The Return of Henry Starr, page 71
“Meis!” said Blaine, and the pattern flashed before him like the gridwork of fields and towns from five thousand feet up. “Who else knew when and where that poker game was going to be, and you in it? Meis!” But actually … “Or I suppose Egan might have told Casey,” he conceded, “or even Poole, if he …” Suddenly Blaine felt afraid, he tore his eyes away from Tilghman and found the bulk of the Standard Oil skyscraper filling the north window. “Any one of them, or they all might have, maybe …” It was big, bigger than the courthouse, it filled the window and stretched up out of the frame into the unseeable sky.
“You think I can’t track a man anymore,” said the marshal. “Whatever a man does, if he does it long and hard enough, he writes his name on it as clear as daylight. There’s a pattern, like there always was. The robbery in Owasso. The robberies in Okfuskee and Beggs and Howitt.”
What did Howitt and Beggs and Okfuskee have to do with it? The old man was wandering off again. “Price and MacKinnon,” said Blaine, “Egan and Meis and Casey and Poole—the nigger they lynched, bootleggers getting busted by the Klan—that’s the pattern, Bill! Damnit! We can run that trail too, if we …”
The old man was fading again, the white light flattening him to the thinness and shine of an overexposed photograph. “You got a call to run it, son, I wish you well. But it don’t belong to me. I don’t want any part of it.”
“It’s you they tried to kill,” said Blaine, pleading.
The old man looked at the blazing window, then back at Blaine. “They can try, if they’re bound to. I can’t stop that. But they ain’t my business. I’m done with them.”
“They’re poisoning this whole stinking city, and everything and everyone in it. Isn’t it any part of your duty to keep the crooks from taking over? Don’t you care what they do to these people…?”
“I gave my word I’d bring the law to them, that’s all. If they take and sell it to a whiskey peddler or throw it away like it was trash, that’s their business. I got nothing … nothing to say to them, one way or the other.” He took the Peacemaker out of its soft worn scabbard and spun the cylinder with a sound like a well-oiled steel rattlesnake, then holstered it again. “Henry Starr was always outside the law, but he give it its due.”
The marshal moved swiftly toward the door, lean and direct as a greyhound, never looking back.
Blaine turned away in anger and grief. The Standard Oil skyscraper clogged the north window, there were clouds behind it. I’d rather be up there, he thought, I’d rather be so high above the streets they look like a road map.
Sign by sign, like a dealer turning cards one at a time, the world kept showing Henry Starr his power and his luck. He’d planned for seven plus himself, and Dick Rowland wouldn’t come—but he still had seven, counting himself as one. Three were waiting for him in an alley off Main Street: all he could find of his old Stroud bunch, the black man Shields and Bergman and Romero, a little grayer than they were ten years ago when he’d run his circle around Tulsa and had the sheriffs the police the federal marshals and the goddamn militia chasing their tails looking for the ghost of Henry Starr, never knowing who it was until he told them.
Except for Bill Tilghman. Bill Tilghman knew it was Henry Starr. So he had been waiting up the road from Stroud, and when the time come, cut wires or not, there he was.
“You got it all in your heads?” he asked them.
Yes, yes sure, sure they did. They let the street fill with the truck and wagon traffic to and from the 2:10 and 2:30 freights on the Katy and the Frisco. They take the left-side bank on the tick of 2:50 while Henry Starr took the right, shots and alarm bells from both sides of the street and with the noise and the traffic freezing Main Street solid so nothing on wheels could move, those old-time horseback outlaws would jump a back fence to where their mounts were waiting and adjourn to “the jungles of the Osage Nation” like they used to in the old days. But this wasn’t the time to be talking it, it was time to do it. They rackracked the levers of the Winchesters, broke and looked down the shotgun barrels, spun the oiled cylinders of their revolvers with a sound like iron crickets.
