The Return of Henry Starr, page 52
—or sweep it off the counter, coins paper notes into your saddle bag, and here it is, right here, the money is right here and that’s more than that damned movie of yours ever was and the bag swings heavy with money on his left arm as he backs out the door and turns in one light swift movement swinging the bag over the pommel and mounting into the saddle, his voice as piercing as a bird cry as he slashes his reins left and right, his horse gathers under him and churns and springs straight ahead—
I tell you I tell you he come smoking, he come blazing, he come boiling out of that town, and behind him the long back trail disappeared in the smoke of burning debt paper, in the smoke of dust, in blue smoke, in blue so that you will never find him never catch him never, with blue, with the color of blue …
—west out of Prue as if heading up the Arkansas for Osage, then north through the brush cross-lots to Wild Horse and east and north, running like a coyote runs, blinding the trail and running again by instinct as natural as breathing or eating, resting no place but touching and moving out moving over moving away—across Bird River at night, camped out above Skiatook, dodging and ducking in his old worn trace—Talala, Watova, Nowata, Lenapah, up the valley of the Verdigris running for safety over the Kansas line—
And far up ahead in the V notch of the road a small white dot, jiggling in the hard light and heat-twisted air, maybe a mirage?—not a mirage, because he was coming up on it, closer and closer, smoking down toward it till its edges hardened and he knew it was men on horses, half a dozen men, half a dozen riding north on the road from Belle Starr’s ranch to Coffeyville, and he had started far back, thirty years back since they had called him Young Henry and welcomed him to the family and told him you keep your eye on the money Henry that’s the ticket ’cause money don’t ever get old or sick and it don’t ever die—thirty years’ head start but he could almost see Bob Dalton’s face turning to check his back trail to see how Henry Starr was gaining on him, Young Henry Old Henry Henry Starr the outlaw, the smartest outlaw who ever, and maybe he would just go whooping right on past Bob Dalton and straight on to Coffeyville and glory.
And not any damn movie-screen glory either, Miss Woodly, not the kind you win with a gun full of blanks, but the real thing, the kind you win with real bullets the kind that gets you
gets you killed, or half killed and the rest dropped down a hole into stone prison.
Yes, but they can’t hold you in those prisons, Miss Woodly, because if you got that real kind of glory, then the law can’t hold you, only justice can hold you, so you slide out between the bars between the stones like quicksilver, one way or another way—the law can’t hold you because your name is bigger than the law, Miss Woodly, like a picture that prints itself in the lights of people’s minds so the glory don’t ever fade out of it, but when you see it it all comes back to you just like it really was, the glory as real as the bullets, the justice as real as the law, the bank robbery then as real as the money is now, and all of it just as real as the crowd was and the packed sand of the arena the little white chicken head poking up out of the earth at the rodeo in Tahlequah, as real as that, as real as I dreamed it would be lying in my boardinghouse room prison cell mother’s pantry-room Munson’s Store Fort Smith Prison the rolling wagon coming home from Bartlesville the cornfield outside my mother’s cabin where I lay with the sun on my back reading red-covered Last of the Mohicans because I was that kind of boy until the railroad agent …
No: the cornfield and the railroad agent—that never happened at all that was Miss Woodly’s idea she made it up:
And the gun he had held in his hand: the old .45-caliber Colt Dragoon: blue iron heavy in the hand but inside there was nothing but the movie blanks he had loaded it with to rob his next bank in Henry Starr: A Debtor to the Law, photoplay by B. C. Woodly, and if banker or clerk had had a gun ready to hand …
A thrill of pure terror went through the middle of his spine like an ice needle, as if Miss Woodly’s blue eyes had suddenly zeroed on the soft secret core of his body—just when he thought he had run out of her eyes and her thinking here she was again, her and that nightwalking “Henry Starr” she had made up, not just eating up his tracks like Bill Tilghman would, but eating up bits of Henry Starr’s memory and life too, so that he couldn’t see clearly anymore where the made-up parts left off and his life began.
