Dim bulbs in sheer wells overhead cast down a little light on the rows of seats where, in all the theater, no more than a handful of patrons waited patiently for the end of the film — all of them men, none of them accompanied, although one person toward the front talked out loud to himself as if that were company enough. It was a sorrowful and ostentatious pre-war theater. Burris sensed rather than saw the pointless curtains dripping as if putrefied from the walls, as he waited at the top of the aisle to trust his eyes. The seat he chose, in the very front row, shrieked as he sat down in it. Without thinking he put his hand in the popcorn, and right away he was nauseated by the greasy feel of it. Putting it aside, he took a bottle of Jack Daniels from his back pants pocket and stared forward in total blindness at the screen, taking a pull from the bottle every ten seconds or so until half of it was gone. Around him men choked and coughed, and the one man talked, explaining to the darkness that no worthless bitch of a whore would ever tempt him to get himself chopped into pieces by some halfbreed. Then he stopped talking.
On the screen, two men fought with knives in a western barroom.
Burris understood none of it for the moment. His throat hurt, and the pulse in his head was enormous. The air-conditioned theater seemed too cold, but just as soon as he noticed the chill, he started to perspire. His throat ached more and more — it was as if a tennis ball had caught itself in his Adam’s apple and was swelling inexorably — and then suddenly, great sobs burst out of his lungs. He bent over in his seat, crying and coughing, and saliva found its way into his sinuses and burned his eyes and nose. The tears streamed over his cheeks. Trying to hold back sobs, he produced a squeaking sound. The crowd in the barroom on the movie screen shouted and exclaimed incoherently, while behind him, the men in the theater kept their silence.
In a minute he sat back in his seat and let the light from the screen play over him, greatly relieved and calmed. But he didn’t know what to do — he could never again see anybody who knew him, and every stranger was a hazard — and he understood he’d be caught. Almost as soon as it had passed he could feel, deep in the recesses of itself, his panic being born again. His face was hot and cold. A tingling sensation passed through his arms and legs, as if they were coming awake. He gulped the bottle empty, and nearly vomited. Wearing long trenchcoats, carrying shotguns and rifles, men on horses rode along a dirt road, passed into a forest, and made for a cabin in the clearing. Burris wished he could engage himself in their story — a story of men with guns, exactly like his own, except that nobody going to the movies ever guessed the essential, gigantic truth of it, which was that these men would trade everything they had for one clear minute of peace.
As he stared slack-jawed at the screen, almost overcome by the whiskey, his eyes abruptly turned gruesome and his stomach began clawing at itself. Trying to look like nobody in a hurry, nobody worth looking at or remembering, he rushed to the foul john and sat, nauseated and quaking, on one of the two stools there.
Burris wanted to weep with frustration because the lavatory was cramped and filled with stink, and the stalls, in one of which he sat chilly and vulnerable with his pants around his ankles and his arms around his belly, were without doors. His bowels moved with a spasm that shook him, and he began feeling better. Maybe no one would come in, while he sat like this in his utter helplessness. He felt that men who owned themselves and who had nothing to fear, coming into the bathroom to relieve themselves, would attribute all the odors to him alone.
But nobody was around, and there was nothing to distract him from himself but the drawings of genitalia and the urgent, depraved messages scratched on the walls that hemmed him in. At this moment, the vision of Burris’s spirit was riveted on the single fact he could be certain of: he was a wasted and desperate human being who hated himself. Anyone who came to stand before him at this moment would see the person Burris Houston as he really was — finally naked, finally made clear. Above all, he knew he would be caught. He would be arrested and harmed. He only wished they’d get to it. From his shirt pocket he took a ballpoint pen, a cheap one that wouldn’t write properly, and on the partition to his left he slowly wrote:
I ll suck your cock mmmmm
Underneath it he wrote:
When Put dat and time
And beneath that:
Fuck You Homos
He thought he heard someone coming and hastily used the toilet paper and pulled up his pants, though he feared another intestinal spasm. Half-drunk and yet with fear racing throughout his system, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw nothing. There was nobody there. He left quickly. The next movie they were going to show was Coma, and he didn’t want to miss any of it.
But the story of the grim and terrible events in the lives of armed bandits was still playing across the screen when he sat down, and it was far from finished.
He’d seen this movie before, it seemed to him, on TV: driven to desperate measures by their status as renegades following the Civil War, the James brothers of Missouri led a life of fighting and hiding. They were the first to rob trains. The backwoods people they’d grown up among protected them from authority. What had become of that time when a person could depend on his neighbors?
Burris could identify with these men. Once they’d made the initial move over the line of the law, everything else followed with the certainty of a boulder travelling down a hill, picking up wreckage in its path until an awful landslide of people, places, and things slaughtered you in a confusion of blood. And what could you do about it? You couldn’t expect the James boys to go looking for employment, hunted as they were like animals by the FBI, or whoever it was — the Pinkertons, Burris heard them called now — and so, in the end, although they were older and probably didn’t care any more about the Civil War, probably felt no anger against their enemies, probably wanted nothing more than to ride and hunt and live and breathe in the woods of their childhood, in the bosom of their families, in the company of their friends, they were driven nevertheless to strike as bandits once again. As the six gang members rode feeling like lords of the land into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, everything started to go wrong. The teller in the bank claimed he couldn’t open the vault, and in a hypnotic moment of anger and chaos, somebody shot his face off for him; and the people of the town of Northfield, it now turned out, had arranged themselves everywhere — behind barrels, on the wooden roofs, under the water troughs — to ambush the brothers and theír comrades as they stepped out of the doors of the bank. From one end of the street to the other, the men faced nothing but the firepower of hideous strangers. Burris had never seen anything more horrifying. What he couldn’t understand was why people who didn’t know you, people who’d never even seen you before, could be so filled with hatred they would risk their lives to see you die — why the bank guard had risen up, his eyes two white mirrors of terror, to rip apart poor James Houston with a gunshot wound, throwing himself away forever in the effort.
Burris didn’t know why he’d left his brothers. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. One minute he’d been standing on the sidewalk, and then almost simultaneously, it seemed, he was walking away from the Chrysler along the edge of the dry Salt River.
Burris felt his throat swelling again and knew he was about to weep; but the James gang, slowly and mercilessly ravaged as they charged through a mutilating swarm of bullets, back and forth, driven like a pack of wolves, thwarted at either end of the dirt street by barricaded murderous citizens, did not know anything about sorrow, grief, or fear. Methodically they ranged up and down the town’s thoroughfare, seeking an opening for escape, increasingly decimated, picking up their wounded when they fell from their horses, risking everything, absolutely everything, to take their brothers home. Holding his jaw tightly shut, the tears burning up his face in the dark theater full of lonely men, Burris understood at last that whatever the odds, whatever the chances, whatever the outcome and regardless of what came down, these sons of bitches did not intend to take any shit. They did not take shit, and they did not give out: and they never, ever turned each other in.