Wildwood Boys (16 page)

 

“Tell you what, Sheriff,” Bill Anderson said, stepping off the
sidewalk and taking his horse’s reins from the hitch post. “
I’ll
go get
that bill of sale myself and we’ll get this done with.” He stepped up
onto the saddle and said to Ike Berry, “You best be telling the truth,
Henry. I don’t find that bill in your possibles I’ll know you for the
horsethief they’re saying you are.”

 

“It’s there,” Ike Berry said. “I ain’t no damn rustler.”

 

“And you boys,” Bill Anderson said, pointing at his brother and
Butch Berry. “Who gave you leave to stand around here admiring the
ladies? I want you back with the herd right now.”

 

Some of the onlookers chuckled at Jim Anderson’s and Butch
Berry’s looks of disappointment as they stepped down off the sidewalk and mounted up.

 

“I’ll have your man over at the jail,” the sheriff said. He pointed
down the street. “Just around the corner there.”

 

Bill Anderson unholstered and cocked a Navy and pointed it at
the sheriff’s face and said, “I’ll have him now.”

 

Mouths came open—and Jim leaned down and grabbed the shotgun from the startled deputy. Ike laughed and hopped off the sidewalk, snatched away his reins and stepped up onto the gray. Butch
held a revolver on the others and said, “Turn loose of them, boys—
now
!” Three of the deputies let their guns fall—but the redhaired
deputy jerked up his pistol and fired at Bill Anderson and passed a
ball through his hatbrim. Butch shot the redhead in the face and the
man sat down hard on the sidewalk with a black hole under his eye
and a look of profound astonishment and Bill shot him above the
same eye and he pitched onto his back like he’d been yanked by the
collar.

 

The onlookers scattered amid women’s shrieks and the shrilling
of horses lunging against their posted reins and the patrons gathered
behind Coogan’s big window ducked out of sight. The deputy called
Junior fired twice at Ike Berry and both times hit his horse and Ike
managed to jump clear as the gray buckled under him with a rasping
grunt. Jim Anderson discharged both shotgun barrels and the buckshot stripped Junior’s lower leg to the shinbone and ricocheted off
the sidewalk in a spray and shattered Coogan’s window and a falling
shard gashed the arm of a woman crouched inside. Sidestepping the
frighted horses, the sheriff saw Butch Berry loom before him and
shot him in the side. Butch clutched hard to his saddlehorn as Ike
shot the sheriff in the arm and in the hip and the man went down.
Ike grabbed the reins of a tall buckskin and swung up into the saddle
and Bill yelled “Go!” and they put heels to their mounts and sprinted
away in a hammering of hooves and flying dirtclods.

 

They pounded like racers past an encamped wagon train just
outside of town and every settler’s face was agape in the billow of
their trailing dust. They rode at full stride until they were miles from
the town, then reined up on an open rise and stared hard behind
them but saw no sign of chasers. Each saw on the others’ faces his
own wild grin.

 

“You holding all right?” Bill Anderson asked Butch.

 

Butch took his bloody hand from his side and considered his
wound. He nodded.

 

“Then let’s move,” Bill said.

They rode through the rest of the afternoon and into the rising
dusk and made camp alongside a creek in a dense wood. They
could not have said whether they were in Kansas or Missouri.
They’d shot a pair of rabbits and dressed and split them, and the
four halves were now roasting on spits over a wavering fire, juices
dripping and hissing.

Butch Berry sat shirtless with his back against an oak trunk and
his bloody side to the light of the fire, Ike and the Andersons squatting beside him. The round had only scraped his ribs, and the wound
looked more like a nasty cut than something done by a bullet. Ike
was the best of them with needle and thread and he set to sewing up
his brother.

“You were lucky,” Jim said. “Couple of inches over and it
might’ve been serious.”

Kansas City

 

“If I was lucky,” Butch said, “it would’ve missed me.”

 

As Butch endured his brother’s rude surgery with grit teeth and
low profanities, Bill said he wasn’t sure if they should return straightaway to the Parchman farm. “I mean, what if there’s trackers coming
behind? We got Aunt Sally and the girls to consider.”

 

“That’s right,” Jim Anderson said. “We don’t want to lead some
posse to the farm and them think it’s a haven for outlaws. Kansas
sonsofbitches would fire the place in a minute.”