Then the horse moved restlessly under his hand and he knew that he had run his ghost back around the circle and into the thicket above the Coffeyville Road once again: listening for the pursuit. Not a sound at all between Coffeyville and Tahlequah as far as he could tell. They chased him for a thousand miles and never caught …
But they had caught him, hadn’t they—every time he thought he was riding that horse and climbing over the world and riding right up into the notch of the V where the road goes into the sky: that was when it come to take him from behind, the punch of the hog killer in the spine, or Bill Tilghman’s tap on the shoulder while you’re rolled up inside that store-bought sweetie’s honeyhole as snug as a .45 Colt in a scabbard, or the taptap of Tilghman’s horse riding carefully up your back trail, taking his time because he owns some naked clue Henry Starr has dropped or forgotten in his haste and fear and now old Ice Eyes will follow it home to him, and come ahead of him into Coffeyville to sit in hiding, waiting for Henry Starr to finish one last run down that same old road he had run so many times before—out of Tahlequah out of Bentonville out of Keystone out of Preston out of Owasso out of Stroud—as if all that running twisting dodging was just the wriggles of a bug with a needle through his spine pinned to a paper, and Bill Tilghman’s knowing white eyes was the needle, and he saves your life or the half of it that is all you have left—
And puts you back in the same prison he put you in before, Bartlesville Jail Fort Smith Prison McAlester Ma’s windowless Tulsa pantryroom Stroud City Jail where they cut you in half and the blue, the black comes up like rising smoke like rising water over your face and your breath and your name till it covers you and there’s nothing, no-clan no-name, this is the death of Henry Starr, and nothing to keep it away but the life of your brother Cherokee Bill: since that’s the only coin they’ll take—and it’s not even to buy you free to find your horse again, and your road, but just to let you live in a box to breathe your name at the blue, at the black—but even so you will pay the price whatever it is, and pay it and …
So when you get out of those prisons they say it is because you are Henry Starr, the luckiest the smartest outlaw who ever lived, and nobody ever got up early enough to climb over Henry Starr. But the truth is they made you sell they made you bite off and leave behind a piece of who you was, a piece of your name and your ghost so every time you come out you’re weaker, you’re less—your name is smaller, and your word—that word with which he robbed a-many banks and—that word of his … that he had given to Cherokee Bill, to write his death and his memory in ghost-lights so it would live forever in the Nations.
The road and the story always ended the same: with Henry Starr dropped down a blue stone hole and Cherokee Bill sold to the Hangman to buy Henry Starr’s life. Not even Miss Woodly could think of a way to get Henry Starr out of blue smoke stone prison without finding him a murdering nigger half-breed named Cherokee Bill, whose body Henry Starr could give to the Hangman and the picture-man, whose name and ghost Henry Starr would leave to die and be remembered by a nigger’s death.
Miss Woodly: with her blue eyes and those small fine lips like a child will have, but a look in her eyes sometimes like a bobcat on a cornered rabbit, and her breath as sweet as …
You were supposed to make it over in that sweet breath of yours, Miss Woodly, you were supposed to change it and make it like your breath would be if it was singing: so that instead of everything twisted around biting on itself like a mad dog ride rob and run over and over till they catch me and drown my breath in blue smoke it would all flow out clean and smooth like water running, all the different circles run together and run out smooth like film on the spool, running toward a place where it all comes together and comes to an end, and when you turn and look back there’s your whole long road like a silver path running straight and true from back then to here and now, and it all makes sense and it comes to good, Ma and Grandfather and Floyd Wilson and Cherokee Bill and Young Henry Starr who won the prize and robbed the bank at Tahlequah, Henry Starr the traitor and the rescuer and the Robin Hood of Old Oklahoma, Henry Starr the Last Chief and Redeemer of the Noble Red Race of the Ten Lost Mohican Tribes of the One Big Union of the United States of America, finally and forever coming together and coming out right …
The horse jerked his head, trying to shake off Henry Starr’s hand so he could snuff the morning.
