Great Train Robbery

While waiting to waylay a train, a band of outlaws, hard men wearing black hats, sits around a campfire on top of the railway tracks they've scouted out, while the orange-haired bandit queen, perched high on the day's pile of loot, sings them sentimental old ballads about lost solitude and soiled doves and tepee burning in the untrodden vales of purple sage, and about dirty dealing and dysentery and wick dipping in the old corral with its rivers of blood flowing beneath the whispering cottonwood trees. They've been out robbing stores and banks and killing people all day and they're all a bit trail-weary, grateful for this restful interlude, and when Belle sings about the hanging judge who hanged a whole town, they all sing along (even the ex-sheriff joins in, though he can't sing a lick) as she lists the victims, each verse adding two or three more--He hung the teacher and the preacher and the Chinese prostitute! He hung the rambler and the gambler and the peg leg in his boot! etc.--then in unison shout out the chorus: But he never hung me! And they laugh and spit at the fire and pass the whiskey bottles, reckless, violent men of good spirit.

The ex-sheriff's black mare is curled up beside him by the fire, allowing herself to be used as a backrest and a shield against the elements. The place they have come to is bald and open to the four winds, which are all active on this night, blowing dust up their noses and whipping their hats off. They have to keep an eye on the campfire so that blown embers don't set the dry scrub ablaze and spoil their robbery plans, but they need the light from it so as not to lose sight of the train rails which have been eluding them all day, slippery as water snakes. It has taken hours hunting the rails down to this lonely spot, and, that thanks mainly to the black mare, who led them here, following a spoor of fine cinder, after the rails they'd been tracking had seemingly dead-ended in a water hole. Even here, the rails have tried to slither away, which is why they've built the campfire on top of them: If they shift again, they'll all shift together.

Most commonly after so long in the saddle, getting his thighs buffed and his prostate spanked all day, he's pretty sore, finding sitting down and standing up equally insufferable, but the mare is an easy ride and if anything he feels better tonight than when the day began, no new torments and his old wounds and bruises mainly healed as though gently massaged and oiled away. She's fast, too, and fearless, coolly outrunning the bullets shot at them today as they galloped away from trouble, and she can fly over fences and chasms, take any incline or crisis in stride, turn on a nickel and leave four cents change. They had to kill a few breachy clerks, shopkeepers and deputy sheriffs during the day's adventures, but the only serious trouble they had was when they were robbing black hats from a dry-goods emporium and ran into another gang robbing the same store. During the explosive shootout that erupted the mare slipped in and stole all the hats, rescued him from where he was pinned down behind the calico bolts and, stomping a few heads along the way, led the whole gang in a clean getaway. Almost clean. They lost a couple of men to the hail of fire, but members of the rival bunch later offered to join up with them if they could each have a hat, so they are back to a full complement again.

Now one of the new members of the gang, a rangy white-shirted and black-vested dude with a thin black mustache, sleeve garters and spectacles like two dimes on a wire, interrupts the bandit queen's legs-up number about skylarking range tramps on a bunkhouse toot to complain that his hat doesn't fit him properly. "It sets down on my ears sorta funnylike," he grumbles.

"Dodblast yer peculiar pitcher," growls a black-bearded hunchback, and he pulls out his walnut-handled pistol and shoots the man square between the dimes. "Belle wuz singin."

"Hole on thar, bible-back," says a swarthy, squint-eyed renegade with a cigarillo dangling in his scarred, puffy lips. "That feller was a pal a mine. You dint hafta kill him jest on accounta he busted in on a fuckin song."

"No?" The hunchback turns his pistol on the half-breed. "You want yer turn, buzzard bait?"

The dark fat man squints expressionlessly down the barrel of the pistol, dragging slowly on the cigarillo, his hands tensed on his knees. "You rather hold over me, podnuh. I reckon I caint call that hand." Ash blows from the reddening cigarillo in the coiling wind. "Ante 'n' pass the buck."

"The buck aint fer passin, puffguts, and the ante's yer ass," says the bearded hunchback, cocking the hammer of his pistol.

The ex-sheriff gets up from where he's been lying against the black mare, walks over there, ready to shoot them both if he has to, at the same time that the bandit queen climbs down off the pile of loot and interposes herself between them, her crimson-tassled black sombrero tipped sternly down over one brow as if to say she means business. "We aint got time fer no hossshit bickerin, boys," she says, cuffing their ears so sharply she knocks their hats off. He reaches down and takes the hunchback's gun away from him, uncocks it, empties the chamber, drops it back in his lap. "Now I want you two bigmouthed jackasses t' shake 'n' make up."

"Aw Belle----"

"Cmon now, aint no point argufyin the question," she says, giving them another slap. "That train's due by here any minnit. You in this gang or aint you?"

