Chapter 21

The sneer on Ralph’s face was ghostly and without venom -vain mask over his exhaustion. The old man said that he should ride no farther. He had been hit in the chest and groin and was in bad shape. Blue Duck was tired. He would have been happy to lie down now on the floor. His body was as heavy as a tree. He did not care about food. He asked the old man if they could leave Ralph here and sleep in the shed.

Belle was sitting at the table looking at Ralph. "No. We'll go out somewhere and hit the dirt. I don't want to sleep inside tonight."

They rode out a quarter-mile from the shack and got down the roll. The sky was rumbling and flickering in the west. Blue Duck didn't care if it rained or what, he just wanted to sleep. He would have preferred to be alone, but there was only one blanket. She put down the saddlebag for a pillow. He lay down and there was a rock under his back and he was thankful for it. He let it push up between his shoulders for a while, then rolled off slowly and dug it out. Belle was fooling with her clothes. The lightning was getting sharper.

"What's that blood on your coat?"

"I don't know."

"You ain't got any holes in you?"

"No holes."

"We must be lucky, Mr. Duck."

“Mmm."

"It's gonna rain on us."

"Mmm."

"It'll blow."

"Good."

"You feeling okay?"

"Okay."

She rolled over on his chest. "What do you think about it?"

"What?"

"What we done."

"I think it was a mess."

"It was, all right. ... There ain't a name I know of, alive or dead, who would have tried it."

"Wonderful."

"Are you getting smart?"

"No. I'm getting stupider by the minute. I am satisfied to be stupid. Good night."

"Hotsie's leaving."

"So am I." He felt almost breezy saying it.

"Ride with me to Tahlequah. You got some salary coming."

"What are you going to do in Tahlequah?"

"Get our payment and get Ed out of jail."

"That's unlikely, isn't it?"

"You read the newspaper. Jim July or somebody's spilling the beans about this deal. Fatman sends the marshals over to get Ed and that'll be it, buster, nothing you can do when they get them to Fort Smith. We've got some leverage on Mayes now; I think we can spring him."

"The sacrifices are made, eh?" Her face was close to his, appearing and appearing in the lightning. "What do you mean?"

"I am too beat to talk. I mean nothing."

She spoke as if to herself, "Mayes tried to set it up so I wouldn't see him again. We'll have to get through that."

"You never cease, do you?"

"Cease what?" She got up and went off a ways to pee. In the lightning he saw her hunkered down. He lay back and watched the sky. He was too exhausted to sleep. A funny light energy tickled along his ribs and spine, and all of his thoughts seemed unimportant, trivial, mildly entertaining. He felt good actually. Nothing mattered. The most abominable thought was a joke. He tried some abominable thoughts. The day--the last few days--was a series of disasters.

"One should never get involved with his patients" A doctor in one of his romances had said that. "One shouldn't. Really." The wind was picking up now, gusting hard. It was going to rain. They were on top of a knoll and would probably be struck by lightning. Fried. A perfect end to his career as outlaw: fried on a knoll with Belle Starr fried beside him. Nice for the buzzards. A name. Why, don't you know? He was a name. He became a name and disappeared that very week. Some speculate that he was fried. Remarkable.

She was there again, lying on her side propped up. He noticed that she stank. Or perhaps it was him. He. He who stank. She had the look on her face. The smile. The mother-of-the-dead smile. Necrofilial. That was one thing that was not funny. Not funny because he did not like to fuck with her anymore. Fucking with her had become a frightful bore--no one ever said that in his romances. He was not a good fucker. Leave that to Jim July and Cole Younger. Leave it to the true names. The nouveau name was satisfied not to achieve that distinction.

