Lonesome Dove (5 page)

It made no sense to Lorena, but she relaxed. There was no likelihood he would try anything crazy on her.

“This is ten dollars,” she said, thinking maybe he just hadn’t noticed what kind of money he was handing over.

“You know, prices are funny,” he said. “I’ve known a good many sporting girls and I’ve always wondered why they didn’t price more flexible. If I was in your place and I had to traipse upstairs with some of these old smelly sorts, I’d want a sight of money, whereas if it was some good-looking young sprout who kept himself barbered up, why a nickel might be enough,”

Lorena remembered Tinkersley, who had had the use of her for two years, taken all she brought in, and then left her without a cent.

“A nickel wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I can do without the barbering.”

But Augustus was in a mood for discussion. “Say you put two dollars as your low figure,” he said. “That’s for the well-barbered sprout. What would the high figure be, for some big rank waddy who couldn’t even spell? The pint I’m making is that all men ain’t the same, so they shouldn’t be the same price, or am I wrong? Maybe from where you sit all men
are
the same.”

Once she thought about it, Lorena saw his point. All men weren’t quite the same. A few were nice enough that she might notice them, and a goodly few were mean enough that she couldn’t help noticing them, but the majority were neither one nor the other. They were just men, and they left money, not memories. So far it was only the mean ones who had left memories.

“Why’d you give me this ten?” she asked, willing to be a little curious, since it seemed it was going to be just talk anyway.

“Hoping to get you to talk a minute,” Augustus said, smiling. He had the most white hair she had ever seen on a man. He mentioned once that it had turned white when he was thirty, making his life more dangerous, since the Indians would have considered the white scalp a prize.

“I was married twice, you remember,” he said. “Should have been married a third time but the woman made a mistake and didn’t marry me.”

“What’s that got to do with this money?” Lorena asked.

“The pint is, I ain’t a natural bachelor,” Augustus said. “There’s days when a little bit of talk with a female is worth any price. I figure the reason you don’t have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk. Listening to women ain’t the fashion in this part of the country. But I expect you got a life story like everybody else. If you’d like to tell it, I’m the one that’d like to hear it.”

Lorena thought that over. Gus didn’t seem uncomfortable. He just set there, twirling his rowel.

“In these parts what your business is all about is woman’s company anyway,” he said. “Now in a cold clime it might be different. A cold clime will perk a boy up and make him want to wiggle his bean. But down here in this heat it’s mostly company they’re after.”

There was something to that. Men looked at her sometimes like they wished she would be their sweetheart—the young ones particularly, but some of the old ones too. One or two had even wanted her to let them keep her, though where they meant to do the keeping she didn’t know. She was already living in the only spare bedroom in Lonesome Dove. Little marriages were what they wanted—just something that would last until they started up the trail. Some girls did it that way—hitched up with one cowboy for a month or six weeks and got presents and played at being respectable. She had known girls who did it that way in San Antonio. The thing that struck her was that the girls seemed to believe it as much as the cowboys did. They would act just as silly as respectable girls, getting jealous of one another and pouting all day if their boys didn’t act to suit them. Lorena had no interest in conducting things that way. The men who came to see her would have to realize that she was not interested in playacting.

After a bit, she decided she wasn’t interested in telling Augustus her life story, either. She buttoned her dress back up and handed him the ten dollars.

“It ain’t worth ten dollars,” she said. “Even if I could remember it all.”

Augustus stuck the money back in his pocket. “I ought to know better than to try and buy conversation,” he said, still grinning. “Let’s go down and play some cards.”

4

WHEN AUGUSTUS LEFT CALL sitting on the steps he took a slow stroll through the wagon yard and down the street, stopping for a moment on the sandy bottom of Hat Creek to strap on his pistol. The night was quiet as sleep, no night when he expected to have to shoot anybody, but it was only wise to have the pistol handy in case he had to whack a drunk. It was an old Colt dragoon with a seven-inch barrel and, as he was fond of saying, weighed about as much as the leg he strapped it to. One whack would usually satisfy most drunks, and two whacks would drop an ox if Augustus cared to put his weight into it.

