So Brave, Young, and Handsome (12 page)

“Where were you all this time?” I said, not without some heat.

“I took a small siesta,” he said. His hair was pushed awry and poked about like any drunkard’s. For some reason the sight of him this way filled me with trouble. I could not imagine what I was doing in this place and again began to blame Glendon in my heart.

“He asked me about Monte Becket,” I groused.

“Who’s Becket?” Hood wanted to know.

“Waits is Becket,” Glendon replied.

Hood gaped until his dimple appeared—his day just kept improving.

Glendon said, “You could have been yourself, Monte. You could’ve owned up. It would have been all right.”

“I’m sure it would’ve. I’m sure Siringo would’ve seen nothing suspicious in my use of a counterfeit name.”

He said nothing to that. He ran his hands through his sweaty hair.

“Say, did you hear my story?” Hood said to Glendon. “I sure headed that old man in the wrong direction! What did you think of my story?”

“I think you’ve had a little practice,” Glendon replied.

Hood fell quiet while I found Glendon a lump of bread and the last rank cheese.

“And you’re Jack Waits for certain now,” Glendon said. “I’m sorry, I know how it feels. If it helps any, I thought Jack handled himself fairly well.”

I had fallen into something of a wallow—I suppose Glendon felt bad about it. Clearly he wanted to lift the mood. He said, “What about it, Monte? Did you ever use an alias before?”

“No, I never thought of it,” I said—although I
had
thought of it; in fact Susannah had suggested I use a nom de plume on
Martin Bligh
. The vain truth is I wanted to use my real name just in case it was a success. This, however, seemed off the subject. Also I was enjoying a spot of petulance. “What about you, Glendon? You’ve lied about your name for years. Give me your wisdom on the matter.”

He had eaten the bread and offered the cheese to us and after our refusal flung it into the brush with obvious relief. Now he was packing his little briar. He said, “The thing is to get a name that tallies with how you are inside. A name is like the shirt you pull on in the morning. Take Siringo. I didn’t know his name back then; he went by Jip Fingers or Dull Knife. A flashy name always pleased him. The shirt that feels most like your own skin is the one you want for the long trip.”

Hood said, “So your name ain’t Dobie.”

“No.” Glendon lit his tobacco with a flaming twig from the fire. “I used John Bartle for a time. It was easy to remember when you woke in the morning. But some of the fellows would tease and call me John Bottle, which hurt my feelings. So I thought it over and lit on Solomon, but there was no living up to that. Let’s see, I went through a little spate. I tried out Mike Dugan and William Fast and then Harry Tracy, and here’s a funny thing. Harry Tracy seemed to fit. I liked the name. Here was the cotton shirt you might say. I was Harry Tracy for better than a year and then, don’t you know, a man arrived at the Hole who was also Harry Tracy, only that was his actual name.”

“I heard of Harry Tracy!” Hood exclaimed.

“A dangerous person,” said Glendon. “An awful boy. Soul rot, that’s what he had. The only specimen I ever knew who liked shooting people and would look for reasons. You want no association with a boy like Harry Tracy.”

“I got a alias,” said Hood Roberts suddenly.

“What is it?” Glendon asked.

“Hood Roberts,” was the grinning reply.

“Come on,” said I.

“No, it’s true,” he replied.

“What’s your real name, then?” I persisted.

“Well, never you mind!” said Hood. He was plainly injured. Glendon also was looking at me in a way that confirmed my question was bad form.

“It ain’t Hood Roberts, is all,” said Hood.

“So what about you, Jack Waits,” Glendon said, deflecting talk from the suddenly moody boy. “Why select that name, of so many available?”

“I don’t know. I just reached down and up it came.”

“Well, it’s about perfect, anyway,” Glendon observed.

“Why perfect?”

He drew on his pipe and regarded me across the fire. He seemed to feel some sadness about my new acquisition, yet it was sadness alloyed with humor. “Well, because Jack waits, don’t he? He always waits,” Glendon mused. “Then one day you write down his name instead of your own and lo, Jack is free unto the world.”