Lightning burst apart in the sky. The wind rose and tore hungrily across the plain, cool wind, really cool for the first time in recent memory. For the first time ever, this wind. She was there and smiling but what could he do about it? What did it matter here? Dead men walked out the door. Her face was strange lying so very still while the light pounded the earth. To be tired like this was a memory in his body--it, too, vaguely pleasant. The body assured of its continuity. He watched her face and daydreamed, the wind finding under his clothes, sand blowing against his skin, rainsmell as thick as vegetables in the air. Always a pot of meat boiling to offer visitors. She sat at the fire and he sometimes noticed her old dugs through the loosely cut arms in her dress. A favorite dress from the time when she was a mother giving milk. Three love charms on it, beads, porcupine quills--old woman in the clothes of youth. I have made friends with this hide, she said. And the time he did not see was not when they threw him down and screwed the spikes into his chest but when he went off alone into the hills and fasted for four days and saw nothing but thirst and hunger. He came back and told them the truth. The body weak.

He was awake now and fucking her. It surprised him. She was under him with the same face. Big drops began to smatter the dirt; lightning tore at his ears. It was to get that look off her face. Rain told him he was naked. Pleading scorn, immutable in jags and unfoldings of light. The storm was moving fast, as peremptory as a common visitor. He was awake and asleep at once. She would not break when he did but it was all right. He snapped like a dry limb. The closest space had become rain. He roamed and smelled her body like a scavenging dog -interesting here and there, the smell of menstrual womanflesh as pungent as death, saddle and dirt and nerves curious to taste. Was she cursing? Now rivulets off her belly. Mud ponds? Tiny creatures finding shelter? The dry hide opening like the dry earth, running like the dry earth. Buckshot rain--the horses were probably having heart attacks. He looked up and could not see them in the havoc of light. Shelter was irrelevant, to move anywhere worse than staying low and riding it out. On his hands and knees he tasted what was neither pleasant nor unpleasant but so much of each that it produced in him a kind of frenzy to decide. It was a place of the world, part of the landscape. Rot, blood, nectar, the response in her, a certain strange tension that was part of the taste.

He rooted like an animal to find it out, not a taste of tongue and mouth to brain but to fear, the place of twenty skulls. It satisfied and enraged him equally. Acrid. Slipping. He kept slipping away. . . . In his mind, he went to the funeral. He looked upon her. The others suspected him. The husband might have killed him. He did not care. He looked upon her. He walked out. He went somewhere else. He ate garbage as he had done four years before. He sat on his haunches fishing dreamily in putrescence. Except now he spoke this language, now he had certain desires. The coyote was dead.

The rain slowed as suddenly as it had started. He was so very tired. He felt pulverized. Her arms were held out. She called him and he lay down with her and she was in a wild state like he had never seen her, and that was fine, he was in her and she was so very needful and yet composed, oddly, voice husky out of her throat, saying "keep on, please keep on." And he kept on until she started to break, in Cherokee now, bitter,

"What's the matter with you? Please don't. God damn you don’t. God damn please kill me please. Kill me please. Kill me. Please."

She chanted the hard Cherokee words. It scared him and made him weirdly happy. Ravening, finally breathless, she bucked like a horse and threw him into the dirt. Ejected him from her body. He was not needed any longer. It made him laugh. He marveled and laughed inside. Strange and joyous--how could he feel this way? He crawled back onto the edge of the blanket tentatively, like a little boy seeking warmth. His thoughts were silly and wild like dreaming. The chair from St. Louis got up and walked with stiff dignity out the door. Books in his parlor flapped their covers, gossiping. The Masonic Building was dragged off into the sky by a giant balloon. She was brought up from the earth so that he could work on her teeth. He hammered horseshoes into the jaw. Flowers bloomed from the eye sockets. Sweet peas. How beautiful they were.

Rain light and clean against his skin, quieting, he saw her disappearing now. Leaving his presence and becoming ... what? She must become an animal. The lessons were not clear until the beast was named.

But it didn't happen. Again it didn't happen; that was all right. His bones were clay. He died.

In barest light he awakened in his nose -air steamy, warm, portentous. Propping himself up, he saw her ten feet away from him, eyes awake under half-sleeping lids, squatting with her arms crossed on her knees looking off across the hills. Her posture was symmetrical, like she had been there a while.