"Ow! Shore, Belle, but----"

"Then git to it."

"Well. Well awright, damnit, I'm sorry I shot yer bud. It wuz jest I wuz so wound up a-waitin fer that cussed train."

"It dont matter none. T' tell the truth I couldnt hardly suffer that dandified turkeyass anyhow."

"That's a mite better, boys," says the bandit queen, ruffling their hair, and she climbs back up on the loot and tunes up her guitar, while he rests down against the mare again, fingering the gold ring that Belle stole earlier for the bullet hole in his ear and reflecting, as he watches the stars get whipped about by the winds, on the way his own days seem to blow past him out here as though on those winds, and his memory of them, too, swept away as if they never were, leaving only a lingering constellation of habits and impressions that constitutes his dim untidy notion of himself--and constellations, as a crusty old scout once pointed out to him, do not really exist, are merely the local illusion of earthbound ramblers. That's what he said and it seems likely so. Which means he knows nothing, and sometimes less than that when confusions beset him. One impression, for example, that the day has given him is that he probably takes more favorably to breaking the law than to preserving it, but that preference is muddied by a troubling disquiet of the heart, the nature of which he suspects but cannot quite take in, for he has always known himself to be--by trade, druthers and constitution--a free man and a drifter and a loner, not susceptible to such perturbations.

"Them rails hummin yet?" Belle asks.

An eye-patched mestizo with long, black, greasy hair puts his one ear to the rail that he's been squatting on. "Nope. Nuthin."

"Mebbe these aint the right ones," says a bandy-legged old graybeard in a red undershirt and black derby. "Mebbe these're jest more false tracks that consarned train has laid down t' throw us offn its trail."

The black mare behind him lifts her head and shakes it with a dissentious snort. "Them's the tracks, ole man," he says quietly, patting the mare's shoulder. "Dont git antsy. It'll be here soon enough."

To bide the waiting time and calm this restless bunch of high-tempered road riders, Belle sings old camp-meeting favorites about destiny and fast guns, potency and freedom (sumthin howlin, sumthin prowlin, black 'n' hairy on the prairie, she warbles into the dark, windy night, the ruby pin in her cheek so lit up from the campfire it seems more like a window to a furnace in her mouth), and at the end (space without end! amen! amen!) he and the men all join in by throwing their heads back and emitting long, mournful howls which seem to enter into the winds and become part of them and spread over the dimly glowing landscape as though to blanket it with the foggy ache of their unrealized desires.

Slowly the howls fade into the distance, carried away by the departing winds, and in the dense silence that follows, the stringy-haired mestizo puts his ear to the rail and raises his hand and whispers: "It's comin!"

Hastily, they stamp out the fire and don their masks and mount their horses. They can hear it now, wailing dolefully in the distance as though returning their own howls, and heading this way. He steps the black mare into the middle of the track bed to block the train's passage and also to nail the skittery rails in place and the others gather around him, pistols and rifles out, waiting for whatever happens next. The roar augments, the steam whistle bawls, they can hear the rhythmic clatter of the steel wheels drawing ever nearer, but as yet no sign of the train itself.

"We should oughter be seein its light," someone says, and suddenly everything goes silent.

"Whut? Whar'd it go?"

"Shh!"

They stand there in the dead of night, huddled together on their horses atop the short stretch of rails they've secured, scanning the pale empty horizon, nothing to be heard but their own breathing and the occasional stamp of a hoof, someone sucking nervously on a loose tooth. And then, as suddenly as the silence fell, the train is thundering up on them, its whistle shrieking, its headlight swinging above them like a diabolical pendulum, fire belching from its stack, sparks flying from the pounding wheels. Horses rear, riders tumble, some scream and run, but he and the mare stand fast and the train vanishes again. Silence and darkness fall, even deeper than before.

While the other men, mumbling curses, brush themselves off and crawl back onto their horses, the bandit (continued on page 88)Great Train Robbery (continued from page 86) queen sidles up to him on her pony and says: "Whuddayou reckon?"

"Dunno. Must be hidin from us. Tryin to."

"It aint got past?"

"No. It's out thar. Sumwhars." Slowly his eyes, temporarily blinded by the locomotive's headlamp, adjust to the darkness, and he searches the bleak scene for any irregularity which might conceal so great a thing. Mostly just dark clumps of sage, scrub, outcroppings of pale rocks.

"Whut about that ole abandoned silver mine?"

"Silver mine?"

"Over thar. In that little cleft this side a that far butte. See the black hole? It's deep and it's got rails down it coulda used."

He nods. "Aint nuthin else t' choose from." He turns to the old graybeard. "You stay here, ole-timer, and mind them tracks dont sneak off sumwhars. The resta you men come with me."

