The Chosen Few

ACT OF LOVE

The old barn, a distance from the road, was nearly hidden by spreading oaks and overgrown grass. At the end of the civil war, the land had belonged to an Indian
woman, but the main house had been stripped of valuables and burned. Now only the barn remained with missing shingles and rusty door hinges, and smelling of rotting wood and faintly of goats, although the hayloft was intact. That spring, dappled with afternoon shadows, it waited for Hope.
She limped toward it, inching through the tall grass, ignoring the buzzing insects, careful not to scrape her wounded leg bandaged with cloth. Panting, she heaved
inside the open barn door, her long skirt and petticoats dirty and torn, tendrils escaping from the blonde neckbun. Trying to catch her breath, she listened to the
shouts of the men seeking her, their heavy boots clumping through the grass. She shrank against the wall and sucked in her breath as the voices approached, sounding as if they’d soon reach her. But just as suddenly the voices receded; the men had passed the path leading to the barn and were heading toward the woods beyond the old farm.
Holding her injured leg, she hobbled to the door. She heard only the beating wings of insects, and blue jays flying past. As she returned to the wall, she heard a
strange noise, and glanced up fearfully toward the dim hayloft.
A man was watching her.
Terrified, she cowered against the wall, wondering if she should try to escape.
Using broken boards like a ladder, the man descended from the hayloft, a rifle strapped to his back. He was a half-breed Indian, wearing leggings, a fringed leather shirt, and a headband. Two reddish plaits hung over his shoulders, one entwined with a single red feather. His eyes were pale brown. Standing motionless, he watched her.
“Help me, please,” she said weakly, sinking to the ground.

“Come with me.” He motioned for her to rise. She felt too weak. He again motioned and she forced herself to stand. Pain pierced her leg; she winced.
“Can you walk?” he said, surprising her by his lack of accent.
“I think so.”
“Good. Let’s go then.”
They walked slowly out of the barn and through the tall grass toward the woods, where they followed a worn path. Sometimes she felt so weak she was afraid of fainting, but the Indian’s patient waiting spurred her. Overhanging tree limbs swept aside, scattering birds that chirped warnings to each other in the forest’s cool mustiness.
An hour later the pair left the woods and headed through open fields of grass and shrubbery. It took another hour to reach the mountains. Along the way, her companion pointed out food, and she filled her skirt with blackberries, cattail roots that tasted like celery, wild carrots that were surprisingly white, acorns and black walnuts.
“You’re not going to eat?” she asked when they stopped for her to rest in a cave behind a copse of oaks.
She reached for the remaining blackberries and hesitated. It didn’t seem right--eating alone.
“You need nourishment,” the Indian said.
Swallowing the berries that dyed her hands brownish red, she studied him as he squatted nearby. He was handsome with Indian features: high cheekbones, clean shaven, and full sensuous lips, his shoulders broad and his waist narrow. He probably came from the reservation near Pemberton. She blushed, and reproached herself for studying his body. He was just an Indian being kind to a white woman.
“I’m glad you liked the food,” he said when she finished, “but you need meat. I’ll hunt for rabbit.”
“What’s your name?”
“Vincent MacDonald.”
Well, some of his folks came from Scotland--same as hers! “What were you doing in the barn?”
He smiled, a forlorn sad smile. “Did I ask you that question?”
“I’m sorry.” She looked away, her blush deepening.
“I’ll take you to Pemberton,” he said. “My aunt lives there. She’ll heal your leg wound.”
“I’m a fugitive,” Hope blurted out. She bit her lip. She shouldn’t confide in strangers. And if she frightened him off, he wouldn’t help her.
He simply nodded.
“A man came into my sewing shop in Centerville. I...didn’t want to...He had a gun...He twisted my arm...Then the gun was in my hand and he fell...”
He nodded. “Let me see your wound.” Stooping, he motioned for her to lift her petticoats.
She flushed and straightened the skirts. “It’s just grazed.”
He smiled then, a beautiful wide smile with strong white teeth.
Hope smiled back, regretting she hadn’t trusted him.
“Can you make it to Pemberton?” he said finally. It’s only a few miles from here.”
She nodded.
“We’ll leave soon,” he said and disappeared into the rear of the damp cave, the cracks lined with mosses and lichen. After awhile he reappeared, a sack tied to his back with leather thongs, along with the rifle. “Come, we must leave.”
She stood, wobbling, and reached toward him to steady herself, but refrained from touching him when she flushed at his nearness.
Leaving the cave, they walked along the mountainside for two hours and reached another forest. There, under a broad oak, she rested. Beyond the clearing, the meadow was filled with wildflowers and humming insects. Hope smiled to herself. She felt like just sitting, smelling the sweet air and watching the birds chattering among themselves. It was the first time she’d felt like this since that awful man came into her shop. She leaned against the tree. She’d almost forgotten how tired she was. Eyes closed, she felt a pelt spread over her.
“Rest now,” the Indian said.
Feeling strangely comforted, she stretched out on the cool grass and slept soundly without dreaming.
The smell of cooking flesh awakened her. Beside her was a greasy tin platter and she ate with her fingers. Rabbit had never tasted so good.
He smiled. “It’s important to eat meat. You’ll recover your strength.”
“Don’t you ever eat?” she said, wishing he wasn’t so good looking, and nice. She didn’t want to fall in love with an Indian, a man from another race. She had enough trouble dodging the Sheriff. She wiped her hands with tree leaves.
“I ate while you slept,” he said. “Can you walk more?”
Nodding, she rose, and followed his tall, graceful body, trying not to imagine it against her, trying not to imagine his arms about her, focusing her attention on his broad back as she followed him slowly through the forest path that paralleled a main road. Occasionally riders on horseback cantered past, and they paused behind the thick shrubbery. At dusk they camped deeper within the forest, and he made a crackling fire.
“Tell me about your family,” she said, her body propped on elbows. The brushwood catching fire showered sparks; his eyes glowed against the flames.
“Please tell me.”
He studied her. “My father was a white attorney, my mother Comanche... I was born and raised in Connecticut.” He stared at the fire and it suddenly blazed.
“Tell me more,” Hope said, wanting him to confide in her.
“After my mother died...my Aunt Tula lived with us and taught me Indian ways. Then...my father died, and Aunt Tula married a white man and they bought that farm...where you and I met...” He paused. “Would you like some coffee?”
She shook her head. “Please keep on.”
“I lived with Aunt Tula for awhile. Then...the reservation near Pemberton.” He gazed at the fire. Hope smiled for him to continue. He shrugged. “You need rest.
We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
She nodded and fell asleep immediately under the pelt, dreaming that she and Vincent started talking and then held hands. She awoke at dawn, startled to see him bent over roasting meat, but staring at her.
“You’re beautiful--” He turned as if embarrassed.
She sighed. He was so different from most men, treating her with respect as if he valued her.
The next day, they began walking again through forest, fields of tall grass and shrubbery, and more forest, stopping only to eat and rest until, a week later, they finally reached Pemberton.
Waiting until dark to traverse the deserted streets, he led her to a small clapboard house near the town’s edge. “Aunt Tula will help you,” he whispered and disappeared into the dusk.
His Aunt Tula, tall and very fat, opened the door with a smile of surprise at Hope’s explanation, and ushered her inside. Aunt Tula had the high cheekbones and straight black hair of an Indian, hanging in plaits like Vincent, but her dark eyes were deep-set above plump cheeks. Wearing a voluminous leather skirt and fringed shirt, she led Hope upstairs to an attic bedroom where she helped her guest remove her tattered clothes. Then, she washed and sterilized the leg gash with wine, and rewrapped the wound with clean cloth.
Smiling, she said, “Rest long as you want. I cook dinner now and wash your clothes.” She gestured toward a steamer trunk at the bed’s foot. “Put on my cousin’s clean dress when you’re ready.”
“Thank you,” Hope said, and watched Aunt Tula lumber down the narrow stairway. In the small room with its homemade pine furniture, she gazed at the yellowing dresser photograph of an adorable baby with reddish hair who vaguely resembled Vincent. Exhausted, she lay under the soft quilts and fell asleep. Vincent’s arms embraced her but as he bent for a kiss she awakened.
It had seemed so real, she could hardly believe it was only a dream. Shaking her head, she rose and opened the trunk. Vincent probably preferred Indian women. Her blue eyes widened with pleasure as she lifted the long leather skirt and fringed tunic that had lain folded atop the clothes. They seemed made for her slender body.
Descending the narrow stairway, she saw Aunt Tula setting bowls of corn and hot biscuits beside a plate of baked meat. The older woman waved a heavy arm for Hope to sit. “So, my young cousin’s clothes fit.”
Hope smiled. “Yes.” She glanced about. “Where’s your nephew? I thought he’d be here for dinner.”
Aunt Tula sighed deeply. “Running Eagle, Vincent, died four years ago. In that barn at Centerville. He visits me sometimes, though you’re the first person he ever brought with him. I love him very much, but it’s no good his spirit can’t find peace.”
Shocked, Hope stared at Aunt Tula. “That can’t be! I was with him for many days, he told me about himself--”
Aunt Tula smiled, a sad little smile like Vincent’s, as if she, too, wished she didn’t have to explain. “It is only his spirit, but it should rest.”
Hope trembled, wondering if Aunt Tula were sane, but the small dark eyes gazed with serenity and pity at Hope’s disbelief. Finally, Hope whispered, “How...did he... die?”
“When white folks set my farm on fire, he tried to save my goats in the barn, but got trapped.
“Ohhh...” Hope stared through the window at the general store across the street, and reproached herself; she shouldn’t want something she could never have.
She stayed in Pemberton for two months, helping Aunt Tula by sewing poke bonnets to sell in the general store. Once, Vincent suddenly stood beside her reflection in the bedroom mirror. Gasping, she turned to touch him and he was gone. Had he really been there? Or had she wanted him there so badly she only imagined his presence?
“Forget Running Eagle,” Aunt Tula said over her sewing. “You’re still young and pretty. You could find a husband to take care of you.”
“I don’t want someone else,” Hope replied, her gaze fastened on the lace she added to a bonnet.
Aunt Tula sighed. “No good mooning over a dead man--like chasing a dream.” She put down the sewing basket and rose. “Come, I’ll show you his grave. Then you’ll see that it’s better to forget him.”
“All right,” Hope said, reluctantly, and heard a knocking at the door. Maybe it was Vincent! She flew to open it and recognized the gray-haired, mustached sheriff from Centerville.
“Ma’am, I’m here to arrest you for murder,” he told Hope who stared at him dumbly. “Will you come peacefully or do I need these?” He dangled handcuffs.
She bit her lip. “I won’t give you any trouble.”
He politely led her to the wagon outside. Before climbing in, she embraced Aunt Tula.
“I’ll visit you,” the older woman said, and scowled at the grim-faced sheriff tugging at the horses’ reins after Hope settled beside him on the front seat.
During the journey, she scanned the countryside, hoping Vincent would again help her. If only she could talk with him, just for a moment, jail wouldn’t seem so hard.
Resigned to her solitude, she spent her first night lying on the cell bed and staring at the barred window. Suddenly she heard the same strange noise that she’d heard in the barn. She quickly rose and looked outside. Vincent stood there, a finger hovering across his lips. She nodded and waited. Soon afterwards, she heard a thud against the floor. Vincent suddenly stood at her jail cell. He turned the key noiselessly in the lock and motioned her outside. They hurried past the sheriff sprawled on the floor.
“You’ll be safe with my relatives at the reservation,” Vincent said.
She looked directly at him and noticed now the eerie glow in his pale brown eyes. Sharing confidences around the campfires, she’d thought it was only a reflection from firelight. She should have realized... Maybe she hadn’t wanted to... She shuddered then, knowing she’d fallen in love with a being beyond understanding, perhaps a devil from hell...
She swallowed hard and fought her fears. “I want to go with you.”
He shook his head. “You would become a spirit, like me, no longer a person.”
“I don’t care,” she whispered, and tried to embrace him, but her hands touched only mist.
“Close your eyes,” he said, and she felt a gentle kiss on her neck that made her tingle and feel that anything was possible.
“Hope...Hope...Hope...” He repeated her name as though he couldn’t believe they were together. “You can’t come with me, I can’t ask this of you.”
“Do you want me?” she whispered.
“Should I lie and say no?”
“Then please let me go with you.”
He hesitated. “It’s wrong. You’re alive and beautiful. There are other men...”
“I love you,” she said and closed her eyes again. She clung to the sweetness of his kiss on her lips. She’d follow him anywhere, no matter what he was.
After the jail break, Hope Elizabeth Murdock vanished and no one, not even Aunt Tula, knew what happened to her. Because Vincent stopped visiting, the heavy-set woman searched his cave. One evening she visited the old barn she’d once owned,
knowing that her nephew’s spirit often stayed there. The barn, slanted with twilight shadows, rose against the gray sky. Aunt Tula looked up in the tall grass, her heavy arms shading her eyes.
She shouted, “Running Eagle, tell us what happened to her!” Cupping her hands around her mouth to increase the loudness, she repeated the question four times as was the Indian custom.
There was only silence.
She scanned the barn’s interior, then awkwardly climbed the broken boards, gasping to catch her breath. Reaching the hayloft, she sat heavily for a moment and rested, glancing about. Suddenly she smiled. Near the wall, a red feather protruded between floorboards, encircled by a honey-blonde curl.