There is one more thing you should know about that last night in the Flint Hills, and that is how Glendon, as the fire weakened, took his bedroll and walked some distance into the brush and slept apart from Hood and me. I didn’t question this but in the night I was awakened by footfalls. So stealthy were they that I did not speak but tensed and peered out under my eyelids. Glendon was kneeling at Hood’s side, lifting the blanket to get a better view of the boy’s face. For his part Hood was sleeping like one does at sixteen. He was ruddy from the settling coals. I watched Glendon with curiosity then noticed something, a humped profile to his shoulders. His boots were wrong also. My guts liquefied. It wasn’t Glendon. It was Charles Siringo.

He looked at Hood, was apparently satisfied, rose silent as a hare and stepped across the fire to kneel beside me.

I feigned sleep as if born for that very purpose. I don’t know how long he looked into my face. Despite close listening I did not hear him
walk away. Sometime later I did hear, very distantly, the ignition of an automobile and its diminishing hum to the north.

In cold relief I fell asleep, only to wake before dawn with Glendon himself this time squatting beside the dead fire.

“He came back,” I told him, while Hood slept on.

“Yes, he did.”

“What did he expect to find? Does he know you’re with us?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“But he came back,” I repeated.

“If he hadn’t come back, he’d be a fool,” Glendon said. “That’s something Charlie never was.”

Now a cloud appeared in the south and east. We didn’t understand what it was right away—coming out of the Flint Hills we saw a dark line scribed over that horizon as though the land itself were an inky color there—and we drove toward the Hundred and One raising dust over the abruptly windless plain, each of us glancing left now and then without knowing why. I can tell you we didn’t talk much that day, though Hood kept bringing up his artful misdirection of Charles Siringo. He loved praise and pursued it with as much delicacy as any five-year-old. It’s true we enjoyed the prospect of the old predator moving quickly in the wrong direction—we congratulated Hood until he began to seem a little too large, whereon we changed the subject.

The Packard functioned smoothly and we stacked up eighty miles in one day while the cloud remained a nearly imaginary presence to the far southeast, like an army or a rumored sea. In this way we traveled several more days while the heat rose in the afternoons along with the spectral dust of the road.

The horizon meanwhile grew darker.

Nearing the Oklahoma line we encountered a cool breeze—the cloud’s advance guard, its annunciation. The wind was a relief after the heat but we looked askance at the approaching weather, which seemed to crawl over the continent with calculated stealth. We passed towns where people leaned from their windows or stood in the streets looking into the eastern sky, ranches where children hurried to empty clotheslines and penned remudas nickered and tossed their manes. My own fear registered as a tendency to run the Packard at high speeds. Hood buttoned his shirtsleeves and hunched in the auto. Glendon alone
seemed unafraid of the fetid yellows and violets atwist in that appalling cloud. Attaining a height of land we stopped the car and stood in the noontime sun to watch it come. Only miles away fields lay under nightfall. Trees caught the sunlight then were extinguished. It was as though we looked across at another country and it was night there.

Hood asked Glendon whether he’d seen any such thing in nature and Glendon stretched and told, in a bemused voice, of a dark fog that swallowed his boat for four days. This was immediately after he fled capture and left Blue standing in the surf of the Sea of Cortez. The fog next morning was so heavy he could stand at the tiller and not see the mast. He tied the dripping sail along the boom and so flat was the sea that the dripping was all the sound he had in those four days. Hood wanted to know if the porpoises came and kept him company—he had heard of porpoises and their famous goodwill toward men—but Glendon said no, it was just him and God, and God not saying a word. The story didn’t do much for me, but Hood seemed to feel more cheerful. In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

Hours later we drove out of sunshine into cold and stagnant gloom. It seemed impossible there was no rain. Immediately Hood began singing to himself, simple schoolyard tunes along the lines of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” He was apt to hum when he was ruminating or couldn’t sleep; it did no harm. The country under the cloud smelled of damp lime and the colors were dark and mossy. We were all of us uneasy—I’d have sung too, if it would’ve helped. As it was, the only helpful thing I could do was drive, so I turned on the Packard’s headlights, which seemed naïve and petite against this occupying night, and I drove. We seemed the only thing moving. Hood moodily produced the penciled directions to the Hundred and One his former employer Lewis had given him. We went through the silent town of Ponca City in which bats dropped out of eaves everyplace you looked. We crossed a bridge over the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. Hood called out to me to turn at this barn, at that painted house; one of the landmarks was a bison ranch and we glimpsed their arcane humped profiles behind a fence built against giants. Now the Salt Fork appeared on our right, bending close then turning away. Ahead were
lights—and now a familiar weighty shape reared up suddenly; I braked hard and Hood Roberts threw himself with a yelp to the floor of the Packard.

