The Return of Henry Starr, page 67
As they are marching Henry Starr and Cherokee Bill to the scaffold, Cherokee Bill suddenly breaks free and seizes a gun from one of the guards—the crowd falls back as the outlaw savagely menaces all around with the weapon, thrusting it against the head of the guard who kneels at his feet:
Title: “Spare me! I have a wife and child …”
Cherokee Bill grimaces savagely and motions for Starr to pick up a fallen rifle.
We see Starr’s face in close-up. We see the cloudy image of the woman and child in the cabin …
Title: The instincts of a just man triumph over temptation.
Cherokee Bill holds the guard tight, pressing the pistol against his head and motions for Starr to pick up a fallen rifle—we see Starr’s face in which conflicting emotions war—then his features set:
NIGGERFACE:
NIGGEREYES
NIGGERTEETH
NIGGER-WITH-A-GUN
Title: “Drop your guns and clear the way, or this man dies!”
Henry Starr shakes his head, and holds out his hand.
Title: “You owe the law a debt, Bill. And Henry Starr will see that you pay what you owe!”
And the rest of it rolled out as smooth and clear and irresistibly as water rushing over a long sleek fall, so swift and sharp and hard that everybody there in the dark seemed to suck breath at once and then blow it out in one big Rebel-yelling war whoop; Hi! Yay! Hurray! That’s done it! That’s what we should have…! Got him! String the nigger up!
Guards and citizens come pouring into the cell block, they seize Cherokee Bill …
[Who is not Dick Rowland, she doesn’t know who it is, but what is the difference so long as it looks like—]
a nigger carried kicking and screaming and twisting, rolling his eyes till the whites show, twisting his body in snaky curls like a weasel in a leg trap, his legs and arms gripped in bunches of white hands that reached in and pulled him spreadeagled, his head held back by the hair and a white gag rammed through his lips and into his throat …
She should have known better; if you let a man do it to you and take money from him it doesn’t matter if it’s only once and only a little money, it makes you a whore. She had let them do it, let them put their hands all over it, she had said yes, thinking it will only hurt a little bit and then I will have—but it was as if that little yes had given them a right to hold her down and open her up, and rape her between her legs—all of them, Wilberforce Poole Foley Esterhazy—between her legs and then rape her again in her open eyes and her mouth, her throat, and she couldn’t speak to say no while they twisted themselves into knots inside her and carried her to
The Hanging Tree:
(The very gallows-limbed cottonwood any Tulsan would recognize as his from a dozen handbills and news photos)
from which the limber noose dangles, and they put Cherokee Bill’s head in a black bag, then rope and clinch it, the soundless straining of his body against the bag and the ropes are screams as dense as the absolute silence in which the picture moves as they throw him into the air—
In shadow silhouette, we see Cherokee Bill hanging against a transfiguring blaze of light:
Title: The Law takes its Course … The human beast is made to pay his debt to civilization.
“Just a few changes on the title cards, a picture snipped out here and spliced in there. Oh, and a few unscripted scenes we had to shoot for continuity. A very simple process, really, when you understand the technique.”
We see Starr’s face, calm and pale, with a light on it like that which illuminated the sleeping woman in the cabin.
Tilghman appears at the door of Starr’s cell. He holds out a paper:
Title: … but Mercy hath its place.
Starr looks at Tilghman; at the guard whose life he saved.
Title: Marshal Tilghman: “I have pursued you for ten years, Henry Starr. You have courage, and you always played square. In your heart, you are a good man. Go and sin no more.”
We see Henry Starr riding his horse slowly over a hill. He pauses and looks down—dreamily, as at the beginning. We see that he is looking into a valley, in which sits a poor small lonely cabin, with a curl of smoke at the chimney.
Fade out as Starr rides down the hill toward the cabin which is haloed in yet another sunset glory …
THE END.