THE CURE-ALL MACHINE

Henry found the machine by accident. He was a meek accountant plodding along in a dreary electronics firm, and saddled with a coarse, domineering wife. To escape his unhappiness, he’d become a film buff. One Saturday afternoon, enthusiastic over an Ingmar Bergman preview, he arrived at the Greenwich Village theater an hour early and decided to wander around, window shopping. On a narrow side street off Waverly Place, in the cluttered window of Abraham’s Curio Shop, there glittered an odd, metallic cube. Henry paused to examine it, shading his eyes from the sun’s glare. Wide as a shoe box, the cube had a green knob, and above that a small printed card that read FRONT. Sprouting from the top, like antennae, were two levers: the left painted silver; the right, gold. Impetuously, he stepped inside the musty shop crammed with exotic wares, reminiscent of the biblical Middle East. Hearing the doorbell tinkle, a swarthy young man wearing a skull cap of many colors emerged leisurely from the rear, threading his way among tambourines, frolicking camels, and kissing shepherds.
“I’d like to see that unusual thing in the window,” Henry said.
“Which unusual thing?”
“That metal cube with the knob and levers.”
“Oh, you mean the Cure-All Machine.” The young man removed the heavy object and placed it in Henry’s hands.
He turned it about for inspection. Each side had a knob: green, yellow, red, and a larger black one in back. He tugged gently at the gold lever; it wouldn’t budge.
Juggling the cube, he heard something rustle inside, but couldn’t find an opening.
“Why is it called a Cure-All Machine?”
The young man shrugged. “Don’t know. Some flipped-out professor talked me into buying it this morning.”
“Well, I’ll take it!” Henry said, watching the cube sparkle. “It has a mysterious, fascinating quality.”
Excited over this strange purchase, he postponed the film and caught the East Side subway to his small Bronx apartment, which his wife had decorated with garish furniture and idiotic ornaments. In the peppermint-striped living room, he set the cube on the gilded coffee table; then he called out for Evelyn to come and look.
Annoyed because her hair was only half-set, his fat wife appeared in gaudy orange robe, her lips pursed as though expecting every plan to turn sour. Hands fisted on hips, she glanced at the object, and said, “Now what in hell is that, Mr. Smart?”
“A Cure-All Machine,” he replied timidly, worried she’d disapprove. “Intriguing, isn’t it?”
“Intriguing, hell! If you think I’ll allow that monstrosity in my lovely home, you’re nuts. Get rid of it this minute!” In a huff, she snapped back a bleached hank of hair and flounced into the ebony bathroom, where she spent most of her time.
Fond of the object by now, especially since Evelyn had rejected it, Henry sat disconsolately on the leopard-skin sofa. “Hmmm, I wonder why it’s called a Cure-All Machine,” he mused, and pressed the green knob on the FRONT side. Instantly, a slot opened at the bottom of the cube, and a printed card slipped out. It read:
* Test Case No. 2... Your name, please? I am called Havohej. Press the yellow knob, and I will satisfy your desires. All I ask in return is appreciation. **
Aha! A sort of modern Aladdin’s Lamp--his Ship of Good Luck finally arrived! Filled with hope, he pressed the yellow knob. “This is Henry Farnsworth. Please, give me self-confidence. Make me aggressive so I can get a promotion, and--”
Before he finished, bluish smoke spiraled up from the gold lever. Astonished, Henry watched the smoke hover like a cloud above his head and then melt away. He felt a peculiar exhilaration, an ecstatic giddiness--like a mystical experience. As he sat there basking in riotous contentment, the red knob flashed on the machine and a card slipped out. It read: * You forgot to say thank you. **
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” he babbled happily but absentmindedly, for he began debating other requests. They were sensible things. For example, he often regretted that his marriage was empty, he and Evelyn barely tolerating each other. If only she were more sympathetic, understood his needing films as an outlet... He pressed the yellow knob, and asked that Evelyn be kinder. Sure enough, as soon as the smoke cleared, she appeared.
“Henry, I’ve been thinking... If that damn thing means that much to you, you can keep it!”
Elated by her acquiescent attitude, he watched her return thoughtfully to the bathroom. Right afterwards, however, the red knob flashed and another card slipped out. It read: * You didn’t say you love me. **
“Of course, I love you,” he whispered, puzzled at the machine’s petulant demand for affection. He studied the cube awhile. Havohej was very valuable; it shouldn’t just sit about. Jumping up, he stuffed it among the junk in the bedroom closet, where his wife wouldn’t discover it since she never cleaned the closets.
“Oh, I threw out the eyesore,” he explained later, and planned on making requests gradually to avoid aggravating his sensitive benefactor.
Monday, reporting to work, he was delighted by his cheerful manner. He’d always approached dreary Tenth Avenue with a sinking feeling that the squat gray corner building was his tomb. Now, he strode briskly through the dingy corridor toward his cubicle, and energetically attacked a pile of invoices. After lunch, the haughty president signaled him into the plush corner office with its paneling and mahogany desk.
“Farnsworth, I’ve been thinking... For thirty years you’ve done your job competently, never missed a day, never asked for a raise, never complained. Well, I’m promoting you to comptroller with appropriate salary.”
Overjoyed at this marvelous news, Henry could hardly wait to tell his wife. That evening, he hurriedly climbed the four flights in his brownstone, his heart palpitating from excitement and the hot, crowded subway. He sometimes suffered from a heart murmur, but now he had a cure. While Evelyn fussed in the bathroom, he finished his bowl of greasy stew, hauled out the machine, fondly patted the gold lever, and stated his request. After the smoke cleared, his heart never felt better. This time, though, he waited for the flashing red knob and card. It read:
* A pat on my lever is insufficient. To show proper thanks for my supreme generosity, worship me. **
“No!” It debased his pride, groveling to a machine. Besides, he’d always considered religious rites a bunch of nonsense. The next card read:
* Warning! Your rejection hurts my feelings. Console me at once with worship--or suffer a penalty! **
Henry thought for a moment, and pressed the yellow knob. “What penalty?”
The machine didn’t respond.
“What is the penalty!” he shouted, growing frantic.
His benefactor pouted in silence.
Fearful of punishment, he kneeled on the purple rug and bowed his head, hands steepled as for prayer. “Dear Havohej,” he mumbled, feeling foolish. “I love you, beg your forgiveness, and promise to obey your commands.”
It wasn’t so much worship of a machine that bothered him; after all, it was a silly formality--like praying to a church icon. But considering the cube’s excessive need for gratitude, he thought he should be handsomely rewarded. One night after arguing with Evelyn over seeing a Kubrick film, Henry recklessly requested that his crude, ignorant wife have a fatal accident. The very next morning, she slipped on a hair roller in the bathroom, banged her head against an iron Cupid, and died.
He attended the funeral and sadly returned home--feeling like a murderer. Filled with remorse, he wandered through the apartment, and glanced wistfully at her portrait on the shocking pink dresser. Finally, he sat on the sofa and stared glumly at the machine, now perched on the coffee table. The red knob flashed. Reluctantly, he reached for a long card, that began quite poetically:
