Lonesome Dove (23 page)

19

NEWT’S MIND had begun to dwell on the north for long stretches. Particularly at night, when he had nothing to do but ride slowly around and around the herd, listening to the small noises the bedded cattle made, or the sad singing of the Irishmen, he thought of the north, trying to imagine what it must be like. He had grown up with the sun shining, with mesquite and chaparral, armadillos and coyotes, Mexicans and the shallow Rio Grande. Only once had he been to a city: San Antonio. Deets had taken him on one of his banking trips, and Newt had been in a daze from all there was to see.

Once, too, he had gone with Deets and Pea to deliver a small bunch of horses to Matagorda Bay, and had seen the great gray ocean. Then, too, he had felt dazed, staring at the world of water.

But even the sight of the ocean had not stirred him so much as the thought of the north. All his life he had heard talk of the plains that had no end, and of Indians and buffalo and all the creatures that lived on them. Mr. Gus had even talked of great bears, so thick that bullets couldn’t kill them, and deerlike creatures called elk, twice the size of ordinary deer.

Now, in only a few days, he would be going north, a prospect so exciting that for hours at a stretch he was taken away from himself, into imaginings. He continued to do his normal work, although his mind wasn’t really on it. He could imagine himself and Mouse out in a sea of grass, chasing buffalo. He could scare himself to the point where his breath came short, just imagining the great thick bears.

Before the Irishmen had been there a week, he had made friends with Sean O’Brien. At first the conversation was one-sided, for Sean was full of worries and prone to talking a blue streak; once he found that Newt would listen and not make fun of him, the talk gushed out, most of it homesick talk. He missed his dead mother and said over and over again that he would not have left Ireland if she hadn’t died. He would cry immediately at the thought of his mother, and when Newt revealed that his mother was also dead, the friendship became closer.

“Did you have a pa?” Newt asked one day, as they were resting by the river after a stretch of branding.

“Yes, I had one, the bastard,” Sean said grimly. “He only came home when he was a mind to beat us.”

“Why would he beat you?” Newt asked.

“He liked to,” Sean said. “He was a bastard, Pa. Beat Ma and all of us whenever he could catch us. We laid for him once and was gonna brain him with a shovel, but he was a lucky one. The night was dark and we never seen him.”

“What happened to him?” Newt asked.

“Ha, the drunkard,” Sean said. “He fell down a well and drownded. Saved us killing him and going to jail, I guess.”

Newt had always missed having a father, but the fact that Sean spoke so coldly of his put the matter in a different light. Perhaps he was not so unlucky, after all.

He was riding around the herd when Jake Spoon trotted past on his way to Lonesome Dove.

“Going to town, Jake?” Newt asked.

“Yes, I think I will,” Jake said. He didn’t stop to pass the time; in a second he was out of sight in the shadows. It made Newt’s spirits fall a little, for Jake had seldom said two words to him since he came back. Newt had to admit that Jake was not much interested in him, or the rest of them either. He gave the impression of not exactly liking anything around the Hat Creek outfit.

Listening to the talk around the campfire at night, Newt learned that the cowboys were unanimously hostile to Jake for fixing it so that Lorena was no longer a whore. Dish, he knew, was particularly riled, though Dish never said much when the other boys were talking about it.

“Hell,” Needle said, “there never was but one thing worth doing on this border, and now a man can’t even do that.”

“A man can do it plenty over in Mexico,” Bert observed. “Cheaper too.”

“That’s what I like about you, Bert,” Augustus said, as he whittled a mesquite twig into a toothpick. “You’re a practical man.”

“No, he just likes them brown whores,” Needle said. Needle kept a solemn look on his face at all times, seldom varying his expression.

“Gus, I’ve heard it said you had a fancy for that woman yourself,” Jasper Fant said. “I wouldn’t have suspected it in a man as old as you.”

“What would you know about anything, Jasper?” Augustus asked. “Age don’t slow a man’s whoring. It’s lack of income that does that. No more prosperous than you look, I wouldn’t think you’d know much about it.”

“We oughtn’t to talk this way around these young boys,” Bert said. “I doubt a one of ’em’s even had a poke, unless it was at a milk cow.”

A general laugh went up.

“These young uns will have to wait until we get to Ogallala,” Augustus said. “I’ve heard it’s the Sodom of the plains.”

“If it’s worse than Fort Worth I can’t wait to get there,” Jasper said. “I’ve heard there’s whores you can marry for a week, if you stay in town that long.”

