Riding the Backwash

I.

The Pinkerton man sat in the back room of the Rawlins telegraph office with his ledger open and his pen moving in the careful hand of a person who had been trained that penmanship was evidence. His name was Harlan Scobie. He was thirty-one years old and had been with the agency for six years and in that time had developed the habit of arriving in towns before the men he was looking for, which he considered not a strategy but a disposition. Some men chased. Scobie waited.

He was filling out a Bertillon card. The system had come over from Paris in the eighties and spread through the agency’s Western offices by the early nineties, and Scobie had learned to use it the way a carpenter learns the plumb line — not with enthusiasm but with the steady faith of a man who trusts measurement over memory. The card had fourteen fields. He filled them from the Denver arrest file: skull width, 15.5 centimeters. Right ear, 6.2 centimeters. Left foot, 26.1 centimeters. Left middle finger, 12.0 centimeters. Left cubit, 45.3 centimeters. Standing height, 178 centimeters. Eye color, brown. Hair, brown going gray at the temples. Age, approximately thirty-seven.

Category 243-B. One of 243 classifications. A man sorted like mail.

Scobie paused at the supplementary description field. The physical data was mathematics — you either matched or you didn’t. But the supplementary field was language, and language required a different kind of precision. He wrote: Talks. Constant. Uses humor to manage situations. Subject believes himself charming. Likely to attempt conversation with arresting officers. Do not engage.

He blotted the card and sealed it in an envelope and addressed it to the railway express office for distribution along the corridor. Then he stood and looked out the window at the town of Rawlins, which sat on the Union Pacific mainline like a callus on a knuckle — something that had formed around friction and stayed. The spur line south would be done by spring. Four miles of wire per day. The telegraph would reach Separation by January, and after that every sheriff’s office between here and the Arizona border would have the card, the measurements, the category number.

Scobie did not need to find Gar Olmstead. He needed to wait for the distance between towns to shrink until there was no distance left. He had all winter. He sat down and opened a different file.

II.

Two days’ ride south of Rawlins, in a drainage wash that ran crooked through sagebrush the color of ash, Gar Olmstead was talking.

He had been talking since breakfast. Before breakfast, if you counted the sounds he made while building the fire, which Lyle Duff did count, because Lyle counted everything — the sounds, the silences between the sounds, the number of times Gar said Mexico in an hour, which today was four and it was not yet nine.

“The thing about the Rawlins bank,” Gar said, “is that it’s still operating like it’s 1885. One teller, one safe, no alarm system. The Stockmen’s Association put a guard on the Lander bank and the Rock Springs bank but they forgot about Rawlins because Rawlins is on the mainline and they figure the mainline is protection enough. Which it is, if you’re coming from the east. We’re not coming from the east.”

Lyle was sharpening his knife on a whetstone. He did not look up. The sound of the blade on the stone had a rhythm to it that was nothing like the rhythm of Gar’s voice, and the two rhythms ran side by side without meeting, the way two streams will run parallel in a drainage and never merge until the ground tells them to.

“We come in from the south, through the canyon system past Separation, hit the bank on a Wednesday because Wednesday is when the cattle buyers pay in and the safe is fullest, and ride back out through the same canyons before anyone can get a wire to Cheyenne. By the time the wire goes out, we’re fifty miles into country that doesn’t have a telegraph pole within a day’s ride.” Gar paused to let this settle. It didn’t settle. It floated the way his plans always floated, on the surface of his enthusiasm, held up by talk. “Three months,” he said. “That’s the window. After that the spur line reaches Separation and the window closes and the whole corridor goes institutional. You understand what I’m saying.”

Lyle drew the blade along the stone. “I understand what you’re saying.”

“This is the last one like this. The last bank you can hit where the nearest telegraph is forty miles away. After this they’ll all be connected and the whole game changes.”

“You said that about the Kemmerer job.”

“Kemmerer was different.”