* I am the Good Shepherd who leadeth thou into green pastures of delights: the comfort of thy soul. But...to repay my benevolence, you must erect for me in thy bedroom a shrine as per specifications on the ***Holy Testament*** cards that I shall emit forthwith. Sunday, at sunrise, pull the gold lever and say: Hail, oh Glorious Divine Machine--to Thee I owe all! Repeat the above every hour, ending at sunset. **
“Is that enough?” Henry muttered sarcastically, feeling somewhat bitter about the machine killing his wife. The next card read:
* Your attitude is not loving! To avert my wrath, you’d better offer me succulent sacrifices, such as tenderloin, medium rare, easy on the gravy, and a tossed salad--I prefer Roquefort dressing. Be sure the rolls are hot and crisp, not soggy! **
“But, Havohej, a machine can’t eat human food!”
* Despite my superb gifts, you insult me with heretical notions. Therefore, pull the silver lever to learn thy penalty. **
“No! Why should I pull the lever and suffer for it?”
* Foolish mortal. Get smart, Henry, and pull the lever--or you’ll be sorry! **
Bracing himself, he pulled the silver lever.
* As penance, you must worship me for an entire week, which you will celebrate every year as a holiday in remembrance of your joyful benefactor. Furthermore, your sacrificial dishes had better be gourmet, such as... Beef Wellington with Yorkshire Pudding. For dessert, let’s see now... Ah, flaming Cherries Jubilee! (This is tricky, so be careful.) Oh, I’d also like a bottle of good wine, and some lighted candles. Make sure they don’t over drip. **
Henry dropped the card in astonishment. “A week’s worship is impossible! I can’t take off from work whenever I feel like. Besides, there are important art films I haven’t seen. De Sica is due Wednesday, and Saturday I want to catch Kurosawa’s--”
* Oh, child of Havohej, I shall set thee on the righteous path. Forget such sinful ideas as art with its graven images, and concentrate solely on me--a wondrous being. **
“Forget art films?” cried Henry, horrified. “Forget the enjoyable hobby I’ve spent years studying? Never!”
* You are being stupid by shunning my commandments. But enough of this quibbling! Start praying, fast, or I’ll really get sore. And once my wrath is aroused, cities may burn down, a whole civilization scattered like seed in the wind... There’s just no telling how far “Okay!” Henry shouted, not finishing the card. He was thoroughly alarmed. The machine had become a Frankenstein’s monster, a glutton for adoration! Henceforth, he would avoid further requests, and devise a plan to dispose of his threatening benefactor.
That weekend he erected the shrine--a kind of tented minaret, squeezed between the bedroom closet and pink dresser. For hours he labored with knotty pine, hammer and nails, following the instructions of the *** Holy Testament *** cards. Worded in a peculiar archaic English, the meaning was often contradictory and obscure.
Improvising, he grabbed from the dresser Evelyn’s two pearly angels, crowning the striped canvas tent with the grinning cherubim, and installed Havohej on a fluffy, cotton-lined ledge within. He finished Saturday night, exhausted. Setting the alarm clock, he rose sleepily at dawn to being the rituals.
As the week progressed, Henry learned how draining continual worship can be. Unable to leave the apartment lest the machine need his services, he waited on the sofa, glancing at his watch to check the hour, and wracked his brain for a plan to destroy his captor. He felt like a prisoner in his own home, and yearned to see an art film to alleviate his misery.
By Thursday, he could bear it no longer. That morning, he slyly ordered some delicious sweet and sour spareribs from the Yin Yang Restaurant across the street.
Storing in the refrigerator the unconsumed Eggs Benedict served for breakfast, he purified the plate, as per the *** Holy Testament *** cards, and set the steaming spareribs on the shrine’s offering table. Then he spent the entire afternoon abjectly declaring his total love and obedience--interjecting for dramatic effect a fervent
“Amen!” and “Hallelujah!”
After awhile the cube began to radiate a warm glow, a golden aura that hovered over its levers like a halo. Henry, resting a moment, gaped at this strange sight, and noticed the red knob flashing. The card read, as though purring:
* More... more...”
Anxious now to appease his benefactor’s insatiable need for affection, he jumped up and wildly promised all sorts of goodies: a marble temple at Sutton Place, a cup of his blood poured daily over the altar, and other grandiose commitments he couldn’t possibly keep. Finally, he closed the velvet curtains, and sneaked out to Greenwich Village, where he saw an absorbing Fellini film. He returned several hours later, having thoroughly enjoyed himself, and feeling refreshed.
Entering the apartment, he heard an eerie hissing sound from the bedroom--like escaping steam. He rushed to the shrine and yanked apart the curtains. Bluish smoke billowed from the gold lever, the red knob flashing hysterically. For a moment he stood petrified with awe, not knowing what to expect. A card shot through the slot. It read, bitterly:
* Ah, the selfish wretch returns at last! The pure savor my omnipotence; they shall enter the kingdom of contentment. But the sinner who scorns my company--what a damned fool! **
“I only left for three hours,” Henry said sheepishly, wishing he hadn’t dropped by the Happy Hippie Bar for a cocktail. But what a relief--away from his tormentor!
The next card read, coaxingly: * Come, reconsider; it’s not too late. Cast aside your evil thoughts. Let thy heart dwell only on me, the Wonderful One. Just ask and it shall be given unto you. Everything... everything... **
“Except freedom,” he muttered in disgust.
The next card read, whiningly: * I am superior, magnificent, a glory of perfection! So, where are the converts you promised? Where are the pretty virgins? The candelabra? Exotic prayer beads? Where’s the mushroom pizza for my late-night snack! **
Fed up with the machine’s childish chatter, Henry said impatiently, “Okay, you shelled out a few nice things, but look what you want in return--my enslavement!” Wearily, he reached for the next card that struggled through the slot.
* ... You...You... abominable golden calf! For your impiety I shall cast you into hell! Miseries will be heaped upon your head--aye, unto your entire family, even the seventh generation! First, I’ll send a catastrophic flood; then, I’ll demolish survivors with fire and brimstone. Wailing in sackcloth and ashes, they’ll beg my forgiveness, but I’ll stand firm--not one drop of mercy! Oh, boy, just you wait; will I get even with you and yours! **
Furious, Henry hurled the card at his snarling benefactor. “Go ahead, do your worst! Demote me at work, bring Evelyn back--I don’t care. I’m sick and tired of your asinine demands and obnoxious bragging!” Then, too angry to weigh the consequences, he threw the machine on the shaggy rug, and gave it a swift kick--right in the gold lever. For several moments it writhed like some obscene animal, sputtering bluish smoke. Henry watched with satisfaction. Maybe, if angered enough, it would somehow self-destruct.
He suddenly felt a stabbing pain--like the onset of a heart attack. Clutching at his chest, he frantically sought a way to deactivate the machine before it destroyed
him, and impetuously pressed the black knob in back. His heaving benefactor shuddered with a violent tremor, and abruptly lay stock still, the smoke vanishing.
Weak from his ordeal, though the pain was gone, Henry bent for a final, somewhat mangled card that had wriggled through the slot. It read, as if gasping in rage:
* ... *@&+! ...Ready for *@&+! ...computer invented by Professor Jacobs. Fulfill man’s need for god by duplicating biblical Jehovah. Ready... Test Case *@&+! Destroy Farnsworth. Kill him! No, please, not that black knob, you ungrateful schnook! All I asked for was appreciation... appreciation... apprecia