The screen blanked, light popped out of the ceiling fixtures exposing Henry Starr’s face pale and sickly, his lips pressed thin and looking greenish—they sat there as the audience rose to its feet around them applauding, jabbering praises, as if the two of them were sinking slowly through the floor on a pair of mechanically operated lifts. But his eyes had a tight set on the backs rising between him and the blank square of the screen. “What’s done can be fixed,” he said, and then shifted his eyes to her. “I’ll see to it they do right by us.”
She couldn’t answer a word, because looking at him in that light she knew suddenly and surely that he was going to fail, that even Henry Starr was not equal to what had been done to them—knew that, because she knew he could not feel in the same way how deep and wide and completely they had been ruined, and she didn’t have the words to tell him. It was as if she had had a child inside her, a small free ghost living in the strings of her blood, and she had opened herself meaning to give it to the light—but instead she had let them reach inside and put a twist in it and it had come out wrong, like a dead stick with human eyes, like a baby’s face with Henry Starr’s smile and her own blue eyes and the tusky snout of a boar hog.
There was no power in Henry Starr to do anything at all about that. In that ugly light she saw him smaller, as if the glare of the fixtures had shrunk his long shadow to a black puddle at his feet.
So she would go with him to the banker’s office, not to help him win or even to watch him fight, but just so that her body would lend him a little more shadow, as if shadow were a kind of ghostly armor that could stop Poole and Wilberforce and Foley doing inside Henry Starr what they had already done to her.
TULSA
June 1, 1921
They met in the bank, just like the last time, except that Esterhazy was not waiting with them. Mr. Armbruster sat talking loans with another farmer. This time the janitor sweeping the marble floor was a white man.
The contracts they had signed were laid out in a line on Wilberforce’s desk. It was a line Henry Starr had no power to cross. If the banker had been plain Mr. Wilberforce maybe Henry Starr could have made him dance to his tune; but those papers made the banker Party of the First Part, and no Party of the Second Part that ever lived could climb over Mr. Wilberforce if he was First.
They let her say her piece—what was it? The words came out, predictable and so absolutely beside the point that it was like saying yama yama yama, she hardly listened to it herself. When she was through with it Poole said, “I’m sorry you dislike what Mr. Foley has done. But we feel he has fulfilled our expectations and produced a fine bit of historical drama.”
It was useless, but Henry Starr couldn’t let her stand there and not side her. “They used to print up cheap handbills to advertise their hangings,” he said. “I guess this is progress, making a handbill that moves. But it’s still ugly, and it’s still cheap.”
“You are a man of talents, Mr. Starr,” said Poole affably. “You were hired as an actor and technical adviser—I had no idea that you were a critic as well.”
Foley guffawed. “Actor? You call that…?”
“However,” Poole continued, “I’m afraid we already employ a drama critic at the Lamp. He and I are eminently satisfied with the results.”
“Even if you didn’t get to hang your nigger,” said Henry Starr.
“I believe we made our point,” said Poole softly; it was so obviously true it hardly needed the breath he gave it.
“The contract gives us the right to make any editorial changes which, in our judgment, are necessary to the commercial success of the venture,” said Wilberforce patiently. “The selection of editor likewise is within our choice, pursuant to the consideration previously stated.”
“You made a liar out of me,” Henry Starr said, shifting his glare to Foley. But the red-faced director just grinned, he was feeling pretty cocksure. “Me? I didn’t make the pictures, boy. I just ran them together.”
“I’m going to call you on that,” said Henry Starr.
“No,” said Poole quietly, “you won’t.” He got up, looking lean and sharp in a light-striped beige suit. “It also says in your contract that you will do nothing to obstruct or impair the success of the venture. I don’t know what you have in mind—perhaps standing out front of the theater and telling the patrons it’s all a damn lie? Perhaps a letter to the editor of a rival paper: Miss Woodly could write that for you too. But if you do any of those things we’ll charge you with breach of contract and creating a public disorder—the police are being quite stiff about disorders just now …”
“And back you go to McAlester!” chortled Foley.
“Mr. Wilberforce,” said Henry Starr quietly, “I’m not working for you anymore.”
