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of a cigar-smoke cloud. He knew he would be tested and a man burst through the smoke, Longbaugh ducking, a fist glancing off his ear, and he grabbed the man’s throat, crushing it to papery flakes, as if it was insect-infested pine under his fingers. He fought to extract himself from the dream, but his arms and legs were leaden, immobile, and yet somehow he was walking, walking a path, a path that brought him to a narrow boy standing in a field of poison purple larkspur, pleasant enough until he saw it was a boy with milk on his mustache raising Longbaugh’s good revolver and firing at his face,bullet spinning through a spew of yellow flame. A dream for sure, as he had time to duck from its path, and in that turn of his head he was facing the other direction and there she was at the chapel with the music in her heart and her infectious smile, slim in her wedding dress—do you take?—yes of course—say I do—all right, I will—laughing over it later in their honeymoon bed, between sheets, a lingering kiss, her smooth thighs cool against him.
    She had helped him survive prison, the way she knew and understood him, the way she believed in him, allowing him to keep a grip on his identity. She did it with her words. With her letters. He fought to wake up, as he knew his dream was about to go sour, and he wanted to avoid the darkness of isolation and loneliness, but his exhaustion held him under and drowned him in imagery, and he remembered, remembered a train, train rushing, rushing below in the dark, and they leapt together, he and affable, round-faced Parker, known to the world as Butch, landing in unison on a passenger car, laughing in each other’s faces, Parker, who had escaped that day.
    Butch. Longbaugh had been disoriented in prison after reports of his own death in another land, reported in ’09, a year after it was supposed to have happened, and he wondered, was he alive or had he died along with his name? It meant that Butch was gone, and the loss of his friend had carved out a hole in his marrow. But at least back then her letters still came from New York, for another two years they came, and, even more than before, they were his lifeline. If the unreality of his own death cloaked him in heavy moods, her letters were the link to stable truth, even if they were addressed to Alonzo rather than his real name. Her letters had come weekly, reliably, creating a need he did not know he craved, until there was nothing. A silence that had lasted the past two years. He took a step, expecting solid ground, and his foot fell through black space, dropping headlong into the empty abyss of her silence. He had blamed the guards, their one sure method of punishment, but the guards swore they withheld nothing. He continued to send his own letters to her until a visit from the warden, holding those very letters, all returned from New York City, someone else’s scrawlrefusing them. From the bottom of the abyss he knew the truth and he believed it, there would be no more correspondence, and in the blackness came a stunning ache.
    Bringing on the second incident. The big man had snickered, the big man who thought he was important enough to tease the legend, making his insinuation about Etta public. Longbaugh did not remember reacting, he only remembered his eyes unclouding to find the big man on his knees, bloody and cowering. This shocked him, first that he was capable of it, then that he had lost control. There were no repercussions—the big man did nothing after it happened, the big man’s friends did nothing, and no punishment came from the prison staff—as if no one believed Longbaugh capable of such fury.
    The nightmare now let go and he drifted into an easy dream, the boy Harry growing up in Philadelphia, traveling west as a young man, breaking horses, living on ranches, the mind-numbingly dull winters, the first time he and the boys drank themselves stupid and robbed a bank, his