The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (3 page)

H
e was in Chicago for one day and night and that was enough. At the first downtown intersection he tried to cross he went sprawling back onto the sidewalk to avoid being trampled by the horses of a furniture wagon, the driver cursing him for a bumpkin as he lashed the team by.

He had not heard the wagon’s approach for the surrounding din. The city was an assault on the senses, the streets a clamorous jam of clattering draft wagons and clanging streetcars trailing crackling electric sparks along the overhead lines, trains screeching and rumbling on the elevated tracks, an assortment of chugging and honking motorcars under the harried guidance of goggled pilots, shrilling whistles of policemen trying vainly to direct the tangle of traffic, cries of newsboys hawking headlines on every corner.

The sidewalks were thronged with a mix of humanity bellowing in a half-dozen tongues. The air ripe with the reek of the multitude, of horse droppings and alleyway garbage, with the stench of the upwind stockyards and slaughterhouses. This mix of stinks fusing with alien odors of tenement cooking and the aromas of bakeries and chop houses and cafés.

He bought a small notebook and wrote a short letter to his mother, saying he was sorry for what he’d done but Kaicel had given him no choice and he did not feel like a murderer. He told her not to worry about him and that he would try to write often. At a post office he bought an envelope and stamp and sent the letter off. He would write to her every so often as he moved about the West, but he feared giving himself away to agents of the law who might examine the letters, and more than six months would pass before he would risk a return address.

On that Chicago evening he went into a saloon and treated himself to a mug of beer and a shot of whiskey, the first of his life not pilfered from Kaicel’s unguarded beer bucket or poorly hidden bottles, and then had another of each. He ordered up a steak, having sworn it was the only way he would evermore engage with a cow. Nor would he again touch any teat but a woman’s, a happy experience he’d a few times had with a girl, although he’d not yet progressed beyond it. It was a failing he set out to rectify on the completion of his meal. He’d been told that a man could not walk two blocks in Chicago without bumping his nose on a cathouse door. An hour later and for the price of one dollar he knew the rapture of his first coitus. Enjoyed upon a skinny blonde girl who smelled of boiled cabbage and was missing a lower front tooth. She spoke only Polish and giggled at his clumsy way with the language, and he wished he’d paid better attention to his mother’s tutoring in it.

He departed the building feeling like a man of the world. So languidly content he took no notice of the ruffians watching from the shadows across the street. Two blocks farther on he was coshed from behind and lugged into the darkness of an alley, vaguely aware of the malodorous slime of the pavement under his face, the hands at his pockets, the low cursing of the assailants and their rapid footfalls as they made away.

The damp dawn found him a quarter-mile west of the railyard, huddled in the brush of a junk-littered swale bordering the tracks. The spot Steamer and Iron George had proposed as the best for catching a westbound train. His head throbbed with every heartbeat and the hair at the swollen bruise on his head was matted with half-dried blood. He was furious he’d been waylaid so easily. See if he let his guard down next time he was in a goddamn city.

The day was breaking red when the train came lumbering out of the yard. Cattle cars, mostly, all of them packed but one. He scanned the train for a watching brakeman and saw none, then ran from the brush and up the crushed-stone embankment, pain pounding his skull. A hatless grayhaired man lurched out of the weeds nearby and started for the train too, but he could not run well and immediately fell behind. Ketchel ran up to the stock car and executed the boarding move exactly as he’d been taught, nimbly swinging himself up to the door and opening it enough to slip into the car. He looked back to see the old bo halted and bent over with hands on knees, a quit man. He slid the door closed. The cattle shuffled uneasily. The car floor was strewn with straw and droppings, but he found a clean corner and gathered more straw into it and settled himself.

“At least you ain’t milk cows,” he said to the steers.

That afternoon he crossed the Mighty Mississippi into Iowa, his
stomach drawing tight as he hung out the door for a better view of the wide expanse of gliding caramel water far below the track bridge. This side of the river the flat dull countryside looked to him like more of Illinois, which had looked mostly like more of Michigan.

But so what? He was over the Mississippi. He was by God in the West.