“You can’t walk away from us either, Starr,” said Poole quickly. “I guess you prefer cheap fiction to more demanding prose, but you really ought to read your contracts. You’re signed up for three more movies with us. You can’t work for any other company till you finish that. The law of contracts,” he mused, “it’s too bad you don’t know it. The fundamental basis of civilization as we know it is—”
“I don’t have to work movies,” said Henry Starr, and Foley yapped at him from the side, “What else you gonna do, Starr? You’re too old to work cattle, and I can’t see you picking cotton. Of course there’s always banks but …”
“And then,” said Poole, “there’s the further matter of that camera you shot up. Malicious and willful destruction of company property: you’re liable for that. I could charge you right now with malicious mischief, and you a man on parole, too. But I’ll forbear, as long as you stay on to work out the cost. You’ll scout locations for us—I believe Mr. Foley already has an itinerary planned—and you will perform in seven more films, as Mr. Foley directs you. Seven films … with the rate we’re paying you, yes: a percentage out of your wages plus your royalty on Debtor to the Law—that should bring you square.”
He looked at Miss Woodly. “You chose a good name for that movie,” he said, “A Debtor to the Law. Between us we’ll see that Henry Starr pays his debts—after all, he has said in our movie that he always pays what he owes, and it would breach our contract if we did anything to discredit our own movie.”
They didn’t light the lamps in her room. She sat at one end of the sofa and he sat at the other, and it would have hurt if either one had tried to touch the other.
He was closed in on himself, staring at the black square of the window. He thought about Shaker sitting by Bub’s corpse jerking at the shirt pocket from which the badge had been torn, You ain’t you ain’t you ain’t Henry Starr, you used to be but you ain’t no more. He was thinking about Shaker, and when he looked harder he saw he was also thinking about himself: standing in the street of Tahlequah in front of a Grandfather as big and dead to him as a dead standing tree or a cigar store Indian. The little white man who stole my son’s blood: spit on the tobacco and grin, your name is nothing, I have climbed over your spirit, your name is blue!—is blue smoke! Your name is black, your name is no, is no-name. “That’s what my name will be in the Nations from now on down,” he said, “and that’s what Cherokee Bill’s name will be, and Dick Rowland’s and Bub’s, all of us.”
“Oh,” she said and she bent over herself as if she were a dry stick and he had just cracked her. “I got you into it,” she said. “If I hadn’t thought of it …”
Her hair fell away from the delicate line of her neck and her small shoulders, and she seemed not just a small-made woman, but a girl, a child; he remembered the look of Jiminy when something took him deep-sad and he thought, Poor kid, poor little kid, I wish I could …
“Listen,” he said, “it isn’t on your shoulders. They tricked me too, and I should have known better. After everything I been taught about signing treaties and bank papers …”
She lifted herself straight again, a woman grown, whatever it was she had done she wasn’t going to ask him to carry it for her—not now that she knew Henry Starr wasn’t some giant tireless sure-shooting see-through-the-walls hero out of a storybook, but just … just what he had been this afternoon in Wilberforce’s office, just what he was right now.
“You trusted me to take care of the business end,” she said. “I told you I would handle it, and then got so tied up in writing about you that I … and anyway I got you into it, if I hadn’t talked you into …”
“No,” he said, “it was my idea from the start …”
“What?” she said. “Your idea…?” It was pure reflex, her jealousy, but for that second she forgot that the thing she was protecting was dead or twisted ugly.
Her look made him smile at her. “Well, Bobcat,” he said.
“What’s so damn funny?” she said, embarrassed that her blood was shining in her cheeks and sure he could see it even in the twilight.
He kept smiling and smiling. “You look like you looked that day I came into the bank, and you thought … you give me that look of yours, like saying ‘What? You think you’re going to rob my bank?’”
She remembered. “It never was my bank,” she said, “but it was my idea to make the movie.” She was sitting up straight again, the thin fracture line where she had broken through the middle was weak and tender, but it held.
“Yes,” he said, “all I meant was, even before I come out to the set that first time, I was thinking I had to make me a movie. I guess you were thinking the same when I come along: but you were ready to go and had an idea how—you were a lot quicker on the draw than I was.”
