So Brave, Young, and Handsome (32 page)

When I looked at Glendon he was already looking at me.

“Let me talk to him,” I said.

I peered out the window. There sat Siringo behind the wheel of a black Chalmers automobile.

“I’ll go out to him,” said Glendon.

“Who is he?” cried Susannah.

“Siringo,” Redstart replied, who had gleaned my adventure to the last bronze nail and now owned it as though he had been there himself.

“Don’t, Glendon,” said Ar
ā
ndano.

Recalling with what little ceremony the old Pinkerton had shot Hood Roberts I went out, not waiting for Glendon. As the door shut I heard Ar
ā
ndano telling him to go out the back, to take the cutter.

The Rienda of course goes all the way to the ocean. I was thinking that myself, and of the boat, on which a man could neatly live.

Siringo saw me coming but didn’t get out of the car. He was holding a long-barreled revolver. The barrel was resting on the car door.

“Hello, Siringo. I’m a little surprised to see you up and about.”

“Pursuit,” said he, by way of reply.

“Glendon isn’t here.”

“Oh, he’s here.”

“He
was
here.”

At this Charles Siringo looked mildly downhearted. How frail he was! His left eye was sleeping and his skin looked as if it might not bleed if pierced.

I began to think it was possible, then, that he was capable of giving up.

“How do you feel?” I couldn’t not ask it, he looked so low. Under everything else, he was an old man.

“I’ve been better.”

Something kind, I am sure of it, dwelt behind his eyes. I’d have even tried his grasp now, if he had only put down the revolver and offered me his hand.

“Is that your woman?” said he, for Susannah had come out on the porch in her blue dress.

“Yes.”

“Lord Almighty,” said Siringo. “Well, you don’t deserve any such thing.”

He reached down, set the gun on the seat beside him. He was short of breath. He swung around and looked behind him and put his hand on the shifter.

At this point Glendon stepped out of the house. He had his hat on, a vest. He had a little duffel and came down off the porch in our direction.

Siringo picked up the revolver again. He looked at me with his old snap, admiring me, I think, for lying.

Glendon said, “Charlie.”

“Glen Dobie,” said Siringo, and this is the oddest part of it: yes there was triumph in his face, yes the thrill of success at long last and all the rest of it. But there was also a longing there, as though he’d missed Glendon, as though he were meeting an old comrade—which, of course, he was.

Siringo said, “It has taken me longer than usual.”

“But here I am,” replied my friend.

“Let’s go, then,” said Siringo.

Glendon nodded. He shook my hand and tossed his duffel into the back of the car. He said, “Goodbye, Monte.”

I had no hold on this. I looked round and saw the thin-shouldered form of Ar
ā
ndano at the window, Susannah on the porch holding tight to Redstart.

“Goodbye,” I said.

He nodded again and in his open face and the grip of his hand, flexible and strong as my own, I saw again the remarkable difference in the two men—the one archaic and closing fast, the other seeming to get younger.

Glendon walked round to the passenger door while Siringo kept the revolver trained on him. The hammer was cocked. When Glendon opened the door Siringo actually dropped the gun. It landed on the floor of the automobile—somehow, it didn’t go off. Siringo dug for it but he couldn’t bend very well. A string of saliva came off his lip as he felt around for the gun.

Glendon got in the car, leaned down and retrieved the gun, uncocked it, and handed it back to Siringo.

Siringo said, “You are not winning.”

“No. You win, Charlie.”

Siringo put the car in reverse. He said again, “You are not winning.”

They drove out of the yard and up the road.

What am I to say here? I don’t know that I ever saw a stranger event than Glendon’s surrender to Charles Siringo, for at the same time that he lost everything—the very direction of his own steps—he won the thing he’d held so precious he wouldn’t approach it in words.

He won Blue.

She didn’t say so, even to Susannah; she gave no outward clue, except that she wrote to the Governor and to the California Board of Corrections; she packed up and spent time in Sacramento to lobby clemency for this man who had deserted her in order to go rob trains and shoot a politician in the face. It didn’t make her popular, and if you read the newspapers of the day they are filled with the usual righteousness of the press:
TREACHEROUS FELON CAUGHT AT LAST
! As for Siringo, he was once again the man of the hour, though it’s telling that in none of the articles does a current photograph appear. There is instead an old picture, the same one you may see today inside the covers of his books, a handsome devil with a mustache and in his eyes the ways of acquisition.
JUSTICE TRIUMPHS
, cried the newspapers, for there is no statute of limitations on murder, and murder is what Glendon confessed to; representing himself, he would plead nothing less than guilty and was handed eighteen years in the Los Angeles pentitentiary.

From time to time, he wrote us letters.

Here is part of one from that first year. I won’t reproduce it all. I know the pains it took him.

Dear Blue & Monte & Susannah

Thank you for writing it is all fine here. They have given me my 1st spectacles which are a true surprise, also a fellow here provided me a book it is Don Quixote should keep me busy til I get out. No complaints. Hello Joaquin, how is that Maria? Red you forgive that principle for it was his hand & not your own.