H
E ASSUMED THE
hobo name Steelyard Steve and over the next months rode the rails through boundless tracts of western America. He sought respite in hobo camps and was welcomed far more often than not. He held to Steamer’s advice and kept his mouth shut unless spoken to. He observed closely. He listened hard.

He rode through Nebraska and Kansas, across the Oklahoma gun barrel into Texas all the way to the Rio Grande. Up to New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming. Across Idaho and Oregon and down into California. Over to Nevada and Utah. South into Arizona Territory. The untamed beauty of the country was everything he’d imagined. He was agawk at its glorious vastness. Plains of tall grass rolling to the ends of the sky. Mountains like great muscles of the earth. Hills of every color. Rivers deep and swift and fierce. He’d never before known clouds of such tower and breadth, such a blazing nearness of the stars, such intensity of sunrise or sunset. Such heat. Such wind.

He rode past farms with smoke spiraling from kitchen chimneys and men at plowing and at harvest, past meadows with families at picnics, past waving men and boys fishing from trestles, past fields where traveling tent shows had set up, past ferries of pull ropes or poles, past river baptisms in progress, past a Mexican birthday party amid an assembly of shanties where a blindfolded child swat
ted with a pole at a colorful piñata. Past a hatless girl with blonde hair streaming as she raced her palomino alongside the fence next to the tracks.

He sometimes camped beside rivers jumping with fish the size of his arm and he cursed his bad luck not to have a line and hook. Camped sometimes in deep woods where insects rattled in the trees like tambourines and an owl as big as a cattle dog once swooped within feet of him. Camped sometimes on open prairie where wolf howls woke him deep in the night, his heart jumping with excitement and the hair rising on his nape.

W
HEN HE WAS
arrested along with three other boes at pistol-point by a yard bull in Alpine, Texas, his first impulse had been to run for it, but an older bo warned against it. “In Texas they’ll shoot you for the sport, sonny.” They got fifteen days for vagrancy and were put to work with a chain gang grading a stretch of the Fort Davis road. They fed, morning and night, on fatback and beans and bread. A few days into their sentence one of the boes stepped over to a rocky mound to relieve himself and happened on a nest of rattlesnakes. He was so startled he slipped and fell onto it and was struck on the legs, arms, face, everywhere. He stood screaming with a snake thrashing from his chin and one from his thigh and Ketchel snatched them away. By the time he was laid in the truck to be taken to the hospital his clothes were tight on his bloated flesh and his face was a blackening horror, and he died before morning. At the end of their sentence, Ketchel and the other two boes were driven out to the railyard so they could board a westbound freight. One of the cops said they best never come back to Brewster County if they knew what was good for them. Ketchel would sooner have walked barefoot over burning coals than set
foot in Texas again, but he wisely refrained from sharing that sentiment with the cops.

H
IS FIRST RIDE
on the rods was worse than any he’d been told of. He and a bo named Eight Ball tried to sneak aboard a Santa Fe freight one morning at a whistle stop some forty miles south of Albuquerque, but they found the boxcars locked. So they crawled under one and got up on the rods, one man behind the other. From this precarious perch the crossties seemed close enough to touch.

“I ain’t so sure about this,” Stanislaus said.

“Don’t worry, kid. I done it a dozen times. Just set yourself good and enjoy the ride.”

Then the train was moving again and the track bed became a blur and there were no sounds on earth save the rumble and clash of steel and roaring rush of air. But a shack must’ve seen them get under the car, because a length of chain spilled down between the car they rode and the one directly ahead and started paying back toward them. Attached to the end of the chain was a coupling pin, glancing off the ties and roadbed, whipping around under the car like the head of a crazed iron snake, banging wildly against the undercarriage, clanging off the rods.

Stanislaus had heard of this method some shacks used for clearing the rods of riders. He was forward of Eight Ball and so the coupling pin would reach him first. He did as Iron George had taught him and tucked his head down between his arms to protect his skull as best he could and held on with all his might and hoped he would suffer no broken bone.

