Shot in the Back (21 page)

Jesse and Billy rode south from the road where they had stopped the stage, then turned west.

“Are we going to find a railroad?”

“We'll go on into Colorado and catch a train there,” Jesse said. “I've sort of got a hankerin' to see what has become of Wild Horse. Also, I'd like to visit your ma's grave.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Yeah, I think I'd like that, too.”

“We can ride for a while. We don't have any urgent need to be in California.”

“Pa,” Billy said. “If there's anybody still in Wild Horse, they'll know us.”

“Sure they will. They'll know us as neighbors who used to live there. Billy, I do want you to be careful, and watch what you do and what you say, but you can't go through the rest of your life being afraid of every shadow. If you do, it just isn't worth it.”

“All right,” Billy replied.

They rode on in silence for about another hour.

“Pa?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm hungry.”

“Well, what do you think we ought to do about it?”

Billy laughed. “That was part of my schoolin', wasn't it?”

“Yes, it was.”

 

 

An hour later Jesse and Billy were stretched out on blankets near a fire. A rabbit, stretched across a circle of rocks, was browning in the flames.

“I wish we had some salt,” Billy said.

“We do. I never travel without it.”

Billy laughed. “You never taught me that before.”

“I thought that was something you could figure out yourself.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jesse reached over to move one of the rabbit's legs. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It's done.”

It was another week before they reached Wild Horse. By now, even Dunnigan's Grocery Store was gone, and the structures that remained were boarded up. As they rode down the street the sound of the hoofbeats seemed louder than normal, echoing back from the front of the silent buildings.

“It seems kind of spooky, don't it, Pa?” Billy asked.

Jesse chuckled. “Maybe that's why they call them ghost towns.”

The only living creature they saw in the entire town was a coyote who stared at them from between two of the boarded-up buildings.

“There's where I went to school,” Billy said.

The windows of the schoolhouse had all been broken out, and the front door hung askew on a single hinge.

“Pa, can we look inside?”

“Ha!” Jesse said. “It was all I could do to keep you in school when you were young. Now you want to look inside?”

“Yeah.”

“All right.”

They angled their horses toward the small building, cut across the school yard, then tethered them to the railing that was still intact on the front porch. There was drift dirt on the floor inside, but all the desks, including the teacher's desk, were still there. The blackboard was there as well, and there was a chalk message faded, but still legible.

Billy laughed. “Mrs. Foley was always putting little things like that on the blackboard. I wonder where she is now.”

“I'm sure she's teaching school somewhere,” Jesse said. “Everyone said she was a real good teacher.”

Billy looked around the school, then began pointing out desks, naming who sat at each of them.

“That's where Ann Woodward sat,” he said. “I sure pined over her, but she never would give me a second look.”

Billy was quiet for a moment, then he turned and started toward the door. “Let's go, Pa. I don't want to be in here anymore.”

From the school they rode out to the cemetery and were surprised to see it was remarkably well kept up. There was a sign erected at the edge of the cemetery.

Jesse and Billy walked over to look down at Molly's grave.

“Pa?”

“Yes?”

“When we was in Missouri, you put that flower on your first wife's grave. Do you miss Ma as much as you did her?”

“Billy, I was only married to Zee for eight years. I was married to Molly for nineteen years. If you want to know the truth, I miss your ma more than I miss Zee.”

“I'm glad,” Billy said. “I mean, I'm real sorry about your first wife, how it had to be and all. But I'm glad to know how you felt about Ma.”

“Let's go to California,” Jesse said, turning to leave the cemetery.

“How far is it to California?”

“I don't know; I've never been there. But all my life I've heard about how far it is. And how pretty it's supposed to be.”

“Are we going to ride horses all the way to California?”

“No, we'll sell our horses and tack in Mirage, then take the train. Only not right away.”

“Why not right away?”

“Damn, boy, you want to get on the train looking and smelling like we do now? They would more'n likely make us ride on the car with the horses. We'll get us a hotel room in Mirage, spend a few days there, get cleaned up, and maybe buy some new clothes.”