“I guess we’re at the ranch,” said I, for the fearsome shape was exactly one African elephant strolling beside the road. The elephant bellowed and stamped; its ears rippled like laundry, its weedy tail slashed about. Poor Hood, he moaned like a sylph, but Glendon wore a bewildered smile. An elephant! I knew right then he was glad we’d come.

For all Hood’s faith in the Hundred and One, there was no question that storied place had entered a slow fade. I’m sorry to have missed its prime, for it was once the jewel of western showbiz. Hood knew all about it. The ranch was owned by three brothers named Miller who through luck and audacity had amassed more acres and beasts and renown than any six ranches on the Great Plains. For two decades the Hundred and One held every ace. Wild horses bought by the Millers inevitably became the finest cow ponies working; newly purchased land tracts seemed always to reveal deep pockets of oil barely under the clay. Proud entertainers, these brothers built a circus kingdom with its own streets and cafés, with film stages and trick riders, with Arabian camels and lions in cages and gorillas returning the stares of patrons. People traveled from neighboring states to glimpse these exotics and to witness action scenarios from the Vanishing West. The Millers erected a grandstand they boasted would be visible from the moon. At its peak a thousand cowboys and Indians worked at the Hundred and One, and every night at six they had a war.

In recent years, though, attendance was down. Popular whimsy was in motion and apparently away from cowboys; some people had begun to think if the West was going to Vanish it should probably get on with it. Also, certain favorite performers had departed or died, such as Cyclops Mike, and the Siamese Twins who rode with a binary saddle and could rope two steers at a time.

“So this is the mighty Hundred and One. I didn’t expect it to look so down at the mouth,” Glendon remarked, as we drove between leaning storefronts under the liver-spotted cloud.

“It don’t look bad, that’s an effect of the weather,” Hood mumbled—I could barely hear him.

Still it didn’t rain. Painted signboards stood around advertising that night’s Wild West performance on the parade grounds—the show was canceled, I am sorry to say, so I missed my chance to see a Wagon Train of Brave Settlers, Savage Indians Taking Scalps, Flaming Arrows, and so forth. It would have been nice to have seen that show just once. I talked with a youngster who’d been in the crowd the night a gristly old Mimbreño, aroused by raiding again after long hiatus, forgot himself, scalped a fellow performer, and stood shaking the trophy at the roaring spectators as the cavalry rode in tooting their horns.

But as I say, the performance was shut down by the ominous and apparently endless cloud. What is more forlorn than an empty carnival? Where does everyone go? We left the Packard on the street and took two rooms at a boardinghouse where the wallpaper slumped and the lightbulbs buzzed and browned.

“Look, they’re making a picture,” said Hood, peering out our window—I shared a room with him on the second floor. He was looking across the street at a foursquare clapboard with light pouring out the open door. Its windows were bright rectangles past which vivid characters spun. A camera wheeled by on spidery legs pushed by a beefy youngster in a backward golf cap, and a girl stepped out the door lighting a cigarette. A Mexican girl in a dress the color of sunsets. She stood in the street holding the cigarette in her fingers and looking up at the cloud. Hood leaned down so intently his head struck the window glass, then pulled away lest she look up and catch him watching.

“Oh, gee,” he remarked.

“Gee what?”

“Gee, she is awful pretty,” Hood elaborated. I might’ve expected him to blush with this admission but the opposite happened; his face looked bare and bloodless, as though the mere sight of this señorita had stopped his life and set it in some form of reverse.

The girl took a few twirling steps down the boardwalk like someone accustomed to an audience. She examined the hostile sky and made, I believe, a face at it—she gave the old cloud an insouciant sneer. She dropped the cigarette on the boardwalk, set her toe on it, and spun
round before running back into the building. It was a small but beautiful display.