“It won’t matter how long we stay,” Augustus said. “I’ll have skinned all you boys of several years’ wages before we get that far. I’d skin you out of a month or two tonight, if somebody would break out the cards.”

That was all it took to get a game started. Apart from telling stories and speculating about whores, it seemed to Newt the cowboys would rather play cards than anything. Every night, if there were as many as four who weren’t working, they’d spread a saddle blanket near the campfire and play for hours, mostly using their future wages as money. Already the debts which existed were so complicated it gave Newt a headache to think about them. Jasper Fant had lost his saddle to Dish Boggett, only Dish was letting him keep it and use it.

“A man dumb enough to bet his saddle is dumb enough to eat gourds,” Mr. Gus had said when he heard about that bet.

“I have et okra,” Jasper replied, “but I have never yet et no gourd.”

So far neither Newt nor the Rainey or Spettle boys had been allowed to play. The men felt it would be little short of criminal to bankrupt young men at the outset of their careers. But sometimes when nobody was using the deck, Newt borrowed it and he and the others played among themselves. Sean O’Brien joined in. They usually played for pebbles, since none of them had any money.

Talking to Sean had made Newt curious about Ireland. Sean said the grass was thick as a carpet there. The description didn’t help much for Newt had never seen a carpet. The Hat Creek outfit possessed no rugs of any kind, or anything that was green. Newt had a hard time imagining how a whole country could be covered with green grass.

“What do you do in Ireland?” he asked.

“Mostly dig spuds,” Sean said.

“But aren’t there horses and cows?” Newt asked.

Sean thought for a moment, but could only remember about a dozen cows in the vicinity of his village, which was near the sea. He had slept beside their own old milk cow on many a cold night, but he figured if he tried to lie down beside one of the animals they called cows in America the cow would be fifty miles away before he got to sleep.

“There are cows,” he said, “but you don’t find them in bunches. There’d be no place to put them.”

“What do you do with all the grass then?” Newt asked.

“Why, nothing,” Sean said. “It just grows.”

The next morning, while helping Deets and Pea build the branding fires, Newt mentioned that Sean said he brought his milk cow into the house and slept with her. Deets had a good laugh at the thought of a cow in a house. Pea stopped working for about ten minutes while he thought the matter over. Pea never liked to give his opinion too quickly.

“It wouldn’t work around the Captain,” he said finally, that being his opinion.

“How long do you think it will take us to get up north?” Newt asked Deets, the acknowledged expert on times and distances.

Though he had laughed about the cow in the house, Deets had not been his usual cheerful self for the last few days. He felt a change coming. They were leaving Lonesome Dove, where life had been quiet and steady, and Deets could not understand the reason for it. The Captain was not prone to rash moves—and yet it seemed rash to Deets to just pick up and go north. Usually when he thought about the Captain’s decisions he agreed with him, but this time he couldn’t. He was going, but he felt uneasy in his mind. He remembered one thing the Captain had drilled into them many times during the rangering years: that a good start made for a good campaign.

Now, it seemed to him, the Captain had forgotten his own rule. Jake Spoon came home one day, and the next day the Captain was ready to go, with a crew that was just a patched-together bunch, a lot of wild cattle, and horses most of which were only half broke. Besides that, it was nearly April, late to be starting out to go so far. He had been on the plains in summer and seen how quickly the water holes dried up.

Deets felt a foreboding, a sense that they were starting on a hard journey to a far place. And now here was the boy, too excited about the prospect to keep his mind on the work.

“Chop them sticks,” Deets said. “Don’t be worrying about the time. It’ll be fall, I expect, before we get there.”

Deets watched the boy, hoping he wouldn’t chop his foot off cutting the wood. He knew how to handle an ax, but he was forgetful once he got his mind on something. He didn’t stop working, he just worked absently, thinking about something else.

They were friends, though, he and Newt. The boy was young and had all his hopes, while Deets was older and had fewer. Newt sometimes asked so many questions that Deets had to laugh—he was like a cistern, from which questions flowed instead of water. Some Deets answered and some he didn’t. He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder. Deets liked his work, liked being part of the outfit and having his name on the sign; yet he often felt sad. His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water tank at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Those feelings hadn’t come to the boy yet. He was a good boy, as gentle as the gray doves that came to peck for gravel on the flats behind the barn. He would try to do any task that was asked of him, and if he worried overmuch it was that he wasn’t good enough at his work to please the Captain. But then the whole outfit worried about that—all, at least, except Mr. Gus. Deets himself had fallen short a few times over the years and had felt the Captain’s displeasure afflict him like a bruise.