“You know what I want? I want me a hat like the one that was on the head of that little banker feller on the stage.”

Jesse laughed. “Yeah, you'll look real fine in that hat.”

They reached Mirage late that afternoon, checked in to a hotel, took a hot bath, and spent their first night in a bed for some time.

The next morning, Jesse inquired at the desk about some of his friends.

“Larry Wallace? Oh, yes, he's still here. He's a deputy sheriff. I imagine you'll find him down at the sheriff's office now; he mostly just stays there and watches over the place.”

Wallace was sitting behind a desk, reading the paper, when Jesse stepped into the office a few minutes later.

“I thought you weren't going to do law work anymore,” Jesse said.

Wallace looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. “Frank!” he said. “My, oh my. It's been a coon's age. How are you doing? What brings you here?”

“Billy and I are on our way to California, so we decided to stop by the cemetery and visit Molly. I was surprised at how well the cemetery is being kept up.”

“Yes, well, half the town of Mirage has folks buried there, so several of them go over there from time to time and work. I'm sure glad you stopped by. You said you and Billy. Where's young Frank?”

“He got himself married to the prettiest girl in Oklahoma,” Jesse said. “Or at least that's what he says, and you'd better not argue with him.”

“You know, folks are still talkin' about what a great job he did, speakin' those words over Molly's grave like he done. I'm sure glad you stopped by on your way.”

“What are you doing wearing a badge? I thought you had sworn off that.”

“Well, I guess I just got it in my blood. You know how it is, you sometimes get used to somethin', and you find that you just can't walk away from it as easy as you thought.”

“Yes, I know how it is,” Jesse said, thinking of his own return to the outlaw trail.

“Oh, by the way, we've got us a stagecoach robber to look out for now.”

“Where? Here in the county?”

“No, it was back in Kansas, but what with automobiles, and trains all over the place, and telephones, robberies aren't all local anymore. Although these two were ridin' horses. At least one of 'em was, 'n he brought the horse for the other robber, who had started out as one of the passengers. He stole a money shipment from a bank messenger, then took the other passenger hostage.”

“What happened to the hostage? Was he hurt?”

“No, he managed to escape from them when they weren't looking. Say, do you remember that time you rode on the posse with us and shot down all four of the bank robbers?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Jesse said. “But I don't like to dwell on it. Killin' those four men didn't sit all that well with me.”

Wallace shook his head. “No, I don't reckon it did. Killin' don't sit well with any decent man. So, you're going to California, are you? Well, how long are you going to be in town?”

“Not long, maybe a day or two to catch up with some friends. Gene Welch, Glen Dunnigan. Are they doing all right?”

“Yes, both of them are. Dunnigan's got hisself another store.”

“I'm glad.”

Wallace picked up the phone. “Let me call my wife. I'll have her round up the Dunnigans and the Welches. You and Billy will come for dinner tonight, won't you?”

“Sure, we'd be glad to.”

 

 

“New York City is absolutely the biggest place you've ever seen in your life. I thought Kansas City, Saint Louis, and Chicago were big. But New York is so big I can't describe it,” Billy said at dinner that evening. “They've got trains that run by electricity on tracks that are so high they are halfway up the sides of the buildings. And they're as fast as greased lightning. And one of 'em we was in ran off the track and fell to the ground below.”

Billy also told about the St. Louis World's Fair, and all the “wonderments” they had seen.

“I don't see any need for you folks to go on to California,” Dunnigan said. “We can always use good neighbors right here in Mirage.”

“I appreciate the invitation, Glen,” Jesse replied. “But I've always wanted to see California, and you know what they say, I'm not getting any younger.”

“Oh, California is a pretty place, all right,” Dunnigan said. “I've been there a few times. But it can't compare with Colorado.”

“I've heard about San Francisco for nearly my whole life,” Jesse said. “That's where we're headed.”