The black darkness was turning black-blue, was blue: was opening into gray.
A bird spoke behind him.
The road was still empty. Henry Starr swung himself up into the saddle, lifting his stiffened leg tenderly over the cantle. “Tsik,” he said, and the horse stepped out of the thicket and moved at a touch of the reins north toward Coffeyville.
Let it all go. Dreams and conjures and prisons go together. You are outside, the sun will be up in five minutes and that’s a mock-bird calling out of the thicket behind you. When you cross the line you will be safe from Oklahoma law, and when you get to Coffeyville it will be noon and you will have lunch. You will pay for it with money taken out of your saddlebags, which are heavy on the mare’s spotted rump because they are topping full of genuine silver dollars and gold and silver and greenback certificates backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, you can’t ask for anything solider than that. So you remember, it wasn’t dreaming got you here.
No, the horse was real, and the money, and the bank robbery had been real enough, although the fact was he had never planned it beforehand nor prepared himself but took what was given and made up the rest as he went along, dressed up like a movie cowboy and never even bothered to check the loads in his gun—and maybe if you looked at it cold it was a fool thing to do, but it had worked like a charm, worked like if you had the power, if you were a real bank robber you maybe didn’t even need real bullets …
But no: that was one trick you didn’t want to have to try a second time. Not even on purpose, let alone by surprise. Stick with what you can see, with real horses on a real road, and real guns with real bullets in them, to use when you want to rob real money from real banks.
Only, don’t go down that road thinking that when it ends Henry Starr will have become something else—Something: a name greater than the Daltons or Jesse James or Tom Starr or Robin Hood or Jesus Christ, a name that don’t get small or sick or old, a name that don’t die, but whenever people see the difference between law and justice rich and poor strong and weak they see my face, and they whisper Henry Starr.
Because memory ain’t like money, is it? It gets old and it gets sick, and when them that carries it dies then it is dead, dead like the buffalo and the Last of the Mohicans and Tom Starr and the Cherokee Nation, dead like Bob and Grat Dalton who said “Welcome to the family, Henry Starr,” and told me that the money don’t ever die so stick to that, and then rode off themselves down the road to rob two banks and have it out once and for all with the ghost of the name of Jesse James in the streets of Coffeyville—and the citizens woke up and tore them apart with pistols rifles shotguns, blowing pieces of meat and bone off them like butchering hogs in a back alley while the ghost of Jesse James laughed at them and rode on, Jesse James Jesse James.
Jesse James: the Daltons never caught him, and I’ll never catch them; and if I did it wouldn’t make no difference. What would I say if I come up with them on this road—turn back, boys, you can’t beat Jesse James today or ever, this road ends one way and the only thing to do is turn around and go back to where it all began … and do what? Start over again? But you can’t, I found that out too: the roads in this part of the country run one way.
They were ahead of him, waiting there in ambush when he came riding into Coffeyville before noon. Nearly thirty years since the Daltons: the main street was paved and gas-lit, but there were the two banks stilt, the First National and the Condon. The Condon was a big, two-story ornate turreted building, gilded lettering over a big plate-glass front, and carefully inset in the glass was a framed pane with a large bullet hole in it; and inside the window a framed photograph of the dead bodies of Bob and Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers, laid out under a wall with their stiffened limbs sprawling, lids drooping over dead-blank eyes, mouths sagging, bullet holes like inkblots up and down their fronts,
One road, one ending: the ghosts of the Dalton Gang were real small and gray, shrunk down and held for thirty years in a little black-frame prison, with no power to keep the eyes of anybody at all away from the nakedness of their deaths. Give them a couple of days and they’d put Henry Starr’s name to the Prue bank job, put his name and his price and a small gray image of his ghost on a handbill and tack it up in bank windows just like this one, and that would be the start of the conjure that would put him back in a stone box for good, blood ghost brains sore ass and all.