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Gaynell Gowrie Briggs knew that her mind was going, knew that she could not do anything about it, and knew that she was not going to care greatly. She would dress well and groom herself properly for as long as she could, and others would probably do that for her as long as she could not. She would hurt others when the outside world fogged up and she withdrew into herself, but she had always hurt others without meaning to, just as others had always hurt her.
She had hurt her husband Tom Briggs most of all. Tom was a genuinely good man who deserved a lot of things. He deserved a million dollars and had almost had it a couple of times, but he enjoyed the wheeling and dealing more than he enjoyed the possession itself. If he ever achieved a dream, he would inevitably parlay that into the next dream until the whole structure collapsed. Then he would start over with another big scheme and would keep on doing that until he died.
Tom deserved a kind of love she had never been able to give him. It was not just the lack of children, although that was part of it. Gaynell had always been afraid of the pain of childbirth. Her own mother had never really recovered from her birth and had died when Gaynell was five years old. Her aunt had died giving birth to her cousin Flossie. Another aunt and her husband had adopted Flossie. She could remember being present at the birth of her cousin Morgan’s son Cletus when she was thirteen. The screams of Morgan’s wife Annie terrified her, although Annie soon recovered and pretended that it had been nothing at all. Her stepmother had also pretended that it had been all in a day’s work a year later when her half-sister Ernestine had been born, but she had heard the screams then, too.
It was more than just the fear of physical pain. She had let others get the impression that she was afraid of having a child by Tom, who was a huge man with huge bones, but that was not really true. Others supposed that she did not want Tom’s children because of the persistent rumors about a scandal in Tom’s ancestry, but that was not true either. It was mostly that she feared she would be an unloving mother, a terribly incompetent mother in all essential ways. Although a gracious hostess when someone else was doing all the real work, she was never a competent housekeeper, never a willing housekeeper, and the details of taking care of a demanding baby would have been quite beyond her.
It was getting worse now that her memory was going. Ernestine would come over and find tablecloths that should have been washed but had just been put away in a drawer after being used. Tom, who loved to cook and had grown up in a series of lunch wagons, would chide her about unwashed pots and exposed sandwich makings. Tom did his best to help, but he was busy with a million schemes, currently centered on real estate. Gaynell was increasingly unable to cope by herself.
Tom had no close family of his own and loved being part of hers. He doted on Ernestine’s children and on the children of her cousins before that. He loved big family gatherings even when his other troubles sometimes made him drink too much. He loved the camaraderie of politics and business and the social life that was part of that. He loved being the center of attention and never got enough of it, not even during those times when he had held public office. He had adored her, been kinder to her than she deserved. She had been kind in return, but that had never been enough.
Once for a few years in the 1950s she thought she had found a niche where she could truly help Tom, one in which she really belonged. Tom had used his political influence to get the franchise for a television station. In those days a lot of daytime programming was local, and Gaynell conducted a popular daily interview show. She had her beautiful black hair, just beginning to be touched by gray, done up by a professional every broadcast day. She interviewed passing authors and civic club speakers, winners of prizes at the county fair, aspiring politicians and enthusiastic hobbyists of all sorts. It did not last. Echota, Oklahoma proved to be too small a market for television. Tom eventually had to sell the station to entrepreneurs who re-centered the station on Oklahoma City. Somehow Gaynell did not have what it took to make it as a television personality in a larger market. Perhaps, she thought, she lacked warmth.
She had warmth enough for a succession of pampered cocker spaniels. She had enjoyed helping to raise her half-sister Ernestine, she enjoyed being an aunt to Ernestine’s children and to her cousin Flossie Bickam’s children, too, especially when they reached the age to make intelligent conversation. She had enjoyed college, especially the subtle lessons in refinement that had been part of the privilege of being a member of a good sorority. She had majored in English. She had tried teaching for a year after graduation, but she had no talent for keeping order and little interest in the standard curriculum. She was a good enough writer to work for a small town weekly newspaper that Tom Briggs had owned for many years, but she had no extraordinary talent.
She read constantly and liked a lot of the current best sellers and Southwestern regional writers like Tom Lea, whom she had met during the war when Tom Briggs was stationed at Fort Bliss. However, her favorites were detective stories and related genres. They ended with discovery, rational explanation, and a sense of order restored if only temporarily. She was delighted when her cousin Flossie’s son Max Bickam developed the same taste in early adolescence. Gaynell bought Max a subscription to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as a Christmas present when he was twelve, and they enthusiastically discussed their favorites together. Long-playing records were beginning to be available then, and she and Max shared a love of classical music that was rare in that time and place. The music, too, had a quality of tapping unruly passion and then ordering it that she liked.
Sometimes she and Max disagreed about books. He highly recommended a World War I spy novel by Manning Coles called Drink to Yesterday, but Gaynell was disappointed when it ended with the death of the protagonist, a meaningless death as far as she could see, as meaningless as the war itself. Her cousin Oliver Gowrie had died of the flu at the end of that war, and her cousin Caleb Gowrie had come home from it with the tuberculosis that killed him a few years later. Tom Briggs had spent World War II editing an army camp newspaper, Ernestine’s husband Herman Betz and all her Gowrie relatives had survived, and she was glad of that. She preferred death as a puzzle to be solved rather than the mess it often was in the real world.
Max’s favorites soon became the hard-boiled characters of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, men who managed to embody an astringent virtue in a world of bottomless corruption. Gaynell preferred the Perry Mason novels of Erle Stanley Gardner. She devoured each new one in the series as soon as it was available. She especially loved the parts where Perry Mason would trick the real killer into confessing right in the courtroom. Somehow she would dream that she was confessing on the witness stand and somehow felt relieved that her secrets were now out in the open and the world was in balance again.
The details of those dreams would fade when she woke up, but she had an idea of the reality behind the things to which she had confessed. In a few months of 1934 she had had the only really passionate sexual relation of her life with a bank robber who was also a killer. She had helped make his legend and had wanted to share the doom of a man who knew he was doomed.
A lot of it, especially the passion she had felt, would always be her secret, although kind and friendly Tom Briggs must have guessed it and had done everything humanly possible to supply its loss. Her uncle Hab Gowrie had known about the hideout and known that his niece was involved. Her father Zeke Gowrie had known enough to prevent her from going to her death. Even her cousin Flossie’s husband Henry Bickam had made a shrewd guess about the relationship. None of these ever talked to her about it afterward and others who might have had suspicions held their peace, too. It had ended, as she always knew it would, in death, a death that she had wanted to share. Parts of the rest of her life had been good, but she knew nothing would ever match that intensity.
Now in 1977 at the age of sixty-six, she knew that her mind was going. They called it Alzheimer’s disease now. When the mind of her aunt Lorena Maxson had gone the same way in the 1940s and 1950s it had just been called senility, something that happened to a lot of old people. They still had no clue as to what might be done about it. She knew she would have good days and bad days but that finally there would be only bad days and a death of which she would be unaware and others barely so.
Was there anything worth saving, worth anyone else’s remembrance? The letters, maybe. The first drafts were in her handwriting. She had made her outlaw lover Cowboy Buddy Logan laboriously copy them by hand before they were sent to the newspapers. They had been printed and reprinted in newspapers and magazines all over the country and had made the temporary fortune of the Choloneh Plainsman. They had made Buddy famous the way he had always wanted to be, but she, Gaynell Gowrie, had written them. They were her immortality, too.
An FBI agent had checked the letters that came into Tom Briggs’s weekly paper in Choloneh. Comparing them with samples of Cowboy Buddy Logan’s handwriting they had from other sources, he pronounced them authentic.
“The thing I don’t understand, though,” the agent had said, “is how this man who never had much real schooling and could barely complete a sentence in the last orphanage that he ran away from does it. Now all of a sudden writes letters that have a bigger audience than William Allen White or Arthur Brisbane. This hick bank robber writes like a cross between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Will Rogers.”
Gaynell was pleased. She had graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a degree in English, but her writings had never been singled out for praise there. She had found most of the literature she had been required to read rather boring. Yet the first of the letters in Logan’s handwriting that had been sent to the Choloneh Plainsman contained a classical allusion that caught the imagination of the public.
I am told the ancient Greek hero Achilles was given a choice between a long and peaceful life and a short and glorious life. He chose glory. I would make the same choice. There is no war going on now that I would care to fight, but I have decided to get my glory robbing banks. These banks squeeze the farmer and the small town merchant for all they can get, then pretend to go broke so they can take every penny that people have saved. The posters call me a public enemy, but these banks are the real public enemy. I have always shared out what I had with people who needed it, and I will continue to do that until I am killed.
I know I will be killed. The police, all over the country, work for the bankers, and I have never needed more than a couple of friends to knock over a bank. I am outnumbered, but that is all right. I have chosen the short and glorious life.
Two months later H. L. Mencken praised that letter in the American Mercury: “This young hoodlum has a panache that should be the envy of our windbag politicians and juiceless professors. In the unlikely event that he survives a few more years, he may define our age as Francois Villon defined his.” Gaynell had put that paragraph in the same manila envelope as her drafts of Buddy’s letters and the clippings about him.