“You said Kemmerer was the last one like Kemmerer.”

“It was. This is the last one like this. Different category.”

Lyle looked up. His face was the kind of face that didn’t hold expression so much as permit it, briefly, before returning to its natural state, which was a flat patience that could be mistaken for stupidity by people who confused talking with thinking. He was twenty-seven, thin, sand-colored, with eyes the washed-out blue of denim that’s been through too many summers. He had been riding with Gar for four years.

“You want coffee?” he said.

“I want you to tell me this plan makes sense.”

“It makes sense.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I sound like a man who wants coffee.”

Gar grinned. This was the rhythm — the pitch, the deflection, the grin. He had been doing it so long it felt like breathing. He poured the coffee and handed Lyle a cup and sat on his heels and looked out at the drainage running south through its channel of sage and bunchgrass and gravel. The sky was enormous and pale and sat on the land the way a weight sits on paper, pressing everything flat.

Gar had been robbing banks for fifteen years, since he was twenty-two and had walked into the Miners’ Trust in Leadville with a bandana and a borrowed revolver and walked out with three hundred and forty dollars in a flour sack. That was 1884. The country was different then. A man on a fast horse could outrun a warrant because the warrant traveled at the speed of a postal rider and the horse traveled at the speed of a horse and the horse was faster. You could ride from Leadville to the Utah line and nobody would know your name or your face or the shape of your skull, because those things hadn’t been written down yet.

That was the country Gar lived in. The country of blur.

“You know what my father did?” Gar said.

Lyle blew on his coffee. He had heard this before.

“He drove freight wagons between Cheyenne and Deadwood. Twelve days each way. He said the thing about the road was that it was all in front of you and none of it was behind you.”

“Your father drove freight wagons.”

“For eleven years.”

“And then he stopped.”

“The railroad reached Deadwood. Freight went by rail. The road was still there but nobody drove it.”

“Is this a story about the railroad or about your father.”

“It’s a story about timing.”

“It sounds like a story about a man who was too slow.”

Gar laughed, because he always laughed when Lyle said something that hurt, and Lyle said things that hurt the way a man drives a nail — one stroke, no wasted motion, the point flush with the wood before you registered the swing.

III.

They rode into Separation on a Friday afternoon. The town wasn’t much — a main street of packed dirt with a general store, a livery, a saloon that doubled as a post office, and a rooming house whose sign had lost its second O and now advertised ROOMING H USE, which Gar found hilarious and Lyle did not comment on.

The general store was a timber building with a false front that added four feet of respectability to a structure that needed it. Gar went in for supplies — coffee, flour, salt pork, ammunition — while Lyle stayed with the horses. Inside, the store smelled of leather and dust and coal oil and the faint sweetness of dried apples in a barrel by the door. A man behind the counter watched Gar move through the aisles with the careful disinterest of someone who had learned that watching was cheaper than asking.

Gar found it on the wall by the door, tacked between a patent medicine circular and a notice about a lost mule. A printed card, agency letterhead, with a series of numbers arranged in columns. His numbers. Skull width, 15.5. Right ear, 6.2. Left foot, 26.1. The supplementary description was there too, in a hand he didn’t recognize: Talks. Constant. Uses humor to manage situations.

He read it twice. Then he laughed.

“Hey,” he said to the storekeeper. “You know what this is?”

The storekeeper looked at the card and then at Gar and said, “Pinkerton circular.”

“That’s me. Those are my measurements.”

The storekeeper’s expression did not change. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Fifteen-point-five centimeters,” Gar said, tapping his skull. “That’s my head. They measured my head. In Denver. A man sat me down and put calipers on my skull and wrote down a number and now that number is on your wall. You know what that is? That’s fame.”

“That’s a circular.”

“It’s a circular about me. There are men in offices writing down my skull width. That means I’m somebody.”

The storekeeper said nothing. He rang up the supplies and put them in a sack and took Gar’s money and gave him change and throughout this transaction maintained the expression of a man on a budget for opinions.

