Transcript

He was growing into middle age and
was living then in a bungalow on
Woodland Avenue.
He installed himself in a rocking
chair and smoked a cigar down in
the evening as his wife wiped her
pink hands on an apron and
reported happily on their two
children. His children knew his
legs, the sting of his mustache
against their cheeks. They didn’t
know how their father made his
living, or why they so often moved.
They didn’t even know their
father’s name.
He was listed in the city directory
as Thomas Howard, and he went
everywhere unrecognized
and lunched with Kansas City
shopkeepers and merchants, calling
himself a cattleman or commodities
investor, someone rich and
leisured who had the common touch.
He had two incompletely healed
bullet holes in his chest and
another in his thigh. He was
missing the nub of his left middle
finger and was cautious lest that
mutilation be seen.
He also had a condition that was
referred to as granulated eyelids
and it caused him to blink more
than usual, as if he found creation
slightly more than he could accept.
Rooms seemed hotter when he was in
them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed.
Sounds were amplified.
He considered himself a Southern
loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil
War that never ended. He
regretted neither his robberies
nor the seventeen murders that he
laid claim to. He had seen another summer
under in Kansas City, Missouri, and on
September fifth, in the year 1881,
he was thirty-four years old.