The first robbery of which Buddy was in charge earned him the nickname Cowboy. He and an associate had tied a rope around the safe of a bank in Moscow, Oklahoma, and tied the rope to a pick-up truck. They then pulled the safe through the back door of the bank, splintering the doorframe. After loading the safe on the truck bed, Buddy had flourished the rope with a whoop and holler as his partner drove him and the safe away. The banner headlines next day said: COWBOY ROBS BANK.
That day Tom Briggs told his only reporter Gaynell Gowrie to write something about the early Spring that would exactly fill a hole of four column inches in the paper that was going to press the next day. “The haberdashery is going broke and can’t pay for their ad,” he said.
Gaynell thought a few lines of verse would be in order, even though that was difficult for a printer to set in type. She drove her flivver to one of her favorite spots, the cottonwood-lined creek on one edge of the farm that her cousin Luke Gowrie had lost to the bank the previous fall. Her uncle, Hab Gowrie, had used that secluded spot for manufacturing whiskey for forty years. She was not surprised to see the remains of a campfire near where she parked, for hobos often stayed overnight there.
She was surprised when she heard the sound of a gun cocking and a voice that said, “Don’t move, girlie. Don’t move a muscle.” Gaynell wanted to scream but somehow could not make a sound.
“We got a visitor, Buddy,” the voice said. “What do you want me to do with her?”
“Her?” Buddy asked. “Let me have a look.” Gaynell stiffened with fear.
The one called Buddy came around to the front of the car. He was just short of six feet tall, slim and hard-muscled. His light brown hair was neatly parted, and he had just shaved. He was not wearing a collar or tie, but his vest was buttoned up. His two-toned shoes looked freshly polished, and he wore spats. Gaynell wondered how he could be so neatly turned out if he had spent the night camping out. He had a very pleasant smile.
“Who might you be, young lady?” he asked. “And what are you doing here?”
“My name is Gaynell Gowrie from Choloneh,” she said. “I drove out here because this is pretty country and I have an assignment to write something about it for the local paper. This land used to belong to my cousin before the bank took it and to my uncle before that. My father is thinking of buying it when times get better.”
“We found what looks like part of a still,” Buddy said. “Was your cousin a bootlegger?”
“The still belongs to my uncle, Hab Gowrie,” Gaynell said. “He’s not a bootlegger. He just makes enough for family and friends.”
“That sounds like a real gentlemanly way to deal with whiskey,” Buddy said. “You wouldn’t happen to have any of that whiskey with you?”
Gaynell blushed. Last December Tom Briggs had traded a display ad for Hab Gowrie’s hardware store for a couple of quart bottles of Hab’s 1921 batch. He had given one bottle to his printer and kept the other in a locked drawer of his desk. Gaynell had learned to drink at college, although she never drank much. More as a way to tease than anything else, she kept telling Tom that she wanted a drink of his whiskey for Christmas. On Christmas day Tom presented her with a flask with her monogrammed initials on it full of her uncle Hab’s whiskey. She kept the flask under the seat cushion of her car. She had not had a drink out of it since her first sip four months before. She reached under the seat cushion and pulled it out.
“My friend Hank here claims to be a judge of good whiskey,” Buddy said. “Do you mind if he has a nip?”
Gaynell shook her head. Hank came around to stand by Buddy. He had eased down the hammer on his revolver and set the safety. He wore a threadbare jacket over his overalls and had not shaved that day or the previous day. He opened the flask, took a sip, and then a swig, holding the liquor in his mouth appreciatively.
“This is very good stuff,” Hank said, “about as smooth as I have ever tasted. It has spent a lot of years in the keg.”
Hank handed the flask to Buddy. Buddy looked to Gaynell before he drank. She nodded. It was obviously stronger liquor than he was used to. He wiped the mouth of the flask carefully before handing it back to Gaynell. She politely took a sip before placing it back under the seat cushion. She had no idea what might happen next. Buddy was obviously dangerous and his dangerousness increased his attractiveness. Looking down the creek bed, Gaynell could see a pick-up truck with a safe resting on its bed. Buddy followed her gaze.
“You’ve figured out who we are, then,” he said. “We had business with the bank in Moscow yesterday.”
Gaynell nodded.
“Now we have two problems,” Buddy said. “What do we do with that safe, and what do we do with you?”
“That safe belongs to the bank,” she said. “I think you ought to return it.”
Buddy laughed. “Hank,” he said, “this lady has a lot of sense. We have what we needed out of that safe and have no further use for it. When we have taken it back, we can return this pick-up that we borrowed from a farmer without his permission and get our own car.”
“Do you think this girl is good at forgetting?” Hank asked.
“No matter what I think, I never hurt a woman and I never intend to,” Buddy said. “She shared her flask with us right away. I think she’s on the square.”
“You’re the boss,” Hank said.
“Miss,” Buddy said, “I will trouble you for one more thing. I need to write that bank a note. Do you have pencil and paper?”
Gaynell handed him the notebook in which she had intended to write her poem about Spring and also the fountain pen her stepmother had given her when she went away to college.
Miss Gaynell Gowrie, you have fancy writing equipment,” Buddy said. Gaynell thrilled when he pronounced her name. He wrote for a while, then returned the notebook and pen to her. She read the note:
Dear bank,
I am returning this safe because I have no further use for it. I am keeping the money, about six hundred dollars, and don’t try to claim it was more. There were a lot of morgage papers and stuff that I burned. I hope you have no copies so you cannot foreclose on folks. We did not blow up your safe. We just took the back off it, which we done easy. You can screw it back on.
Sincerly,
Gaynell looked at the note. “You have misspelled mortgage and sincerely. You need to say ‘we did easily’ rather than ‘we done easy’. Otherwise it is a very good note.”
“Are you a schoolteacher?” Buddy asked.
“I was,” Gaynell said. “I was not very good at it.”
Buddy took a new notebook sheet and corrected the note according to Gaynell’s suggestions. He handed the sheet to her.
“You didn’t sign it,” she said.
“I am not real, really anxious for people to know my name just yet. They’ll know it soon enough.”
“This morning’s Wichita Beacon says, ‘COWBOY ROBS BANK’,” she said.
Buddy signed the note “Cowboy.”
“This has been a very pleasant meeting,” Buddy said. “I would take it kindly if you would not say anything about it. This is a good place, and we might like to come back here some time. I would like to see you again, too. I never met a lady as nice as you before.”
“I would like to see you,” Gaynell said before she could stop herself. She drove back to town and immediately typed exactly four column inches of fervent prose about the floating seeds of the cottonwood trees. Tom Briggs was pleased.
It was a great year for bank robbers. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis, Ma Barker and her boys, and others were operating in 1934, and many of them died before that year was out. The automobile made it possible to rob slackly defended small town banks and be out of the range of local law enforcement officials quickly. Bank robbers were popular in a depression year when many people believed banks had robbed them. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had just begun its unparalleled publicity campaign against wanted robbers.
Gaynell searched the newspapers that daily came into the Choloneh Plainsman. Within a week in Stanton, Kansas another safe had been pulled through the back wall of a bank. The leading robber there had been described as handsome and well mannered. Gaynell was sure that had been Buddy. Still later a clerk at a resort hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas that was robbed during a Baptist convention recognized the robber as Buddy Logan, whom he had known ten years before in an orphanage in Henryanna, Texas.
Soon the newspapers had abundant information on the background of the now legendary Cowboy Buddy Logan. He had been born in 1910 on a farm that his parents had homesteaded on the former Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation near Mountain View, Oklahoma. A train killed both his parents at a grade crossing in 1920. He was sent to a Baptist church orphanage. He ran away from it two years later and became incensed when he found a bank had foreclosed the mortgage on his parents’ farm. He was sent to another orphanage for problem boys in Nebraska and ran away from there in 1925 at the age of fifteen. The next year he returned to the area where he had been born and was arrested for assaulting a bank official who had gained possession of what Buddy Logan still regarded as his family homestead. A local jury refused to convict him of that, but Oklahoma City police arrested him a few months later for riding with some friends in a car that proved to be stolen. He served six months in a reformatory and never reported to a parole officer after his release.
He got a job as a counterman in a diner in Bowman City, Texas. He impressed a traveling salesman there who got him a job selling hardware wholesale all over the Southwest and Midwest. Buddy Logan saved his money, acquired a wardrobe and demeanor that earned him good commissions, and had dreams of some day opening up a hardware store of his own. Then in 1933 when he was twenty-three years old, the company for which he was working went bankrupt while owing him several hundred dollars in commissions, and the bank in which he had placed his savings failed also.
Buddy Logan decided to become a bank robber. After apprenticing for some months as a lookout or driver for a more established gang, he decided to go into business for himself. He knew very well that his career as a bank robber was likely to be a short one, but he cared little. His first three robberies netted him more money than he had ever made as a traveling salesman in his best year and gave him a sense of empowerment that he had never felt before.
Gaynell Gowrie received a letter postmarked Claremore, Oklahoma written in pencil with no address except her name and the name of the town. It read, “If you can and if you want to, meet me where we met before next Saturday afternoon.” It was unsigned. She drove out to the creek after lunch, having told her stepmother that she might be having supper with some friends.
At first she did not see him, then he stepped out from a grove of trees that concealed an obviously new Packard touring car. “I was hoping you would come,” he said.
“Do you need to write another letter?” she asked.
“I need that among other things,” he said.
His name was beginning to be known, and he needed to justify himself, for he did not know how much longer he might be allowed to live. Gaynell suggested the analogy to Achilles, which he liked. She wrote out the text following his suggestions. He copied it on a sheet of stationery from the resort he had robbed in Arkansas. He put it in an envelope and affixed a two-cent stamp.
“Who do you think I ought to send this to?” he asked.
“Address it to the Choloneh Plainsman, Choloneh, Oklahoma,” she said. “I will drop it in the box in front of the post office in the town of Jackson on the other side of the river either today or tomorrow. It should get to the paper by Tuesday and be printed Thursday. We have an exchange with all the papers in the area. It will be picked up and reprinted by a lot of them, and I bet it will make the Associated Press wire, too.”
“You are so smart,” Buddy said. “I’m real, really glad I met you. Can you stay for a while and talk?”
They sat on the running board of his Packard. He told her about his life on the road and now on the run and about growing up in orphanages, hobo jungles, and the reformatory. She told him that her father, Zeke Gowrie, had once had a wild streak, too, and had spent a year in Leavenworth Prison for taking a woman across the state line for immoral purposes.