Outside, Gar showed Lyle the card. Held it up in the afternoon light like a man showing off a newspaper clipping.

“They measured my head,” he said.

Lyle took the card and read it. He read it slowly, without visible reaction. He read the supplementary description. Talks. Constant. He read the category number: 243-B. He handed the card back.

“We should go,” Lyle said.

“We just got here.”

“There’s a reason that card is on the wall in a town this size.”

“The reason is they’re printing them by the hundreds and posting them everywhere. It’s not specific to this town. It’s a dragnet. You throw a dragnet, you hit every wall in the territory. Doesn’t mean they know we’re here.”

Lyle looked at him. The look held something Gar didn’t read, or chose not to read, which amounted to the same thing.

“I need to see about the horses,” Lyle said.

IV.

The livery was at the south end of the street, a low building of unpainted boards with a corral that held four horses and a mule. The owner was a man named Peck who had a crooked back and a careful way of speaking that suggested either a natural reserve or a stammer he’d learned to route around.

Gar worked him the way he worked everyone — the patter, the jokes, the slow lean into confidence. He told Peck they were cattle buyers from Laramie, down to look at some stock south of town. He told Peck the horses needed boarding for three days, maybe four, and what would that run.

“Dollar a day each,” Peck said. “Hay and water included.”

“A dollar a day. For these two animals who are practically paying your mortgage in charisma alone.”

Peck looked at the horses. They were average horses. “Dollar a day,” he said.

“What if I told you a story.”

“I’d charge you a dollar a day and the story.”

Gar laughed. “I like you. You’re not easy. The easy ones bore me. What if I said fifty cents a day and I’ll help you reshoe that bay horse I see favoring her left front.”

Peck looked at him and then at the bay horse and then back at him. Something moved behind his eyes — not the arithmetic of fifty cents versus a dollar. A different calculation entirely.

“You know, I’ll do you one better,” Peck said. “No charge. Board them free. Three days.”

“Free.”

“Free. You boys are cattle buyers, you’ll be spending money in town. The town could use it. I’ll consider it a public service.”

Gar turned to Lyle with the expression of a man who has just proved a theorem. “You see that? Free. That’s what a good conversation gets you.”

Lyle was looking at Peck. Peck was looking at his own hands. Nobody was looking at Gar.

They put the horses up and walked back to the rooming house. Lyle was quiet, but Lyle was always quiet, and Gar filled the silence with talk, with plans, with the continuous narration of a life he was convinced was interesting because he was the one narrating it.

“Three days,” Gar said. “We scout the bank tomorrow. Hit it Wednesday. Out through the canyons by Thursday morning. Then south.”

“South.”

“Mexico, maybe. Arizona Territory. Somewhere the telegraph hasn’t reached.”

“The telegraph has reached Arizona Territory.”

“Then deeper. Farther. Somewhere.”

Lyle stopped walking. They were in the middle of the street, the sagebrush flats running to the horizon in every direction, the sky so wide it bent at the edges. A wind came through carrying the smell of dust and distance and the particular loneliness of a place that has been settled and unsettled and settled again and is tired of the whole process.

“I’m going to check on something,” Lyle said, and walked toward the post office that was also the saloon. He had letters in his saddlebag. He had been carrying them for weeks, not hidden, just not mentioned.

V.

Gar spent Saturday scouting the Rawlins Stockmen’s Bank in Separation, which was not in Rawlins and was not staffed by stockmen but was named for the association that had capitalized it, because in Wyoming the name on the building was aspirational, not descriptive.

The bank had one teller window, a safe the size of a cookstove, and a door in the back that opened onto an alley that ran to the edge of town and then became sagebrush. No alarm wire. No guard. The teller was a young man with pomaded hair and a collar so tight it looked like the collar was wearing him. Gar went in and opened a savings account with four dollars just to see the inside of the operation, and while the teller filled out the forms Gar asked him questions — about the town, the weather, the cattle business — in the easy, smiling way of a man who had been making strangers comfortable his entire life and had come to believe that comfort was a thing he created rather than a thing people offered him out of politeness or wariness or the desire to be left alone.

