But I have spent these last years in Hollywood, California, where I suppose I will sleep one night and pass on to glory in striped pajamas, with my mouth open, and with a dozen medicine bottles on the bedside vanity. It is 1937 and I am sixty-five years old and not the kind of man I started out to be, but a real-estate broker, a building contractor, a scriptwriter for Western movies; a church man, a Rotarian, a member of Moose Lodge 29, which is a true comeuppance for a desperado of the Old West, for the boy Emmett I was, and something to consider as I stood at night on my kelly-green lawn, a tinkling glass of ginger ale in my freckled, shaking hand.

A girl I didn’t know was alone in the pool swimming slowly back and forth in satin underwear while in the dining room a combo from Havana played its trumpets and castanets in slick black hair and frilly sleeves. A week ago my wife and I returned from Coffeyville, Kansas, where I was the favorite son, where I was famous, so this was a welcoming party of sorts; but it was a celebration too, because my second book, When the Daltons Rode, had just been sold to a film studio here and I was made richer by quite a little. So male movie stars slouched around a billiards table in white flannels and sweaters tied at their necks and a makeup man was perched on our white corduroy couch with my stout and mankind-loving wife, hooting at Julia’s comments, saying how precious she was.

If I went inside that grand stucco house with its South American look, women with platinum hair and clinging gowns and perfume strong as onions would beg to see my velvet-wrapped pistol or inquire about the Dalton gang and expect me to enchant them, become the gabby sidekick, confess about how it really was, as it those years of robbery were no more than a yarn about a blue ox or some carnival geek who chewed glass. If I went back inside I could see a houseboy carting drinks and a tray of bread squares smeared with black fish eggs, see a studio vice-president nuzzling the neck of another man’s wife or a gaffer in a red cummerbund learning the rhumba with a girl from the typing pool. And I could see myself in an old silent movie that was flickering against the living room wall, see Emmett Dalton in middle age jabbing a six-gun at a bank teller’s face as jostling dancers interrupted the screen, my holster strapped over a woman’s back, a drawer of coins on someone’s tuxedo shoulder.