The Return of Henry Starr, page 65
At which point the blue Olds materialized at the end of the street fishtailing round the corner and into the County Road on fleering tires, lights on, siren shrieking, motor roaring like an express train as the car spun dust, gathered itself, and shot like a bolt down the street after the horsemen gaining every second as it come.
The thundering riders and the roaring car came straight for Billy Claybo on the stoop of Chalmers’ Store, hooves and necks and smoking horseheads reaching for him and the blue fury of the shrieking Olds behind them driving them madly onward, and Billy saw himself wiped out at the next instant in the unappeasable rage of their piled up momentum—horses shotguns riders blue touring car—when the three men leaned their bodies “like they was hauled on one string” and the horses deflected to his right, not down the County Road for the bridge and the open road beyond but down Chalmers’ Lane direct for the deadend fence and the frozen canal.
As the brown man swept by he gave Billy Claybo a smile and a wave of the derby, white teeth flashing in a smooth brown face above the red bandanna he had slipped, and it was like a sudden call or command that sent Billy’s heart leaping into hands and feet—so that before he had thought about it he had jumped Old Blue in as near a straddle as he could without doing himself an injury, and then he was furiously pedaling along with them, dropping behind in their dust but still following, the blue Olds now raging up behind him roaring in his left ear, and it was through dust and tears that he saw the three horsemen race up to the picket fence never slacking off or drawing rein but right at it with perfect and unquenchable speed till, at the last of seconds, the men seemed to shrug their shoulders in despair … and magically lifted their horses into the air sailing over the fence in a clean jump six feet up and it would have to be fifteen feet straight across—
Which Billy could not see because just as they lifted Deputy Charlie Bascomb and Sheriff Bodine came barreling past him in a wipe-out boil-up of dust, siren wailing, the brims of their Stetsons blown back, shotguns at high port, and Billy (almost at the fence now) saw Charlie Bascomb heave up against the steering wheel with the thrust of his whole upper body like a man trying to lift his horse into the jump as the blue Olds, never slacking speed or drawing rein, blew right through that goddamn picket fence smashing it to kindling, flew eight feet through the air and whump! flat ass and withers deep in the irrigation canal. The ice water hit the radiator and it blew its top like a gusher, and Billy could hear Charlie Bascomb and Sheriff Bodine splashing and cursing, Charlie sitting in the water with the steering wheel and a piece of the column in his hands.
Billy was off the bike by then, Old Blue lying on one side with the back wheel still spinning from the wild gallop down the lane, Mrs. Robinson’s grocery bag disemboweled beside it, Billy perched on the remaining fence post straining to see three galloping figures, their horses’ hooves smoking the dust and powdery snow out of the stubble field as they raced flat out for the dark line of wooded hills in the distance. Even then, sitting on the post with Charlie Bascomb and Sheriff Bodine splashing and cussing below him, he knew he would always be able to see this as sharp and clear and hard as he saw it now—all of it, the tall rough-haired horses trotting up the street, the fumble with the bandannas, the swift glide into the bank, the silence and emptiness of the street, the bland plate glass; the sudden eruption, the men backing out guns leveled, horses turning as they mounted, wheeling and racing for the end of the street with everything flying loose till the brown smiling man slid his horse to a flaring halt at the Tulsa Pike and brought the three of them charging straight back for him, smoke and lightning and thunder shots with the blue Olds screaming round the corner in pursuit—the brown man smiling, swooping down alongside the galloping horse to snatch his derby out of the dust and the grin and wave as he passed (white teeth flashing in a smooth brown Indian face) that was like a command to get up and follow—
The shrug of the shoulders that hauled the three giant horses right up into the sky.