He flinched and yelped at the clouts of the pin to his shoulder, to his hip. Then the flailing end of the chain was past him and he
looked rearward just as the pin struck Eight Ball in the face and burst an eye and a small ribbon of blood fluttered from it. Stanislaus couldn’t hear his own scream as the caroming pin cracked against Eight Ball’s elbow and the man fell headlong. But one leg was caught in the undercarriage and for an endless moment he was dragged over the ties and rocky roadbed with large portions of him detaching in quick red rips. And then all of him was gone except the lower leg, torn off at the knee and still jammed in the tie.

Now the coupling pin started lashing back toward Stanislaus and he braced himself once more. Then the chain abruptly straightened and reversed direction and the length of it went shuddering past and vanished. It took him a moment to understand that the brakeman must’ve lost his hold on it.

It seemed like hours before the train at last halted at the Albuquerque yard but could not have been more than fifteen minutes. He had to force his fingers free of the rods before he could ease himself to the track bed and roll out from under the car. As he hobbled away toward the yard’s high iron fence and the sanctuary of the woods beyond, he heard a shouting of pursuers. He made the fence and scaled it, dropped to the other side and ran for the woods as two pistolshots cracked behind him. Then was into the trees and gone.

H
E HAD FANCIED
becoming a cowboy and riding the range, though he had never sat a saddle or even been astride any mount but Kaicel’s aging draft horse. On seeing real cowboys at work on their ponies he knew he would never be one. But he was an expert hand with tools of all kinds, and wherever he went he easily got work. He repaired gates and barn roofs, wagon axles and whiffletrees. He could mend harness and was an able smithy. He took
pleasure in the exercise of pitching hay, and his endurance at it was a wonder to every man who witnessed it.

He worked hard and fed well. He relished the comradeship of the bunkhouse, the easy talk and tales of lurid adventure, the Saturday night sessions at poker. He discovered he owned a certain dexterity with the cards and was not above employing it now and then to abet his luck. His adroitness was less than he fancied, however, and on occasion his sportsmanship was called into question. The first time he was accused of bottom dealing he lunged over the table and unhinged the man’s jaw with one blow. He’d added pounds of muscle since absconding from his Michigan home and his punch was an awesome thing. Even the foreman was impressed, but nevertheless fired him for a troublemaking cardsharp. That was in Oklahoma.

There were other fights on other ranches, other firings. None of the lost jobs mattered to him at all, as he in any case never stayed on a ranch longer than it took to finish the job he was hired for. He was ever eager to be back on the rails and on the move. To see what might be waiting down the track.

There were fights on the trains, too. And in the railyards and in the hobo camps. Somebody would try to steal his shoes or his bindle. Or would already be in a freight car he boarded and would not want to share it. Or a bull or brakeman would lay hand to him rather than simply order him to hit the grit. He broke noses, teeth, bit off part of one man’s ear and almost all of another’s nose, drove a knee into various sets of balls. To the cheers of onlooking hoboes, he beat a shack bloody with the same club the brakeman had tried to use on him. But nothing so outraged him in a fight as the introduction of a knife, which happened twice, the first time in a hobo camp outside of Flagstaff, where he dodged the swipes of a
Green River knife until a fry pan came to hand and he laid it hard into the man’s ear and then bashed him cockeyed with it. The other time was in a boxcar when a bo tried to steal the bedroll of a thirteen-year-old runaway. Stanislaus interceded and the man pulled a hawkbill. Stanislaus took a gash to a hand before pinning the bo’s arm and snapping his elbow joint over his knee, then shoving him from the speeding train.

S
HARING A BOXCAR
with a graybeard Yank veteran who’d been with Joe Hooker at Antietam, he was enthralled by the man’s war tales. Then another old bo clambered aboard at a water stop and as it happened he’d served with Stonewall Jackson. The oldsters locked up in a clumsy fight that had Ketchel laughing until they reeled across the car with their hands on each other’s throats and fell out of the highballing train and were gone.

Rolling through New Mexico on a night of windy rain he was witness to a boxcar birth, the woman assisted by her male companion, the infant entering the world with irate squalls. The woman held the babe to her breast and whispered to it as it fed. He asked what they intended to name it, and the man said John
L.,
after his own hero, even though he didn’t know what the
L
stood for. Neither did Ketchel. “Lucky,” the woman said. “It stands for Lucky.”