That evening he found a railroad surveyor in the saloon and bought him whiskey. The surveyor was a young man from Pennsylvania who had come west for the pay and stayed for reasons he couldn’t articulate, which in Gar’s experience was how most people ended up in Wyoming — they came for a purpose and the purpose evaporated and they were still here, like a stain that outlasts the spill.

“When does the spur line get here?” Gar said.

“Three months. Maybe four, depending on the grade south of Creston. That granite shelf is giving us trouble.”

“They’ll run telegraph alongside?”

“Telegraph, express office, the whole package. This town’ll be connected by spring. You should see what they’re doing in Cheyenne — they’ve got a switching station that can route a telegram to San Francisco in four minutes. Four minutes. Used to take a rider three weeks.”

“Four minutes,” Gar said, and he was smiling, because to Gar this was the evidence — the world was closing, the corridor was narrowing, and he was inside it while the inside still existed. He heard the number and thought: we have three months.

“And then what?” Gar said.

“And then it’s a town. Right now it’s just a wide place in the road.”

Gar bought him another whiskey and thanked him and walked out into the evening, not knowing that the surveyor would mention the two cattle buyers from Laramie to the express office manager before finishing his third drink, and that the express office manager would tap out a wire to the Pinkerton bureau in Denver before the surveyor finished his fourth, and that the wire would travel at the speed of electricity, which was faster than a horse by a factor that made the comparison obscene.

The light outside was the color of a bruise, purple and yellow where the sun had gone below the flats. Lyle was sitting on the porch of the rooming house with his legs extended and his hat pulled down and his hands folded across his stomach in the posture of a man who had stopped waiting for something.

“Three months,” Gar said.

“I heard.”

“So we’re inside the window.”

“We’re inside something.”

Gar sat down next to him. The street was empty. The town made the sounds a town makes when it’s thinking about shutting down — a door closing, a dog barking once and deciding against a second time, the creak of a sign that said DRY GOODS turning in the wind.

“You ever think about what we’ll do after?” Gar said.

“After what.”

“After this. After the last one. When the corridor closes and there’s nowhere left to run a clean job without a telegraph on one end and a Pinkerton on the other.”

Lyle didn’t answer for a while. When he did his voice was flat and careful. “I think about it.”

“And?”

“And I think about it.”

Gar waited for more. More did not come. He filled the gap with a laugh and a theory about Mexican land prices and the two men sat on the porch while the sky went from bruise to black and the stars came out — not gradually but all at once, the way they do in country where there’s nothing between you and them but sixty miles of sagebrush and the curvature of the earth.

VI.

Wednesday. The bank.

Gar had done this nine times before. He knew the motions the way a carpenter knows the motions — the walk, the angle, the voice, the exact moment to show the gun and the exact moment to put it away.

He came in through the front door at eleven in the morning wearing a kerchief over the lower half of his face, which was theatrical but necessary, and the gun in his right hand, which was practical but regrettable. Lyle came in behind him and went to the door in the back and stood there with his own gun pointing at nothing in particular, which was his role — the silent weight, the implication.

“Morning,” Gar said to the teller. “I expect you know what this is.”

The teller looked at him. The teller did not flinch. The teller did not raise his hands. The teller reached below the counter — not fast, not panicked, but with the practiced motion of a man who has rehearsed this — and placed both hands flat on the countertop.

“I need you to open the safe,” Gar said.

“The safe is on a time lock,” the teller said. “It opens at two.”

“It’s eleven.”

“Yes sir.”

Gar looked at the teller. The teller looked back with an expression that was not fear and was not courage but was something else — a trained response, a drilled behavior, the face of a man who has been told what to do in this exact situation and is doing it. The Stockmen’s Association had been here before him. Not the men. The method.