Henry Starr stepped out first into the street: sign by sign, everything spoke to him, everything was the sign of his luck. The hard bright December air showed things sharp and clear—the crowds in the street shopping for the holiday, the wind slatting the banner that swept overhead
WELCOME TO TULSA, ALL-AMERICAN MAGIC CITY OF THE SOUTHWEST
and under it in smaller letters a streamer saying
“Merry Christmas Tulsa Boosters”
—the gas flares waving like banners off the tops of the oil wells, the looping swags of electric Christmas lights swung from lightpost to light-post, evergreen boughs tied to the uprights.
There was only three things he didn’t have or couldn’t see:
Miss Bobcat was one, it felt like he had left her a long time ago and way off, but really it was just this morning, and not more than eight miles of white road and cold air—no more than she put between them every day she went to work at the bank. But he knew she’d be in the bank now, just as she was supposed to be, just like she always was this time of day. And if she was there she would know, she would be ready like she always was, and when he come through that door …
All those words this morning, they were wind under the door when you put them next to the fact of her, with her blue eyes and her bobcat grin—she had grit and she had bottom, and she knew him like he knew her, which was by the ghost. What did it matter if she said no to him, when the breath in her chest meant yes?
And the second was Dick Rowland—who should have been his second inside the bank, that’s how he had told her it would be when she asked him “How would you rob my bank?” But in a way Dick was inside the picture too, because he was right where he was supposed to be, and so his not being here in the street was no worse a thing than not being able to talk to Tom Starr or Bub or Aunt Belle or Cherokee Bill when he needed to. Not seeing them didn’t mean they wasn’t in the picture.
It was real strange, but suddenly the one he missed was Esterhazy—the man ran scared so you couldn’t trust him to stick by you, but he wished he had Esterhazy working for him today, because the cameraman would have appreciated what it was to do a job in one perfect seamless take, and because Esterhazy filming this would have made and kept it perfect, he could have arranged it so you wouldn’t notice the cars and trucks, the gasoline stink, the paved street and the paved sidewalk, the electric lights up and down the street on cast-iron gallows, SEQUOYAH HOTEL in electric letters, and then MAGIC CITY HARDWARE / CRYSTAL SETS REPAIRED, then the marquee of the Lyric Theater:
NOW SHOWING
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
BY POPULAR DEMAND!!!!
then the Chemical-Cattlemen’s Bank, and off in the distance the skeleton of an oil gantry like a naked church steeple waving a long banner of blue and yellow flame—Esterhazy, he could look you right past all of it to what was still there underneath, black and white and gray, the ghosts that were underneath …
“Let’s go,” he said, and they stepped out of the alley and into the street, Henry Starr crossing just under the nose of a big rusty Reo truck that came on grating its gears and heaving forward on its springs, a flare of blue smoke at its asshole.
His men stayed behind and began to loiter their way up the east side of the street toward the First National Bank, just as he had laid it out in his mind, just as he had showed them, telling them first then walking it through with his men, just as he always used to do: and they would go into their bank on the tick of the watch three minutes after he stepped inside the Chemical-Cattlemen’s Bank. And then this: and then that: everything as it used to be, as it always was, time after time after time, Thumbs up and stand steady, bust the safe burn, the mortgage papers and then—
He walked slowly up the street, thinking how he had gauged the crowds and the traffic and the fall of sunlight against the windows just right, he was okay so far for this world, it was the other one was worrying him. Give me a sign I got it working there too, he said, that’s what I need. Hey, Grandfather: give me a sign.
He stopped in front of the Sequoyah Hotel and looked ahead to the Lyric Theater. Paul Curry stood in the shade of the marquee, in an ill-fitting go-to-town suit that showed his wrist knobs. He carried a rifle in a scabbard and shoulder sling: a short rifle, a hog-killing gun. He kept peering out into the bright sunlight, looking for someone. Then he would stand and fidget. Then he would look at his watch.