 

Ike paused in his stitchwork. “I’m with you boys,” he said. “I say
we keep a distance from the farm for a time.”

 

“So where do we lay up?” Jim said. “We can’t stay here for long.
It’s Union men patrolling all up and down this border.”

 

“Ain’t you boys always said we’d get a fair welcome in Ray
County?” Bill Anderson said to Ike.

 

“Damn right,” Ike said. “We had plenty of good neighbors back
there. We won’t ever lack for a full plate of dinner nor a dry place to
sleep.”

 

“Let’s do it,” Jim said. “Only let’s make a stop in Kansas City.
They say that town’s got sporting ladies to make Helen of Troy look
like a mangy dog.”

 

“All right, then,” Bill said. “Ray County it is—by way of Kansas
City.”

 

Ike resumed his surgery and Butch took up his muttered cursings.
In truth, none of them was eager to get back to a life of farming, not
even Butch, whose reveries entailed vague wooings of Josephine on
his return to the Parchman place.

 

Bill uncorked the jug and took a pull. He passed the whiskey to
Jim, who had a drink and then held the jug out to Ike, who again
left off from his sewing. “You know,” Ike said, “I was just wondering if I did in that sheriff. I hit him twice but I don’t believe I hit him
mortal.”

 

“No question we did in the badface,” Bill said. He took off his
hat and poked a finger through the hole in the brim. “I want you all
to look here what that jackleg did to my hat.”

 

“I know I made a cripple of that one deputy,” Jim said.

 

“Maybe the sheriff bled to death,” Ike said. “You reckon?” He
took a drink and passed the jug to Bill.

 

“You all don’t quit this gabbing and give some attention here,”
Butch Berry said, “
I’m
like to bleed to death. And how about letting
the only wounded man here have a pull off that damn jug.”

 

Ike Berry affected to harken to some distant sound. “You boys
hear something? Like some naggy woman at complaining?”

 

Bill Anderson smiled and cupped a hand to his ear. “More like a
baby mewling, I’d say.”

 

“I don’t know,” Jim Anderson said. He cocked his head in an
attitude of hard listening. “Sounded to me like some little girl crying.
Maybe skinned her knee, something like that.”

 

“You sorry sonofabitches, all you,” Butch Berry said. And grimaced with the pain of joining in their laughter.

They rode into Kansas City on a night of sodden rain. Its official
name was City of Kansas and would remain so for another twentyseven years, but even now everyone called it Kansas City.

The enclouded sky looked like violet smoke in every shimmer of
haze lighting. The rain had fallen steadily through the day but was
now eased to a drizzle. Federal soldiers everywhere in black slickers,
horsed and afoot, resembling conjured shades bound for dire and
dark appointments. The wagon traffic heavy despite the inclement
weather, muleteers cracking whips and cursing at teams lunging
against loads bogged in the mud. Blazing yellow doorways of saloons
and bawdy houses open wide and issuing a cacophony of music into
the night. Strains of piano and fiddle and banjo, songs abused at a
bellow. Laughter of every sort—high and happy, hoarse and lewd,
shrill and near to demented.

They trotted past a clutch of onlookers withstanding the weather
to witness a pair of men grappling clumsily in the mud and cursing in
gasps, vowing each to kill the other, though neither man was sober
enough to stand unassisted or armed with more than bare hands and
bad intention.

They stalled their horses in a livery and gave the boy instructions
to feed the animals and rub them down. As they slogged across the
street toward the nearest saloon they were hailed by a pair of cajoling young women leaning out of a brightly lighted second-floor window. The girls wore ribbons in their hair and lip paint bright as
blood and yellow pantalettes of thin cotton that clung to their
haunches like fruitskin and they wore nothing else. They held one
hand to their breasts and blew red kisses at them with the other. Ike
Berry waved vigorously in return and slung kisses back with both
hands. The girls laughed and turned around and waggled their bottoms at them and withdrew into the room.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Ike said. “I believe I’m in love.”

