Chapter 9

It was already hot. She went to a joint on Coke Hill and had a hoecake with butter and molasses and a quart of coffee. She was feeling good today and wasn't about to let the dentist put her in a mood. What was he being so damned careful about? He hadn't been an ounce of careful the night before, neither at Parko's bar nor at the room later. For a man who'd lived without a woman so long, he was a quick learner. Not that there was all that much to learn, little more than a cat or dog could do, and not that it gave her any more pleasure than usual. There had been only a few times in her life when that kind of thing happened, and it was not exactly the stuff of sweet nostalgia. The thought of it was in fact enough to send her into a pharmacy looking for some Phoenix Pills. They didn't have them, so she bought two papers of morphine in case the day kept worrying on like this. It could conceivably get worse, what with Prettyman and Jim and Blue Duck and these other thugs to deal with. She could only hope that there'd be any thugs to deal with. If J. B. couldn't get anybody interested, the whole plan might fizzle out before it got started.

She bought a bath and headed over to the Boston Store on Garrison A venue for clothes. On the street she kept her head down, face partially hidden by the shawl. There were any number of people on the sidewalks and chewers-and-spitters at the corners and clerks in stores who might recognize her, and on a better day she'd be saying hello to them and passing the time. They looked upon her with respect. She thought of herself as a kind of public entertainer when she came to Fort Smith, someone who livened things up and maybe laughed and amazed a little of the pain out of their guts. She was glad to do it, to play in a bar or ride down Garrison in silk and ostrich plumes with them looking after her and pointing, shaking their heads and pretending to disapprove.

A few times over the years she had hired on regular at Fort Smith saloons just to keep her hand in. Folks came more to look at her than to hear her play. Once a few years before they'd hired her to be an "outlaw" in the Fort Smith rodeo. They had her "rob" a stagecoach, chasing it around the circus shooting in the air and whoopin it up, stopping it and making everyone get out and deliver the goods. Old Ike Parker himself was one of the "prominent citizens" that she got to rob that night, which tickled her pink. He lined up outside the stagecoach with the rest of the prominent citizens and handed her over a big fake watch soberly.

Blue Duck had hinted that she was getting out of her element by taking on this job for the Indians. Maybe he was right. Maybe not only Joel Mayes but she herself was being taken in by the image of Belle Starr. Maybe a middle-aged rodeo queen ought not leave the show to go out chasing wild horses. And then again, maybe she should. Maybe it was exactly what she should do.

She fiddled around in the Boston Store for a while buying a petticoat linen dress with a front-ruffled blouse and a sculptured jacket with peplum trim and a feathered hat that could be pulled down over her forehead and eyes. She looked at herself in the mirror and wished there was some way to hide that chin. Permanently. She was being waited on by a clerk who didn't know her, but as always when someone was buying, other clerks were beginning to buzz around, and she had to get out of there before this became an appearance.

On Garrison, she hesitated a moment. Up the street a ways was the Arkansas Bank of Commerce. She hopped a mule streetcar and rode up in that direction. It was a six-story brick building nothing like the clapboard joints Cole and them had gotten famous for holding up. It was a fortress in a civilized town. Fort Smith made the Dallas of her youth look like a boomer camp. She got off the streetcar and took another one going back down toward the river. A bridge was being built at the end of Garrison. Within a year or two a person could just ride his horse or wagon right on across from Arkansas into the Indian Territory. She felt a little quirky about that. It seemed like the Territory was being opened up wide as a barn dance. All the barriers were coming down, and it damn sure wasn't the tribes paying for those bridges and laying that track.

A big sign was stuck in the dust:

THE JAY GOULD ARKANSAS RIVER BRIDGE TO BE COMPLETED 1890.

Who was Jay Gould? Probably some banker. That's who was behind most of these big projects. Big eastern bankers, they were stitching the country up tight with their progress. They'd make a state out of the Indian Nation before long -call it "Oklahoma, the White Trash State" and fly strumpets all over the sky dropping leaflet invitations.

At Speer Hardware Company and the Carriage Repository, she got off the streetcar and walked over one block to the federal courthouse. It was a brick building which had been the officers' quarters in the old fort. In the basement was the "new" jail -new for ten or fifteen years now -where they shoveled in crooks and whiskey peddlers up to 160-175 at a time. Over by the gallows enclosure were parked a couple of tumbleweed wagons with cages on the back designed to hold six or seven men. They scoured the Territory with those things, hauling them in at two bucks a head. She walked up the pitted wooden sidewalk a ways, trying to decide what to do. It would be nice to just walk in there and look on Heck Thomas's bulletin board for her warrant. That way she could be one-hundred-percent certain that it was Prettyman who had put them on to her. She had a lingering uncertainty about Miss Laura Ziegler Reed, but that may have been just because she felt a little bad about running her off so harsh.

