The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “ ’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 tow-sack 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 seeme
d 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.

  Lippy began to feel unhappy about the fact that Xavier had thrown his hat out the door. Augustus’s mention of the pigs put the whole matter in a more ominous light. After all, the pigs might come along and eat the hat, which was one of the solidest comforts in his meager existence. He would have liked to go and retrieve the hat before the pigs came along, but he knew that it wasn’t really wise to provoke Xavier unduly when he was in a bad mood anyway. He couldn’t see out the back door because the bar was in the way—for all he knew the hat might already be gone.

  “I wisht I could get back to St. Louis,” he said. “I hear it’s a right busy town.” He had been reared there, and when his heart was heavy he returned to it in his thoughts.

  “Why, hell, go,” Augustus said. “Life’s a short affair. Why spend it here?”

  “Well, you are,” Dish said, in a surly tone, hoping Gus would take the hint and set out immediately.

  “Dish, you sound like you’ve got a sour stomach,” Augustus said. “What you need is a good satisfying game of cards.”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Dish said, casting a bold and solicitous glance at Lorena.

  Looking at her, though, was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed as they were. You could go to them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting.

  Xavier stood at the door, staring into the dark. The rag he used to wipe the tables was dripping onto his pants leg, but he didn’t notice.

  “It’s too bad nobody in town ain’t dead,” Augustus remarked. “This group has the makings of a first-rate funeral party. What about you, Wanz? Let’s play cards.”

  Xavier acquiesced. It was better than nothing. Besides, he was a devilish good cardplayer, one of the few around who was a consistent match for Augustus. Lorena was competent—Tinkersley had taught her a little. When the Dry Bean was full of cowboys she was not allowed to sit in, but on nights when the clientele consisted of Augustus, she often played.

  When she played, she changed, particularly if she won a little—Augustus frequently did his best to help her win a little, just to see the process take place. The child in her was briefly reborn—she didn’t chatter, but she did occasionally laugh out loud, and her cloudy eyes cleared and became animated. Once in a while, when she won a really good pot, she would give Augustus a little punch with her fist. It pleased him when that happened—it was good to see the girl enjoying herself. It put him in mind of family games, the kind he had once played with his lively sisters in Tennessee. The memory of those games usually put him to drinking more than he liked to—and all because Lorie ceased being a sulky whore for a little while and reminded him of happy girls he had once known.

  They played until the rustler’s moon had crossed to the other side of town. Lorena brightened so much that Dish Boggett fell worse in love with her than ever; she filled him with such an ache that he didn’t mind that Xavier won half of his next month’s wages. The ache was very much with him when he finally decided there was no hope and stepped out into the moonlight to unhitch his horse.

  Augustus had come with him, while Lippy sneaked out the back door to retrieve his hat. The light in Lorena’s room came on while they were standing there, and Dish looked up at it, catching just her shadow as she passed in front of the lamp.

  “Well, Dish, so you’re leaving us,” Augustus said. “Which outfit’s lucky enough to have you this trip?”

  The quick glimpse of Lorena put Dish in such perplexity of spirit that he could hardly focus on the question.

  “Reckon I’m going with the UU’s,” he said, his eyes still on the window.

  The cause of Dish’s melancholy was not lost on Augustus.

  “Why that’s Shanghai Pierce’s bunch,” he said.

  “Yup,” Dish said, starting to lift his foot to his stirrup.

  “Now hold on a minute, Dish,” Augustus said. He fished in his pocket and came out with two dollars, which he handed to the surprised cowboy.

  “If you’re riding north with old Shang we may never meet again this side of the bourn,” Augustus said, deliberately adopting the elegiac tone. “At the very least you’ll get your hearing ruint. That voice of his could deafen a rock.”

  Dish had to smile. Gus seemed unaware that one of the more persistent topics of dispute on the Texas range was whether his voice was louder than Shanghai Pierce’s. It was commonly agreed that the two men had no close rivals when it came to being deafening.

  “Why’d you give me this money?” Dish asked. He had never been able to figure Gus out.