It's a fair gallop across the vast flat desert to the silver mine, but they cover it in due time, or rather in no time at all, for it seems he's still contemplating the distance they have to travel when they are pulling up at the mouth of the mine on sweaty frothing horses to ponder their next move.

"It's down thar awright," whispers one of the men. "I kin hear it wheezin."

"So, uh, whuddawe gonna do, kid?" It's the trigger-happy humpback, now wearing the wire-rimmed specs on his bulbous nose, the two black disks pupilled each by a reflected star.

"Pears we got no choice. The train's gone down that hole. Ifn we wanta rob it we gotta go down thar, too."

"Uh-huh. Well. Yer probly right." His gnarled hand digs deep into his beard, scratching at the roots. He looks around at the others. "Sumbody should likely oughter go down thar."

The men of the gang, half-circling around, stare at him sullenly in the darkness. There is a lengthy silence, broken only by the train engine letting off a bit of steam deep in the earth. "Awright," he says finally. "But shares accordin." There's some grumbling, but Belle says: "Shore. Heck. That's fair."

As he steps the mare toward the mine shaft, however, she rears and balks, forcing him to dismount (better to go in on foot anyway, he reasons, allows for a better chance of ducking out of its way, should it come cannon-balling up out of there all of a sudden), then plants her body sideways in front of the black mouth of the tunnel, blocking his way down. She snorts pleadingly, rubbing her nose against his buckskin shirt, forcing him back. He steadies himself, one arm over her withers, and whispers into her lowered ear, twitching in front of his nose as if trying to flick flies off it: "It's awright. Aint nuthin down thar but an ole gully-jumper gone off its rails. And anyhow, shoot, you know I aint got no choice."

•

Once, long ago--he remembers this now as he pushes past the distressed mare and steps into the ink-black mine shaft, blindly feeling his way and as though possessed by some unspoken obligement he does not even recognize--he won a woman in a game of stud poker, one of the sort Belle was singing about earlier. She was, as they said about such women, a nymphe du prairie who had killed a lot of men by charming them to death, so there was a price on her head and bounty hunters were after her. In fact he was himself a bounty hunter at that time, so what in effect he had won was $100. His problem was hauling her up to the next fort and cashing her in before rival bounty hunters got to her, so instead of killing her straight off and having to drag her dead weight around, he figured that it was better to keep her on the hoof until he could safely collect. He figured wrong. Should have known better, he was not ignorant of her reputation, but he was young then, and reckless (as if he's grown any wiser: look where he is now), and untutored in the witching ways of professional nymphes du prairie. It was said she cast her necromantic spells through ancient metaphysical member-rubbing techniques, so as a precaution he strapped a holster betwixt his legs and pulled on an extra pair of pants, backward, then gagged her and tied her hands behind her back. Of course that meant that he had to feed and clean her, which tasks led him to the discovery that there were other sorcerous parts of her, and not least her eyes, which never ceased to fix their gaze upon him, a savage gaze, for she was of mixed breed, yet a gaze of such seeming purity and natural goodness that eventually it was all he could see and he was in her power and she was unbound and practicing her murderous skills upon him. The days that followed blurred into a ceaseless present and, as he felt his life essence draining out of him, he lost all sense of time. And place: Even the landscape seemed to change, acquiring a roseate glow which glow in the end was all he could see, the intensity of his pleasure, which was also pain, dissolving the world's salients, dips and bends into a single throbbing rubescent surface that encircled him much as does now this tunnel down which he gropes, itself now also red and pulsing, though that pounding pulse may only be his own, as it no doubt was then, and the redness an illusion cast upon his eyes by the absolute blackness of the mine. Or are now and then the true illusions and is he still in fact ensorcelled, this powerless sinking into the bowels of the earth the nymph's wry theatrical farewell? Perhaps, and yet he seems to recall a sequel, in which, somehow, through force of youthful will, he escaped her dark enchantment and, though almost too weak to stand, subdued and bound her up once more and blindfolded her as well and sought out in the town wherein he soon found himself a preacher who might break the spell. "Well," said the preacher, looking her over with his tired yellow eyes, "we could tote her down to the river 'n' try baptizin her."

"You reckon? Seems a mite tame."