Every tick as sharp and clear as every other for the rest of his life, whether he was daydreaming or nightdreaming, or telling it to his pals at the Beggs School after the Christmas holiday, or to the folks coming into Chalmers’ Store for months afterward, or years later to his own small children, or to his grandchildren: I was standing right there the time they robbed the Chemical-Cattlemen’s Bank in ’21—three of ’em, big hombres on big horses—with sawed-off shotguns and a couple of Colt’s Dragoon pistols, the old-time kind like you see in the pictures, like a haunch off a pig. They looked like business, them fellers. And what they did to the law…! Don’t let nobody tell you a horse ain’t good as a car, for some things anyway—if you know what you’re doin’. Yes: There was two of ’em cowboys, and a dude in a derby hat and a brown suit that everybody said was a Mex: but I saw him plain, it was like he wanted me to see him: so somebody—me—would know who done it …
That was all the crowd in the bank could say, “Who done it? Who was it? Two cowboys and a goddamn greaser.” The door to the bank was jammed with tellers, weeping women customers and secretaries, Mr. Jessup, Mr. Chalmers, and more running up every minute from down the County Road and round the corner on the Pike. Deputy Bascomb and Sheriff Bodine had to bull their way through the door, their khaki uniforms black to the armpits with ditchwater and mud, hanging on them like sheets of cold iron.
Billy wormed his way to the shot-out plate-glass window, and skipped in between the standing blades of glass that made a V in the middle. Charlie Bascomb was cranking the phone and calling in the law from all points north south and west of Beggs, cranking and cussing till he could raise the operator for another one. The sheriff stood in the middle of the bank, dripping water around his high-heeled boots and trying to question Banker Ford while the clerks and tellers fussed and buzzed at him.
“How do you know the son of a bitch was a Mex?” the sheriff was asking, his voice rising to cut through the palaver. “How could you tell he was a Mex if his face was covered?”
“’Cause he talked Mex!” said one of the tellers, and they all started to agree, yes, talked like a Mex, he was talking Mex to them, and the Sheriff wanted to know did any of them speak any Mex themselves?
And they didn’t.
“Well then how in the hell did you know he was talking Mex?” He glared around at all of them and they shut up. “How do you know he wasn’t an Injun talking Choctaw? Or one of these Eye-talian dagoes from Chicago we got now? Or a Chinaman, for Chrissake?”
It was when he said Injun that the face flashed its grin again for Billy, and he was sure who the man in the derby was.
The banker looked embarrassed now, but he answered anyway: “He kept calling his buddies hombre, and me señor. And he said ándale when he meant us to hurry. That’s Mex, isn’t it? It isn’t Italian…?”
“The two is pretty much the same …” grumped the sheriff, but he looked away from Banker Ford as if he wasn’t on sure ground. “The other two was white enough though, wasn’t they?” He started glaring again: “Wasn’t they?”
“Well, I guess …” said the first teller. “I mean, they looked like they was white, their foreheads and eyes I mean … but they understood all that Mex, and there’s Mexicans is pretty near white …”
“Well shee-it!” said the sheriff. “If you can’t tell … didn’t anybody in this goddamn place see anything at all?” and Billy piped up: “I did.”
The whole room turned to look at him and the palaver shut up. Billy was the center of a circle of eyes and mouths—the tellers, the banker, Mr. Chalmers, the sheriff and Deputy Charlie Bascomb himself on the inside, and the crowd pressing in at the jammed-up door and leaning gingerly against the broken glass front.
“What did you see, son?” asked Charlie Bascomb.
It was the first time Billy would be telling the story, but he knew he would be telling it for the rest of his life, one way or another. And always he would suit the first lines to the occasion, depending on how he had brought the talk round to it, and on who his listeners were and how much they already knew—this time not having to remind people of the robbery, which was all around them, as he would have to remind them later. But the rest of it was set: “I was sweeping off the porch of Mr. Chalmers’ Store, like I always do. Just a plain old afternoon. And I was just greasing up Old … my bike to go and deliver the stuff to Mrs. Robinson, and that’s when I saw ’em—three of ’em coming up the street real slow on them big horses …” He couldn’t tell it smooth as he would have liked to, as he would later, because they kept interrupting him with questions, and the sheriff had to keep shutting people up to let the boy tell it his own way, and finally he came to the moment when the three riders charging straight for the door of Chalmers’ General Store, leaned their horses into the lane and came roaring past him.