Jesse and Billy had rented a row house on Steiner Street in the marina district of San Francisco. It was early in the morning and Jesse was still asleep, when suddenly his bed tilted, dumping him onto the floor. At first he thought Billy had done it, coming into the room to play some joke on him. But as he lay on the floor, still in a stupor, he realized that the entire house was shaking. From outside, he heard a loud roar.

The closest he had ever come to experiencing anything like this was being caught in an artillery barrage during the war, and for one irrational moment, he thought perhaps that was exactly what was happening. But no, that couldn't be. The shaking continued and seemed to get worse with each second. Suddenly one entire wall came crashing down, exposing the outside.

He was unable to get to his feet because of the violent tossing of the floor, then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

“Pa! Pa, are you all right?” Billy called from his room.

“Yes, I think so. Are you hurt?”

“No,” Billy said. “But I can't get the door open. I'm trapped in my room.”

“Let me see what I can do,” Jesse said.

Jesse didn't have the problem with his door that Billy did, because Jesse's door was off the hinges. When he stepped out into the hallway, he saw why Billy couldn't get his door open. A pile of bricks and board, shaken loose from the house, was stacked up in front of the door. Jesse worked on it for nearly half an hour, until he got enough of it moved aside to allow Billy to come through.

“Get dressed, gather up the money, and let's get out of here,” Jesse said.

Fifteen minutes later, they were dressed and outside, where they saw that the streets had cracked and opened, with chasms extending in all directions. Entire buildings had collapsed, and they saw dead people and animals, crushed under the debris. And though the sun had come up, the sky was black with smoke roiling up from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fires.

“Pa, you think we can get back in the house?”

“Why would you want to go back in?”

“We left all our clothes in there.”

“We'll buy new clothes,” Jesse said. “We aren't like the others; they live here, they have to stay here. We don't. We're leaving.”
⁹

Jesse and Billy had bought a house on the beach. Both of them got jobs, as much to have something to do as to demonstrate to neighbors that they had a sustainable source of income. Billy got a job as a trolley motorman, and Jesse took a job in a store called Walkers Spirits and Fine Wines.

The liquor store stayed open till nine o'clock, and one night, at about a quarter until nine, Jesse was waiting on Mrs. Prescott, a middle-aged widow who was a regular customer.

“Mr. Alexander, I do declare that wine you recommended the last time I was in here was such a success. I served it to the ladies at our book club.”

“I'm glad you enjoyed it, Mrs. Prescott. I have to confess that I don't really know that much about wine, but Mr. Walker does, and he suggested it. He goes up to where they grow the grapes and make wine.”

“Well, I'll just have another bottle if you don't—”

“Put your hands up!”

The shout came from the front door as two masked men came bursting into the store. Both were brandishing pistols.

“You, old man!” one of them said, pointing his pistol toward Jesse. “Empty the cash box. You, bitch, hand over your purse.”

“Now, is that any way for you to talk to a lady?” Jesse asked calmly as he put the cash box on the counter.

“I'll talk to her anyway I want. And if I hear another word from you, I'll shoot you and her both.”

“Leave now, or die,” Jesse said.

“You don't listen good, do you?” The robber turned his pistol back toward Jesse, but before he could pull the trigger, Jesse took his pistol from inside of the cash box and fired twice, in less than a second. Both men went down.

Mrs. Prescott screamed, and Jesse, with the smoking gun still in his hand, stepped around the corner and put one arm around her shoulders.

“I'm sorry you had to be here for this,” he said.

“Are they . . . are they dead?” Mrs. Prescott asked in a tight, frightened voice.

“I expect they are,” Jesse said. Walking over to the wall-mounted telephone, he lifted the receiver, then moved the hook up and down a few times.

“Operator, get me the police department,” he said. Then a moment later he spoke again. “Police, my name is J. Frank Alexander, and I just shot two men who tried to rob me at Walker's Spirits and Wine. Yes, I'll be here when you arrive. What? Oh, yes, they'll be here, too. They're both dead.”

