A Congregation of Jackals (9 page)

Dicky thought of Allison. He remembered her sleepy
eyes in the morning, her long cool fingertips on his chest and the kind way she corrected words he mispronounced when he read to her in an effort to improve his powers of elocution. Something burned the edges of his eyes like the bites of fire ants; his vision began to blur.

“You’re taking this a lot worse than I expected,” Godfrey said. “You could always go for her friend—she’s glanced this way a couple of times since the one with black hair dozed off.”

“I am thinking about something else.”

“You want to talk about her?”

“I do not.”

Oswell sat in the illuminated dining car, the sheaf of incriminating papers laid in his lap. He glanced at Addy two tables away. The colored woman sewed holes in socks she had pulled from the feet of her two children, both of whom were absent, presumably tucked in their beds within the servants’ car. The rancher looked through the window to his left: lumps of west Iowan hills crept by like turtles. The rest of the train was quiet with slumber.

The well of sleep had claimed Oswell the previous evening, but tonight he was wide awake, determined to finish the letter he had thrice contemplated burning. He removed the tablecloth and put down the newspapers Addy had given him in case the ink bled
through again. He set his missive atop the old gazette and looked at the unfinished line in the middle of the fourth page.

We robbed small banks for t

Oswell twisted the cap from his fountain pen, pressed the gleaming point to the paper and wrote.

hree years
.

He glanced over at Addy as if she might have been able to divine from the pen’s scratching what he had written. She paid him no attention. Her eyes were almost entirely closed, and her dark digits carried a needle through worn socks with the precision of pistons. Oswell turned back to the pages in front of him.

With the iridium dagger that tipped his enameled pen, he transformed his misdeeds into curvilinear lines.

J, the other fellow and I didn’t get rich, but we lived well, mostly in hotels in the big towns near the small ones we robbed. We moved on after the area was picked clean or if people were suspicious. It seemed like we’d finally figured out what to do with ourselves. If we were smart, we would’ve put some money in the bank or stashed it somewhere, but we were just happy to eat good meat and buy drinks and have nice guns and horses
.

Then there was the first job that we did in Louisiana. We went into a bank with scarves over our faces and guns out. We were always quick when we did this. J got the door, the other fellow shouted at the customers and I showed my gun to the teller. Then some guy said, “I seen you before,” to J. J told the guy
to shut his mouth and turn around and face the wall. I banged my gun on the wood and thumbed the hammer to hurry the teller, but he was an old fellow and only moved two ways
—
both of them slow
.

The oldster dropped his spectacles, and while he was looking for them, the guy with his face to the wall said to J, “I saw you box in Louisville. You went against my cousin. You just stood there like a idiot taking punches and not doing anything. I know your name too!” and before the fool could say the name, J shoots him in the back, right through his heart, and he falls to his knees and then tips over, dead
.

That was the first time any of us ever killed someone in a robbery. A kid started yelling and the other fellow went over and slapped him a few times to shut him up. I got the money from the old man and we ran out of that place and got to our horses. Somebody yelled out, “With God our Vindicator!” and I didn’t realize until later why he yelled that
—
that bag was two-thirds Confederates, which were hardly worth burning by then. We rode out of that town and were different
.

Since we had killed somebody, somebody else decided to name us
—
the Tall Boxer Gang, which was pretty silly since only J was a boxer and tall, and I was the leader, but we couldn’t change it. Drawings of us started to circulate in the South, though they didn’t really know what we looked like other than that one of us was tall and was a pugilist, so sometimes they drew him wearing boxing gloves and the scarf over his face at the same time. This would have been funny if the reward wasn’t more for us dead than alive. We got out of Louisiana and the South altogether and thought about disbanding, but didn’t have any more options than we did three years ago, when we began it all
.

We went over to Ohio. The first job we did there
went fine, though we didn’t make enough to cover expenses for the winter, and that Ohio cold isn’t something to go camping in. So we had to go and do another job before long. That next time, the teller pulled a gun he’d hidden under the counter and I shot him in the neck. He died. I didn’t feel bad about what I did
—
I was angry that the fellow was going to kill me over some other fellow’s money and cursed him for being a fool. I had no way to get behind the bars and get at the money so we just tore out of there no richer and down one bullet for our effort
.

We rode all that day and straight through the next two out of that state and into Pennsylvania. We went into a small Dutch settlement there. We were tired and starving and held up a grocery store and got food and all the money that was in the register. They gave us no trouble and actually seemed to feel sorry for us, which made the other fellow angry so he slapped around some old fellow and then broke his nose with his elbow. We camped a little bit, robbed another store and camped some more. There was never enough liquor for J. When we ran out of liquor for him I had to tie him down for a couple of nights, but he got past it
.

I was twenty-five by then and it was getting cold. The three of us went south again to Kentucky. We were at a bar when this young slick from New York, a fellow named D, came over and sat with us. He bought us each a glass of fancy bourbon. When we were drinking, he let us know that he recognized the Tall Boxer Gang the minute we walked in, but he didn’t say it like a threat, he said it like he wanted in, though he had his gun drawn under the table in case we were unfriendly. D set us up in rooms at the hotel (where it turned out he worked) and also introduced us to some women. These were the first girls I did not have to pay for,
though you should know that I never said the words to any of them and was always polite. Maybe I shouldn’t write about that
.

It turned out that D had a Louisville bank he wanted to hold up, but needed a gang like mine to back him. Originally, my gang stayed away from big city banks because we didn’t want to go up against the armed men the banks employed, but now that we had a reputation and no qualms about killing a fellow who drew on us, we decided it might be better to go for a big score instead of a bunch of small ones, even if we did have to leave a guard curled up with a bullet in his stomach.

