So Brave, Young, and Handsome (17 page)

Then there was a report, at which I can reliably tell you several women began to cry; only it was wrong, the sound of that shot. It was close. As if fired from above us the report echoed off the water and decayed above the floodplain; then, “Lookit him, he’s killed,” cried the imp, because Charles Siringo had drained down in the saddle and slumped forward against the neck of the shire. Relieved of direction, the horse made a half circle and began its slow return while Glendon, in the coracle, continued on.

I would love to tell you that Darlys DeFoe turned herself in. That she came down off the roof of Marland Oil across the street, where she had climbed unnoticed when all eyes were on Siringo and the big horse, and that she presented herself to the law and told her tale of misplaced affection. That would be romance! That would be opera! But the fact is she disappeared even more handily than Glendon himself had done. José Barrera said he saw “a tall man wading toward Texas” while the rest of us were transfixed watching Mammoth’s slow return, but who knows? Though a search turned up one fifty-caliber shell casing and a soaked sheepskin on the roof where she had rested her rifle, nothing suggested where Deep Breath Darla might be planning to go next or by what means. So far as I can tell, no one who was then at the Hundred and One ever saw her again.

Which, I suppose, is fairly romantic too.

Meantime Charles Siringo lay against the shire’s neck like wet bedding. There was some debate among the boardinghouse audience whether he was alive or dead on that horse, but I hadn’t any doubt of his living. Laugh all you like at the old perception of the fated existence; Siringo wore it like his own skin. You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own.

A new day appeared and I wrote Susannah. It wasn’t a proper letter, but it was the longest thing I’d managed to put down since leaving home. I wrote about the treacherous brown flood, about the day of departing wagonloads with their sallow passengers. I wrote how it was to see the yellow sun again, but words were poor compared to the relief I felt, which was acute as bee stings.

In fact the old sun appeared the morning after Glendon’s providential escape. The great cloud dissipated as though released from duty and the light came over a horizon that was no longer a ranch but a calm and littered sea. I suspected more days would pass before I was able to leave. José Barrera tried to drive a hayrack out behind two of the big shires; the rig made it fifty yards before the horses lost all footing and the harness had to be cut loose.

I was sitting on the ledge of an open window, groggy with sun, when Dr. Clary stepped into the lobby.

“Excuse me, are any of you gentlemen Monte Becket?”

No one but Glendon and Hood had used my real name in weeks. It was a strange and welcome sound that brought me to my feet.

“What do you need?”

He said, “Mr. Siringo is repeating your name.”

Charles Siringo was in the ad hoc infirmary upstairs. He had been shot in the ribcage though the bullet’s route was still a mystery. Clary had ascertained one smashed rib and believed the lungs were whole but beyond that was unwilling to guess. Siringo had arrived unconscious aboard Mammoth and was carried upstairs in a state of escalating fever, but soon awoke and began to shout nonsensical language.
Clary took his hand and was met with violence; he restrained him and was met with rage. At last for Siringo’s own safety he dosed him with ether, only to have the old vulture wake hours later, still angry though with less noise.

“He’s saying Monte Becket,” Clary told me. “You might help him settle. What else he’s saying doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“What else is he saying?”

Clary didn’t answer so I followed him up the steps to the infirmary. It was no place you would choose to be sick but the doctor had made the best of it. He had waded to the small hospital maintained by the ranch and manhandled supplies to high ground: surgical implements, corked brown bottles, setting plaster and bandages by the roll. Amid this smart clutter lay Siringo in the bed vacated by Ern Swilling. Frankly, Siringo looked soon to follow Ern wherever. He was talking in a husky baritone like a man still in the tavern at sunup. He didn’t look at me but breathed out a dragon of illogical syllables.

“Wait a little,” said Clary. Siringo bored on in his husky voice. Abruptly a few words spilled out. Names mostly. I remember he said Jip Fingers. He rolled to and fro in his ravings. He said Monte Becket, and I answered him yes.

“Who are you?”

“Becket.”

He laughed at this and focused on me with his fevered eyes.

“Not Jack Waits then.”

“No.”

“Friend of Glen Dobie,” he said.