December 19, 1921
Dear Mr. Starr,
I will gladly meet you at the time you say, waiting for you at the Lyric Theater, and bring the rifle one way or another. If Mr. Brogan will not lend it, I will have it anyway, and as you say who has a better right?
Thank you Mr. Starr, I am in your debt for giving me a chance. But I am ready for it, and believe I will not disappoint you.
Thank you Mr. Starr,
Yours sincerely,
Paul Curry
No need to thank me, Henry Starr thought, it’s only fair that a man should get a second chance at the things that make a difference to him.
Curry made six, he was almost there.
The wind blew a cloud across the sun, darkening the street, brightening the lights in the shop windows. Henry Starr stepped into the bay of the hardware storefront—took a deep breath, stepped out onto the sidewalk again as the sunlight nailed him like a spotlight—and the tail of his eye caught a lean gray shape under a gray Stetson vanishing back into the storefronts like smoke fading in a breeze.
Henry Starr smiled. Old Bill must be getting a little slower or …
Or what?
He didn’t finish the thought. Sometimes my conjures work so good, I even scare myself.
He had his seven. He looked around at the world. Everything was in its place, everything as it should be, everyone moving and standing and speaking and keeping still just as he had imagined it, just as it was supposed to be. The long street ran out ahead of him past the hotel and the movie house and the bank out to a vanishing V point, a small white place where the sky was tacked to the edge of the earth. When he was done here he would ride that road to the end, and sweep that white point up in his hand as easy as snapping a chicken head, leaning off the side of your smoking horse as he blows you through the judges and the barriers and into the blue distance of your perfect getaway.
Yes, perfect: because this time they couldn’t bushwhack him by pure dumb luck, some jerk of a kid with a hog gun shooting him in the ass like they had done in Stroud. Live or die now, Henry Starr could not lose this game. He had his seven, Henry Starr and his three men, and Miss Bobcat waiting in the bank, and Curry and Tilghman, so this time even if they got him it wouldn’t be any damn surprise, it would be the kind of death a man would choose for himself, like in a book or a picture, everything in its place, everything as it should be, hundreds of people watching, the whole city of Tulsa, every newspaper in the Nations in the state of Oklahoma in the United States of America I came here to die, not to make a speech, that’s what Cherokee Bill said, but I got more than that to say… :
Now I walk towards the Chemical-Cattlemen s Bank, moving quickly, giving Paul Curry his chance to see me go in and to see that I will not notice him waiting there, and it is just as if we had rehearsed it before, and I guess in a way we have. The windowed door of the bank glazed by the white sunlight is like a screen, and I can see my ghost coming towards me out of the bright screen, my hand on the door will shake the hand of my own ghost and then we’ll take the bank together, the last bank, the second bank of two banks robbed by the Henry Starr Gang at the same and single time, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth banks Henry Starr robbed, for his clan and his Nation and for Bub Houston’s Nation and for the Nation that was lost or sold away and Frank Little’s and Preacher Brown’s Nation of Nations that never was yet but maybe will be, and it will go all of it just as I wish it, so that as I come up close enough to my ghost to feel its breath I will see the flash of her golden head behind the shadow of my face like a signal in the dark of the bank, a signal saying yes …
She’d watch him come in, and she’d know—even without Dick Rowland with him, she would know and it would be just the way he told her when she asked him How would you rob my bank? knowing like she must have even then that someday it would come true like it was her prayer or her dream. So she’d be ready, she was always ready for things like this, her body worked slick as a cat’s and her head was faster than electricity, Thumbs up and stand steady, and she’d start playing the lady in distress so perfectly that no man in the place would think of his gun for wanting to reach her a handkerchief; and one way or another between tears and fainting and throwing up her hands she’d show him whatever they had that he couldn’t find for himself. And when he was gone, when he had made his getaway, when he was gone in the blue distance of the most perfect getaway ever known in the Nations, she’d come away and wait for him, and he’d find her again—
And this time he’d take the stairs two at a time, the way Jesse James took banks, two at a time till he come to her landing and opened her door and found her waiting for him, leaning against the wall, her blue eyes open to the bottom saying henry henry henry henry Henry Starr …
And now I’m standing at the door but in another second my hand will reach out and open it and I will be—
He pushed the door open. A tiny bell above his head tinkled! There never was a bell before, and it froze him for one tick of the heart.
