Against the Day (38 page)

After what seemed like a week on the
train, “What did you need me along for, again?”

“Cover my back.”

“She that dangerous?”

“Yehp, and she ain’t all that’s
there.” After a couple of slow, wheeling changes of landscape, “You might like
it, Francisco, why, there’s a church, a schoolhouse, any number of those
backeast vegetarian restaurants—”

“Oh I’ll find something to do.”

“Don’t be mopin’ now. “

“Whoa, you think I’m mopin, I ain’t
mopin about this, how can you think such a thing?”

“Don’t know, if it was me, I might
be.”

“You, Reefer, you don’t know your
heart from your hatband.”

“Put it this way—everybody has
to have somebody to make em look good, which just happens to be you in this
case.”

“Course, but wait a minute, now which
one
. . .
is making the other one
look good, again?”

Well, it was sure another world they
were riding through, a waking dream. Saltflats in the rain, no horizon,
mountains and their miragereflections like skulls of animals from other times,
washed in a white shimmer. . . sometimes you could see all the way to a
planetary horizon warped into an arc. Eastbound storms were likely to carry
snow with some thunder and lightning thrown in, and the valley fog was the same
color as the snow.

The depot
at Nochecita had smooth stuccoed
apricot walls, trimmed in a somehow luminous shade of gray—around the
railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had
grown, houses and businesses painted vermilion, sage, and fawn, and towering at
the end of the main street, a giant sporting establishment whose turquoise and
crimson electric lamps were kept lit all night and daytime, too, for the place
never closed.

There was an icehouse and a billiard
parlor, a wine room, a lunch and eating counter, gambling saloons and
taquerías. In the part of town across the tracks from all that, Estrella
Briggs, whom everybody called Stray, was living upstairs in what had been once
the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore
strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in
places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been
threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated
snowshed roofing. The restaurant and bar on the groundfloor corner had been
there since the boom times, offering twobit allyoucaneat specials, sawdust on
the floor, heavyduty crockery, smells of steaks, chops, venison chili, coffee
and beer and so on worked into the wood of the wall paneling, old trestle
tables, bar and barstools. At all

hours the place’d be racketing with
gamblinghall workers on their breaks, bighearted winners and bad losers,
detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. A sunken chamber
almost like a natatorium at some hotsprings resort, so cool and dim that you
forgot after a while about the desert waiting out there to resume for you soon
as you stepped back into it
. . . .

Stray
, as it turned out, was real
pregnant. Not only showing it, but also that other composed and dreamy thing
you couldn’t help noticing right away when the rest of the neighborhood was
anything but. Through the upper rooms, insomnia ruled. It happened to be a week
of convergences from all over. Everybody but Stray was nearly crazy already,
Reef and Frank showing up was just one more problem. There were also her friend
Sage’s Mormon exfoster parents from olden times, “sacred arrangements” going
back in history to her Ma’s problems with these people, Sage’s own promise to
join the faith, her latest beau, and maybe even another exbeau, who might or
might not be also about to show up, or even be in town already, along with newer
influences, not so much personal it seemed as almost public, a set of bornagain
“friends”—though more in this official, maybe even sheriff’soffice
way—“friends” more newly made than these Mormons but no less clamoring
for the girl’s time, uneasy, in fact desperate to see her safe and married, who
would stand literally
in a circle
around the couple as if enforcing the
choice and allowing them no other
. . . .

Frank came quickly to understand that
Stray and his brother had had a dustup, and Reef had taken off but was now
repentant, and what he needed Frank along for seemed to be muscle. Maybe.
Almost as if he didn’t really know what he was doing, and meant to consult
Frank about it. Or as if two pissignorant rounders would turn out to be smarter
than one.

“Nice that you got around to tellin
me anyhow.”

“Frank, meet Stray.”

Ohoh, Frank thought. “Family idiot,”
he introduced himself, “taggin along case anybody needs some emergency droolin
done, or whatever.”

At any given time, two or three girls
were either packing or unpacking, just back from trips or just about to leave,
so there were clothes new bought and not yet put on, sewing patterns and scraps
of material, provisions in cans or jars or sacks, all as yet unstashed, strewn
about the rooms. No claims of female tidiness around here it seemed. Though all
of these girl bunkmates—how many and what their names were he never got
straight either—were pleasant enough, letting Frank right into the
kitchen and eventually the pantry, assigning him one of the dozen or so empty
beds, he couldn’t be sure

they weren’t a little wary of him for
being Reef’s brother. Ready, at anybody’s first funny move, to protect Stray.
There was also a possibility in the air that Stray and Sage would just fling up
their hands and go vamoose town together if the beau situation got much more
complicated.

One of these semiawaited young
gents—Cooper—when he did show up, turned out to be blond, shy,
scaled about seveneighths the size you’d expect, pleasantfaced enough except
for something about his upper lip, which tucked over his teeth in a protective
way, as if there was deep injury of some kind in his past, long enough ago at
least for this defense to have worked in and set. Wouldn’t come in the house,
just sat out there astride his machine, a black and gold Vtwin with white
rubber tires and a brass headlamp, beaming his own blueheaven luminaries at
those who passed—with whom, despite the lip held so neutral, this tended
to register as a smile.

Cooper and his rig were parked across
the street. Frank, trying to be helpful, went down there to look them both
over. “How you doin?”

The scaleddown motor badman nodded
back, beaming away.

“Lookin for Sage?” coming out harsher
than it should. Maybe this got Cooper to dim down a little, though given the
eyeball diameter here, it wasn’t much as flinches go. “ ’Cause I think she went
to the depot, ’s all I meant.”

“Meetin somebody, or leavin town?”