The border nights had qualities that he had come to admire, different as they were from the qualities of nights in Tennessee. In Tennessee, as he remembered, nights tended to get mushy, with a cottony mist drifting into the hollows. Border nights were so dry you could smell the dirt, and clear as dew. In fact, the nights were so clear it was tricky; even with hardly any moon the stars were bright enough that every bush and fence post cast a shadow. Pea Eye, who had a jumpy disposition, was always shying from shadows, and he had even blazed away at innocent chaparral bushes on occasion, mistaking them for bandits.

Augustus was not particularly nervous, but even so he had hardly started down the street before he got a scare: a little ball of shadow ran right at his feet. He jumped sideways, fearing snakebite, although his brain knew snakes didn’t roll like balls. Then he saw an armadillo hustle past his feet. Once he saw what it was, he tried to give it a kick to teach it not to walk in the street scaring people, but the armadillo hurried right along as if it had as much right to the street as a banker.

The town was not roaring with people, nor was it bright with lights, though a light was on at the Pumphreys’, whose daughter was about to have a baby. The Pumphreys ran a store; the baby their daughter was expecting would arrive in the world to find itself fatherless, since the boy who had married the Pumphrey girl had drowned in the Republican River in the fall of the year, with the girl only just pregnant.

There was only one horse hitched outside the Dry Bean when Augustus strolled up—a rangy sorrel that he recognized as belonging to a cowboy named Dishwater Boggett, so named because he had once rushed into camp so thirsty from a dry drive that he wouldn’t wait his turn at the water barrel and had filled up on some dishwater the cook had been about to throw out. Seeing the sorrel gave Augustus a prime feeling because Dish Boggett loved card playing, though he lacked even minimal skills. Of course he also probably lacked ante money, but that didn’t necessarily rule out a game. Dish was a good hand and could always get hired—Augustus didn’t mind playing for futures with such a man.

When he stepped in the door, everybody was looking peeved, probably because Lippy was banging away at “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” a song that he loved to excess and played as if he hoped it could be heard in the capital of Mexico. Xavier Wanz, the little Frenchman who owned the place, was nervously wiping his tables with a wet rag. Xavier seemed to think keeping the tables well wiped was the crucial factor in his business, though Augustus was often forced to point out to him that such a view was nonsense. Most of the patrons of the Dry Bean were so lacking in fastidiousness that they wouldn’t have noticed a dead skunk on the tables, much less a few crumbs and spilled drinks.

Xavier himself had a near-monopoly on fastidiousness in Lonesome Dove. He wore a white shirt the year round, clipped his little mustache once a week and even wore a bow tie, or, at least, a black shoestring that did its best to serve as a bow tie. Some cowpoke had swiped Xavier’s last real bow tie, probably meaning to try and impress some girl somewhere up the trail. Since the shoestring was limp, and not stiff like a bow tie should be, it merely added to the melancholy of Xavier’s appearance, which would have been melancholy enough without it. He had been born in New Orleans and had ended up in Lonesome Dove because someone had convinced him Texas was the land of opportunity. Though he soon discovered otherwise, he was too proud or too fatalistic to attempt to correct his mistake. He approached day-to-day life in the Dry Bean with a resigned temper, which on occasion stopped being resigned and became explosive. When it exploded, the placid air was apt to be rent by Creole curses.

“Good evening, my good friend,” Augustus said. He said it with as much gravity as he could muster, since Xavier appreciated a certain formality.

In return, Xavier nodded stiffly. It was hard to extend the amenities when Lippy was at the height of a performance.

Dish Boggett was sitting at one of the tables with Lorena, hoping to persuade her to give him a poke on credit. Though Dish was barely twenty-two, he wore a walrus mustache that made him look years older than he was, and much more solemn. In color the mustache was stuck between yellow and brown—kind of prairie-dog-colored, Augustus thought. He frequently suggested to Dish that if he wanted to eat prairie dog he ought to remember to pick his teeth, a reference to the mustache whose subtlety was lost on Dish.