Because both men were still masked, both were holding pistols, and Mrs. Prescott substantiated Jesse's account, there were no charges filed against him. And, Mr. Walker, who had been summoned by the police as soon as they received the call, rewarded Jesse with a ten-dollar bonus.

“Jesse, did you feel a little strange about shooting those two men? I mean, put yourself in their shoes. What they were doing was no different from what you, by your own admission, had done many times before,” Faust asked.

“I suppose looking at it from your viewpoint I can see where you might think that,” Jesse said. “But I didn't put myself in their shoes then, and I don't now. At the time, I believe those two men fully intended to kill me, and probably Mrs. Prescott as well. I had no choice but to shoot them before they did that. And if they didn't intend to shoot me, they made me think they were. That's one of the risks you take when you go down that trail. I've taken many of those risks myself.

“Did I feel strange? No, and I didn't even feel bad about it. I have been in those kill-or-be-killed positions many times in my life. They are never pleasant while you are in the middle of the situation.” Jesse smiled. “But I'll tell you this. Life is never sweeter than it is when you have almost lost it. There aren't any of us going to get out of this world alive, Fred. You are a lot younger than I am, but who knows, I might well outlive you.”
¹⁰

“I suppose that's true. Tell me, how long did you stay in California?”

“Almost three years. We were in San Francisco for half a year, until the earthquake drove us out. And we left Los Angeles a few months after the incident I just told you about.”

“Where did you go from there?”

We went to Phoenix. Well, not exactly Phoenix. We wound up in Maricopa County, Arizona.”

“Did you go into ranching in Arizona?”

Jesse laughed. “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“You remember when I told you we spent money on ostriches?”

“Ostriches?” Jesse questioned, not sure he had heard Billy correctly.

“Yes, we'll start an ostrich ranch, and we'll make a ton of money,” Billy said.

“Ostriches are those great big birds, right?”

“They're big all right. From the ground to the top of their head is over six feet tall for the female birds, and the male birds could be as tall as eight feet.”

“And would you tell me just what in the world did you plan for us to do with them? Do people eat ostriches?”

“I don't know if you can eat them or not. But we won't be raisin' them to eat. We're raisin' them for feathers.”

“Feathers?”

“Yeah, Pa. I've been readin' all about 'em. Why, did you know there are rich society ladies that will give forty dollars for one feather?”

“If one feather cost that much, it isn't going to be cheap for us to buy ostriches, is it?”

“Four thousand dollars for a pair,” Billy said.

“Four thousand dollars?” Jesse shouted. “Are you kidding? A prize bull doesn't cost that much.”

“Pa, when you pull out a feather, it grows back. Why, these things are regular money trees!”

The ostrich ranch didn't work out the way Billy thought it would. Ostriches proved to be very difficult to raise. It took three years for the birds to mature to the point where the feathers could be plucked, but they lost more than half their birds in the interim. The birds would step into a hole and break a leg, in which case they had to be put down, or they would get hung up in a barbed wire fence, cut their throats, and bleed to death. They were also very aggressive birds, and during mating season, sometimes the male birds would kill each other.

Then, the first year that they had enough birds, and enough feathers to go to market, the fashion changed.

“What do you mean, the fashion changed?” an exasperated Jesse asked the broker in Phoenix.

“The fashion moguls in New York say that feathers are too ostentatious for the new style.” He pointed to the sacks of feathers Jesse and Billy had brought in. “You may as well make a feather mattress out of these feathers. Right now, that's all they're good for.”

One month later they sold their remaining birds to a zoo for display. The creatures, which once cost four thousand dollars for a pair, sold for twenty-five dollars apiece. They had ten of them. The land sold only for enough to pay off the note the bank held.

They bought a Ford Model T and left Arizona with one hundred dollars cash between them.

“What are we going to do now?” Billy asked.