"The way I baptize em, son," said the preacher with a thin black smile, "it either takes or we bury em." So he left her with him and went to the saloon across the way to recover some of his natural vitality. There some men joined him and affably offered to let him buy them a drink and asked him about the light a love he'd towed in trussed up like a mountain cat set for a skinning and he freely told them about her, as they were unarmed and lacked ambition beyond the whiskey remaining in the bottle. "So you turned her over t' that thar ranter whut runs the gospel-mill crost the street?" "I done so. He figgered he could unwitch her with a theologic river-duckin." "Well, pard, I think you jest lost yerself a hunderd bucks. That feller might be a amensnortin pulpit banger on Sundays but rest a the time they aint a more robustious hard-shelled bounty hunter in the Territory." He sat there taking in these ungratifying tidings, feeling his juices starting to churn once more, but unable as yet to set his limbs in adequate motion. "Tell me then," he said. "Whut day's t'day?" "Dunno, but it aint Sunday lest that gospel shark says it is." So, though putting one leg in front of the other still required considerable effort, (concluded on page 174)Great Train Robbery (continued from page 88) he took his rifle and went looking for the preacher and found him naked and sucked down to skin and bone and floating facedown in the river. Never saw the nymph again but he's never been certain that he is shut of her, for she left him full of doubts about the world he walks and about himself and what is real and what is of her conjuring.

•

The train coughs suddenly, quite nearby, startling him, and he presses back against the glowing tunnel wall, but only silence follows. As, cautiously, he edges forward again, it occurs to him (the red walls remind him: yes, they are no illusion) that his fears of its roaring out and running him down have been for naught, for of course the train has ducked down here cowcatcher first and cannot turn around, that red glow being provided by its caboose lantern. Which, as he rounds a falling bend, he sees, rocking faintly to and fro from the heaving tremors of the trapped engine down at the other end. It cowers there, nose buried in the narrowing tunnel like a whipped puppy trying to hide under a haypile.

"Well, well," he says. "Whut depot's this?"

The train lets off an explosive burst of steam and sets its whistle shrieking, its bells clanging, but it's all empty bravado.

He waits for it to cool down and then he says: "They aint no way outta here, you know, cept backin out tailfirst through the hole you come in. It's all uphill, you caint git up no speed, and they's a passel a bodaciously wicked desperadoes up thar jest itchin t' take you apart rivet by rivet when you come crawlin out. So I reckon the best thing fer you t' do is give up yer goods right here and go peaceful."

There's another whistle howl and blast of steam and a rattling of the couplings, the caboose lantern bouncing wildly on its hook at the parlor end and sending shadows leaping about the hellish tunnel, but the train knows well it's beat. A final rackety spasm shudders its length, and then the cars slump forward in defeat, knocking dolefully up against one another, and the caboose lantern ceases to sway and hangs limply in dimmed despond.

"I'll see to it they dont hurt you none," he says, and the train, in abject surrender, sighs grandly and commences to spill out its contents. When it has wholly emptied itself, he leads it, its drivers and steel wheels groaning self-pityingly, back up out of the mine shaft. He feels like he has been down here for weeks, but it has probably not been so long, though he does emerge into midday sunlight, to find his gang still mounted and waiting for him as he left them, the black mare foremost, greeting him at the entrance-way with an eager whinny and nuzzle of his chest. "You kin let the train go, boys," he announces. "We aint got no more use of it. It's dumped all its freight down below. Go hep yerself!"

"Yippee!" the men shout, and leap out of their saddles and, as soon as the train, chugging gloomily, has backed out of the way, they go charging off into the mine, firing their pistols and racing one another for first pick among the goods. He can hear their scampering bootsteps echoing up out of the pitch-black tunnel, the occasional ricocheting shot, their curses as they bounce off the walls and each other and tumble down the shaft. Still sitting on her horse above him, the bandit queen takes her mask off and says: "I got some news fer you, kid." Before she can deliver it, though, they are interrupted by a terrific explosion in the depths of the mine and the tunnel mouth spews forth a macabre and filthy rain. He turns in rage and fires his rifle futilely at the escaping train, showing now only its red-tipped caboose, wagging tauntingly in the sun-bleached distance. He leaps astride his mare, prepared to give chase, but Belle restrains him.

"Whoa, cowboy," she says, grabbing the reins. "Let it go. We didnt need that gang no more anyhow. They've hung sumbody else fer thievin thet hoss. You been pardoned. Yer a free man." He rests back in the saddle, taking in this unexpected news. In the distance, above where the Judas train disappeared, a lonely hawk wheels like a summons. It's time, it spells out upon the slate blue sky in graceful loops and swirls, to put this town behind him. "You kin go back t' bein sheriff agin, darlin. You 'n' me, we kin clean up that disreptile town."

He removes his black hat, blows the muck off, all that's left of his gang and the bandit life. "I dont figger on stayin, Belle," he says. "Dont much cotton to the sheriffin line." The bandit queen looks sorrowed by the news but not surprised. It's who he is after all. "I reckon I'll be pushin on west." He strips off his mask and squints off toward the horizon. Whichever direction that is.

She was a nymphe du prairie who had killed a lot of men by charming them to death.

As soon as the train backed out of the way they go charging off into the mine, firing their pistols.