“That’s right.” There seemed little use for caution now, with Glendon gone, and Siringo in this condition.

He struggled to get a line on me and I moved round to the foot of the bed where he could look me straight on.

“Did you shoot me, lad?”

“No.”

“You were with him, with Dobie.”

“I didn’t shoot you.”

He rolled half over with an agonized shout—it made me jump, but he calmed and lay still.

The doctor said, “You were shot, Mr. Siringo, by a gunman who is still at large and whose identity no one knows for certain.”

This was a mild equivocation, since everyone at the ranch knew there was only one person who could’ve made the shot.

“And who are you?” he asked the doctor.

“James Clary.”

“You going to open me up?”

“If your fever goes down. If you live long enough.”

Siringo had a week’s beard. A century’s lines. He said, “Well, you be careful in there.”

“I will,” said Clary.

“You keep your eyes open.” Siringo started to laugh—he seemed onto a vein of comedy. “Don’t take out nothing I need, amigo.”

“You rest now, Mr. Siringo.”

Siringo nodded. His breathing guttered like flame. He seemed near lapsing into either sleep or madness, but he managed another quiet laugh saying, “I got a burly old heart—you remember not to nick it, understand?” Then a pain got him and he swore at it, shouting in a blistered voice. Clary shook a bottle onto a cloth and I turned my face away while the room grew quiet.

“How well do you know him?” Clary asked.

“Not well at all.”

“Who is Glen Dobie?”

“The man he was pursuing when he was shot.”

Clary chuckled at my caution. “That much I see—I mean, who is Glen Dobie that this old boy is so hard after him?”

“They have a grudge,” I replied.

Clary put a hand on the plaster wall—I think he would’ve tipped over otherwise. “I must have some rest,” he said.

“I’ll sit here with him awhile.”

“Would you do that? Since you know him?”

I nodded.

“I had a young man and two nurses. They went out on the wagons.”

“It’s all right.”

Clary bent down and looked closely at Siringo’s eyes and listened to his breathing. “If he wakes in a frenzy, come get me. Don’t try and dose him yourself.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I guess you wouldn’t.” Clary lifted a muslin curtain and went into the adjoining room. I heard a reserved sigh and the clink of a decanter. It seemed only moments later he was snoring. His snores were low and delicate—he was a particular man, even sleeping.

That is how I came to be Siringo’s keeper—I would say his nurse, only I served him little except as company. I suppose I felt partially responsible for his condition, though his pursuit of Glendon was his own choice. For two full days he was on precarious ground—he would wake and carry on, lucid a small percentage of the time. When he roared his gibberish the boardinghouse residents cowered in the hallways, but then for minutes together he might speak with urgent exactitude as though narrating a preposterous memoir. He revealed many pieces of his life, including an account of his first meeting with Darlys DeFoe that made me blush to the eyeballs. He told how he left off cowboying when the profession of detective was chosen for him at a public demonstration of phrenology. The phrenologist’s fingers strolled over his scalp like ten stubby prophets and he uttered the word “detective” in a divine whisper, after which Siringo considered no other course. He talked about being dynamited out of his Chicago house by anarchists, landing literally in the street while pine shards and hot plumbing rained around him.

His sentiments for the most part were vengeful and emerged from experiences so long at a simmer that he spoke in what amounted to strong verse about those who had wronged him. I was surprised to learn he had been fired by the Pinkerton Agency years before; he gave an eloquent screed on the decayed character of Allan Pinkerton, whose “spine went missing at birth.” To a cowardly pard who had fled gunfire he gave a scorching epitaph. Strangely his softest words were for certain of the outlaws he had hunted: Butch Cassidy, whom he never saw in the flesh through four years of pursuit; the surgeon and gentleman
gunsmith Howard Cawley, whose talent for baking cinnamon rolls made him welcome at Hole in the Wall; and Glendon, whom Siringo referred to as “that gentle bastard.”