Next to the Condon the marquee of a movie theater overhung the sidewalk, with bunting stirring in the afternoon breeze:
BUCKSKIN BILL VS. THE STARR GANG.
Under it a red-lettered strip of paper said:
Next Week: THE BIRTH OF A NATION!
Across the street near the First National another, smaller theater with a billboard front:
HENRY STARR, SCOURGE OF THE SOUTHWEST.
Like looking in a mirror and you know it is your face, but it can’t be your face because you are young and the face is old because you are old and the face is …
“Look in the water,” he boomed out of the shadow, the sun flaring out of his head, “Look in the water and you will see your ghost …”
Henry Starr sat his horse in the middle of the main street of Coffeyville, Kansas, with his saddlebags full of cash from a bank he’d just robbed and looked up at his name in giant letters staring down from the marquees of two different theaters playing two of his movies at the same time in Coffeyville, Kansas.
He took some coins belonging to the Prue State Bank out of his saddlebags, bought a ticket, and went in right in the middle of the picture, forgetting to notice which of the two movies he had chosen.
There he was, his face and his name written Henry Starr on the wall in black and silver lights, an icy silver with the piercing intensity of acetylene. He had become huge, his face Henry Starr filled all the world that eyes could see—but then again he was small, small with distance. His ghost in silver light could bring you as close as breathing or put you as far away as the edge of sight, could carry you along or let you drop—could carry him along, Henry Starr! Because this Henry Starr had power enough to lift and carry the little body that made the ghost, carry him high and far, carry him like an eagle climbing up out and over everything in the world, Tom Starr Cherokee Bill Floyd Wilson Bill Tilghman the square black cell of Fort Smith Prison …
Blackness shut down like a door, then light erased it, he heard the whirr of the reel winder: but the silver light still moved in ghostly repetition behind his eyelids. All they had to do was rewind the film and they would be ready to show the movie again.
He rose and walked outside, a dozen people with him, jabbering, laughing, a kid said, Wasn’t that great? The sunlight was yellow and blinding, full of dust—the light of the screen had been better, like cool water, very clear. Inside people would soon be watching that silver flow like running water, drinking it again with their eyes. And when they had done looking at it …
Then, he thought with a smile, there was another movie across the street that they could go see.
And if he went back to Tulsa to work with Miss Woodly, then there would be another one after that, till wherever he went he would find his silver-light ghost running through cabins banks and countryside, into jails and into shut-down blackness—and out again to blaze silver and black down a silver trail, his ghost and his name sliding out of the black night like quicksilver between the stones or light between the bars, to run and run and run again …
Henry Starr stood in the streets of Coffeyville where the Daltons had been shot full of holes by the citizens of Coffeyville and the ghost of Jesse James, with his pockets full of the Prue State Bank’s cash and his eyes full of movies. Nobody knew who he was, except maybe Henry Starr himself, and maybe the ghosts of Grat and Bob Dalton staring out of their picture-frame prison. But he was Henry Starr, the smartest outlaw who ever lived, who had finally climbed over the ghost of Jesse James’s Double Daring: Henry Starr, who had hit the two-at-a-time in Coffeyville and got away with it.
He didn’t have to choose between the ghost world of the movies and the dusty world of banks and prisons. He had the kind of money that worked on both sides of the line, what he stole in one world he could spend in the other. He could step from the screen into the world with his pistol in his hand and rob real banks of real money with a gun full of make-believe movie bullets. And when he had done he could vanish into the screen, vanish not in a cloud of dollars but into a cloud of ghosts, the spirits of power and memory, Jesse James who robbed two banks in one day and Tom Starr who gave no trail to a bear, and back further, to the powers that slew the monsters and made the Nation in its ancient home back there among the mountains, where the water was.