She sat on a bench in the yard for a moment thinking about it. Court would be in session, as usual. The old man would be there on the job as he was twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day of the year except Sundays, Christmas and Easter. She kind of admired old Fatman Parker, for sitting on his butt that much of his life looking like a judge if nothing else. Spent that much of his life looking like one then she supposed he must be something of one by now. She'd read in a newspaper article that he'd tried over ten thousand cases on the bench in Fort Smith. And of course they always mentioned that he'd hanged more men than any judge in history. Newspaper reporters came from St. Louis and New York and New Orleans to cover the hangings, writing about how they were inhumane and so forth.

She didn't know for sure what she thought about executions, but most of the crooks she'd ever been around didn't worry about whether they were "inhumane" or not, and most of them had a certain respect for a man like Parker. The way some of them talked, it almost seemed like they believed in Parker and the law more than honest men. The law and breaking the law was the game they chose to play, and maybe a person just naturally tended to respect what he did. Most of the guys who ended up on the gallows were poor sorts, wrung-out breeds and niggers who grew up hungry and just cut loose on a spree one day until they got caught. Very few professionals ended up dangling off that crossbeam. They ended up dead all right, but not with a broken neck. There was a certain ignominy to it that the professionals shunned. She worried about that for her boy as much as anything. To be hanged alongside two or three other drained-out sad whiskey-broke punks who got caught shooting somebody in the back for twenty dollars and couldn't afford a good lawyer to confuse a jury -the thought of it made her stomach turn over. What was she supposed to do, stand out on this lawn in front of four or five thousand people while they slipped the rope over her boy's head? That was ridiculous.

She got up and went toward the courthouse. She really shouldn't, but what the hell. She pulled the hat down low over her forehead and tried to walk up the steps unobtrusive and humbled over. Maybe she would pass as a witness. She sure couldn't pass as an observer, because Parker didn't allow females to sit in on his trials. The weaker sex were positively forbidden from anything but the formal proceedings, and he always gave little speeches to any of them taking the stand. He thought that they would all be -or should be -horrified at what went on in court.

The marshal's office was at the end of the main hallway and the courtroom off to the right. There were a half-dozen men standing around outside. A voice, not Parker's, droned on and paused, a chair dragged the floor. It was a common day in the courtroom, justice piddling along under the heat. She stopped in front of the bulletin board and looked for her own warrant. What was it Parker had said when she stood before him to be sentenced? That by her actions she had clearly and flagrantly abandoned the virtues which nature to render the sex amiable had implanted in the female heart, that the verdict was an entirely just one and must be approved by all honest men, the offense of which she had been convicted shocked all persons who were not brutal and brought forth shame from the hearts of honest women, the example set by her being a pernicious and . .. Somewhere near the end of a pretty long speech he remembered to mention that she'd been caught stealing some horses, too. She'd been in his court a few times before and he'd never gotten a chance to sentence her, and he was sure enjoying the opportunity.

Standing in front of the bulletin board remembering that day, she heard him say something now -the tone of his voice if not the words. He sounded bored. She'd never thought of how bored he must get sitting up there looking at one bum after another. The funny thing about his face -which she could see in her mind -was his eyes. They were dark and bright and flashing like a young man's. They were passionate and somewhat bulging eyes, strange in his otherwise judicially dulled countenance.

She found her warrant. It was for assault on Mr. Prettyman. That was fine. She could deal with that. Now she just had to get her bustle out of this place. Which she was about to do when something caught her eye. The door to the marshal's office had just opened at the end of the corridor and a deputy ushered in someone who'd been sitting out of view among the old kegs and broken-down chairs that served as a waiting room. It was Jim July.

Jim July was talking to Heck Thomas. What about? Surely she'd remember if he'd said something last night about going to see the marshal today.

She hurried out of the courthouse and over to Coke Hill. Blue Duck was back already, napping on the bed with his hat over his face. He told her that he'd found the photographer.

"So you're going with me?" she asked.

"You look pretty in your new dress," he said.

"Well ..." The remark confused her for some reason.

"Helps me to pass. I've been getting around without anybody noticing me so far. I'm going right directly over to see Prettyman now. You want to come?"

"What do you have in mind?"

"Don't know yet."

"Are you taking a gun?"

"Dh I've got a gun when I go to the outhouse. But don't worry, I don't aim to do him any harm. That don't ever do any good."

"What's that?"

"Shooting people and such. You usually have to eat it, worse than what you did in the first place."

Blue Duck laughed. One surprised burst. It was the first time she'd heard him laugh.

"What's funny?"

He shook his head.

"What?"

He stood up, shaking his head.