  “You asked me for it, didn’t you?” Augustus said. “If I’d given it to you before the game started I might as well have handed it to Wanz, and he don’t need no two dollars of mine.”

  There was a pause while Dish tried to puzzle out the real motive, if there was one.

  “I’d not want it thought I’d refuse a simple loan to a friend,” Augustus said. “Specially not one who’s going off with Shanghai Pierce.”

  “Oh, Mr. Pierce don’t go with us,” Dish said. “He goes over to New Orleans and takes the train.”

  Augustus said nothing, and Dish soon concluded that he was to get the loan, even if the aggravation of Mr. Pierce’s company wasn’t involved.

  “Well, much obliged then,” Dish said. “I’ll see you in the fall if not sooner.”

  “There’s no need for you to ride off tonight,” Augustus said. “You can throw your blanket down on our porch, if you like.”

  “I might do that,” Dish said. Feeling rather awkward, he rehitched his horse and went to the door of the Dry Bean, wanting to get upstairs before Lorie turned off her light.

  “I believe I left something,” he said lamely, at the door of the saloon.

  “Well, I won’t wait, Dish,” Augustus said. “But we’ll expect you for breakfast if you care to stay.”

  As he strolled away he heard the boy’s footsteps hitting the stairs at the back of the saloon. Dish was a good boy, not much less green than Newt, though a more experienced hand. Best to help such boys have their moment of fun, before life’s torments snatched them.

  From a distance, standing in the pale street, he saw two shadows against the yellow box of light from Lorie’s room. She wasn’t that set against Dish, it seemed to him, and she had been pepped up from the card playing. Maybe even Lorie would be surprised and find a liking for the boy. Occasionally he had known sporting women to marry and do well at it—if Lorie were so inclined Dish Boggett would not be a bad man to settle on.

  The light had gone off at the Pumphreys’ and the armadillo was no longer there to roll its shadow at him. The pigs were stretched out on the porch, lying practically snout to snout. Augustus was about to kick them off to make room for the guest he more or less expected, but they looked so peaceful he relented and went around to the back door. If Dish Boggett, with his prairie dog of a mustache, considered himself too refined to throw his bedroll beside two fine pigs, then he could rout them out himself.

  5.

  WHATEVER SUBJECT Augustus had on his mind when he went to bed was generally still sitting there when he woke up. He was such a short sleeper that the subject had no time to slip out of mind. Five hours was as much as he ever slept at a stretch, and four hours was more nearly his average.

  “A man that sleeps all night wastes too much of life,” he often said. “As I see it the days was made for looking and the nights for sport.”

  Since sport was what he had been brooding about when he got home, it was still in his thoughts when he arose, which he did about 4 A.M., to see to the breakfast—in his view too important a meal to entrust to a M
exican bandit. The heart of his breakfast was a plenitude of sourdough biscuits, which he cooked in a Dutch oven out in the backyard. His pot dough had been perking along happily for over ten years, and the first thing he did upon rising was check it out. The rest of the breakfast was secondary, just a matter of whacking off a few slabs of bacon and frying a panful of pullet eggs. Bolivar could generally be trusted to deal with the coffee.

  Augustus cooked his biscuits outside for three reasons. One was because the house was sure to heat up well enough anyway during the day, so there was no point in building any more of a fire than was necessary for bacon and eggs. Two was because biscuits cooked in a Dutch oven tasted better than stove-cooked biscuits, and three was because he liked to be outside to catch the first light. A man that depended on an indoor cookstove would miss the sunrise, and if he missed sunrise in Lonesome Dove, he would have to wait out a long stretch of heat and dust before he got to see anything so pretty.

  Augustus molded his biscuits and went out and got a fire going in the Dutch oven while it was still good dark—just enough of a fire to freshen up his bed of mesquite coals. When he judged the oven was ready he brought the biscuits and his Bible out in the backyard. He set the biscuits in the oven, and sat down on a big black kettle that they used on the rare occasions when they rendered lard. The kettle was big enough to hold a small mule, if anybody had wanted to boil one, but for the last few years it had remained upside down, making an ideal seat.