Lorena had her usual look—the look of a woman who was somewhere else. She had a fine head of blond hair, whose softness alone set her apart in a country where most women’s hair had a consistency not much softer than saddle strings. Her cheeks hollowed a little—it gave her a distracting beauty. Augustus’s experience had taught him that hollow-cheeked beauty was a dangerous kind. His two wives had both been fat-cheeked and trustworthy but had possessed little resistance to the climate. One had expired of pleurisy in only the second year of their marriage, while the other had been carried off by scarlet fever after the seventh. But the woman Lorena put him most in mind of was Clara Allen, whom he had loved hardest and deepest, and still loved. Clara’s eyes were direct and sparkled with interest, whereas Lorena’s were always side-looking. Still, there was something about the girl that reminded him of Clara, who had chosen a stolid horse trader when she decided to marry.

“’I god, Dish,” he said, going over to the table, “I never expected to see you loafing down here in the south this time of the year.”

“Loan me two dollars, Gus,” Dish said.

“Not me,” Augustus said. “Why would I loan money to a loafer? You ought to be trailing cattle by this time of year.”

“I’ll be leaving next week to do just that,” Dish said. “Loan me two dollars and I’ll pay you in the fall.”

“Unless you drown or get stomped or shoot somebody and get hung,” Augustus said. “No sir. Too many perils ahead. Anyway, I’ve known you to be sly, Dish. You’ve probably got two dollars and just don’t want to spend it.”

Lippy finished his concert and came and joined them. He wore a brown bowler hat he had picked up on the road to San Antonio some years before. Either it had blown out of a stagecoach or the Indians had snatched some careless drummer and not bothered to take his hat. At least those were the two theories Lippy had worked out in order to explain his good fortune in finding the hat. In Augustus’s view the hat would have looked better blowing around the country for two years than it did at present. Lippy only wore it when he played the piano; when he was just gambling or sitting around attending to the leak from his stomach he frequently used the hat for an ashtray and then sometimes forgot to empty the ashes before putting the hat back on his head. He only had a few strips of stringy gray hair hanging off his skull, and the ashes didn’t make them look much worse, but ashes represented only a fraction of the abuse the bowler had suffered. It was also Lippy’s pillow, and had had so many things spilled on it or in it that Augustus could hardly look at it without gagging.

“That hat looks about like a buffalo cud,” Augustus said. “A hat ain’t meant to be a chamber pot, you know. If I was you I’d throw it away.”

Lippy was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it, which in fact it did. Lippy had something wrong with his nose and breathed with his mouth wide open.

Accustomed as she was to hard doings, it had still taken Lorena a while to get used to the way Lippy slurped when he was eating, and she had once had a dream in which a cowboy walked by Lippy and buttoned the lip to his nose as if it were the flap of a pocket. But her disgust was nothing compared to Xavier’s, who suddenly stopped wiping tables and came over and grabbed Lippy’s hat off his head. Xavier was in a bad mood, and his features quivered like those of a trapped rabbit.

“Disgrace! I won’t have this hat. Who can eat?” Xavier said, though nobody was trying to eat. He took the hat around the bar and flung it out the back door. Once as a boy he had carried slops in a restaurant in New Orleans that actually used tablecloths, a standard of excellence which haunted him still. Every time he looked at the bare tables in the Dry Bean he felt a failure. Instead of having tablecloths, the tables were so rough you could get a splinter just running your hand over them. Also, they weren’t attractively round, since the cowboys could not be prevented from whittling on their edges—over the years sizable chunks had been whittled off, giving most of the tables an unbalanced look.