“The cash drawer, then,” Gar said.

The teller opened the drawer and stepped back. There was less money in it than Gar had seen in any bank he’d ever hit. The drawer held maybe two hundred dollars in mixed bills and coin. The real money was in the safe, behind a time lock, three hours from now.

Gar took the money. It fit in one hand.

He looked at Lyle. Lyle was at the back door with his gun at his side and his face empty, the face of a man who had already left and was waiting for his body to follow.

“Thank you for your time,” Gar said to the teller, and the words came out smooth and easy, the automatic courtesy of a man who believed that manners cost nothing, not understanding that in this case manners cost him the three minutes that allowed the storekeeper across the street to walk to the express office and send the wire that Peck, the livery owner, had asked him to send the moment anyone matching the Bertillon description entered the bank.

They rode south. Fast at first, then slower as the ground broke up into the canyon system where the drainage ran in its crooked channel between walls of red sandstone that rose higher with every mile. The horses were good but the ground was bad — loose shale, gravel, the kind of footing that punishes speed. The sky above the canyon was a strip of white that narrowed as the walls climbed.

Gar was counting the money. Two hundred and fourteen dollars. Split two ways, that was a hundred and seven each. He had spent more than that on supplies.

“The safe was on a time lock,” he said.

Lyle said nothing.

“They put a time lock on the safe in a town that doesn’t have a telegraph. You know what that means? It means they’re scared. It means they know we’re coming. It means we matter.”

Lyle said nothing.

“It means they’re spending money to stop us. You don’t spend money to stop something that isn’t a threat.”

The canyon walls rose. The sandstone was dark in places, coated with a sheen that caught the light — black and orange, like a burn mark on the rock.

“Desert varnish,” Lyle said.

“What?”

“That coating. Takes about ten thousand years to form. Manganese oxide, mostly. Bacteria pull the manganese out of the air and deposit it on the surface. The whole coating is thinner than a fingernail.”

Gar looked at the walls. He did not see ten thousand years. He saw rock. “How do you know that?”

“Worked a season for the geological survey. Before.”

“Before me.”

“Before this.”

They rode in silence for a while, which was unusual, because Gar did not ride in silence. He rode in narration. But the canyon pressed down on sound, the walls absorbing it, and for a few minutes the only noise was the horses’ hooves on gravel and the wind in the channel above them.

VII.

Lyle told him in the late afternoon, when the canyon widened into a bowl where the drainage pooled in spring and left behind a crust of white alkali that cracked underfoot like old paper. A cottonwood grew sideways out of the canyon wall, surviving on moisture that seeped through fractures in the sandstone. They stopped to water the horses at a trickle that came out of the rock face and ran six feet before the ground drank it.

“I’m going to Nebraska,” Lyle said.

Gar was loosening the cinch on his saddle. He stopped. “When.”

“Now. After we split the money. I’m going north from here. There’s a ranch road that comes out at the Platte.”

“Nebraska.”

“My sister has a farm outside Ogallala. She wrote me in July. She wrote me in August. She needs help with the harvest and after that she needs help with everything else.”

“You never mentioned letters.”

“You never asked.”

This was true. Gar had not asked because asking would have meant listening, and listening would have meant hearing something that did not fit the story he was telling, which was the story of two men heading south together after the last job, heading for Mexico, heading for the open country that was always somewhere ahead of them, receding at the same rate they advanced.

“You can’t go to Nebraska,” Gar said.

“I can.”

“The plan is south. Mexico. We talked about this.”

“You talked about this.”

“I talked about it and you listened. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.”

Lyle sat on a rock. The rock was coated in desert varnish and he sat on it like it was a chair. “Gar,” he said.

“Don’t say my name like that. Don’t say it like you’re ending something.”

“I’m ending something.”

