She smiled and kissed him on the shoulder. She got off the bed and poured the rest of the bottle into her glass and blew out the candle on the chair seat. “When you’re inside me what does it feel like?”

He looked down into his glass and finished off what was there. “Ask me another question.”

Eugenia stared out the tall windows. The wind was teasing the curtains. She rolled the glass against her cheek. “Okay. Spend some time on this. Don’t give just a short answer. What do you think about when you’re alone?”

He rocked forward with a pillow mashed in his face, worrying it and muttering. Then he drank from her champagne glass and shut his eyes. “How famous I’m going to be. How it’s just around the corner.” He opened his eyes as if that were enough.

“Amplify,” she said.

He shouted, “How famous I’m going to be. How—”

“Idiot,” she said.

He kissed her hand and put his head on her thigh and brushed the blond bangs from her forehead. “My name’s going to be in all the New York and Chicago and Denver papers; boys who only saw me once will say we worked a hay baler together, and Easterners who never stepped in a cow pie will make up adventures about me for Beadle’s Half-Dime Library. I’ll be as important as Jesse James and soon as I’m dead they’ll steal my clothes and auction off my pistols and strangers will visit my grave. I’m looking forward to it.”

She sat there in the dark.

He said, “Do you want me to ask you questions now?”

He never told me what they were.

9

THEY HONEYMOONED ALL that summer. They’d sleep until ten and swim naked in Canton Lake and sit on a yellow porch-glider at dusk. They didn’t even farm. But they put tables in the front yard for a cookout in July and the whole of the Dalton gang was there: Bob, Eugenia, Julia, myself; and Doolin, Broadwell, Powers; Bitter Creek Newcomb and his buddy Charlie Pierce; Blackface Charley Bryant came with Miss Jean Thorne, and the black cowpuncher Amos Burton brought three prostitutes from Dover who ate their suppers on the back porch and later walked into the crab apple tree shade with the cowhands.