And if Tom Starr, or Floyd Wilson, or Cherokee Bill came haunting after him in this life, asking him about blood, about all the blood Henry Starr spoiled or spilled or betrayed, he would vanish through the screen and dissolve himself in silver lights, he would weave them an answer in silver and black that would change the blood to small black shapes; if they came after him questioning they would be dissolved into his answer: an answer of silver light, smooth as running water, in which everything would be made right.
I tell you I tell you he come smoking, he come blazing, he come boiling out of that town, and behind him the long back trail disappeared in the smoke of burning debt paper, in the smoke of dust, in blue smoke, in blue so that you will never find him never catch him never, with blue, with the color of blue …
—west out of Prue as if heading up the Arkansas for Osage, then north through the brush cross-lots to Wild Horse and east and north, running like a coyote runs, blinding the trail and running again by instinct as natural as breathing or eating, resting no place but touching and moving out moving over moving away—across Bird River at night, camped out above Skiatook, dodging and ducking in his old worn trace—Talala, Watova, Nowata, Lenapah, up the valley of the Verdigris running for safety over the Kansas line—
And far up ahead in the V notch of the road a small white dot, jiggling in the hard light and heat-twisted air, maybe a mirage?—not a mirage, because he was coming up on it, closer and closer, smoking down toward it till its edges hardened and he knew it was men on horses, half a dozen men, half a dozen riding north on the road from Belle Starr’s ranch to Coffeyville, and he had started far back, thirty years back since they had called him Young Henry and welcomed him to the family and told him you keep your eye on the money Henry that’s the ticket ’cause money don’t ever get old or sick and it don’t ever die—thirty years’ head start but he could almost see Bob Dalton’s face turning to check his back trail to see how Henry Starr was gaining on him, Young Henry Old Henry Henry Starr the outlaw, the smartest outlaw who ever, and maybe he would just go whooping right on past Bob Dalton and straight on to Coffeyville and glory.
And not any damn movie-screen glory either, Miss Woodly, not the kind you win with a gun full of blanks, but the real thing, the kind you win with real bullets the kind that gets you
gets you killed, or half killed and the rest dropped down a hole into stone prison.
Yes, but they can’t hold you in those prisons, Miss Woodly, because if you got that real kind of glory, then the law can’t hold you, only justice can hold you, so you slide out between the bars between the stones like quicksilver, one way or another way—the law can’t hold you because your name is bigger than the law, Miss Woodly, like a picture that prints itself in the lights of people’s minds so the glory don’t ever fade out of it, but when you see it it all comes back to you just like it really was, the glory as real as the bullets, the justice as real as the law, the bank robbery then as real as the money is now, and all of it just as real as the crowd was and the packed sand of the arena the little white chicken head poking up out of the earth at the rodeo in Tahlequah, as real as that, as real as I dreamed it would be lying in my boardinghouse room prison cell mother’s pantry-room Munson’s Store Fort Smith Prison the rolling wagon coming home from Bartlesville the cornfield outside my mother’s cabin where I lay with the sun on my back reading red-covered Last of the Mohicans because I was that kind of boy until the railroad agent …
No: the cornfield and the railroad agent—that never happened at all that was Miss Woodly’s idea she made it up:
And the gun he had held in his hand: the old .45-caliber Colt Dragoon: blue iron heavy in the hand but inside there was nothing but the movie blanks he had loaded it with to rob his next bank in Henry Starr: A Debtor to the Law, photoplay by B. C. Woodly, and if banker or clerk had had a gun ready to hand …
A thrill of pure terror went through the middle of his spine like an ice needle, as if Miss Woodly’s blue eyes had suddenly zeroed on the soft secret core of his body—just when he thought he had run out of her eyes and her thinking here she was again, her and that nightwalking “Henry Starr” she had made up, not just eating up his tracks like Bill Tilghman would, but eating up bits of Henry Starr’s memory and life too, so that he couldn’t see clearly anymore where the made-up parts left off and his life began.