The din pressed on them like a thing of substance as they shouldered through the crowd and up to the bar. Men conversing in yells,
greeting each other in hollers, bellowing profanities in earnest and in
jest. There were two pianos, one to either side of the room, each
playing at full volume and each a different tune. A half-dozen young
women in uplifted ruffled skirts were bouncing about on a small
stage in rude and risqué semblance of French-dancing, singing with
no hope of harmony to an audience whooping its admiration and
lobbing coins onto the stage in proof of it. The air of the place was
humid and hot as breath, woven with the smells of smoke and
whiskey and lamp oil, of men long between baths, of perfumes and
powders and pomades.

They stood drinking and admiring the huge gilt-framed copy of

The Rape of the Sabine Women
hung above the backbar mirror.
They pointed out to each other various of the painting’s notable
qualities—mostly pertaining to its bounty of female nakedness.
When they had exhausted their store of art criticism, they stood with
their backs against the counter so they could study the room.

They drank, sang along to the piano tunes, pitched coins to the
dancers. A half-hour later each of them went upstairs with a whore.
When they reconvened at the bar, Ike and Jim were manic with
delight and couldn’t stop talking about the goodlooking cyprians
they’d sported with. Bill said his girl had lacked a proper enthusiasm,
but this failing had been somewhat offset by her breasts, as lovely as
any he’d ever known. “All in all,” he said, “if she gave me back one
of my two dollars and I gave her a feather up the ass, we’d both be
tickled.”

Asked about his girl, Butch shrugged and said she was all right
but nothing special. The others traded looks and smiled in their sad
knowledge that he was in love, a sore affliction that can imprison a
man in thoughts of the beloved and make dull for him all readier
pleasures, a condition the more vastly pitiful when a man’s love was
unrequited, which they knew his to be.

They moved on to other establishments. At the saloon next door
they had a drink and then another just to be sure the first one did its
duty. Then to another emporium, and then another, and they took a
drink at every saloon they entered and tapped their feet to the music
of piano or fiddle or a string band entire. In every place they went
they called for favorite tunes, Ike exhorting for renditions of “Darlin
Corey,” Jim Anderson for “Shady Grove.” In this manner did they
work their way down one side of the street and back up the other.

They took rooms in a hotel that night, and in the morning had a
breakfast of beefsteak and eggs in a raucous restaurant full of teamsters and roustabouts and Union soldiers. Then the Berry boys and
Jim Anderson went off to the docks to look at the steamboats and
watch the passengers boarding and debarking, and Bill went in
search of a bookstore. He inquired of a storekeeper on Grand
Avenue who was sweeping the walkway fronting his establishment
and the man directed him to a place called The Bookworm, just
around the corner. Every wall of the store was covered with shelves
from floor to ceiling and every shelf was spilling with books.

As he browsed, other customers came and went, almost all of
them women and all of them piqued by the rough aspect of this lean
and handsome presence whose muskiness pervaded the room and
whose idle glances their way sent their own eyes blindly scampering
over the stacked titles before them. He settled on a collection of Poe’s
tales. At the front desk, the aged and bespectacled proprietor with
skin the color of watery milk consulted the inside of the front cover
for the book’s penciled price. “Strange fella, this one,” he said.

Bill jutted his chin at the book lying open in front of the man and
said, “What about him?”

A ferry crossing

 

It was a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. “He’s another,” the old
man said, and they both laughed. He went out with both volumes
under his arm.

The next day they moved on, following the river road to eastward
along the top of a low pale bluff. The caramel-brown Missouri was
in full view below them, gently rippled and a hundred yards wide at
this stretch. The high ground gradually declined and some miles farther on they spied a ferry landing and whooped at their good timing—the ferry was on the near side of the river and taking on
passengers. They paid a dollar apiece to hup their horses aboard in a
clattering of hooves and join three other horsemen and a family with
a wagon and a two-mule team. The vessel was a capacious log-andplank construction and was operated by a heavy-muscled man in a
sleeveless yellow duster, assisted by his wife and a pair of strapping
sons both in their early teens. As soon as they were aboard, one of the
boys set the stern rail in place and cast off the mooring ropes and the
family went to work with the push poles.

The current along this stretch was slow but strong enough that
the family crew had to pole at an upriver angle to compensate for
it. The Andersons and Berrys patted their nervous horses and whispered to them. Up close the river was even darker brown than it had
looked from the bluff. It smelled of raw earth and rotted vegetation.
One of the passengers, an old man holding to the bridle of a horse as
gray as his beard, remarked that Big Muddy was sure the right name
for it.