that never changed was all there ever was to them, and till you answered them right they’d keep right on asking:
Tom Starr’s question, Why does a white man like you think he can walk around in my name?
Cherokee Bill’s question, My name, my ghost, my words written in pictures in the light, tell me when you gonna do that, Henry, like you promised me?
Or Kinsley’s question: You’ve had to dump a friend before this to save Number One, why don’t you get smart and join up with the decent folks?
Or Deputy Floyd Wilson’s, only Floyd Wilson’s wasn’t a question, just a fact in the shape of a dead man.
And Cora’s question: Why? and any reason at all would have been better than what I gave her, which wasn’t even answer enough to make a good lie—but a joke, as if I wasn’t only running out on her and Jiminy and everything we … but sticking my tongue out at her for ever believing—
I need to get me some new answers, or some different ghosts with some new questions.
If I had told Cora I done it for the money—it could happen to anyone, man loses his home and family running too hard after a dollar, it happens to lots of people it ain’t no special shame. You do something for money, people can understand, they can respect that.
Maybe I ought to study on money. “You go for the money, Young Henry. Because money don’t get sick and it don’t get old, and it don’t never die.” Yes, when it comes to money, I been advised by experts, men like Bob Dalton that made it their study all the years of their lives, which I got to admit wasn’t many. Not many at all: maybe the money they took ain’t dead, but the Jameses and the Youngers and the Daltons are, and all the cash they took didn’t buy them any piece of that don’t-get-sick -old or -die magic that was in the money; but the money itself worked like a magnet drawing bullets, especially from the back—so in the end the road ran one way for Jesse James and the Daltons and Henry Starr, one generation after another. Maybe you started out to get yourself some justice, get some of your own back from them that robbed or hurt or put you down, and every man woman or child smart enough to know the difference between law and justice—every human person that ever lost blood or sweat or pride to that difference—why you was them, you was their boy, and they’d lie to the law for you and tell stories and sing songs about you to their kids, till you had a big name in the Nation.
But it never lasted long that way, you could never make it last. Little had it right: getting the money out of the banks, that was what the game always come down to, that and making your name big in the Nations so that folks would give way to you and the law think twice and the tough hands and the smart hands want to join with you and nobody else. So even if you started out thinking it was about justice, it kept coming down to getting better and better at getting more and more money out of the banks: so you’d rob ’em fast and then slow, slip up on some and hooraw others, rob some plain and some fancy, some like a cavalry raid and some like a pickpocket; you’d do banks and switch to trains; if you did trains in stations then you’d do ’em in open country, trains moving and standing still; and small banks, country banks, city banks, banks that was bullion depositories and banks that held paper—and when you’d done all of those things once and one at a time, why then you could better it doing ’em two at a time, because you made twice the money twice as fast—and also because to double the deeds that way, why it doubled the power of your name and your fame, Jesse James’s Double Daring; or, Two Banks at One Blow …
And so whatever it was you started out doing it for, in the end it was the banks and the Pinkertons and the federals that you played to, and when they posted your rewards up higher than the Cook or the Doolin gangs, when they posted you up toward the money they would have paid for the Daltons or the Youngers or Jesse James, that was your applause and your praise, that told you where you stood with the people and the Nations. Because somehow you didn’t stand anymore for what you used to, for their justice. All you stood for was money and being famous, and your face disappeared in a cloud of famous names and the names was just a cloud of dollars, and the same people that would tell their kids about Henry Starr or Jesse James robbing the rich and giving to the poor, they’d spot you in the street and name your name just to get their own names up there with yours in the paper, just like Robert Ford back-shooting Jesse, and the citizens of Coffeyville shooting the Daltons to pieces, and somebody told them where to find Henry Starr with his pants down.
But how could you blame folks that couldn’t see more of you than five thousand dollars dead or alive, when that was what you saw yourself every time you looked in the mirror, a man who robbed more banks and was worth more money dead or alive than Jesse James?
Only Tom Starr—he never done it for the money, but for the justice pure and simple.
Yes, and died a poor old crazy blanket-head Injun, hating his own kin and blood, hating everything he come across from here out to the edge of the horizon.