He himself had a linen tablecloth which he brought out once a year, on the anniversary of the death of his wife. His wife had been a bully and he didn’t miss her, but it was the only occasion sufficient to provide an excuse for the use of a tablecloth in Lonesome Dove. His wife, whose name had been Therese, had bullied horses, too, which is why his team had run off and flung themselves and the buggy into a gully, the buggy landing right on top of Therese. At the annual dinner in her honor Xavier proved that he was still a restaurateur of discipline by getting drunk without spilling a drop on the fine tablecloth. Augustus was the only one invited to the dinners, but he only came every three or four years, out of politeness; not only were the occasions mournful and silly—everyone in Lonesome Dove had been glad to see the last of Therese—they were mildly dangerous. Augustus was neither as disciplined a drinker as Xavier nor as particular about tablecloths, either, and he knew that if he spilled liquor on the precious linen the situation would end badly. He would not likely have to shoot Xavier, but it might be necessary to whack him on the head, and Augustus hated to hit such a small head with such a large pistol.

To Xavier’s mind, Lippy’s hat was the final exacerbation. No man of dignity would allow such a hat in his establishment, much less on the head of an employee, so from time to time he seized it and flung it out the door. Perhaps a goat would eat it; they were said to eat worse. But the goats ignored the hat, and Lippy always went out and retrieved it when he remembered that he needed an ashtray.

“Disgrace!” Xavier said again, in a somewhat happier tone.

Lippy was unperturbed. “What’s wrong with that hat?” he asked. “It was made in Philadelphia. Says so inside it.”

It did say so, but Augustus, not Lippy, was the one who had originally made the point. Lippy could not have read a word as big as Philadelphia, and he had only the vaguest notion of where the city was. All he knew was that it must be a safe and civilized place if they had time to make hats instead of fighting Comanches.

“Xavier, I’ll make you a deal,” Augustus said. “Loan Dish here two dollars so we can get a little game going, and I’ll rake that hat into a towsack and carry it home to my pigs. It’s the only way you’ll ever get rid of it.”

“If you wear it again I will burn it,” Xavier said, still inflamed. “I will burn the whole place. Then where will you go?”

“If you was to burn that pianer you best have a swift mule waiting,” Lippy said, his lip undulating as he spoke. “The church folks won’t like it.”

Dish found the conversation a burden to listen to. He had delivered a small horse herd in Matamoros and had ridden nearly a hundred miles upriver with Lorie in mind. It was funny he would do it, since the thought of her scared him, but he had just kept riding and here he was. He mainly did his sporting with Mexican whores, but now and then he found he wanted a change from small brown women. Lorena was so much of a change that at the thought of her his throat clogged up and he lost his ability to talk. He had already been with her four times and had a vivid memory of how white she was: moon-pale and touched with shadows, like the night outside. Only not like the night, exactly—he could ride through the night peacefully, and a ride with Lorena was not peaceful. She used some cheap powder, a souvenir of her city living, and the smell of it seemed to follow Dish for weeks. He didn’t like just paying her, though—it seemed to him it would be better if he brought her a fine present from Abilene or Dodge. He could get away with that with the señoritas—they liked the idea of presents to look forward to, and Dish was careful never to renege. He always came back from Dodge with ribbons and combs.

But somehow he could not get up the nerve even to make the suggestion to Lorena. It was hard enough to make a plain business offer. Often she seemed not to hear questions when they were put to her. It was hard to make a girl realize you had special feelings for her when she wouldn’t look at you, didn’t hear you, and made your throat clog up. It was even harder to live with the thought that the girl in question didn’t want you to have the special feelings, particularly if you were about to go up the trail and not see her for many months.

Confusing as these feelings were, they were made even worse for Dish by the realization that he couldn’t afford even the transaction that the girl would accept. He was down to his last two bits, having lost a full month’s wages in a game in Matamoros. He had no money, and no eloquence with which to persuade Lorena to trust him, but he did have a dogged persistence and was prepared to sit in the Dry Bean all night in hope that his evident need would finally move her.

Under the circumstances it was a sore trial to Dish that Augustus had come in. It seemed to him that Lorie had been getting a little friendlier, and if nothing had happened to distract her he might soon have prevailed. At least it had been just him and her at the table, which had been nice in itself. But now it was him and her and Augustus and Lippy, making it difficult, if not impossible, for him to plead his case—though all he had really been doing by way of pleading was to look at her frequently with big hopeful eyes.