Eventually James Clary taught me to douse a cloth with ether and lay it firmly over Siringo’s mouth—it was the only way he would fully rest, but I never liked to do it and as in so many things my hesitancy proved expensive. Once as I hovered over him Siringo glimpsed the descending hanky and lunged up, getting my hand in his teeth. He got to the bone before the ether took him, so that meant a little more work for poor Clary, plus my hand looked like a hairless creature killed on the road.

On the third day Clary dosed Siringo heavily and went in after the bullet. He located it between the rib it had smashed and the lung it would’ve pierced otherwise. Waking afterward Siringo told the doctor he had strolled through a deepening valley at the bottom of which he’d glimpsed the gates of Hell—black as you’d expect with the usual smoke rising in the background. His voice amused, Siringo described an emissary who had come out from the gates dressed in shiny skin like an eel’s. The emissary told Siringo they had a room reserved under his name but he wasn’t coming in just yet.

Clary said, “I know a preacher in Ponca City. I’ll send for him if you like.”

“To what point and purpose?” said Charles Siringo.

“Well, in case you wish to make a reservation elsewhere.”

“Be an adult, Mr. Clary. It happened in my mind. My own good brain carved out that valley and built those gates; that eel-skin fellow was my own conjuring.”

Clary regarded him placidly. “Most men would prefer not to take the chance.”

I will say for Siringo that he held to his convictions. Weak from days of fever and pain, he still found the strength to say, “I can’t believe I let an idiot probe my guts with a knife.”

“As you wish,” said Clary.

The earth slowly surfaced. Though I chafed to leave, five more days passed before the fusty waters withdrew enough to allow it. Even then the roads dried last, since they had no drainage. Mr. Bodes took the Packard apart, greasing it piece by cagey piece, and I packed my few clothes and watched from the window as mudcrackle peeled off the world. Redstart had often wondered aloud what we might find if a certain river or lake dried up—he imagined fishing tackle and anchors and human skulls and of course glittering doubloons. Well, I found no treasure as the Salt Fork retreated, but I did come across a decent wood frigate with a muslin sail set afloat by some youngster; also a drifting ox bladder inflated and tied with a knot attached to a note with the childish inscription,
Help help, we are dying of hunger on the See of Sinbad
. The note put me so much in mind of my own boy that I laughed aloud en route to a state of weepy fatigue.

The day came when Siringo crawled off the rank mattress and into a suit of clothes. He’d whipped the fever but I recall him trembling in the lobby after a wall-hugging journey down the stairs. How different he was; the suit was the same he had arrived in, a mossy wool, yet it now seemed his inheritance from a colossal ancestor. His beard had grown in almost pure white except for a streak of intractable red on his chin. For nearness to the next world he looked like one of your querulous great-greats with his damp eyes and his nodding jaw offset like a camel’s.

He said, “I’m afraid my driving days are over.”

“Not at all, you’ll mend quickly now,” I said. It didn’t hurt to be polite—he looked so frail, his clothes falling in over his bones, but then I said, “You’ll be back betraying old friends in a trice, I am sure.”

He seemed to enjoy that, wheezing like a gunnysack. He said, “Clary has arranged to sell my automobile,” and even his voice was attenuated and of shadowy timbre.

I inquired whether he intended to take the train home.

“Yes. Thank you, Becket, by the way,” he added humbly.

I regarded him with surprise.

“For sitting beside me,” he said, nodding as though it embarrassed him. “For bearing with me through the dark valley. It couldn’t have been pleasant for you,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

“Why did you do it?”

I hadn’t an answer. I thought of Glendon saying,
Why don’t matter
. I replied, “You’d have done the same for me.”

“You’re smarter than that,” he said, with a bit of his old pepper.

“I guess I am.”

“Now you’ll be going home. Home to Minne-sota,” he intoned, lightly mimicking the grim Norwegians who had taken root on those northern plains. Noting my hand still bound up in cotton he added in a low voice, “I understand that is my doing.”

“It’s healing.”

“I am ashamed of that, Becket,” he said. “I make no apologies for what I am, but that shames me.”

“You weren’t yourself.”

“Is that a fact? Who would you say I was, then?”

There was a silence during which Siringo seemed to attempt by his will to stop the tremors in his fingers. “And Glen Dobie, where did he get to?”