“Didt’n hear no more’n ’at.”

“Will anybody mind some pickin?” Now
producing a “Cornell” model Acme guitar, Grand Concert size, mailordered from
Sears and Roebuck, whose notes, as he began to play, rang like schoolbells from
end to dusty end of the desert town. Lunchtime customers came squinting out of
the gloom of the Double Jack or detouring down the alley to see what this might
be. As he sang, the newcomer had his waytooreadable eyes locked on the upstairs
windows across the street, waiting for faces there, or a particular face, to be
drawn by the music, which now and then found strange notes added into the guitar
chords, as though Cooper had hit between the wrong frets, only somehow it
sounded right. Little kids from the schoolhouse next door came piling out into
shade under cottonwood trees or onto porch steps to eat or play with their
lunch, some of the moodier even to sing along—

Out on the wind
. . .
Durango dove, Ride the sky, Dare the
storm
. . . .
We never onceDid speak
of love,Or I’d be free,And a long time gone
.
. . .
When the lamplightComes on in town,Rings and rouge,Satin gown . .
.Oh, but myLost. . .Durango dove,Do they believe it all,The way I do?Would they
fallInto your sky,Even die,Dove, for you
. .
. .

     
The small, vibratoless voices, wind
in cottonwoods. Cooper’s fingers squeaking along the wirewrapped strings,
creaky percussion of wagon traffic in the dirt streets. The onset of siesta
time. The pearl and windless sky. And who meanwhile had materialized at the
upstairs window? The boy’s ironclad lip slid up into the most unexpected of
smiles, not very controlled, way too longing. Sage appeared on the outside
stairs in some saloondancer’s practice concern of palest gray, all legs and
sobriety, coming down to him so smoothly, without a thought for stepbystep
details of her entrance, all as easy and light as a breath, that before the
young motorwheelman could so much as blink, she had slipped a bare forearm into
his shirtsleeve up alongside of his own arm, and he was trying to focus ’em
baby blues, was how close she was standing, though she still hadn’t quite
looked him in the face.

Reef couldn’t believe it. “Three
weeks’ wages for one those things? Might be worth it. Couldn’t be that hard to
learn how to play.”

“You think it’d help
you?
”
inquired Frank, innocently.

In the middle
of the night, the schoolteacher next
door was out on the secondfloor veranda preparing meals for the next day. Frank
couldn’t sleep. He stumbled out onto the hardpan and happened to look up. “You
still working?”

“You still loitering down there?”

“I could loiter up there, I guess.”

“Have to put you to work.”

“Sure.”

Up close, in the light from the
streetlamps, he couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was—her cheeks,
beneath dark eyes and eyebrows, showing just the beginnings of some weathering
in, desert influence, no doubt
. . . .

“Here, do these peas. Have you known
Estrella for long?”

“Well
. . .
it’s her and my brother—”

“
Oh
Lord. That was ’at Reef Traverse?”

“Was last time I looked—I’m
Frank
. . .
the one that ain’t Reef?”

“Linnet Dawes.” A desert lady’s hand,
a square handshake that didn’t choose to linger. Or, he guessed, loiter.

“Reef’s well known around town here,
is he?”

“Estrella has mentioned him once or
twice. Not that we’re confidantes or anything.”

A midnight breeze had risen, bringing
with it the sound of a creek not far away. As if Linnet’s own serenity might be
catching, he felt content to just sit there and shell peas, without much need
to be chinning away, though he did slide his eyeballs over now and then to see
what she might be up to in the fractional moonlight, and even found her looking
at him once or twice in the same sidelong way.

Was it just this country? Something
to do with the relative humidity, maybe? Frank had been noticing some kind of
deadman switch or shutdown mechanism at work which, every time an interesting
or even interested woman appeared, immediately doomed all possibility of
romance. Men in this era not being known to sigh, he exhaled expressively. A
fellow could rely on Market Street only so far, and then even that began to get
discouraging, plagal cadences on parlor pianos, bright lights, and mirrors to
the contrary notwithstanding.

Linnet, done with her chores, stood,
shook out her apron. Frank handed her the bowl of loose peas. “Thanks. Your
brother has his work cut out for him.”

“Well I’ll pass that on.” No,
wait—wrong answer, he bet.

She was shaking her head, lips pursed
in a lopsided way. “I’m not worried about either of
them,
much.”

He figured he should let it go at
that, instead of ask who else she might be worried about. She was watching him
as if following along as these thoughts occurred. Over her shoulder, just
before she slipped away indoors, she said, “Maybe we’ll peel onions sometime.”

Next afternoon he was lying in one of
the beds reading the
Police Gazette,
or, actually, looking at the
pictures, when Stray appeared in the doorway, soft as

a housechime, looked to see if he was
awake, nodded, came in, sat on the end of the bed.

“You
. . .
weren’t looking for Reef?” he said.

“No.”

“ ’Cause I think he’s across the
street, saw him
. . .
headin in the
Double Jack, about an hour ago?”

“Frank,” in the twilight through the
dusty windowglass, her face just this side of some outburst he knew he would
not be able to address, “if he wasn’t your brother, just some customer the wind
blew in, would you know what to do about him at all, would you even want to
take the trouble
. . .
?”

“Hard to say.” Oh. Wrong again.

She gazed, impatient, a light tremor
in arms and neck. “Damn all
this,
I can sure tell you that much.”

He tried to make out, against the
daylight flowing in off the plain, what he could of her face veiled in its own
penumbra, afraid somehow of misreading it, the brow smoothed by the uncertain
light to the clarity of a girl’s, the eyes beneath free to claim as little
acquaintance with the unchaste, he guessed, as she might need.