Gar started talking. He talked about the partnership and the four years and the time in Kemmerer when Lyle had pulled him out of a tight spot with the county sheriff. He talked about Mexico. He talked about Arizona. He talked about the future, which in Gar’s telling was always somewhere warm and distant and free of telegraph wire.

Lyle listened the way the canyon walls listened — with the patience of something that has been here long enough and will be here long enough and does not care what you say in the interval.

When Gar ran out, the silence came back. It came back the way silence comes back in canyon country — not gradually but completely, like a door closing.

“Mexico,” he said again.

Lyle stood up. He counted out a hundred and seven dollars from the sack and put it in his saddlebag. He tightened his cinch. He looked at Gar for a long moment — the kind of look that in the comedy would be the setup for a joke and in the tragedy was the last time one man would see another.

“Take care of yourself,” Lyle said.

“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say something that makes sense. I want you to say you’re not leaving.”

“The plan was never the plan,” Lyle said. “The plan was you talking.”

He mounted up and turned his horse north, toward the ranch road, toward Nebraska, toward the sister and the farm and the harvest. He did not look back. The sound of his horse on the gravel faded, and then there was nothing — just the drainage running south, the canyon walls rising, the varnish catching the late light.

Gar stood in the bowl with a hundred and seven dollars and two horses and the sky going narrow above him. He stood there for a while. Then he started talking again — not to anyone, not to the horses, not to the canyon, but to the silence itself, because silence was the only audience he had left and he could not exist without an audience.

He said the plan was still good. He said Mexico was still south. He said these things in the voice of a man who had always said things and been heard.

He mounted up and rode south. The canyon narrowed. The walls grew. The sky above him went from a strip to a ribbon to a thread. The varnish on the walls was the color of dried blood in the fading light, and the hooves made a sound on the gravel that the rock absorbed and gave nothing back.

VIII.

Harlan Scobie wrote his report on the fifteenth of November, 1899, in the Rawlins telegraph office, using the agency’s standard incident form. He wrote in the careful, unadorned style the agency required, which suited him, because Scobie did not believe in language as ornament. He believed in language as record.

On or about October 22, subject Olmstead, G. (file 243-B, Bertillon ref. attached) and associate Duff, L. (file pending) committed robbery upon the Stockmen’s Bank, Separation, Wyo. Amount taken approximately $214. The bank teller, Mr. R. Hollis, executed the prepared response per Stockmen’s Association directive and engaged the time lock on the primary safe. Principal reserves ($1,800) were not accessed.

Subject Duff was apprehended November 3 at a farm property outside Ogallala, Neb., belonging to his sister, Mrs. E. Duff Crowder. Subject surrendered without resistance. Amount recovered: $91. Subject made no statement and requested no counsel.

Subject Olmstead remains at large. He was last reported heading south through the canyon drainage system below Separation. The drainage runs approximately forty miles before terminating in an alkali basin. The route affords no resupply, no settlement, and no exit to the west. To the east, the Platte road is now monitored per standing directive. Copies of Bertillon card 243-B have been distributed to sheriffs’ offices in Carbon, Sweetwater, and Uinta Counties, and to the railroad express offices at Rawlins, Rock Springs, and Green River.

The spur line will reach Separation by February. Telegraph service will be operational by January. At present rate of construction, the distance between monitored stations decreases by approximately four miles per day.

No further action is recommended at this time.

Scobie signed the report and filed it with the supplementary material — the Bertillon card, the bank’s statement, Duff’s arrest record. He put the file in the cabinet with the other files, in its place between Olesky and Ormond, alphabetical, categorical, the system working the way systems work — not fast, not dramatic, but with the patience of a thing that does not need to hurry because it does not need to win. It only needs to wait.

He closed the cabinet and blew out the lamp and walked outside into the November night. The air was cold and tasted of sage and alkali. The stars were out. The town was quiet. Somewhere south, in a canyon that ran forty miles and then stopped, the wind moved through sage and the gravel settled and the varnish went on growing in the dark.