Sundance (3 page)

Once calm, he walked the horse to the livery. The stable man pointed out a new bit, and Longbaugh threw away the spade. The horse came warily back to neutral, but he had expected no less. He had always been good with horses. The horse accepted the new bit. Longbaugh put his dusty saddle on the horse's back and cinched the girth. He finally wiped down the saddle, revealing an old friend in good condition.

The saloonkeeper took a position at the corner of the livery where he could see up the alley to the spot where Billy Lorigan had fallen. The saloonkeeper shifted from foot to nervous foot on his heels. He watched townspeople gather, speaking loudly as if to reassure the dead body that they were doing all they could to avenge him. The saloonkeeper looked at Longbaugh and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. The townspeople united in their outrage and raced to the lip of collective frenzy. Longbaugh saw the saloonkeeper lift his hands to urge him to move a little faster, an implicit
please
in his gesture.

“They're talking posse,” said the saloonkeeper, balling up his apron in his hands.

“Talking about bringing rope.” The saloonkeeper released his apron, then balled it up again.

“Men going for their sidearms,” said the saloonkeeper, watching one of the men coming this way down the alley.

“Count twelve, no, fifteen of them.” The saloonkeeper backed up a step and the man ran past.

“You got to go
now
, Kid!”

Longbaugh glanced up as the nickname hovered in air.

“Ride out the south side of town, stay left through the stand of piñon, they won't see you going into the dry creek.”

Finally Longbaugh placed his boot in the stirrup and came up without swinging his leg over. He stayed there, standing on the single stirrup and patting the horse's side until he felt the horse accept him. He swung his leg over and sat. He was quiet for a moment, years since he rode, and knew he would have blisters as the calluses of the past were but a memory. He heard the familiar creak of leather under his buttocks and thighs, and continued to measure the state of mind of the horse. He was curious as to why the saloonkeeper and Orley had taken his side. The horse took a step and Longbaugh brought him back, steadied him, and when he felt the horse fully alert to him, directed him with a nudge of his knee.

He looked at Orley.

“You going to tell them?”

“You know I wouldn't.”

Longbaugh knew that he would. The old man would not be able to stop himself, he had finally made a connection and it had brought him to life. They might not believe the old man, but they would come hard after him on the off chance that Orley was telling the truth about Longbaugh's identity.

He nodded to the saloonkeeper and Orley, and he and the horse named Felon rode out of town.

L
ongbaugh rode the horse along a red rock ridge fronting an area of low rolling hills that he knew well, then to a high point that afforded him a view of the ground he had just covered. He found a crevice of shade and sat the horse and watched patiently for any sign of the law. After a time of seeing only calamitous jackrabbits, prairie dogs, a coyote stalking three foxes, and a congregation of wheeling red-tailed hawks, he turned to consider the valley ahead. He could wait and cross after safe nightfall, but he preferred to know if someone was coming up behind him. The horse paused at a creek and he allowed him a short drink, then started along the bank and down, through greasewood shrubs that funneled through a wash and emptied into a low stand of boxelder trees. The trees gathered on the edge of the flat and acted as a gate opening out onto a meadow. Longbaugh started across without hesitation.

He thought about the old days when he and Parker would stash food and horses along an escape route, leaving hungry, discouraged posses behind on their exhausted mounts. They had been through this meadow after one of the robberies, but he no longer remembered which one. He rode for some time, calibrating the sun in the sky, came up a rise, and turned the horse so he could once again survey the meadow.

The valley stretched out wide, an easy roll of land with purple larkspur pointing to the sky, and after a few minutes of silence Longbaugh was surprised to see two heavy dark objects burst insanely out of the boxelder trees, leaving a trail of straight lines made of flattened grass. His ear picked out the distant grinding and roaring, and he wondered how he had not heard them before. Both vehicles revved their engines to make up time and began to eat up the valley floor with disturbing speed. He counted three men between the two vehicles, but saw a strange humped shape on the front of the lead automobile that he did not understand.

He watched for too long, each passing moment bringing them alarmingly closer, and he was keenly aware that if they saw him, there was a way to box him in. But he stayed yet another minute and then a minute more. The front vehicle did not slow to negotiate a dry gully between steep banks and struck something that was either tree trunk or boulder, and its front end soared, tires spinning vainly, a back wheel hitting the same obstruction and hurling the motorcar sideways. The unusual hump was thrown clear and he saw cartwheeling legs and arms as the unlucky fellow hit the side of the bank upside down and slid headfirst to the bottom. The vehicle landed upright on the opposite slope and paused there in a steep lean, then slowly, slowly tilted a little farther, then just a little farther, until it gave in to gravity and landed on the driver's side. The second vehicle stopped short, and the two occupants rushed over, one to the driver, the other to the former hump. The upside-down fellow came up limping, and Longbaugh nodded to know he was all right. Longbaugh stayed where he was to see what they would do next.