“I swan,” Pea said, “Jake’s slipped off again. He sure don’t take to branding.”

“Mr. Jake, he don’t take to
work
,” Deets said with a chuckle. “It don’t have to be branding.”

Newt went on chopping wood, a little bothered by the fact that Jake had such a bad reputation with the men. They all considered him to be a man who shirked his duties. Mr. Gus worked even less and nobody seemed to feel that way about him. It was puzzling and, to Newt’s mind, unfair. Jake had just returned. Once he got rested, perhaps he would be more interested in the work.

While he was puzzling about it, he took a bad swing with the ax and a piece of mesquite he was trying to split flew right up and almost hit Deets in the head. It would have, except that Deets had evidently been expecting just such an accident. He quickly ducked. Newt was embarrassed—at the moment he had made his slip, his mind had drifted to Lorena. He was wondering what spending a day with her would actually be like. Would they just sit in the saloon playing cards, or what? Since he had not spoken to her, it was hard for him to know what the two of them could do for a whole day, but he liked to think about it.

Deets didn’t say a word or even look at Newt accusingly, but Newt was still mortified. There were times when Deets seemed almost to be able to read his mind; what would he think if he knew he had been thinking about Lorena?

After that, he reminded himself that Lorena was Jake’s woman, and tried to pay better attention to splitting the tough wood.

20

THE MINUTE Jake stepped in the door of the Dry Bean Lorena saw that he was in a sulk. He went right over to the bar and got a bottle and two glasses. She was sitting at a table, piddling with a deck of cards. It was early in the evening and no one was around except Lippy and Xavier, which was a little surprising. Usually three or four of the Hat Creek cowboys would be there by that time.

Lorena watched Jake closely for a few minutes to see if she was the cause of his sulk. After all, she had sold Gus the poke that very afternoon—it was not impossible that Jake had found out, some way. She was not one who expected to get away with much in life. If you did a thing hoping a certain person wouldn’t find out, that person always did. When Gus tricked her and she gave him the poke, she was confident the matter would get back to Jake eventually. Lippy was only human, and things that happened to her got told and repeated. She didn’t exactly want Jake to know, but she wasn’t afraid of him, either. He might hit her, or he might shoot Gus: she found she couldn’t easily predict him, which was one reason she didn’t care if he found out. After that, she would know him a lot better, whatever he did.

But when he sat down at the table and set a glass in front of her she soon realized it was not her who had put the tight look in his face. She saw nothing unfriendly in his eyes. She took a sip or two of whiskey, and about that time Lippy came over and sat down at the table with them as if he’d been invited.

“Well, you’ve come in by yourself, I see,” Lippy said, pushing his dirty bowler back off his wrinkled forehead.

“I did, and by God I intend to be by myself,” Jake said irritably. He got up and without another word took his bottle and glass and headed for the stairs.

It put her out of sorts with Lippy, for it was still hot in her room and she would rather have stayed in the saloon, where there was at least a breath of breeze.

But with Jake so out of sorts there was nothing to do but go upstairs. She gave Lippy a cool look as she got up, which surprised him so it made his lip drop.

“Why air you looking at me that way?” he asked. “I never tolt on you.”

Lorena didn’t answer. A look was better than words, where Lippy was concerned.

Then, the very minute she got in the room, Jake decided he wanted a poke, and in a hurry. He had drunk a half glass of whiskey while he was climbing the stairs, and a big shot of whiskey nearly always made him want it. He was dusty as could be from a day with the cattle, and would usually have waited for a bath, or at least washed the grit off his face and hands in the washbasin, but this time he didn’t wait. He even tried to kiss her with his hat on, which didn’t work at all. His hat was as dusty as the rest of him. The dust got in her nose and made her sneeze. His haste was unusual—he was a picky man, apt to complain if the sheets weren’t clean enough to suit him.

But this time he didn’t seem to notice that dust was sifting out of his clothes onto the floor. When he opened his pants and pulled his shirttail out a little trickle of sand came with it. The night was stifling and Jake so sandy that by the time he got through there was so much dirt in the bed that they might as well have been wallowing around on the ground. There were little lines of mud on her belly where sweat had caked the dust. She didn’t resent it, particularly—it was better than smoke pots and mosquitoes.

It was only when Jake sat up to reach for his whiskey bottle that he noticed the dust.

“Dern, I’m sandy,” he said. “I should have bathed in the river.”