D said that we shouldn’t walk around in public with J. He said that by himself J was just a tall man, but with a group of mean-looking fellows around him, people might wonder if he was the leader of the Tall Boxer Gang. This shows how simple I was back then that I had to have some fellow from New York point this out to me. So J stayed in the hotel room and whittled while D, the other fellow and I took a look at the bank and brought him back food. I didn’t let him drink anymore.

On Thursdays the bank closed at one o’clock. Five minutes before they shut down the place, the four of us went in with our faces covered and our guns out. The two guards at the door raised up their hands without delay. J shut the door and locked it, D unfastened the guards’ belts and kicked the guns away, the other fellow scared the remaining customers into a corner by yelling at them and I went to the teller.

The teller ran from behind his window into the back and I called after him to stop or I’d kill him. Then I heard a gunshot and turned around and saw the other fellow holding his side—one of the customers drew on him and fired. The other fellow shot back into the crowd and somebody fell to the ground, maybe the one
who shot him, maybe not. The guard from the vault (the teller alerted him) ran out from the back and pointed his shotgun at J, but D put two bullets in his head and stopped him.

I ran past the dead guard, through the open door to the back, and D followed behind me with that key he stole from some guy he played cards with two weeks ago—that was whole reason he thought to rob this bank in the first place, I forgot to mention that earlier.

D and I ran for the vault and there’s that fool teller waiting for us with a gun, like he’s defending his family or something worth sacrificing himself for. I shot him and kicked his body aside. D put the key in the metal door to the vault, twisted it and yanked the handle sideways. There was a lot of money in there.

We loaded up our sacks and went back to the lobby of the bank and rondyvewed with J and the other fellow—he was hurt but could stumble along well enough. One of the guards was sitting in a chair reading a newspaper while his partner smoked a cigarette he rolled while we were cleaning out the vault. I imagine these fellows lost their jobs when the customers told the bank owner about how easily they gave up and decided to read and smoke, but those guards lived and are probably alive right now. We tore out of the bank and to our horses and rode them hard out of town.

It took time to count all of the money we had—it was more than all of the other jobs we’d done added together twice over. But now the authorities had good likenesses of most of us. They had a drawing of D, probably a local recognized him, and the other fellow’s scarf had fallen off when he got shot and he clamped it to the wound to stop the bleeding instead of covering his face back up. And of course J was so tall he always stuck out. It was time for us to cool it for a spell.

We went to the Arizona Territory where we could be anonymous and live in adobe houses and take to the plains whether it was winter or summer if someone came after us
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sorry about that—the train stopped for water.

We went to a town called Nuevo Pueblo and got ourselves adobe houses just beyond the limits and lived there for a while. J started to build things and apprenticed with a carpenter in town. The other fellow almost died from his gunshot wound and his experience made him gentler. He found a girl he liked, but she said no when he asked her to marry him because he wasn’t Catholic and didn’t speak Spanish. D was restless and didn’t care for Mexican girls or even the white ones who lived there. He disappeared for three weeks and we all figured he’d left us, but then he showed up and told us about where he’d been. He did this a few times and was usually off with girls or gambling.

After a year in Nuevo Pueblo we were running out of money and getting on each other’s nerves, especially me and D. I was in the saloon drinking one night when I reached into my jacket and found a note. It read, “Meet me with your gang tomorrow night at the north side of Black Cleft if you are interested in a business proposition.”

I did plenty of bad and wrong things by the time I was twenty-six, but I had never been involved with wickedness, with evil, until I meet the man that wrote that note.

Oswell realized that he was going to need a lot more paper.

Dicky curled his fingers around the straps of his black suitcases, lifted and walked down the shaded stairs of the train into the bright noon sun that shone upon the Billings, Montana Territory, railway station. He set the luggage down on the bleached gravel and summarily rested the meat of his right palm upon the handle of the single-action six-shooter jutting from the corresponding hip.

He eyed the station, a wide one-story building ten yards from where he stood amidst the rails, but saw nobody of note. He looked at the open door, a rectangle of black from which anyone from his past might emerge . . . though nobody did. He watched the Negro porter who stood on the platform atop a small crate scrape his broom across the support beams of the overhang; cobwebs dripped like milk from the bristles. He glanced at the four windows that faced the tracks, all of which were flung wide to admit a summer wind that was currently dead. He tilted his head back to look at the roof; his heart raced as the image of Quinlan and his posse flashed in his mind like a struck match . . . but nobody was up there. A bird wheeled in the distance, dropped, twisted and then flapped its wings twice to climb to the exact same spot it had moments ago vacated.

Dicky tilted his head forward and then back, a nod so slight that it raised and then dropped the rear brim
of his blue hat less than a quarter of an inch from its typical position, parallel with the ground.

Two pairs of boots stepped in unison; the Danford brothers, each on one side of their heavy trunk, strode from the train; they stopped beside the New Yorker. For a space of twenty heartbeats, the three men surveyed the railway station with eyes that glimmered in the shadows of their hats like gems found in cave walls. The continual scrape of the Negro’s broom across cobwebbed wood obfuscated all other sounds.

Dicky looked over at the colored man and called out to him, “You there. Would you please stop that racket for a moment?”

“I gots to clean.”

“Please pause for a minute.”

“I ain’t work for you.”

“I am planning to buy this station. If you want to keep your job, you better mind your manners.”

“I don’t believe you,” the Negro said, though it was clear that he was not entirely sure what he believed. “I got a itch, anyhow,” he added; he climbed off of the crate, sat down, set the broom on his lap and scratched his lower back.

In the nascent quiet, the three men listened. Dicky heard the trot of a lazy horse, a woman call out, a door shut twice, a girl squeal in delight, the name Robert said thrice, each time louder . . . but he heard nothing that alarmed him. He glanced over at Godfrey, who shook his head, and then over at Oswell.