“It was not such a bad thing,” she said, “but he thought that he had been a bad man and that doing his time would help make things right again. When he got out again he courted my stepmother, who is a very nice person. She married him partly because she wanted to make a good home for me, which she has. I have a little sister Ernestine who is eight years old, and I just love her.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
“I suppose Tom Briggs who runs the paper is a boyfriend,” she said. “I really enjoy talking to him and hearing his jokes. He’s kissed me a couple of times, and I didn’t mind. I think he would ask me to marry him except that the paper is not making enough money for that now. He just doesn’t excite me. He’s a big, homely man, but that’s not the reason he doesn’t excite me. He just doesn’t.”
“Has any man ever excited you?” he asked.
“I dated a lot of fellows in college,” she said. “The only one who even began to excite me was an art student. He wanted me to take off my clothes and pose for him. I didn’t do it, but I sort of wanted to. Sometimes I think I have a bad wild streak in me like my father had.”
He kissed her. She kissed him back, hard, with her mouth open.
“I didn’t mean to be so bold,” he said, “but I’m an outlaw and I don’t have much time.”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
He told her that he had been with women that he had paid but he had never had a real girl friend before, never had anyone to love. He had always wanted that, just as he wanted a store of his own in a nice town and a real home to come home to at night.
They detached the seat cushion from her car and laid it down in a shady grove. He fumbled so much undoing the buttons on his spats that she had to help him. There was not much foreplay, but both of them were very excited. She was a virgin, but there was no blood. They rinsed themselves off in the cold water of the creek, splashing each other and laughing. Then they made love again. It was even better this time, especially for her. They got dressed again. Buddy grinned as he put on his spats.
“I didn’t take precautions,” he said.
“If I ever have a baby, I want it to be yours,” she said.
They sat and talked about a million things until almost sunset. Then she drove back to the highway and across the river to post the letter. When she came home her stepmother said, “you must have had a good time at supper. You’re grinning from ear to ear.”
Gaynell called her stepmother mother and really felt that way about her. Mary Gowrie had baked a lemon meringue pie for supper. Her father and Ernestine had had two pieces apiece, but there was one left. Gaynell ate it and praised it highly.
The letter caused a sensation. Tom Briggs printed it on the front page and called the Associated Press himself. “I hope he writes us more letters,” Tom said. “This is the best circulation builder this paper ever had. I wonder why he picked us to write to.”
Gaynell said nothing and Tom did not look suspicious.
The following Wednesday Gaynell almost fainted when she read the headline ROBBER, LAWMAN KILLED in the Kansas City Star. An armed deputy sheriff had been in the bank when it was being robbed in Cutter, Kansas. He had waited until the two robbers were fleeing with bags of loot, then pulled out his gun as they were near the door and away from others. He shot one of the robbers dead and was aiming at the other when he was killed himself. The remaining robber escaped with all the loot. The dead robber was identified as Henry Mazurek of Budweis, Oklahoma, a farmer who had recently been making payments on an overdue mortgage with what he claimed were gambling winnings. Gaynell supposed this was Buddy’s companion Hank, the one who had pulled a gun on her. The other robber had positively been identified as the notorious Cowboy Buddy Logan, who was now wanted for murder.
The next evening Gaynell received a long distance person-to-person call at her home. It was Buddy’s voice. She was about to warn him that the Gowrie phone was on a party line where everybody listened when he said, “This is Bill Larkin, who is marrying one of your sorority sisters from college. We just found out that your wedding invitation and several others did not get mailed. The wedding and receptions are this weekend starting tomorrow night Friday. I know this is short notice, but can you make it?”
Gaynell said she would take the milk train down to Echota in the morning, then catch the little Frisco train called the doodlebug to Tulsa. It arrived, she thought, about three in the afternoon.
“I can’t meet you at the station, but take a cab to the Mayo Hotel. Ask for the room reserved by Bill Larkin. Wear a ring so that everyone will know you are one of the sisters.” She had a sorority ring, but she supposed Buddy meant a fake wedding ring of some kind.
“Should I wear anything special?” she asked.
“I liked what you were wearing when we last saw each other. I would like you to wear that most of the weekend.”
Gaynell blushed, but no one in her family seemed to notice. Mary Gowrie quickly approved the trip and helped her pack an overnight bag. Zeke Gowrie looked at her thoughtfully. He was still troubled by his own wild streak which sometimes led him to do dangerous things on horseback and in cars and hoped it would never surface in his daughters.
While changing trains in Echota she picked up a fake gold wedding band at Woolworth’s. When she arrived at the Mayo, the desk clerk said yes, she must be Mrs. Larkin and was expected. Buddy began taking her clothes off as soon as the bellboy left the room.
They had a meal sent up to the room Friday night and breakfast in bed Saturday morning. Gaynell decided that she did not like that because it was hard to keep from being messy. Buddy was afraid of going out for fear of being recognized now that he was wanted for murder. He wanted to write another letter to justify his actions:
I am sorry I killed that deputy sheriff in Kansas. I know I will pay the penalty for that in time. The only justification that I have for that is that he had just killed my friend and was about to kill me. I am certain that, even if I had dropped my gun and held up my hands, he would still have drilled me. I had no time to think before I shot.
Killing is a bad thing, especially when poor men do it to each other. Most lawmen do not make much money if they are honest, and a fair percentage of them are honest. They are told to kill people who stick up banks and not to kill bankers who take everything from families that are having hard times through no fault of their own.
Hank Mazurek, who was killed by that lawman, was a good man who was just trying to save his farm. I have known him for the past year. He was a good companion in all weathers and just as true as steel. He loved his wife and children dearly. I hope they will be able to keep their farm, which is the main thing that Hank cared about. There is no way that I know of that anyone can prove that any money Hank had came from robbing banks. Anyone who tries to deprive his widow and children of their land will answer to me.
I hope the bankers will take care of the family of that lawman I shot. He was one of their good soldiers, just like the one who will eventually get me. In the meantime I will take such love and friendship as I can get and enjoy what the money from the banks will buy.
Sincerely,
Cowboy Buddy Logan
After dark on Saturday Gaynell talked Buddy into going out on the streets. As they deposited the letter in a mailbox he said, “You are the best thing that ever happened to me.”
They were near a movie theater and decided to see a show. It was a musical with production numbers by Busby Berkeley called Dames. It starred Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and featured a lot of good comic actors like Guy Kibbee and ZaSu Pitts. One of the songs, “I Only Have Eyes for You”, deeply moved them. They decided that it would be their song from now on. Buddy did not take her to the train Monday morning or tell her his plans, but Gaynell vowed to make her great happiness last as long as it could.
When she got back to Choloneh that afternoon, she dropped by the newspaper office on her way home. Tom had taken a drink from his office bottle and had a copy of the Sunday Tulsa World on his desk.
“That society wedding you said you were going to in Tulsa didn’t make the papers,” he said.
Gaynell said nothing.
“I don’t know exactly what is going on, and I don’t really want to know,” Tom continued. I want you to know this, though. I will always be there for you when you need me, and I will do anything to keep you from being hurt any worse than you are naturally going to be.”
The heavy man stood up and Gaynell hugged him with tears in her eyes. Tom’s love was good for her and Buddy’s was not. She was going to stick to Buddy as long as she could.
The letter on Mayo Hotel stationery with the Tulsa postmark arrived the next day. Tom had the printer set it up in type for the front page. He told the Associated Press that they could put the letter on the wire immediately if they paid him a fee and mentioned that the letter had been sent to the Choloneh Plainsman. Then he called the sheriff at the county seat.
“I don’t know why the punk is writing to this paper,” Tom said. “If he keeps it up, though, I am going to build circulation and maybe make a little change. I don’t think I’ve broken any law and don’t intend to. I just wanted the law to know what was up.”
“The federal people will probably want to see those letters,” the sheriff said. “I’ll inform them and then stay out of the way. The feds have a reputation for grabbing all the glory. They can have it, and all the bullets, too. I knew boys who talked like this Cowboy Buddy Logan during the war. I admired their style, but I learned to stay the hell out of their way.”
Over the next two months Gaynell met Buddy five times, once in Wichita, once in a camp ground with cabins on the Salt Fork River upstream of Choloneh, once in Arkansas City, Kansas, and twice more at the little creek near Hab Gowrie’s still. Five more letters resulted, each more widely circulated than the last. Celebrities started making references to Cowboy Buddy Logan. Will Rogers said on radio that he would make a good choice as ambassador to those countries that were refusing to pay their war loans. J. Edgar Hoover said, “Logan expects to be killed, and the FBI expects to stop this plague of bank robberies. Both these expectations will be met, and soon.”
Buddy wanted one more letter to be printed after he died. Gaynell helped him write it, although she was weeping as she did:
By the time everyone reads this I will be dead. I hope I died game with my wounds in the front. Although I surely resisted being taken, I hope I took no one with me. I still feel sorry about that lawman in Cutter, Kansas who was only doing his job. It is a shame to the country when poor men are hired to kill other poor men who are doing what they do only because they are hard up.
I also feel sorry about the man I knew as Florian Armstrong, who drove my getaway car when I robbed the bank at Jones Center, Nebraska last week. He got a bullet through the leg for his pains. He will recover and, since no one has his fingerprints or a description of him, I hope he will succeed in a less risky line of work. He is a colored man, but he treated me as white as anyone I ever met.
The one thing I regret not doing is killing a bunch of really evil bankers like the one who took my parents’ land and tried to put me in prison when I called him on it. I have heard that man died of a stroke last month, and I hope his last thoughts were of me. However, I have learned that all bankers are not evil. I have heard tell of bankers who went to prison or had to flee the country because they lent farmers money on what the bank inspectors said was bad collateral. I do not know much about finance, but I think that is what bankers ought to do. The way things are now a poor man does not have a chance, and we are all trapped into doing bad things.