Then the horse moved restlessly under his hand and he knew that he had run his ghost back around the circle and into the thicket above the Coffeyville Road once again: listening for the pursuit. Not a sound at all between Coffeyville and Tahlequah as far as he could tell. They chased him for a thousand miles and never caught …
But they had caught him, hadn’t they—every time he thought he was riding that horse and climbing over the world and riding right up into the notch of the V where the road goes into the sky: that was when it come to take him from behind, the punch of the hog killer in the spine, or Bill Tilghman’s tap on the shoulder while you’re rolled up inside that store-bought sweetie’s honeyhole as snug as a .45 Colt in a scabbard, or the taptap of Tilghman’s horse riding carefully up your back trail, taking his time because he owns some naked clue Henry Starr has dropped or forgotten in his haste and fear and now old Ice Eyes will follow it home to him, and come ahead of him into Coffeyville to sit in hiding, waiting for Henry Starr to finish one last run down that same old road he had run so many times before—out of Tahlequah out of Bentonville out of Keystone out of Preston out of Owasso out of Stroud—as if all that running twisting dodging was just the wriggles of a bug with a needle through his spine pinned to a paper, and Bill Tilghman’s knowing white eyes was the needle, and he saves your life or the half of it that is all you have left—
And puts you back in the same prison he put you in before, Bartlesville Jail Fort Smith Prison McAlester Ma’s windowless Tulsa pantryroom Stroud City Jail where they cut you in half and the blue, the black comes up like rising smoke like rising water over your face and your breath and your name till it covers you and there’s nothing, no-clan no-name, this is the death of Henry Starr, and nothing to keep it away but the life of your brother Cherokee Bill: since that’s the only coin they’ll take—and it’s not even to buy you free to find your horse again, and your road, but just to let you live in a box to breathe your name at the blue, at the black—but even so you will pay the price whatever it is, and pay it and …
So when you get out of those prisons they say it is because you are Henry Starr, the luckiest the smartest outlaw who ever lived, and nobody ever got up early enough to climb over Henry Starr. But the truth is they made you sell they made you bite off and leave behind a piece of who you was, a piece of your name and your ghost so every time you come out you’re weaker, you’re less—your name is smaller, and your word—that word with which he robbed a-many banks and—that word of his … that he had given to Cherokee Bill, to write his death and his memory in ghost-lights so it would live forever in the Nations.
The road and the story always ended the same: with Henry Starr dropped down a blue stone hole and Cherokee Bill sold to the Hangman to buy Henry Starr’s life. Not even Miss Woodly could think of a way to get Henry Starr out of blue smoke stone prison without finding him a murdering nigger half-breed named Cherokee Bill, whose body Henry Starr could give to the Hangman and the picture-man, whose name and ghost Henry Starr would leave to die and be remembered by a nigger’s death.
Miss Woodly: with her blue eyes and those small fine lips like a child will have, but a look in her eyes sometimes like a bobcat on a cornered rabbit, and her breath as sweet as …
You were supposed to make it over in that sweet breath of yours, Miss Woodly, you were supposed to change it and make it like your breath would be if it was singing: so that instead of everything twisted around biting on itself like a mad dog ride rob and run over and over till they catch me and drown my breath in blue smoke it would all flow out clean and smooth like water running, all the different circles run together and run out smooth like film on the spool, running toward a place where it all comes together and comes to an end, and when you turn and look back there’s your whole long road like a silver path running straight and true from back then to here and now, and it all makes sense and it comes to good, Ma and Grandfather and Floyd Wilson and Cherokee Bill and Young Henry Starr who won the prize and robbed the bank at Tahlequah, Henry Starr the traitor and the rescuer and the Robin Hood of Old Oklahoma, Henry Starr the Last Chief and Redeemer of the Noble Red Race of the Ten Lost Mohican Tribes of the One Big Union of the United States of America, finally and forever coming together and coming out right …
The horse jerked his head, trying to shake off Henry Starr’s hand so he could snuff the morning.
The black darkness was turning black-blue, was blue: was opening into gray.
A bird spoke behind him.