For some reason he woke up quickly. "Mornin." She looked at him and said nothing. After while she spoke. "My boy ..." He lay still and waited for her to continue.

"What?"

"I ruined him."

"... 'ruined him'?"

"Yes."

"What do you mean?"

"Made him do things."

"What kind of things?" No answer. But she seemed to want to say more. "Why?"

"Couldn't help myself."

He waited.

"More'n once," she said.

"I'm sorry."

She stood up. Her face was so very sad. Not scattered like she had been at the hotel in Fort Smith but just sad, staring at him and at the ground. She stood there limply as if there was nothing else to do.

He got up and rolled the blanket, picked up the saddlebag and went over to her. He tried to hand it to her but she made no gesture to take it, so he laid it in the dirt at her feet and went off looking for the horses.

She rode behind him down to the shack. The old man was out front on a stump eating a bowl of kafir. He nodded good morning. On a tabletop without legs a leather pouch lay in a wad of money. Blue Duck had seen Ralph open it on the front porch at Younger's Bend. Inside it were a silver dollar, a Barlow, a needle and spool of waxed thread.

He asked the old man if he would bury him. Yes. He could keep the things. A nod -he would keep the money but he did not want the medicine. Blue Duck accepted the pouch.

She took off at a walk across the yard, through chickens.

In Tahlequah they found a hotel and Blue Duck slept like the dead. He assumed Belle did too. At ten o'clock the next morning he went with her to the government building. She walked in the place like she owned it and said she wanted to talk to Joel Mayes. The secretary frowned: She told him that her name was Belle Starr and there was something Mr. Mayes would definitely want to hear from her mouth. An emergency. His frown deepened. She went on at some length and he listened darkly. "Mrs. Starr, I regret to inform you that Mr. Mayes is quite busy right now with the assembly. The Democratic Congress is in session ...."

"Fuck the congress, I want to see him."

"I beg ..."

"I said fuck the congress in their democratic butt holes, I want to see Joel Mayes. Tell him my name. If he says no, okay. You just tell him my name."

The secretary flustered and fumbled around on his desk. After a moment he left. When he returned, three Lighthorsemen ambled in behind him. "Take your sidearms off, please," one of them said.

Belle and Blue Duck unbuckled their belts and handed them to him. The two others searched them. Belle had the saddlebag and one of them opened it. He looked up from the contents. "What is this?"

"That's paper money. They print it up in Philadelphia."

The secretary's frown grew worried. "Please remain here. I will inform the Chief of your visit."

They stood around for a while and he returned, pale but still civil. "Mr. Mayes will see you on the second floor. Please escort them."

Two Lighthorsemen walked behind, one in front. The one in front went in with them. Mayes sat with his elbows on the desk, fingers touching. He rose to meet them, expression neutral.

''I'm here to report, Mr. Mayes." "I am glad to hear it, Mrs. Starr. You may do so quite easily through the channels we agreed upon." "There are some things I need to talk to you about. You want this Lighthorseman to hear it?" Mayes considered that and said nothing. The Lighthorseman stayed. "Please bring those chairs over and sit down. There is no reason to be uncomfortable."

Blue Duck brought up the chairs but she remained standing. "There's not that much to it. We robbed the bank in Guthrie. You must have heard about that. We blew up a railroad bridge on the Kansas and Western between Guthrie and Enid. You didn't tell me Couch had an army of Pinkertons in Enid. They caught one of my boys up there; we had a shootout with them. Messed up Enid some. Got some ugly rumors going. Shot Couch. Three out of five of my boys are dead. We couldn't go to Kansas to hit the Oklahoma War Chief or them lawyers because we were in such a mess. They were hot after us. I want to settle with you."

Mayes was silent for a moment. "Please take a seat, Mrs. Starr."

She descended slowly.

