Something to Be Desired (6 page)

Twice Lucien got up and stared at the lights of the main house. The third time W. T. Austinberry said, “Jump, and king me.”

Lucien sat down and pressed three fingers on a checker he wasn’t sure he’d play. He was suddenly afraid of something. Maybe he was just tired.

“Let’s finish this game.”

“Not till she’s over,” said W.T.

Lucien floundered onto his elbows. “Can’t play any more.” He was drunk.

“You gettin’ you a little up to the big house?”

“Don’t start that.”

W.T. threw his head back. “Lord!” he bayed. “It’s a little bitty world.”

They fought bitterly but briefly, bloodying each other’s faces on the floor, then refilled their drinks and resumed the checker game. The checkers were all over the board.

“You with the FBI?” asked W.T.

“ ‘No, the USIA.”

“Hunh. Thought she said the FBI. Thought you was a Federale.”

“King, king, king!” Lucien splattered the checkers good. “I win, you lose … talk that way about my girl, you—”

“When’s the last time you had a date with Emily?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Go on, tell me.”

“Years and years ago.”

“Son, she’s changed since that time.” W.T. laughed deep in his throat.

“How?”

“She’s a better shot,” said W.T. with a wide cowboy smile. Then he grew alcohol-pensive. “This time I’m thinking about, I was trying to prove up on a lease I had over at Kid Royal. And we was getting ready to load out at Deadrock. I had the heeler up front with me, the radio on, when I threw a recap right on the scale. I was with Boyd, and he cusses and dumps a set of dead batteries from his hot shot, throws it in the jockeybox and said he’s got a come-along to get our outfit to dry ground with. This was supposed to be the last of a big run of yearlings. And it turns out we got a five-hole spare for a six-hole rim. I knew right then and there my luck was shot. I knew them yearlings would bring next to nothing. God, it was bad. Also at this time I had a girl name of Shawna who wore a mood ring which was always nearly black. She cooked at the brandings and made eyes at the ropers. She was dumb. She read love comics and used her Chapstick as if it was a cigarette, and she was about as dumb as a stick. She lived at Parade Rest Trailer Park, which is no more than a breeding pen, and she was stick-ass dumb. But right about
then
, I met ole Emily. She come into the
sale yard and bought that set of cattle. She gave me my break, and I ain’t looked back since. She liked me.”

“I can’t tell you what this story does to me.”

“I’d follow her to the gates of hell.”

“That’s her most famous effect, all right.”

Lucien refilled the drinks while W.T. talked. “You gotta make them women happy. Plow ’em, take ’em on a trip, put a little smile on their lips. They like to spend, spend, spend. So what I say is, let ’em.” The thermostat on the baseboard heater turned on and forced W. T. Austinberry to get up and go a good part of the way across the room.

He lay out on the floor, barely moving. Then it got quiet. “Hundred-proof whiskey is a cowboy’s color TV,” said W. T. Austinberry from his own world on the bunkhouse floor, and passed out. Lucien looked at him: he could no longer be reached.

Lucien had an awkward time getting back to his room. He thanked W. T. Austinberry for the lovely evening, then did the hurricane walk across the yard from tree to tree until he achieved the main house. He did his best going up the stairs, whereupon Sadie began barking at him in sharp yelps. He smothered her against the floor long enough for her to recognize him, then dragged her into bed.

“Lucien, what’s going on there?”

Lucien froze, clutching his dog. He heard Emily start up the stairs. Then she appeared, eclipsing the dangling bulb that threw a circle of electrical light around her. She glittered in vengeful beauty.

“What’ve you been doing?”

“I’m afraid we got damn well good and drunk,” said Lucien.

“You and W.T.…”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“About what?”

“About anything.”

“God, I don’t know,” said Lucien. “We were playing checkers.”

“Let’s take a walk.”

“Let’s take a walk!”

“Yeah,” she said. “By the moonlight.”

“All right,” Lucien said and got out of bed fully dressed. Sadie shot repeatedly in the direction of the door, indicating her readiness for some hunting.