So Tom Starr’s was a sucker’s game too. His game was standing against the law, and that was his name, he wouldn’t have no law but justice and no justice but Tom Starr’s justice. He couldn’t share it with nobody, it was just his: and finally he just eat that justice up, and if people couldn’t live with that, if they wouldn’t say Tom Starr when they meant justice, then let them die, let them and their land and their children be eaten up by cattlemen railroads bankers or whatever, it was nothing to him, it wasn’t Tom Starr’s business: Tom Starr’s business was to stand against John Ross and the government of the Cherokee Nation, whatever that government might be. And when that happened he become a joke, John Ross could fool him, everyone could fool him and him powerless, locked up alone in the dark inside his blind old head with no family, tribe or nation to remember his name and help him make justice.
If an outlaw don’t become part of something bigger than just his own gang, pretty soon there won’t be nobody he can rely on but himself. That’s what happened to Tom Starr and to Cherokee Bill, to Jesse James, to the Daltons—brother mistrusting brother, after a while. It ain’t enough to stand up to something or to stand against it, it ain’t enough even to be the same blood. You got to stand for something, and people got to be able to tell what that is and recognize it every time they look at you: so that what they see in you and your gang ain’t just a stack of silver dollars and headlines in the paper, but their own justice.
He was still lying in the bed, his eyes still full of the blue darkness of his mother’s pantryroom, but it seemed that the blue was getting clearer, it was not blue smoke anymore. He felt the weight of his own body lying on the bed, and little curls of power lifting in his muscles, like tiny animals taking a scent underground and beginning to think about getting out into the sunlight to hunt it down. If all the folks that ever lost blood or sweat or land to the Thing was on one side, and on the other there was just this great big heap of white paper …
Well, but then what? Just what is it we got to do to set the balance right? Because that ain’t just trash, that heap of paper money that makes up the Corporation, there’s power in it, the paper got its own guns and people to use ’em, it’s got the power to get inside you and turn you around, it can change the names on things. If it didn’t have that power behind it, how could it have stood so many years, weighing down the balance against all those different kinds of people, and the stuff they made or grew?
For a man spent as much time in banks as you have, Henry Starr, you sure got simple notions about the power of the dollar.
If you hunt bear, you got to think like a bear. Down there under the many names and faces was always the one thing, Jack-the-Devil or Andrew-the-Jackson or John-the-Rockefeller, what was the difference? Tom Starr thought the name was John Ross, and Ross thought it was Tom Starr, Dodge thought it was the Katy Railroad and the Katy thought it was Dodge. And John Ross and Tom Starr and Jesse James and William Dodge died, but the Name and the money never did, because the Name was the money and money don’t die: it don’t get sick and it don’t get old, and it just goes on and on, coming and coming after what it wants like a blind root under the ground hunting water. And all the different things that stood against it—Indians coloreds crackers and Chinamen, the Cherokee mountain and water land, ranches cotton fields corn patches coal mines timber ranges—their names got eat up down into the one name, The Chemical-Consolidental Cattlemen’s Oilroad Cottonbank Company—or call it Standard Oil, or the One Big Corporation. And why? Because they was all different names, and right out in the open: and Jack-the-Devil found ’em out, and set ’em to fighting each other, thinking each other was Jack-the-Devil, so he used their own strengths and names against them, and when they was worn down he ate ’em up.
Because they couldn’t see that underneath it all, their justice was one thing. Cherokees only got a taste for Cherokee justice, and peckerwoods for peckerwood justice, and colored colored justice, and probably Chinamen Hebrews Hunkies and even women and children got their own Chinese Hebrew Hunky female or kid’s kind of justice, and they don’t know or care how another man’s justice tastes to him—how maybe it tastes just the same as, their own.
But suppose there was an outlaw that was like the Corporation, that you couldn’t say was it one Name or a million names, that hit you here and hit you there, different every time, no way to get a fix on him, starting out secret and small so you couldn’t even be sure it was one man: except that whatever he hit, when you looked at it, you found it was always the one thing—it was always the bank the store the payroll office that was Corporation in that place, you see?—that was Standard Oil or Consolidated Cotton or the Rockefeller Bank in that place. And anybody who saw that outlaw as the man standing up for his justice, if he looked closer at it maybe he’d see that it really was justice and not just a badman out after money, riding out in a cloud of dollars: he’d see that whatever the outlaw done, it was done against the Name, the Corporation.