He sighed, poured himself a whiskey and sat with his back against the wall, idly running a hand up and down her leg. Lorena waited, taking a sip or two of whiskey. Jake looked tired.

“Well, these boys,” he said. “They are aggravating devils.”

“Which boys?” she asked.

“Call and Gus,” he said. “Just because I mentioned Montana to ’em they expect me to help ’em drive them dern cattle up there.”

Lorena watched him. He looked out the window and wouldn’t meet her eye.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll do it,” he said. “I ain’t no dern cowpuncher. Call just got it in his head to go, for some reason. Well, let him go.”

But she knew that bucking Gus and the Captain was no easy thing for Jake. He looked at her finally, a sadness in his eyes, as if he was asking her to think of a way to help him.

Then he grinned, his little smart lazy grin. “Gus thinks we ought to marry,” he said.

“I’d rather go to San Francisco,” Lorena said.

Jake stroked her leg again. “Well, we will,” he said. “But don’t Gus come up with some notions! He thinks I ought to bring you along on the drive.”

Then he looked at her again, as if trying to fathom what was in her thoughts. Lorena let him look. Tired as he was, with his shirt open, there seemed nothing in the man to fear. It was hard to know what he himself feared. He was proud as a turkey cock around other men, irritable and quick to pass an insult. Sitting on her bed, with his clothes unbuttoned, he seemed anything but tough.

“What was old Gus up to all afternoon?” he asked. “He never got back till sundown.”

“The same thing you was just up to,” Lorena said.

Jake lifted his eyebrows, not really surprised. “I knowed it, that scamp,” he said. “Left me to work so he could come and pester you.”

Lorena decided to tell it. That would be better than if he found it out from somebody else. Besides, though she considered herself his sweetheart, she didn’t consider him her master. He had not really mastered anything except poking, though he had improved her card game a little.

“Gus offered me fifty dollars,” she said.

Jake lifted his eyebrows again in his tired way, as if there was nothing he could possibly be told that would really surprise Mm. It angered her a little, his acting as if he knew everything in advance.

“He’s a fool with money,” Jake said.

“I turned him down,” Lorena said. “I told him I was with you.”

Jake’s eyes came alive for a moment and he gave her a smart slap on the cheek, so quick she scarcely saw it coming. Though it stung her cheek, there was no real anger in it—it was nothing to some of the licks she had taken from Tinkersley. Jake hit her the once as if that was the rule in a game they were playing, and then the life went out of his eyes again and he looked at her with only a tired curiosity.

“I reckon he got his poke,” he said. “If he didn’t you can hit me a lick.”

“We cut the cards for it and he cheated,” Lorena said. “I can’t prove it but I know it. He gave me the fifty dollars anyway.”

“I ought to told you never to cut the cards with that old cud,” Jake said. “Not unless you’re ready for what he’s ready for. He’s the best card cheat I ever met. He don’t cheat often, but when he does you ain’t gonna catch him.”

He wiped some of the mud off her belly. “Now that you’re rich you can loan me twenty,” he said.

“Why should I?” Lorena said. “You didn’t earn it and you didn’t stop it.”

Besides, he had money from his own card playing. If she knew anything, it was not to give a man money. That was nothing more than an invitation to get sold with their help.

Jake looked amused. “Keep it then,” he said. “But if it had been any other man than Gus I would have shot you.”

“If you’d known,” she said, getting up.

Jake stood looking out the window while she stripped the bed. He sipped his whiskey but didn’t mention the trail again.

“Are you going with the herd?” she asked.

“Ain’t decided,” he said. “They’ll be here till Monday.”

“I plan to leave when you leave,” she said. “With the herd or not.”

Jake looked around. She was standing in her shift, a little red spot on one cheek where he had slapped her, a lick that made no impression on her at all. It seemed to him there was never much time with women. Before you could look at one twice, you were into an argument, and they were telling you what was going to happen.

“You’d look a sight in a cow camp,” he said. “All them dern cowboys are in love with you anyway. I’d had to kill half of ’em before we got to the Red River, if you go along.”

“They won’t bother me,” she said. “Gus is the only one with the guts to try it.”

Jake chuckled. “Yes, he’d want to cut the cards twice a day,” he said.

It seemed to him harder, as he got older, to find a simple way of life. On the one hand there were his friends, who expected something of him; on the other there was Lorie, who expected something else. He himself had no fixed ideas about what to do, though he thought it would be pleasant to live in a warm town where he could find a card game. Having a pretty woman to stay with made life happier, of course, but not if it meant having to take the woman to San Francisco.