“We're going to do what I do best,” Jesse said. “We're going to rob a bank.”

“Pa, it's been a long time since we've done anything like that. Do you think you still have what it takes?”

Jesse's only answer to Billy's question was to glare at him.

“Pa, I know you are used to going into banks with guns drawn, ready to blaze away if you need to,” Billy said. “But I've come up with another idea. That is, if you're willing to listen to it.”

“I'm always willing to listen,” Jesse replied.

“Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. There's going to be all kinds of noise, fireworks, probably a few people shootin' off their guns. Especially tomorrow night.”

“There probably will be.”

Billy smiled. “I've got some nitroglycerin. We'll be makin' our own noise tomorrow night.”

“You're planning on blowing a bank vault, are you?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

Jesse shook his head. “These new vaults can't be blown open. Not unless you use enough explosive to take down the whole building.

“The Cattlemen and Merchant's bank vault is the old-fashioned kind, with a square door,” Billy said. “It can be blown.”

“You know this for a fact, do you?”

“Yes, sir. I've already checked it out.”

“All right, Billy, I'll go along with it. What's your plan?”

“Most of the fireworks will be goin' off between ten o'clock and eleven tomorrow night. That's when we'll break into the bank.”

 

 

Just as Billy had predicted, the town was alive with fireworks the following night. Rockets burst high in the air, sending out showers of brilliantly colored sparks, firecrackers popped on the ground, and repeating bombs boomed loudly overhead.

Jesse and Billy parked the car on the street about a block away from the bank, and because there were dozens of other cars already there, one more car didn't arouse any curiosity. Leaving the car, they walked, unobserved, into the alley until they came up behind the bank.

“Wait,” Billy said, and, climbing up the telephone pole, he cut enough wires to render every telephone within a three-block area mute.

“Now,” he said, after he climbed back down.

It wasn't hard to get through the back door; Billy was able to slip the lock with his knife. The security that the bank counted on was the vault itself. Once inside, Billy used the flashlight beam to locate the safe. “See, I told you. It's the old kind.”

From very close by some aerial bombs burst, the noise so loud as to cause the two men to jump. Billy laughed.

“I told you this would be a noisy night.”

Billy forced nitroglycerin into the cracks in the square door. Then taping on a dynamite cap, he ran the detonating wire back from the safe to the marble base of the teller's cage.

“We should be all right behind here,” Billy said as he and Jesse squatted down behind the base. He touched the two wires together. The explosion was so loud that it made their ears ring, and pieces of the safe door were scattered around the room, joined by pieces of plaster from the nearby walls.

“There it is!” Billy said as his flashlight beam caught beams fluttering down through the cloud of smoke that had been generated by the explosion. The explosion was messy and loud, but it had done the job. The money was now there to pick up.

Jesse and Billy had decided that they would pick up as much money as they could in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds, they believed, would leave them enough time to escape from the bank before anyone came to investigate the explosion.

Their plan worked. They were out of the bank and in the car, driving away, before they saw the flashing red lights of an approaching police car.

 

 

Once they were safely out of Ft. Worth, they counted their take. As it turned out, several of the bound stacks were of one-dollar bills. They wound up with only four thousand seven hundred dollars.

“Damn, where were the stacks of twenties, fifties, and one hundreds?” Billy complained. “You know the bank had to have that kind of money.”

“We were grabbing stacks in the dark, and we limited ourselves to thirty seconds,” Jesse said. “If you ask me, we had a pretty good haul, considering. Besides, how much money did we have left when we went into that bank?”

“Forty-two dollars and seventeen cents,” Billy said.

“Four thousand seven hundred is better,” Jesse said.

Billy laughed. “Yeah, it is.”

The car began wheezing and coughing.

“Oh, now, this is just what we need,” Billy said. “The car is about to go out on us.”

“Maybe it's time we got a new car,” Jesse suggested.

“Yeah,” Billy said, smiling broadly. “Yeah, that's a good idea. And I know we have enough money for it.”