“With no masks on?” asked the sheriff and Billy said “No.”
“So you saw what they looked like? Who they was?” said Charlie Bascomb. “Did you know ’em?”
Billy looked into Charlie’s eyes. Charlie Bascomb: the biggest, bravest man in the town of Beggs, and once when I was little he picked me up and put me on the saddle of his horse, talking to my dad down by the post box at our road.
“Two of’ ’em was cowboys … was white, like they said. I never saw ’em before.”
“What about the other one, the Mex … the one in the suit with the derby?” asked the sheriff.
Billy looked at him. This part of the story was different from the way he would tell it afterwards, because it was going to be a lie. (He was grateful that he didn’t have to say it to Charlie Bascomb, but he would have.) As he told it he saw the smiling face sweep by, the wave of the hand holding the swooped-up derby, the smooth brown face he had seen once at the Tulsa Lyric, whose gray ghost he had seen many times since, sweeping in silence across the flickering square of the movie screen at the Tulsa Lyric.
“No sir,” said Billy, “I never knowed him. But he looked like a Mex to me, and not no Injun nor a Chinaman.” Billy swept his hand across his mouth as if to cover the lower half of his face. “He had a big black mustache, like they do. And”—he remembered the man’s smile, clean white teeth in a smooth brown face—“and these teeth like the greasers have, you know, these teeth all black and with lots of gold in ’em, big lumps of it like …”
TULSA
December 22–23, 1921
“… and even a man with a skull as thick as Peter Bodine’s ought to be able to find a greaser with that kind of face. Teeth big and black and gold enough for a shirttail kid to practically count ’em in the, what is it?—three seconds it takes for the horses to go galloping past down the road, yelling like lunatics and shooting up the street with shotguns and pistols, and if you believe them other witnesses hand grenades and tommyguns to boot … I’ll take two cards.” Fire Chief Adkinson dropped his discards and accepted two more from the thick hands of the dealer, Sheriff McCullough. “Sounds like the same bunch that hit the Chemical-Cattlemen’s in Okfuskee four days ago,” said the sheriff. “Somebody in the Creek Nation got a bone to pick with our Mr. Wilberforce.” There were grunts of agreement from the others around the green-cloth covered table in Judge Meis’s large chambers in the Tulsa County Courthouse.
Most of Tulsa’s executive power was at the table. There was Adkinson, the fire chief, looking rumpled and sleepy; Sheriff McCullough, his round face framed in luxuriant sidewhiskers; Editor Dexter C. Poole of the Tulsa Lamp and Pan American Motion Picture Company, with the sleeves of his dazzling white shirt turned back above his lean hairy wrists so that the green cloth wouldn’t soil the French cuffs.
Mayor Egan had the head of the table—“Judge” Egan, who had made his name sending the forty Wobblies to Tulsa Jail four years ago, the jail from which they were taken by the mob, whipped tarred and feathered while Casey’s deputies regulated traffic in the streets below. Egan’s thin red lips looked oddly prominent against his withered pasty indoor skin.
Judge Meis was Egan’s replacement on the bench, and it was Meis who had organized the evening’s entertainment, needing (he said) something to break up an extremely taxing and difficult session. Meis had taken sharp criticism for dismissing the charge against Dick Rowland, but around this table there was appreciation for the good judgment he had shown: because he had now to deal with the far more numerous and important cases arising from the riot, for which those trigger-happy Greenwood coons were going to be held responsible—and the Rowland judgment had given him the all-important appearance of impartiality. Poole admired Meis extravagantly and in print; and on the strength of this felt entitled to kid him a little about the case.