I went back to Minnesota at last that spring and sold the Cannon farmstead. The buyers showed up on a Saturday. They were a young couple locally famed for having produced triplets several years earlier—now those endearing babes were inquisitive rascals bent on conquest, their parents tattered refugees clawing at the door.

“Come in,” I said. The truth is I was glad to have so many lives flood into that house at once, for I had spent two whole days in rooms never meant for silence.

We didn’t bicker but agreed almost at once on a price. They were glad to get the furniture and especially glad to have a barn—I think they envisioned the horde out there at play, and a glimmer of privacy for themselves.

In one thing only were they disappointed. One of the rascals came pounding up to where we stood, discussing wells or windows. He was slick with snowmelt and mud to his kneecaps. He poked my leg until I squatted down and then said, “’Ant the horse.”

“Sorry, amigo,” I had to say. “Chief is going with me.”

It took me two weeks to finish it off—to sell what would sell, arrange train passage for Chief, and pack the rest. On the day I said goodbye to the lovely Cannon the weather was cold and the river ran below its sheath of ice, sometimes breaking through in patches to show its deep green self. I left the keys on the porch table, where I had made and abandoned so many words.

The trip back west was memorable for two reasons. First, I arranged to stop in Revival, hoping to find someone who could tell me more of Hood Roberts—who he was, where he came from. The car dealer, Lewis, had not heard of Hood’s death and didn’t seem overly affected by the news.

“Who killed the boy?” he asked.

The distant way he said
the boy
made me wonder whether Lewis even remembered Hood, or whether he was thinking of someone else.

“An old detective, Charles Siringo.”

Lewis hadn’t heard of Siringo either. He seemed a little impatient with me for stopping. But then he must’ve remembered who Hood was, because all at once he remarked that he never knew Hood’s family, that Hood just walked in off the plains one day with a grin on his mouth and a wrench in his hand. He asked Lewis for nothing except a job; he slept, Lewis said, in an empty cooper shack at the edge of town.

“Was Hood Roberts his real name?” I asked, for this had been picking at me. Lewis smiled at this strange question. “His one and only, so far as I know.”

No one was living in the shack when I found it—there was nothing inside but a few corrupt hogsheads and dusty brown bottles and a dime novel entitled
Tom Knight and the Banditti of the Grasslands
. I picked it up. It contained the adventures of a rambling cowpoke who always got more than he had coming. I put it in my pocket, being careful, of course—those cheap little booklets seemed calculated to disintegrate.

The other prominent incident on that return journey was marked by a column of smoke, sighted as we rolled through New
Mexico. People were exclaiming, crowding to the left side of the train. There was a lot of sweaty speculation about what was burning, though I had a queasy feeling about it. I’d seen such an oily cloud before. When we stopped at the station in Harkin, sure enough, word was Pancho Villa had swept across the border with an army of one thousand Mexicans and burnt half the town of Columbus to ashes. To this day there is speculation as to why he did it. It’s hard to say. But if I were engaged in writing history, I would set aside for a day the darling motives of appetite and politics; I would search out and knock upon the front door of Art Ravel, erstwhile arms proprietor, who once shipped five thousand fraudulent bullets to General Pancho Villa. There might be no answer, for I’ve heard Art is shy about visitors, but it couldn’t hurt to go knock.

I did build a second boat, you may wish to know, and a third, and several more after that. I’m glad to report people seem to enjoy these Dobie Swift Cutters, and I am usually behind in production. While dreading overconfidence I can say they are decently wrought craft, with solid joints and kindly motion, and I mean to go on making them; they seem quite alive to me, and if I can become a bit faster there might be a living in it. But there’s this, too: After a while, a long while, without writing a word, why, a sentence arrived from nowhere. Not a great sentence—actually sort of a ragged one, in need of paring. I searched around for a pencil and wrote it down, a sentence about a white-haired man rowing upstream through the parting mists of the Cannon River.

“What are you writing?” asked Susannah. She was painting something, I couldn’t see what.

“Just a sentence.”

She lifted her head, a daub of orange below her lip. “Read it to me,” she said.

I am surrounded by friends, kept safe by generous people. So it has been for as long as I can remember. Maybe being the youngest of four acclimated me early to a pattern of kindness; whatever the reasons, a surprising number of people have given me the benefit of the doubt.

Therefore let me thank Elisabeth Schmitz, who saw instantly to the soul of this story, and whose questions, confidence, and wit helped me do the same; and Morgan Entrekin, who welcomed an outlaw tale and saved a spot for me in the lineup. Thanks also to Paul Cirone and Molly Friedrich, whose counsel is reliably clear-eyed and practical.

Mom and Dad used to put me to bed accompanied by an album called
Songs of the West
, a loving thing to do. There is no sweeter sorrow than “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Moreover, Dad’s friend Hood Roberts allowed me to borrow his name; I wish he was here to judge the result.

Ty and John spent hundreds of hours in my writing loft, talking, listening, making me laugh—without their vigorous distraction, I might never have finished.

Finally, thanks to Robin, for hearing my pages with persistent grace. Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.