My life has not been all bad. Even while on the run I have known generosity, kindness, and even love in a way that I would not have dreamed possible before. I am probably not right with God, but I believe that even the worst sins can be forgiven. I hope I am with my parents and many old friends by now and that others will join me in God’s own good time.
Sincerely,
Cowboy Buddy Logan
On their last visit to Hab Gowrie’s creek Buddy gave Gaynell a silver locket on a chain. It was inset with a real diamond. Buddy’s picture, taken at a dime store photo machine, was inside it. Gaynell had nothing to give in return until she thought of the flask, now lying on the gas tank of her Ford because they had removed the seat cushion to make love. She had not taken a drink from it since the day she had first met Buddy. She knew that Buddy drank very little, too, but it seemed like a funny and loving thing to give him. It fit exactly into his lower left vest pocket. “I’ll wear it over my heart just like you wear your locket,” he said.
The harvest of winter wheat around Choloneh in June was disappointing for the indebted farmers. The weather was hotter than anyone could remember with the thermometer topping one hundred degrees day after day. Gaynell got into the habit of coming home to her father’s house at noon, taking a quick bath and changing clothes before eating lunch and going back to the newspaper. On Wednesday, June 27 her uncle, Hab Gowrie dropped by as she was getting ready to go back to work.
“Gaynell,” he asked, “do you ever go out to that little creek on the place that used to be mine and then your cousin Luke’s?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I drive out there sometimes. It’s a pretty place. I like to sit there and sometimes write in my notebook.”
“I figured it was something like that,” Hab Gowrie said. “That’s what I told those lawman about an old Model T with recapped tires this morning. The sheriff called me from the county seat about eight o’clock and told me that federal lawmen were coming down to have a look at that place. They think outlaws have been hiding out there.”
Mary Gowrie came out of the kitchen holding a dishtowel. “Mercy me,” she said.
“The sheriff called because he knows that Zeke is thinking about buying that land and that I am in the habit of using that area by the creek sometimes.” Hab knew better than to mention the word whiskey in front of his sister-in-law or his wife or any other Gowrie woman. They knew he made it and drank it, but that was never done in front of the women or in any of their houses.
“I decided to go out there,” Hab Gowrie said. “The sheriff and I have had an understanding for many years, and this particular bunch of federal men have no interest in the use I make of that area, but I just wanted to look things over. These federal men kept their coats and ties on even though it was already hot as a two-dollar pistol. They had plaster of Paris with them and were making casts of all the tire tracks they could find. They would look at those casts and say ‘Packard touring car’ or ‘flivver with recapped tires’. Once they said the tracks were a couple of months old, but they were fairly sure they would match the pick-up truck that was used in the bank robbery down at Moscow. That means that Cowboy Buddy Logan has been hiding out there.”
“Mercy me,” Mary Gowrie said again. Gaynell, you had better not go out to that place for a while.”
Gaynell promised that she would not.
Tom Briggs went across the street for coffee every weekday morning at ten o’clock. Gaynell always stayed in the office in the unlikely event that any printing business came in while Tom was out of the office. She had told Buddy that this would be the safest time to call but that his messages had better be as brief as possible and worded so that no casual listener could understand their content.
On Friday, June 29 she was reading the huge headline in the Wichita Beacon about the bank robbery in Jones, Center, Nebraska the previous day. A town constable had managed to get off a shot that wounded the driver of the getaway car in the leg. Buddy Logan had managed to grab the wheel and keep his foot on the gas pedal. He was out of town before a pursuit could be organized. Several hours later the car used in the robbery had been found abandoned in a Negro neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri.
The telephone rang. Before Gaynell could say anything Buddy’s voice said, “I’m all right and have a new car. I’ll meet you Tuesday night where we have met before.” He hung up before Gaynell could warn him of the danger. An operator told her that the call had come from a pay telephone at a gas station in Peculiar, Missouri, but there was no way she could possibly reach Buddy before he drove into the trap. She decided that she would die with him.
But she did not. She excused herself from the supper table on the evening of Tuesday, July 3 and started to leave the house. Her father Zeke Gowrie barred the way.
“You’re not going out there, Gaynell,” he said. “Hab says the lawmen have had the area around his still staked out for days. Tom Briggs told me an hour ago that Cowboy Buddy Logan robbed the bank over in Storey just after noon. Tom is out at the creek right now with the sheriff.
“I want to be there, too,” Gaynell said.
“You are my daughter, I love you, and I am not going to let you die,” Zeke Gowrie said. “I know you think you love that outlaw. I guessed there was something happening between you just as soon as those letters started running in the paper, but you are not going to die with him. That would nearly kill me and Mary and Ernestine, and I know you don’t want to do that. I know you think this is the end of the world, but it isn’t. I got over the death of your mother, your uncles got over the deaths of their sons, and you’ll get over this. You are not going out that door even if I have to slap you down, which I have never done before.”
Gaynell ran crying to her room. Half an hour later Ernestine tapped on her door and asked if she could use the portable wind-up phonograph in her room. Ernestine had bought a record that day of a tune she had heard Gaynell humming. She intended it for Gaynell’s birthday the next month, but she thought it might cheer her up now. They played “I Only Have Eyes for You” over four times while Gaynell hugged her little sister.
Shortly after nine o’clock Tom Briggs called at the house and asked to speak to Gaynell on the front porch. “It’s over,” he said.
Buddy had driven in without suspecting the lawmen were waiting for him. When he got out of his car, a new streamlined Chrysler, the lawmen put a spotlight on him and ordered him to surrender. Buddy fired one shot. More than two dozen were fired back at him. When the lawmen cautiously approached his body, they smelled whiskey as well as gun smoke and blood. He had been carrying a flask in his vest pocket.
“The bullets had taken out the initials,” Tom said, but I recognized the flask.”
“Tom. I never meant to hurt you,” Gaynell said.
“You never do,” Tom said.
Gaynell got her purse and gave Tom the last letter of Cowboy Buddy Logan. “This will help you write your story,” she said. “You can pretend you got it in the mail and lost the envelope. It will be a really good story. It might even get you a job on a big city paper.”
“No,” he said. “I intend to stay right here in Choloneh with you and your family. You can have the rest of the week off.”
“I’d rather keep busy,” she said. “I’ll cover the Fourth of July celebrations tomorrow and write them up so they can be in the paper the next day. We’ll just keep going on as we were before. It is over.”
She had begun to have her period several days earlier than usual the previous Thursday when she knew her lover was in mortal danger. She would never bear Cowboy Buddy Logan’s child. It was over.
On Sunday, July 22 John Dillinger was shot down near the Biograph Theater in Chicago. The next day Flossie Bickam called her cousin Gaynell Gowrie from Echota twenty miles away.
“I told Henry Bickam that, if John Dillinger could risk his life to see an air-conditioned movie, I can risk my respectability by going out in public to cool off for a few hours even though I am seven months pregnant,” she said. “Henry says we ought to make a party out of it. He wants you and Tom to come down for supper tomorrow night and be our guests at the show. It ought to be over in time for you two to get back to Choloneh.”
Gaynell and Tom agreed. The next day Mary Gowrie went out to the chicken yard in back of the house killed two hens that had not been laying well by wringing their necks, then plucked and prepared them. “Flossie makes good batter,” she said. She has my recipe.”
They left in time to reach the Bickam house in Echota at five in the afternoon. Flossie fried the chicken while Tom made the drop biscuits that were a specialty of his.
Henry Bickam was a traveling salesman, although he was thinking about starting a furniture store in Echota. He and Flossie had been married nearly six years. They were totally surprised and delighted by her pregnancy.
“If it’s a boy, we intend to name him Will Maxson after Flossie’s father and call him Max. We haven’t picked out a girl’s name. If it’s quintuplets like the Dionnes, we’ll give one away to you.”
“I don’t know if I could take proper care of a baby,” Gaynell said.
“That doesn’t stop women from having them,” Henry said.
The afternoon paper thumped on the Bickam front porch. The headlines were still about Dillinger.
“I am glad these bank robber are getting put out of business,” Henry said, “but I feel sorry for them all the same. I met the one they called Cowboy Buddy Logan when we were both traveling salesmen on the road. From all I knew of him, he was a very nice fellow.”
Henry saw the look in Gaynell’s eyes.
“Nobody has told me anything,” he said, “and I have no intention of saying anything to anybody, not even Flossie. In that last letter when he wrote about good bankers having to leave the country, I figured someone might have told him about your cousin Louella’s husband having to run off to Brazil. Hard times are bad for everybody, but we have no choice except to get through them.”
Dinner was very good and the picture show It Happened One Night was even better. When the “walls of Jericho” fell between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in the final scene, Flossie’s baby gave a celebratory kick. That night Gaynell took off Buddy’s locket and put it in the manila envelope with her copies of the letters and all the clippings.
Now in 1977 with her mind beginning to go Gaynell Briggs looked at the envelope again. She had to give it to someone before it faded from her mind. It could not be to Tom, for that would only make his own painful memories worse. Her father and stepmother were dead. Her sister Ernestine had probably never known the whole story, and that tragedy had never really been part of her own life. Flossie Bickam was dead of cancer, and Henry Bickam was bitterly estranged from his son Max and his daughter Lori. Max Bickam had written her recently thanking her for helping to start his large collection of classical records. Gaynell liked Max but he was a writer for magazines, and she did not want her secrets made public until she was long past caring.
Then she thought about her cousin Louella who had resumed the name of Gowrie when her husband had fled to Brazil following the 1933 bank holiday. Louella had become a repository of family keepsakes. Henry Bickam was talking about leaving the land he had inherited from Flossie to Louella in order to keep his children from inheriting it. Yes, she would seal the envelope and give it to Louella to put in her safety deposit box. She would write instructions for Louella to give it to Max Bickam at an appropriate time.
Was there anything else? Her household goods would go to Ernestine and her children. Tom would probably need all the cash that was not his already. People had already forgotten that she had been a minor television personality in a town that no longer had a television station. Was there anything else that she would like to have remembered and preserved? No, she did not think so.