His eyes opened to the darker light of the bank, the dark walnut of the counters, the tarnished brass bars of the cage—
There was no flash of light hair behind the bars of the teller’s cage.
There was no sight or sound or smell of her anywhere.
The bank was quiet as a church, except for the sound of small cash falling on itself like a little steel rain.
He heard a bellow from the street behind him, a yell! Breaking glass, the wrong sound from the wrong place, maybe the boys were spotted, maybe they missed their timing maybe it is all falling in pieces …
He stood in the door. He looked at the empty cage. She just wasn’t there.
But in just another second I will be Henry Starr, who robbed the Katy the Caney the Prue the Beggs the Owasso the Tuba Chemical-Cattlemen’s Bank with his pistol in his—
People were scurrying past the door behind him, a man was bellowing loudly, harassingly, people were running to find out what the ruckus was all about, there wasn’t supposed to be any ruckus.
He tilted back out of the doorframe and glanced back up the street. Past the marquee of the Lyric Theater a circle of passersby was closing in on and then backing away from two men who seemed to be arguing violently: Deputy Price in a dented derby and Bill Tilghman in his gray Stetson,
Henry Starr looked back into the bank. It had a look that was uncanny, repellent, the air smelt bad, it was dark where there should be light and nothing was right about it, the wood had eyes and the marble floor looked like a sheet of ice full of frozen snakes. There were strangers in the teller’s cages, their faces were like dead blocks of wood with eyes in them, and Miss Woodly had disappeared in the blue, the black …
No, he thought. No I guess she, I guess this is not …
He stepped back out the door, stepping in his own footprints to cover his trace, reversing himself like the film of his movie scenes running backwards through Esterhazy’s projector, and she had grinned like a bobcat and they had laughed their fool heads off.
Everything in the bank was exactly as it had been when he stepped through the door, everyone going about his or her business, they hadn’t noticed him nobody said his name.
Out in the street the marshal and the ex-deputy were the center of an uneasy knot of onlookers. Price’s hooting bull voice kept insisting on something, and he kept pushing himself in on Tilghman, who glided back, then tried to shift past Price toward the bank. The two men sketched a broken circle on the sidewalk, they seemed to be dancing an odd two-step toward the Lyric marquee—
BY POPULAR DEMAND!!!!!
“You’d better sober up, Price,” he heard Bill Tilghman say.
The big ex-deputy had on his terrible yellow suit, grease-stained as if he’d slept under a car, he kept trying to grab Tilghman by the lapels of his jacket and pull him close. “You had no right to do that to me, I got a family to think of!”
Tilghman kept fending him off with his arms and stepping back out of the range of Price’s ugly breath; his gray suit gleamed almost white in the intolerable afternoon sun, and it was disgusting to see that lard-assed slob of a deputy putting his hands all over Bill Tilghman, making him have to back off just to keep clean, anybody with any more soul than a rooting hog would know better than to get that close to Bill Tilghman let alone put a hand on him.
Henry Starr started that way.
Deputy Price lunged forward, grabbed Tilghman and swung the old man right toward the gutter just as the black Ford that had been idling its motor up the street gunned forward with a squeal of tires, the snout of a tommy gun jutted out the window, stuttering stuttering shattering the windows of the SEQUOYAH HOTEL, MAGIC CITY HARDWARE/CRYS-TAL SETS REPAIRED, the Lyric Theater’s ticket booth, the windows of the Chemical-Cattlemen’s Bank, spraying a rain of watery sparks into the street, into the screaming of people, men and women ducking, falling down and screaming.