The four men surrounded the vehicle. Not one of them looked around to see if their quarry was near. After an exchange, two went to the front and two to the rear. The grunting posse scraped the vehicle around on the driver's door until the wheels aligned with the bottom of the slope. They converged on the slope above the vehicle, all four grabbed the roof's edge, counted to three, and lifted. Longbaugh watched the roof brought to their belts, to their chests, then over their
heads, where, arms fully extended, they stalled. A moment later, they heaved in unison and for an instant the automobile touched four wheels, but the momentum sent it leaning the other way, onto the far wheels, where it wobbled, almost going over onto the passenger's door. There it paused, groaned, then slowly came back to four wheels and rested.

The men whooped and shook hands. Two returned to the second vehicle, while the other driver went and helped the limper back to his position on the front of the lead vehicle. That confirmed what Longbaugh had come to believe, that the man had been perched on the motorcar's hood, attempting to track him, his face near the ground to follow Longbaugh's trail. Sobering to see them track from an automobile. He missed the old days, when his pursuers were knuckleheads on horseback. With the knuckleheads riding Fords, there was always a chance they could get lucky.

They came on again, more slowly. They had proved themselves amateurs, and at that moment it hit him, a delayed reaction to his release from prison. He was free. The air was warm on his skin and clean in his nose. He was free and he felt good, he felt . . . better than good. He was on a horse, watching profoundly stupid men attempting to track him, and they had no chance whatsoever. He abandoned all caution, remembering the feeling as similar to the first time he took a bank. He decided to have a little fun. He headed in their direction until he intersected with their future path, then took the horse through a series of maneuvers. He made his trail so obvious that even they could follow his curlicued flight.

He stayed out of their sight, keeping half a mile's distance between them, judging their location by the sound of their engines. He noticed a thicket of nettles with a space in between, judged the opening wide enough for the horse but not the vehicles, and saw a way to torment them. After carefully negotiating the horse safely between the bushes, he guided it to shelter in the rocks ahead so he could watch. The vehicles came up the trail following his tracks and drove directly through the space between the nettles, scraping any arms and legs that happened to hang outside the car's profile. The men yowled in pain, and
Longbaugh knew if they did not soon apply creek mud, they were in for a miserable night when the rashes blistered.

They quit the chase early as the afternoon aged. Any decent tracker could have guessed where he was, but none of these men were that tracker. They switched off their engines and waited for night, lighting their kerosene lamps, and making a small fire. Longbaugh moved in on foot and listened to their conversation, but he went away bored as they discussed not their strategy as a posse but the stinging itch of the nettles. He paused by one vehicle, on the side away from the campfire, saw a holstered gun hanging there, but finally did not trade his sad revolver for the better piece.

He left them behind in the setting sun. He rode across rocks and hard ground where, even if they bothered to follow, they would struggle to track him. Eventually there would be others on his trail, real men with knowledge and wisdom to supplement their modern tools, and he would need to be clever.

He had hoped to find tepees in the next valley, and was not disappointed. Another part of the old life that remained unchanged; when the natives traveled between reservations, they still made camp here. He rode in slowly, with his hands visible on the horn of his saddle, a caution left over from earlier days. He dismounted and approached an older man, recognizing the series of small circular tattoos on his neck as Arapaho. He was an elder, a medicine man, once a proud killer of whites. The Arapaho pretended to know him and offered a warm greeting. The man and his family had come north by way of Arizona. Longbaugh was surprised to hear Arizona had been made a state the year before. The Arapaho spoke of the changes to the land over the past decade, and Longbaugh revised his plan of escape based on the Arapaho's particular account. Longbaugh was anxious to move on, but the man's woman invited him to join their family for a meal, and he ate rabbit meat with corn tortillas. He luxuriated in the pleasure of decent food well prepared, and thought of how Etta was a terrible cook, and how badly he missed her burned casseroles. Whenever possible, he had tried to get to the kitchen ahead of her to start a meal. He smiled to
himself as he ate the Arapaho woman's food, thinking that if Etta knew he thought he was saving them from her cooking, she never let on. It was, of course, possible that she considered
him
the poor cook and had been humoring him. After the meal was over, Longbaugh refused the offer of white man's whiskey, as he had many things on his mind and he didn't want an intoxicant to distract him.