Sphere

Arise!, art by Nicole Macaluso

Marquee

Either/Or

The Two Stages of the Phoenix, art by Nicole Macaluso

Flowers

“Dead Poet Society”

Fish

It’s a pretty miraculous thing, I suppose, making the transition from being a fish to being a human being. The first thing I should do is go about explaining how I made the transition, the second thing, attempting to explain why. It has been so long since I made the decision to change and since I have actually assumed the role of a human that it may be hard to explain.
Before my role in human civilization, I was a beta -- otherwise known as a Japanese fighting fish. Although we generally have a beautiful purple-blue hue, most people familiar with different species of fish thought of us as more expensive goldfish. I was kept in a round bowl, about eight inches wide at it’s longest point (in human terms, that would be living in quarters about 25 feet at the widest point). It may seem large enough to live, but keep in mind that as humans, you not only have the choice of a larger home, but you are also able to leave your living quarters at any point in time. I did not have that luxury. In fact, what I had was a very small glass apartment, not well kept by my owners (and I at that point was unable to care for it myself). I had a view of the outside world, but it was a distorted view. And I thought I could never experience that world first-hand.
Previous to living anywhere else, before I was purchased, I resided in a very small bowl - no longer than three inches at the widest point. Living in what humans would consider an eight foot square, I had difficulty moving. I even had a hard time breathing. Needless to say from then on I felt I needed more space, I needed to be on my own. No matter what, that was what I needed.
I lived in the said bowl alone. There was one plastic tree in the center of my quarters -- some algae grew on it, but that was all I had for plant life in my space. The bottom of my quarters was filled with small rocks and clear marbles. It was uneventful.
Once they put another beta in my quarters with me -- wait, I must correct myself. I thought the put another beta there with me. I must explain, but please do not laugh: I only came to learn at a later point, a point after I was a human, that my owner had actually placed my quarters next to a mirror. I thought another fish was there with me, following my every motion, getting angry when I got angry, never leaving me alone, always taking the same moves as I did. I raced back and forth across my quarters, always staring at the “other” fish, always prepared to fight it. But I never did.
Once I was kept in an aquarium for a short period of time. It was a ten-gallon tank, and I was placed in there with other fish of varying species, mostly smaller. I was the only beta there. There were different colored rocks, and there were more plastic plants. And one of the outside walls was colored a bright shade of blue - I later came to discover that it was paper behind the glass wall. Beyond the other fish, there was no substantial difference in my quarters.
But my interactions with the other fish is what made the time there more interesting. I wanted to be alone most of the time -- that is the way I felt the most comfortable. I felt the other fish didn’t look like me, and I often felt that they were specifically out to hamper me from any happiness. You have to understand that we are by nature very predatorial -- we want our space, we want dominance over others, we want others to fear us. It is survival of the fittest when it comes to our lives. Eat or be eaten.
I stayed to myself most of the time in the aquarium; I occasionally made shows of strength to gain respect from the other fish. It made getting food from the top of the tank easier when no one tempted to fight me for the food. It was lonely, I suppose, but I survived -- and I did so with better luck than most of the others there.
Then one day it appeared. First closed off to the rest of us by some sort of plastic for a while, then eventually the plastic walls were taken away and it was there. Another beta was suddenly in my space. My space. This was my home, I had proven myself there. I was the only fish of my kind there, and now there was this other fish I would have to prove myself to. Eat or be eaten. I had to make sure -- and make sure right away -- that this other fish would never be a problem for me.
But the thing was, I knew that the other fish had no right to be there. I didn’t know how they got there, what those plastic walls were, or why they were there. But I had to stop them. This fish was suddenly my worst enemy.
It didn’t take long before we fought. It was a difficult battle, all of the other fish got out of the way, and we darted from one end of the aquarium to the other. It wasn’t long until I was given the opportunity to strike. I killed the other beta, its blood flowing into my air. Everyone there was breathing the blood of my victory.
Almost immediately I was removed from the aquarium and placed in my other dwelling -- the bowl. From then on I knew there had to be a way to get out of those quarters, no matter what I had to do.
I looked around at the owner; I saw them walking around the tank. I knew that they did not breathe water, and this confused me, but I learned that the first thing I had to do was learn to breathe what they did.
It didn’t take much time before I was constantly trying to lift my head up out of the bowl for as long as I could. I would manage to stay there usually because I was holding my breath. But then, one time, I went up to the top in the morning, they way I usually did, and without even thinking about it, I just started to breathe. I was able to keep my full head up out of the water for as long as I wanted and listen to what was going on outside my living quarters.
Everything sounded so different. There were so many sharp noises. They hurt me to listen to them. Looking back, I now understand that the water in my tank muffled any outside noises. But beyond that, no one in my living quarters made noise -- no one bumped into things, no one screamed or made noises. But at the time, all these noises were extremely loud.
I then knew I had to keep my head above water as much as possible and try to make sense of the sounds I continually heard. I came to discover what humans refer to as language only through listening to the repeated use of these loud sounds.
When I learned I had to breathe, I did. When I understood that I had to figure out their language, I did. It took so long, but I began to understand what they said. Then I had to learn to speak. I tried to practice under the water, in my dwelling, but it was so hard to hear in my quarters that I never knew if I was doing it correctly. Furthermore, I had become so accustomed to breathing air instead of water that I began to have difficulty breathing in my old home. This filled me with an intense fear. If I continue on with this experiment, I thought, will my own home become uninhabitable to me? Will I die here because I learned too much?
I decided that I had no choice and that I had to as my owner for help. I had to hope that my ability to produce sounds -- and the correct ones, at that - would be enough to let them know that I am in trouble. Furthermore, I had to hope that my owner would actually want to help me. Maybe they wouldn’t want me invading their space. Eat or be eaten.
But I had to take the chance. One morning, before I received my daily food, I pulled the upper half of my body from the tank. My owner wasn’t coming yet, so I went back down and jumped up again. Still nothing. I kept jumping, until I jumped out of the tank completely. I landed on the table, fell to the floor, coughing. I screamed.
The next thing I remember (and you have to forgive me, because my memory is weak here, and this was seven years ago) is being in a hospital. I didn’t know what it was then, of course, and it frightened me. Doctors kept me in place and began to study me. They sent me to schools. And to this day I am still learning.
I have discovered one thing about humans during my life as one. With all the new space I have available to me, with all of the other opportunities I have, I see that people still fight each other for their space. They kill. They steal. They do not breathe in the blood, but it is all around them. And I still find myself doing it as well, fighting others to stay alive.