There were also Major Bowles and young Captain Blaine of the state police, Blaine the youngest man in the bunch, trim and trig in his short flyer’s jacket. And there was Marshal Bill Tilghman, his lean form lounging back in his chair, five cards stacked under his hand, standing pat.
There was a time last year when Casey would have been at the table: but since the riot you would never find Casey and Tilghman in the same room together for longer than it took Old White Eyes to look at the police chief once.
Blaine shut his own hand nervously and spoke up. “The problem is we don’t use modern methods in police work. If we had had just one plane for your department or the state police to use, all it would have taken was one call—or the alarm ringing in a central office somewhere—and I’d have been in the air over ’em before they’d gotten up into the timber. And even if they had got in, I’d have hung around up there, circling, gliding to save gas, watching to spot ’em the first time they hit a clearing or made a break. A man in a plane can see anything that moves for fifty miles.”
Mayor Egan grinned over at Sheriff McCullough. “Sheriff, this is a sneaky way for you and the chief to pitch for your appropriation. I thought we were here to play poker?” He tossed a stack of chips into the center. “That’s me. Anybody want to call?” And the betting went around.
Blaine expected no sympathy, not even from Tilghman, who was the best of them. Tilghman was a professional, but also still an old-time horseback lawman who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) look beyond the range of his .45 pistol. Tilghman had spent the first part of the night sitting next to the Negro’s cell with a shotgun and a pair of .45s, as if one solitary nigger was the point when all hell was breaking loose outside. The only thing he’d got out of his chair for was to bully McCullough into helping him get the prisoner out of town on the sly. But by that time the mob probably wasn’t even interested in Dick Rowland, being busy over in Greenwood.
They kidded him for taking to the air in the Guard observation plane, but Blaine felt that at the least he had tried to meet extraordinary crises with extraordinary measures. At least he had been able to see what was happening, study it, and think through the measures they should prepare against the next such outbreak.
When I was up there, thought Blaine, I could see everything: streets and railroad tracks like chains of lights in the gray predawn, the gun flashes, the buildings on fire lighting everything up for blocks. I was up in the sun as soon as it rose, and I came in with it behind me the first time, and the city got clearer as I glided down on it, laid out like a map, like a picture getting clearer and clearer as I came down till I could see the mobs running in the streets, the cars, objects lying in the road (bodies or garbage or barrels?), but by then my speed was up, too fast too fast, the closer I got the faster till things smeared across my eyes in a single blur. I had to pull up, lifting and turning, all of it under and behind me and falling falling away as I climbed and looked for the sun again.
It wasn’t like flying in France. When you were across the lines there anything was a target—if it moved you went down on it like a hawk on a hare; but the problem here (it was in his report) was that you couldn’t tell who was rioting and who needed protection. Either you were slow enough to study it but too far off to see, or you were close enough but going too fast to work it out. He’d tried different things: buzzing a mob in a residential district, rioters he thought, he’d seen them duck: machine guns and he’d have bagged the lot, but then there were wagons in the streets that looked to be people trying to get away, women and children—it was hard to be sure.
He looked for shooters: buzzed a car, but it was a police car. Nonetheless, if it had been in use by rioters, and if he had had a machine gun mounted, he could have shot that Ford into a fine spray of metal filings.
Not to mention snipers up on the roofs. Even without guns he had made one duck and run for the street just by buzzing the flat roof of the building on which he had hidden. Couldn’t tell, though, if it was colored or white. But perhaps the difference was unimportant. The point was to stop the riot, to knock the shooters down no matter who they were or why they were shooting, and from his aerial distance Blaine could have done that with perfect safety and disinterested precision.
After a while Bill Tilghman—who had been laying back while Egan pushed the betting—took the pot, sweeping the chips toward him with his freckled hand. He looked at Blaine coolly—“Old Peter and Charlie Bascomb, they believed in modern police methods. Traded their hosses for that blue police car. The one they’re going to try and haul out of that irrigation ditch, if she ain’t rusted away by now?” The laugh went round with the cards that Egan dealt.