“Yes,” she said, her sadness a little theatrical now, “I drew fast and shot myself in the foot. Shot us both in the foot.”
“Nice shooting for one bullet,” he said. “Same fella teach you that who taught you to drive a team?”
She started to laugh but was afraid it would crack her apart again, but it broke away from her, the laugh came choking out, the tears bled into her eyes instead of running and then the crying just ran away with her and she let it go. “Yes,” she said, “they sure taught me …”
He came and sat next to her, and let her lean her weight into him, turning her face into the groove of his neck. He smelled of sweat and horses, that was how he smelled after riding up and down in front of the cameras all day. He said quietly, “I just want you to know, this isn’t the last of it. One way or another, you and I will run this game back on them.”
She could imagine how his face must look, up there looking out over the top of her head, she imagined the skin smoothed and the eyes sharply focused by the strength of his determination. It was a child’s look, a look she remembered from her younger brother’s face, when you have been mastered by mother or father or larger, stronger children, and there is nothing left but to dream an impossible triumph and wear the dream on your face like a mask. “All right,” she said, hoping he would believe she meant it, hoping he would not feel how she did not really believe he had that power—because she knew what that did to you, when people you love won’t believe you are what you know you have to be, and she would do anything in her power to keep that knowledge from him. She curled her body smaller against him to lend him the size he would need.
She felt him gather and lift himself a little. “I been down before this and come back up again,” he said. He touched her cheek to make her lift and look at him. “You always make mistakes first time out, and I guess we made some. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. First bank I robbed I didn’t clear enough to make expenses, burnt the wrong kind of papers. But all I lost was money and a little of my time. As long as they ain’t bad enough to get you killed, mistakes is just a way of learning how. You pay attention to ’em and then you come back smarter the next time.”
Next time. She didn’t know what that would mean, exactly. But if you believed there was such a thing, it meant that there was going to be life for her outside of this time, and that was good news because this time was pretty bad, she wanted it to be over.
In the blue moonlight that came through the slats of her blinds, Henry Starr’s face was masked in blue and black horizontal bars. She touched his mouth with her finger and drew its lines, trying to learn their shape by blind touch. She traced the bony ridge of his cheek and drew the circles of his eyes. She found that despite the lessons she’d been taught by Poole and Wilberforce and all the rest she still wasn’t ready to stop learning, especially not about her favorite subject. She said, “Why did you ever want to make a movie?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s a long story.”
“Tell me,” she said, and he became very still.
“It isn’t that easy to tell it.”
She pushed him back against the sofa cushions with both hands, pinning him for a second, then sat back herself in a straight-backed hands-on-lap pose that was a satire on the good little girl paying formal attention to the grown-ups. “Just tell it the best way you can,” she said, laughing. “Don’t be ashamed if you get it wrong the first time, everybody makes mistakes. But you just keep at it, Henry Starr, and maybe next time you will get it right.”
He had started to talk to her, his voice quiet and stiff and slow at first, then softening and becoming smooth and limber and rhythmic, as if his speaking breath was like a horse: he had to let her work the kinks out and warm and loosen before he could let her run.
His voice, talking talking talking to her in the blue-and-black-striped darkness, filled her head with so many pictures that her room became strange, it was like going away from Tulsa to a different place, riding with him over the old ground they had covered together when she was making the movie. Only now that A Debtor to the Law was done, ruined and done, it seemed to her that her movie dreams had been like a cloud of blue smoke, obscuring or distorting the real shapes of things. The familiar names and places and deeds as Henry Starr told them again seemed small and clear and far away, like images in a photograph: Tom Starr and Belle Starr and the Tahlequah rodeo, how Cherokee Bill was his friend and the promise Henry Starr had made him; and why he couldn’t stay with his wife and child, and how he rode out to get some justice and set the balance right; what was wrong about Stroud, and why in the end he needed to make it all into a movie to pay his debt to his friend and his Grandfather and his Nation, and leave a name that would be good to remember.