He stayed long enough to be polite, and saw they were glad when he was ready to leave. He mounted his horse and rode away from the tepees. The three-quarter waxing moon lit the hillside that carried him out of the valley. He traveled a long time until he was far from other human beings, in a barren place where the moonlight made few shadows. He consulted the angle of the Big and Little Dippers and judged the time to be near midnight. He was close to the canyon walls of an old hideout. The land was stark and silver with moon. It fit his state of mind. He hobbled the horse and left it behind, furthering his isolation. The ground was hard, cracked into puzzle shapes that curled up at the edges and crunched to powder under his boots. He found a tree standing alone, its trunk thick and gnarled, its arms weblike and almost without leaves.

He sat under it. Lightning flashed on the far side of a distant range and exposed its shape against the sky. He waited for the next flash. He was glad to sit alone and think, and he knew exhaustion in his bones. The past simmered and he allowed his mind to wander.

He thought of his time in prison. He had given himself up to protect her and was awarded more years than he had anticipated. Two different times in prison he had been involved in violent incidents. The first came early on and was unavoidable, but it had served to inoculate him for the rest of his stay. The second had happened recently and had surprised him. He had not expected it, a spasm of brutality from deep in his gorge. Old man Orley had pegged it. There was a story there, and in retrospect, it brought him grave discomfort. He had always defined himself a certain way, and now he struggled with his recognition of another side, no matter how he hoped to disguise it.

He was confused as to his true nature. How different was he from
the man the world had defined? He was an ex-con as well as the man who had died a myth in South America, perceived as affable by the dead son of a dead sheriff, among others. In the first instance, he had been arrested and served time. Yes, he was changed, but in what way? The authorities used prison as a cudgel to punish a man's outlaw acts. Had he been punished enough? Or did he still owe? Perhaps twelve years was too long a sentence, perhaps he had been overpunished and was due a peccadillo or two.
Interesting thought
, he mused. So who was he now? Despite the opinion of the state of Wyoming, he did not believe himself to be immoral. His code was strong, severe in many ways. He had paid a price that the rest of the gang had not. Were they better men for not getting caught? Or did they owe on their debt?

He flashed on the dead young man. Could the moment have been avoided, or did he secretly welcome the violence? He had killed in self-defense, but that did not help him. He grieved for that arrogant boy.

His mind drifted again. Silent lightning struck miles away revealing a foam of clouds on the far side of the mountains, followed in time by a curl of thunder no louder than the growl of his belly. She had stopped writing to him two years ago. The real hard time of his incarceration had begun with her sudden, unexplained silence, impossible to believe from the woman he loved. Sitting under the tree in the moonlight, he heard metal gates clang, clang open, open to corridors of cells on a steep grade, sucking him back inside, and his brain warned that he was somewhere between awake and sleep, where he could not know reality from illusion. Gaslight flickered between bars, with unseen men taunting him from the far side of a cigar-smoke cloud. He knew he would be tested and a man burst through the smoke, Longbaugh ducking, a fist glancing off his ear, and he grabbed the man's throat, crushing it to papery flakes, as if it was insect-infested pine under his fingers. He fought to extract himself from the dream, but his arms and legs were leaden, immobile, and yet somehow he was walking, walking a path, a path that brought him to a narrow boy standing in a field of poison purple larkspur, pleasant enough until he saw it was a boy with milk on his mustache raising Longbaugh's good revolver and firing at his face,
bullet spinning through a spew of yellow flame. A dream for sure, as he had time to duck from its path, and in that turn of his head he was facing the other direction and there she was at the chapel with the music in her heart and her infectious smile, slim in her wedding dress—do you take?—yes of course—say I do—all right, I will—laughing over it later in their honeymoon bed, between sheets, a lingering kiss, her smooth thighs cool against him.

She had helped him survive prison, the way she knew and understood him, the way she believed in him, allowing him to keep a grip on his identity. She did it with her words. With her letters. He fought to wake up, as he knew his dream was about to go sour, and he wanted to avoid the darkness of isolation and loneliness, but his exhaustion held him under and drowned him in imagery, and he remembered, remembered a train, train rushing, rushing below in the dark, and they leapt together, he and affable, round-faced Parker, known to the world as Butch, landing in unison on a passenger car, laughing in each other's faces, Parker, who had escaped that day.