Bob heard Bill’s voice and hopped barefoot in his bedroom, hurrying into bib overalls, then banged out through the screen door to clap Bill’s back and hug him in welcome and call for Eugenia to meet his older brother.
Her blond hair was unpinned onto shoulders of a white robe that she was tying as she came out. She shook his hand and stayed shy and tilted her head for her comb. I don’t think she liked Bill much.
My brother Bill put on an apron and cooked a Spanish omelet and fried potatoes and the four of us sat down for a long breakfast during which Bill announced his plans. He wanted a fresh start, to get into Oklahoma real estate, move his wife Jenny and the kids back, study law. He’d settle scores with the railroads, talk with the common people, run for the state legislature. He’d be governor when he was forty. He’d be the good Dalton, the front. He’d invest whatever money we stole and mail what we needed down to the Argentine. And he could spy for us, take the heat off, coddle the lawmen and maybe wangle a pardon for us some day. ‘It’ll work, Bob. By God, it will!’
‘I take it you’re asking Bob to stake you,’ said Eugenia, blunt as a ball-peen hammer.
‘I’m asking, Miss Moore, for a loan; that’s all.’ He winked in my direction. ‘I’d borrow from the Katy but I heard the railroad already gave all its money away.’
Bob rocked back in his chair, amused. He folded his arms and looked at his woman, awaiting her response.
I said, ‘I couldn’t come up with a more bodacious idea if I tried.’
Eugenia turned her coffee cup. ‘Have you had experience in the real estate business, Bill?’
Bill rolled his eyes at my brother. ‘I confess, Miss Moore, that I haven’t traded in land, not in this neighborhood, but I guarantee that during the last thirty-nine years I’ve been out of the nest I haven’t exactly had my thumb up my keester and my mind off in Arkansas!’
Bob said, ‘I get asked for loans all the time, Bill. I’m trying to clamp down. How much was it you needed?’
Bill purchased a farmhouse in Bartlesville, which was oil country then, about five miles from Julia Johnson’s place, about thirty from our hometown of Coffeyville. Soon after he arrived he took the train up to Coffeyville and stayed two days in the Eldridge House where he had businessmen up to his room to taste his Jack Daniel’s Green Label whiskey. He had his hair cut by Carey Seaman, bought buckle overshoes from Charles Brown’s shop, and reintroduced himself to the bankers, C.T. Carpenter at the Condon bank, Thomas J. Scurr, Jr., president of the First National. They were suspicious at first because the Dalton exploits were well publicized thereabouts, but you didn’t dislike Bill for long and by afternoon of the second day, he had them convinced that Bob and Grat and Emmett were merely bad seed.
Then he went around buying. A farmer would die and his widow would ache to go back East. Bill would handle the sale. Homesteaders from the East who rushed out to the territories to grab the cheap land would discover farm work was hard and the weather mean, and they’d give up the caboodle—barn and plows and ox yoke, dirt-floor house and artesian well—for barely five or ten dollars. Bill would pick up the title and split the resale profits with the railroad land bureaus that solicited settlers for the West. And he staked claims for us along the South Canadian River far ahead of the federal government’s approval for public sale: we were ‘Sooners.’
Whenever I visited Bartlesville, I’d sit in Bill’s rocking chair with one of his law books in my lap while Julia stitched a sampler next to me, and I’d see Bill at the dining room table with the kerosene lamp turned up, scratching out ten or twelve pages to his wife, long essays about the economy, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Royal Neighbors of America, the wolves of Wall Street, and the railroads: the Southern Pacific, the Atchison & Topeka, the MK&T, the Rock Island, the Santa Fe. Julia would put an ironstone kettle on the fireplace logs and lift it off with a kitchen towel. She’d ask, ‘Would you like some tea, Mr. Dalton?’
Bill would look up with glazed eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘Julia,’ I said.
‘That’s right, that’s right.’ He touched her cheek as if she were his eldest daughter. ‘No, Julia, I’m very busy now. I have to put some thoughts down before they’re lost forever.’
Julia would bring me tea and a half-dozen macaroon cookies and whisper in my ear, ‘He’s kidding, isn’t he?’
I’d sip from the cup and stare.
Jenny answered her husband’s letters with daily notes mailed general delivery to whatever remote post office Bill considered safe that week: Cleo Springs, Anadarko, Bushyhead, Sapulpa. Whenever legal fees were required on deeds, he paid the court officer something extra. Wherever he went he made friends with the sheriff and attended the local trials, taking notes on procedural matters on the backs of his wife’s envelopes. He flattered and joked and gave horehounds to children; he had a private table in Guthrie’s Silver Dollar Saloon where he weighted his stack of greenbacks with a shot-glass and poured ‘toddies’ out to strangers and talked like a newspaper about monopolies and jurisprudence. He got people to believe the Daltons were on their side, near saints, that in stealing from the railroads we were doing them a good turn.
Bill talked and strutted and Bob and I laid low. I’d stay in the bunkhouse on Jim Riley’s ranch and ride fence for a couple of weeks or I’d sojourn in Dover to chat with my mother and bobber fish on the Cimarron, or I’d spend a month in my brother’s farmhouse in Bartlesville reading the middle sections of Bill’s thick ancient books in a rollaway bed, listening to the squeal of a pumping oil derrick, visiting Julia Johnson at her papa’s big boarding house, which wasn’t far away.
I’d devour a peach and throw its stone at her window and she’d hunker down with me in the weeds beside the Little Caney River, a quilt thrown over our shoulders and her black hair against my cheek.
I asked, ‘Do you need any money?’
She shook her head.
‘Because I’ve got it. I’ve got plenty. More than I can spend.’
‘You’re very nice but no thank you.’
‘Late at night I stroll the road in front of Bill’s house smoking a cigarette and stargazing and somehow I see you sleeping naked under a sheet and I want to be next to you and kiss you under the ear and have you turned to me in the dark.
‘I want you in whichever house I’m at, I want to hear you singing in the next room when I look up from work at my desk, and I want you to bring me pump water when it’s hot and I’m chopping weeds in the sun. I’d be willing to pay a lot for that. I’d give you the best I could afford. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.’
‘But it’s ill-gotten, isn’t it.’ She gazed at me. ‘Isn’t it. That makes it impossible. That makes your romance just a storybook dream, doesn’t it.’
‘About whether it’s ill-gotten or not, well, you can’t look at it that way. Indians ate the heart of Father Marquette and farmers stole land from the Cherokee; in Mississippi they raped and sold brown women slaves and the Union
Army looted Savannah; railroads pushed Chinamen into tunnels with explosives tied to their backs and now train robbers stuff money into grain sacks. The world rocks a little off balance and then it adjusts itself. There’s misery in every human enterprise and whether the outcome is good or evil depends pretty much on who you’re talking to at the time.’