"You appear to be in a blunt mood. That is fine. I appreciate the time that it saves. Allow me to be equally blunt. The congress is meeting right now to consider the question of what we are going to do with the Outlet. There are essentially two possibilities. One is to give the entire region to the United States without argument or resistance. The other is to defend our right to lease or dispose of the land as we choose. You know I stand for the latter." He glanced up at the Lighthorseman. "If the former is agreed upon, I will no longer be of service to the Tribe."

"You'll quit or you'll be fired?"

"It doesn't matter. In my opinion nothing will matter too terribly much if that happens."

''I've got some troubles, too, Mr. Mayes. I've got a couple of weeks of dirt and some dead men walking on my skin. I know you want us out of here."

"I want to remain fully in touch with you. It is a matter, at this moment, of tactics. You are exhausted and not in the mood for my hesitations. I cannot blame you for that. You have done valiant work. But at this moment it would be very imprudent to stimulate rumors around this office. I am exerting every politic, influence I can on the assembly. A rumor that recent actions in the Outlet were countenanced by this office."

"I understand. Pay me and give me my boy."

He frowned.

"We did half the work; you can pay us half the money."

Mayes considered that for a moment. Blue Duck could see by his eyes that he was thinking much faster than he was talking. He was being quiet and distant and measured, as if by this to conceal Belle's appearance. "I cannot release Ed Reed. I have no power to do that. That was not our contract. We are in agreement upon the money."

"That's mighty white of you, Chief, but I want my boy. Somebody over in Fort Smith is talking. If he talks anymore, two things are going to happen. Ed Reed will get extradited and my whole arrangement with you will be on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. Those two things will happen together. Not one but both."

Mayes's expression became somewhat less disembodied,. "How, do you intend to avoid that, Mrs. Starr?", "Call me Belle, please. 'Mrs. Starr' gives me a headache in this building." They were able to smile finally, even the Lighthorseman, who was supposed to not be listening.

"I intend to avoid it by getting Ed Reed out of here. Out and gone. If anybody starts snooping around trying to connect him and that dead marshal, there just won't be anything to go on."

Mayes shook his head. "The whole town of Catoosa knows about that incident. I have seen two telegrams asking for information on a missing marshal in the Creek or Cherokee Nation. It is only a matter of time until this leaks to Fort Smith."

Belle leaned forward in her chair. "Catoosa is a swamp pit. They murder people instead of playing baseball on Saturday afternoon. If one-fifth of what happens in Catoosa got out, Judge Parker's piles would catch afire. What I'm telling you is that Ed in jail here plus my actions in the Territory are not a good combination for you. It will be better for you and for all of us if Ed ain't never been heard of nor seen in your records."

Mayes shook his head fretfully. "That's impossible. Twenty people know about his incarceration. It has been very difficult to avoid a major story in the newspapers."

"There you are. When it gets in the newspapers, you're in trouble."

Mayes spoke with careful articulation. "No malfeasance has been performed by this office."

"I don't know whether you call about ten dead men spread all over the Territory malfeasance or what, but it sure makes good newspaper copy."

"Is that a threat, Mrs. Starr?"

"This thing started on a threat, Mayes. You got me into it on a threat. I didn't come to you. You took my boy and said you'd swap legal protection for my work. It is no longer protection for him to be in jail here."

Mayes picked up a pen and tapped it lightly on his desk. "I have a question. The reason I commissioned you in the first place was to answer it."

"What's that?"

"Can we resist them in the Outlet?"

"Resist them? ... ," she sighed. "I don't know. You'd have to get behind it bigger. That boomer shit ain't exactly what you'd call spontaneous. If you got enough men out there to make it unprofitable, it might slow things down. The only way you'll do it is with small bands. Anything big and they'll send the cavalry. Guerrillas--no armies."

"An army is out of the question." "I guess it boils down to how unprofitable you can make it for them. The big boys are pretty common sense about that." A sad flicker of smile crossed his face. "I am acquainted with that capacity. Who could handle it, though?" "You mean in the field?"

"'Yes."

"I can name a few dead men and men in jail who could do it. And one woman maybe."

Mayes watched her closely. "You would go again?"

"Release my boy and we can do some more midnight talking."