And it wouldn’t be just Cherokees looking at a Cherokee badman either, but every different kind of man that was locked in the cell of his own mind, fighting and afraid of every other man in a cell, seeing that however different the country was—oil or cattle or cotton or timber—the outlaw always found the Corporation and pointed his pistol at it and named it and punished it. Then there would be two powers, the One Big Corporation on one side and the Outlaw on the other—and back of the Outlaw all of those different kinds of people coming together in his name, just like they was that One Big Union Little talked about.
Slowly, invisibly, the Outlaw’s Name would begin to come out of all the different faces and aliases and methods he was using—but not as his real name: no. Because if they got that, if they figured out that the outlaw wasn’t the Outlaw who stood over against the Corporation, but was just some little half-breed desperado named Henry Starr, then I’d lose the power, lose parts of my Nation, and my Name would get smaller, and they’d run me down like they done before. Henry Starr could be the Outlaw as long as nobody discovered the Outlaw’s name was only Henry Starr.
The trick was to make yourself a name that was so much bigger and wider and stronger than yourself that what you was yourself couldn’t cut it down or hold it back, but it would lift and fly off from you like your ghost had turned into an eagle, and left you yourself just one of the other creatures on the earth, your spine hair rises and you scrunch and pray when the shadow covers you and passes by, but a piece of your ghost flies off with it, they can hunt you into your hole and kill you, but the eagle hides in the sun and lives forever.
CENTRAL OKLAHOMA
1912–1913
Like an eagle: he set himself to look down like an eagle, his eye taking in everything that moved between horizon and horizon. Except that all an eagle can see is what’s on the surface, and now he was also seeing like a corporation, scouting the insides of things before he looked at the outsides, his ghost ranging over the whole map of Oklahoma which he held in his head while his eyes sliced through stacks and stacks of newspapers, looking for trouble: barn burnings and bank robberies, mob busting up a foreclosure auction, union men or scabs bushwhacked or riot-gunned, lynchings, lootings of company stores—not just any trouble, but the kind that when it happens you know that there is a place where the difference between law and justice is cutting deep enough to draw blood.
He made his first circle around the center of Oklahoma finding his men and the places where he could work, moving quick and putting lots of distance between stops—Tulsa to Okmulgee, Okmulgee to Okfuskee, to Tupelo in Coal County and Shawnee, to Pawnee County in the cattle country and Bartlesville in the Osage Nation, then back to Tulsa. In every chosen town he made up a different gang for a different target (and yet underneath it the target was the same). For every gang a different mask on the leader’s face, a different set of moves and reasons, keeping his true name secret, hiding even the fact that there was only one man behind it all, only one name for the hunters to sniff out—drawing circles of secrecy around himself like the circles of water around the hole a stone makes when you throw it into a pond, the edges hard and separate and moving farther from the center with every pulse.
CENTRAL OKLAHOMA
1913–1914
It was hard times all over Oklahoma, the Tulsa Lamp had to admit it, “although contemplated in the stern light of economic and moral law it is, perhaps, a blessing in disguise: an occasion for purging the body politic of excess and luxury, and reaffirming the basis of social happiness in hard work, frugality, and discipline.”
In cities like Tulsa young men out of work hung out around saloons, burgled houses and stores for money to live on. Out in the country men on the tramp, out of work or driven off the land, stole fruit out of orchards, butchered a rustled cow for food, or jumped strangers on the road, beat them and took their pocket money. Everywhere you looked there were amateur bank robberies, wild boys with rusty old six-guns getting shot down by guards, or coming in themselves overarmed and scared and hair-triggered, shooting too soon and too much so that half the time they had to run before the cash was delivered. Farmers along the Frisco and the Katy railroad rights of way now and again fired shots at the trains as they roared through, because the screw of rising freight rates was busting a lot of small farmers. In late May a gang of six men, three in dirty overalls, robbed the Oklahoma City Express one night between Tulsa and Bristow.
It was hard times in Okmulgee. Cherokee Oil and Gas was drilling and fighting the Cherokees to hold their lease and the farmers for their mineral rights and their own workmen over wages. On the night of May 31 a gang of five men in drillers’ jackets and masks stuck up the CO & G office on payday, by unfortunate coincidence arriving within five minutes of the pay chest itself.