Of course he could run: he wasn’t chained to the bedpost or to the friends either. There was Mexico, right out the window. But what would that get him? Mexico was even more violent than Texas. Mexicans were always hanging Texans to make up for all the Mexicans Texans hung. If hanging was all he had to look forward to, he’d rather take his in Arkansas.

Lorie was watching him with a strange heat in her eyes. It wasn’t because he had slapped her either. He felt she was reading his mind—somehow most women could read his mind. He had only really out-maneuvered one, a little redheaded whore in Cheyenne who was all heart and no brain. Lorena wasn’t going to be fooled. Her look put him on the defensive. Most men would have beat her black and blue for what she had done that afternoon, and yet she hadn’t even made an attempt to conceal it. She played by her own rules. It struck him that she might be the one to kill the sheriff from Arkansas, if it came to that. She wouldn’t balk at it, if he could keep her wanting him.

“You don’t need to stand there looking out of sorts,” he said. “I won’t run off without you.”

“I ain’t out of sorts,” Lorena said. “You are. You don’t want to stay and you don’t want to go.”

Jake looked at her mildly. “I’ve been up that way,” he said. “It’s rough. Why don’t we go up to San Antonio and gamble for a spell?”

“Tinkersley took me there,” Lorena said. “I don’t want to go back.”

“You’re a hard one to please,” Jake said, getting a little testy suddenly.

“I ain’t,” Lorena said. “You please me fine. I just want to go to San Francisco, like you promised.”

“Well, if you don’t like San Antone there’s Austin, or Fort Worth,” Jake said. “There’s lots of nice towns that ain’t as hard to get to as San Francisco.”

“I don’t care if it’s hard,” Lorena said. “Let’s just go.”

Jake sighed and offered her more of his whiskey. “Lay back down,” he said. “I’ll rub your back.”

“I don’t need my back rubbed,” she said.

“Lorie, we can’t leave tonight,” he said. “I was just offering to be friendly.”

She had not meant to press him so, but a decision had become important to her. She had spent too many nights in the little hot room they were in. Taking the gritty sheets off the bed made her realize it. She had changed them many times because the men she lay under were as gritty as Jake had been. It was something that had repeated itself once too often. Now she was done with it. She wanted to throw the sheets, and maybe the mattress and the bed, too, out the window. She was through with the room and everything that went with it, and Jake Spoon might as well know it.

“Honey, you look like you’ve caught a fever,” Jake said, not realizing it was a fever of impatience to be done with Lonesome Dove and everything in it. “If you’re set on it, I reckon we’ll go, but I don’t fancy living in no cow camp. Call wouldn’t have it anyway. We can ride with them during the day and make our own camp.”

Lorena was satisfied. Where they camped made no difference to her. Then Jake started talking about Denver, and how when they got there it would be easy to make their way across to San Francisco. She only half listened. Jake washed off as best he could in the little washbasin. She had only one spare sheet, so she put it on the bed while he was washing.

“Let’s leave tomorrow,” she said.

“But the herd don’t leave till Monday,” he reminded her.

“It ain’t our herd,” she said. “We don’t have to wait for it.”

There was something different about her, Jake had to admit. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman. Certain mountains were that way, like the Bighorns. The air around them was so clear you could ride toward them for days without seeming to get any closer. And yet, if you kept riding, you would get to the mountains. He was not so sure he would ever get to Lorie. Even when she took him, there was a distance between them. And yet she would not let him leave.

When they blew out the lamp a shaft of moonlight came in the window and cut across their bodies. Lorie let him rub her back, since he enjoyed doing it. She was not sleepy. In her mind she had already left Lonesome Dove; she was simply waiting for the night to end so they could really leave. Jake got tired of the back rub and tried to roll her over for another poke but she wouldn’t have it. She pushed his carrot away, a response he didn’t like at all.

“What’s the matter now?” he asked.

Lorie didn’t answer. There was nothing to say. He made a second try and she pushed it away again. She knew he hated to be denied but didn’t care. He would have to wait. Listening to his heavy, frustrated breathing, she thought for a while that he might be going to make a fight over it, but he didn’t. His feelings were hurt, but pretty soon he yawned. He kept twisting and turning, hoping she would relent. From time to time he nudged her hip, as if by accident. But he had worked all day; he was tired. Soon he slept. Lorie lay awake, looking out the window, waiting for it to be time to leave.