The road was still empty. Henry Starr swung himself up into the saddle, lifting his stiffened leg tenderly over the cantle. “Tsik,” he said, and the horse stepped out of the thicket and moved at a touch of the reins north toward Coffeyville.
Let it all go. Dreams and conjures and prisons go together. You are outside, the sun will be up in five minutes and that’s a mock-bird calling out of the thicket behind you. When you cross the line you will be safe from Oklahoma law, and when you get to Coffeyville it will be noon and you will have lunch. You will pay for it with money taken out of your saddlebags, which are heavy on the mare’s spotted rump because they are topping full of genuine silver dollars and gold and silver and greenback certificates backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, you can’t ask for anything solider than that. So you remember, it wasn’t dreaming got you here.
No, the horse was real, and the money, and the bank robbery had been real enough, although the fact was he had never planned it beforehand nor prepared himself but took what was given and made up the rest as he went along, dressed up like a movie cowboy and never even bothered to check the loads in his gun—and maybe if you looked at it cold it was a fool thing to do, but it had worked like a charm, worked like if you had the power, if you were a real bank robber you maybe didn’t even need real bullets …
But no: that was one trick you didn’t want to have to try a second time. Not even on purpose, let alone by surprise. Stick with what you can see, with real horses on a real road, and real guns with real bullets in them, to use when you want to rob real money from real banks.
Only, don’t go down that road thinking that when it ends Henry Starr will have become something else—Something: a name greater than the Daltons or Jesse James or Tom Starr or Robin Hood or Jesus Christ, a name that don’t get small or sick or old, a name that don’t die, but whenever people see the difference between law and justice rich and poor strong and weak they see my face, and they whisper Henry Starr.
Because memory ain’t like money, is it? It gets old and it gets sick, and when them that carries it dies then it is dead, dead like the buffalo and the Last of the Mohicans and Tom Starr and the Cherokee Nation, dead like Bob and Grat Dalton who said “Welcome to the family, Henry Starr,” and told me that the money don’t ever die so stick to that, and then rode off themselves down the road to rob two banks and have it out once and for all with the ghost of the name of Jesse James in the streets of Coffeyville—and the citizens woke up and tore them apart with pistols rifles shotguns, blowing pieces of meat and bone off them like butchering hogs in a back alley while the ghost of Jesse James laughed at them and rode on, Jesse James Jesse James.
Jesse James: the Daltons never caught him, and I’ll never catch them; and if I did it wouldn’t make no difference. What would I say if I come up with them on this road—turn back, boys, you can’t beat Jesse James today or ever, this road ends one way and the only thing to do is turn around and go back to where it all began … and do what? Start over again? But you can’t, I found that out too: the roads in this part of the country run one way.
They were ahead of him, waiting there in ambush when he came riding into Coffeyville before noon. Nearly thirty years since the Daltons: the main street was paved and gas-lit, but there were the two banks stilt, the First National and the Condon. The Condon was a big, two-story ornate turreted building, gilded lettering over a big plate-glass front, and carefully inset in the glass was a framed pane with a large bullet hole in it; and inside the window a framed photograph of the dead bodies of Bob and Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers, laid out under a wall with their stiffened limbs sprawling, lids drooping over dead-blank eyes, mouths sagging, bullet holes like inkblots up and down their fronts,
One road, one ending: the ghosts of the Dalton Gang were real small and gray, shrunk down and held for thirty years in a little black-frame prison, with no power to keep the eyes of anybody at all away from the nakedness of their deaths. Give them a couple of days and they’d put Henry Starr’s name to the Prue bank job, put his name and his price and a small gray image of his ghost on a handbill and tack it up in bank windows just like this one, and that would be the start of the conjure that would put him back in a stone box for good, blood ghost brains sore ass and all.
Next to the Condon the marquee of a movie theater overhung the sidewalk, with bunting stirring in the afternoon breeze:
BUCKSKIN BILL VS. THE STARR GANG.