“Why don’t you leave the dog …”

Lucien thought about it, then hitched Sadie to the leg of one of the ruined chairs and got a coat. Emily had a pair of jeans pulled on under a nightshirt. She tied the tails of the nightshirt and, downstairs, pulled a loose sweater over that. They headed into the night like laundry.

Lucien didn’t feel very good. As they walked out into the dark, things rose to meet him, then passed. He once reached up to put an arm around Emily but missed completely without her noticing; his arm merely fell through air, then returned to his side.

Lucien made a willow-leaf mouth whistle and blew two notes over and over until Emily took it away from him. She led him over a ridge and a ravine and kicked to dust an abandoned anthill. When Lucien passed a big cottonwood tree, his shadow shot up the trunk, scared him, and disappeared.

In a depression between two small hills was the blue hole. Lucien had seen it before. It was a small steamy
spring, pouring hot water out of rock slab, then brimming over into the woods below. You could see the stars above and the lights of town beyond. Lucien reached down to touch the water, to see where the surface was. The only way he knew his finger had arrived at its surface was by the mark of current that appeared and shone in the light; and down below were shapely round stones that were deep and far away.

Lucien heard Emily’s plunge, then saw her emerge through the curtain of bubbles, wavering like an inverted flame. Lucien left his clothes on the bank and slid in thinking, Now it’s before I was born. They finned and treaded water in each other’s arms. Emily took Lucien and got him inside of herself. She held him on either side of his head with the flats of her hands while they made a queerish love with nothing to hang on to. Lucien came out of her just at the end, and a jet of sperm spiraled to the surface and floated. Emily trailed it off with the tip of her finger and smiled at Lucien.

“It’s been a long time,” said Lucien. He felt himself rocketing into the past.

Emily dug her nails into the backs of his arms. “Just what did that sonofabitch tell you, anyway?” she said.

Emily had incomplete use of her hands from an accident she’d had some years ago in which her husband had figured. Emily was a talented pianist, and there had been this accident. Even when they were in high school she had been considered very gifted;
beyond just high school in Montana. They’d all expected to hear something of her talent, and then came this news of her getting her hands mangled. Lucien used to go over to her house and she’d be practicing. He had a brief, luminous spell as her sweetheart, ended, as it often was, by the arrival of Emily’s future husband, the doctor. He was rugged, intimidating and athletic. He was probably about twenty-one at the time, but to Lucien he seemed to be some outlandish oldster like a millionaire or a Green Bay Packer. Lucien was nervous for the short time that he was around him, shuffling in the front hall of Emily’s house. She and the doctor were soon a hot item. After that, that is, down through the years, the few reports were not good. Her husband was a surgeon, a hard drinker, a big-game hunter, a man of wealth; and so far as Lucien could tell from rumors and long-range snooping, tough with Emily. On a hot day she blew his brains out at close range and turned herself in to the sheriff in Deadrock.

This ranch had been meant as a kind of retreat for that childless couple. Since it was her neck of the woods—he was a Detroiter—Lucien guessed this meant a small capitulation for him. She came earlier each summer, but he never stayed past antelope season. Lucien had observed him a few times at the Bozeman airport, standing next to his luggage in a stadium coat arguing with the baggage handlers about his rifles. Lucien hadn’t seen Emily at all.

But for a short time long ago, Emily and Lucien were going into the sunset as a composer and a painter, leaving the world a richer place. Within a few years he was distributing leaflets to Latinos for the U.S. government and she was getting knocked around regularly by her college
sweetheart. Lucien had spells of delicious blind ambition, spells of painting, spells of high courtship and long, accompanied starlit walks on empty Western Hemisphere beaches, barefoot and with the pantlegs of a well-cut tropical suit rolled higher than the warm breaking waves. He married the companion and had a wonderful little boy.

He was sure Emily had had some fine times too. Lucien was now years older than that man she left him for.

Lucien attempted over the next few days to have a serious conversation about the cattle with Brer Austinberry. He was not interested. This place, he reminded Lucien, was a strict grass outfit and, as such, subject to the worst statistics then current in the cow business. There was a three-year immediate history across the state of Montana of beef prices dropping twenty cents per pound between turnout and shipping in the fall, which meant every cowman went backward until about halfway through the summer or maybe longer, depending upon the nature of his loan. This did not hold Austinberry’s attention; he continued to jingle back and forth across the kitchen in his big roweled spurs. Lucien said, Let’s haul everything to town this fall, accept that we had little that would grade better than utility cattle; then start anew with first-calf heifers in the spring. That meant buying some hay right away.