Under it a red-lettered strip of paper said:
Next Week: THE BIRTH OF A NATION!
Across the street near the First National another, smaller theater with a billboard front:
HENRY STARR, SCOURGE OF THE SOUTHWEST.
Like looking in a mirror and you know it is your face, but it can’t be your face because you are young and the face is old because you are old and the face is …
“Look in the water,” he boomed out of the shadow, the sun flaring out of his head, “Look in the water and you will see your ghost …”
Henry Starr sat his horse in the middle of the main street of Coffeyville, Kansas, with his saddlebags full of cash from a bank he’d just robbed and looked up at his name in giant letters staring down from the marquees of two different theaters playing two of his movies at the same time in Coffeyville, Kansas.
He took some coins belonging to the Prue State Bank out of his saddlebags, bought a ticket, and went in right in the middle of the picture, forgetting to notice which of the two movies he had chosen.
There he was, his face and his name written Henry Starr on the wall in black and silver lights, an icy silver with the piercing intensity of acetylene. He had become huge, his face Henry Starr filled all the world that eyes could see—but then again he was small, small with distance. His ghost in silver light could bring you as close as breathing or put you as far away as the edge of sight, could carry you along or let you drop—could carry him along, Henry Starr! Because this Henry Starr had power enough to lift and carry the little body that made the ghost, carry him high and far, carry him like an eagle climbing up out and over everything in the world, Tom Starr Cherokee Bill Floyd Wilson Bill Tilghman the square black cell of Fort Smith Prison …
Blackness shut down like a door, then light erased it, he heard the whirr of the reel winder: but the silver light still moved in ghostly repetition behind his eyelids. All they had to do was rewind the film and they would be ready to show the movie again.
He rose and walked outside, a dozen people with him, jabbering, laughing, a kid said, Wasn’t that great? The sunlight was yellow and blinding, full of dust—the light of the screen had been better, like cool water, very clear. Inside people would soon be watching that silver flow like running water, drinking it again with their eyes. And when they had done looking at it …
Then, he thought with a smile, there was another movie across the street that they could go see.
And if he went back to Tulsa to work with Miss Woodly, then there would be another one after that, till wherever he went he would find his silver-light ghost running through cabins banks and countryside, into jails and into shut-down blackness—and out again to blaze silver and black down a silver trail, his ghost and his name sliding out of the black night like quicksilver between the stones or light between the bars, to run and run and run again …
Henry Starr stood in the streets of Coffeyville where the Daltons had been shot full of holes by the citizens of Coffeyville and the ghost of Jesse James, with his pockets full of the Prue State Bank’s cash and his eyes full of movies. Nobody knew who he was, except maybe Henry Starr himself, and maybe the ghosts of Grat and Bob Dalton staring out of their picture-frame prison. But he was Henry Starr, the smartest outlaw who ever lived, who had finally climbed over the ghost of Jesse James’s Double Daring: Henry Starr, who had hit the two-at-a-time in Coffeyville and got away with it.
He didn’t have to choose between the ghost world of the movies and the dusty world of banks and prisons. He had the kind of money that worked on both sides of the line, what he stole in one world he could spend in the other. He could step from the screen into the world with his pistol in his hand and rob real banks of real money with a gun full of make-believe movie bullets. And when he had done he could vanish into the screen, vanish not in a cloud of dollars but into a cloud of ghosts, the spirits of power and memory, Jesse James who robbed two banks in one day and Tom Starr who gave no trail to a bear, and back further, to the powers that slew the monsters and made the Nation in its ancient home back there among the mountains, where the water was.
And if Tom Starr, or Floyd Wilson, or Cherokee Bill came haunting after him in this life, asking him about blood, about all the blood Henry Starr spoiled or spilled or betrayed, he would vanish through the screen and dissolve himself in silver lights, he would weave them an answer in silver and black that would change the blood to small black shapes; if they came after him questioning they would be dissolved into his answer: an answer of silver light, smooth as running water, in which everything would be made right.