“We don’t want to buy hay,” said Austinberry. “We don’t want to spend any money.”

“What are we going to feed in the spring?”

“I don’t care what we feed in the spring.”

“Don’t you plan to be here?”

·  ·  ·

After lunch he went up the dry creek bed that wound straight up to the Crazies like a holy road. There was an old wagon track that made parallel grooves in rock. In a hairpin turn he found a moldering pile of empty .45-.70 cartridges, an old firefight in a quiet hollow. Because of his hearty lunch Lucien was suffering what the nutritionists call the alkali tide, and in his lassitude he dreamed of water galloping down the rocky walls of the dry bed and taking him to the ocean, where no decisions would be required and where he could have his little boy back.

Lucien and the lawyer hovered around the glow of the lamp, a medieval gimmick in a lonesome theme restaurant, and a terrific minor anomaly for a Montana cow town. The lawyer, Wick Tompkins, was a heavy man who, you could see, had risen from another station in life. In trying to express the solitude of his existence, he asked Lucien if there was anything sadder than returning home to an empty answering machine. He had a quick-moving face that tapered cleanly from temples to chin; but his hands were those of an honest laborer and fell upon the table with an earnest thud to underscore each phrase. Lucien rather liked him, but Tompkins was determined to maintain an adversary air. It was he who had designed the ranch-forfeit document for Emily.

“She’s going to go to the penitentiary,” he said. Thud. “To make a long story short.” This time the hands fell from a greater height.

“And you’re her lawyer,” said Lucien, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m her lawyer.” The hands lay conspicuously still.

“Oh boy.”

“Hey, look at it this way: she killed him deader than a mackerel. But this is the land of Japanese horseshoes, Taiwanese cowboy shirts and Korean bits. Who knows what a jury will say?”

“There must have been a reason she killed him.”

“There was a good reason. He beat her. But he hadn’t done it in a long time. Therefore it was premeditated murder.
She
describes it as premeditated murder. A jury with a room-temperature IQ will see it as
premeditated murder
. It’s perfectly inescapable. Put yourself in my shoes. I’m going to explain how he slammed her hands in the car door to keep her from playing the piano. And about the time that sinks in, here comes Mr. Prosecutor with a photograph of the mortal remains featuring a face that’s all powder burns except where the bullet actually goes in, which is a hole.”

“Well, then,” Lucien asked, “what good are you?”

“I am going to try to reduce her sentence, string out the road show through appellate court, work on her eligibility for pardon and just all-round obfuscate justice like the good mouthpiece I am. You know, for a country boy.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see. What you see is acquittal for her and a fresh start for the two of you. Y’know, quiet evenings around your paint-by-numbers kit out there to the ranch.”

“You’re getting a little loose-lipped now. This thing is bad enough without the grandstanding. I mean, spare me. And make that your last one—” Lucien pointed at his drink. “Tank towns know few more unpleasant eyesores than native-son lawyers with land-grant educations
tottering out of some roadhouse where they know the owner.… I got to go.”

He started to leave. The lawyer called after him, “One’ll get you ten you lose the hundred thou.”

When Lucien looked back, the lawyer had a light sweat from thinking up his last line. It was like a jog around the block for a guy who runs a lot. He looked fairly pleased with himself, but Lucien appreciated him: freewheeling hick-town wise guys were getting scarce.

Lucien tried to think directly about Emily shooting her husband, a brutal Type A personality who took it out on all and sundry. Emily would look the facts in the eye. Lucien felt he had never been able to do that. He could see her weighing the old husband in the scales of justice the way a park superintendent reviews the record of a garbage-raiding bear who is scaring the campers: we’ve got one here who’s got to go.

Lucien got up early and made breakfast. It was a wood stove with a water jacket, and kind of amusing to run. It had a lot of hot spots on top, so cooking eggs required moving the skillet around until you found a reasonable temperature that didn’t burn them up. Today they were going hunting.