‘Oh, Phil,’ the kid said, looking up with eyes like little boiled beets. ‘Oh, Phil.’
Phil chuckled. ‘You’ll maybe be all right after you eat.’
‘Oh dear Christ, don’t say eat. I’m gonna die.’
‘Die, hell,’ Phil laughed. ‘You got years and years of misery ahead for you.’
When were they going to eat, anyway? They all sure required more than the pickled egg, herring and peanuts handed out in the bar. If the power had been there, they’d be loaded by now, filled with grub and in the hay. But it wouldn’t be the first time they’d loaded by lantern light.
‘Recall one time,’ Phil said seriously inside, and told of loading cattle there in the dead of night in the dead of winter, in the days of Bronco Henry. ‘Fifty below it was,’ he recalled. ‘You got to be careful in that weather. This fool greenhorn working for the Ainsworths got all gowed up on booze and was chasing cattle around the pen and breathing deep through his mouth. Frosted his lungs. Dead the next day.’ He turned. ‘And where in hell you been?’ he now asked George, who had appeared out of nowhere.
‘Telegraph fellow asked me to his place up over the station for a cup of java. Got a real nice little place up there, nice little wife.’
‘What’s the story on the power?’
‘Won’t be in till morning. Stopped over at the eat-joint and said we’d be over pretty quick to eat.’
The woman over there at the eat-joint had pushed three tables together so there was room for the whole bunch. She greeted George and Phil pleasantly enough, so her suicide husband mustn’t have tipped his hand about being taken by the scruff of the neck. Well, hell, what man would dare tell a woman a shameful thing like that? She had got out white napkins for each place, quite an experience, Phil thought, for the cowhands who had about as much use for napkins as for finger bowls. La-di-dah. Worth the price of admission to see what the fellows did with them. The place was kind of roadhousey, and Phil guessed that accounted for the candles she had in old wine bottles.
And the paper flowers, the paper flowers.
Phil would have preferred to have had the whole place to himself, just for the Burbank outfit, but over in one corner was a party of six that gawked at them when they entered. Phil always had hated strangers around gawking and whispering and touching their lips with their napkins as if they were ladies and gentlemen. One of the women was smoking a cigarette, bold as brass and twice as cheap, and my wasn’t she trying to look elegant touching her lips with her napkin, like real quality, and then smoking that cigarette! It was Phil’s opinion that a woman who would smoke in public would do anything. And she was. She was drinking.
Over there, too, were paper flowers on the table, paper flowers in a bottle painted so it wouldn’t look like a milk bottle.
‘Well, where’s the service?’ Phil asked aloud. ‘If we can’t get the power, we ought to get the service, eh, lads.’ The young cowhands, cowed by the prissy roadhousey atmosphere and the napkins looked at Phil, admiring his poise.
Then there came through the swing door the woman’s son with a white napkin over his arm, just so. He wore pressed dark trousers and white starched shirt, and smiled at them there at the table, at the Burbank outfit, and went right on past to the table in the corner. Phil made a harsh chuckle. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said aloud. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’
Well, there’s one thing Phil could tell you: that young kid with a napkin over his arm was a sissy. Phil watched him standing there by the party of six. A little bit too heel-clicky to suit Phil, a little too spruce, funny little arrogance. Must have been the kid’s idea of some Frog waiter, something picked up from some moving picture he’d gone to, or maybe some fool story in a magazine.
Yes, the kid was talking to the party of six and yes, the kid had a little lisp just like every sissy Phil had ever heard, and a way of tasting his own words. Now, some people can get along with them, just as some can get along with Jews and shines, and that’s their business. But Phil couldn’t abide them.
He didn’t know why, but they made him uncomfortable, right down to his guts. Why in hell didn’t they snap out of it and get human?
And oh, didn’t that sissy kid just walk right by them, with that glance of his, and the lips set in a way that made Phil want to smack them!
‘Yeah,’ and Phil leaned back in his chair so the front legs were off the floor. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’
George sat there like the Great Stone Face.
Hmmm! Phil knew how to get the kid’s goat, and he chuckled, thinking of it. Imagine having a kid like that! Oh, Phil knew how to get his goat. Phil was sitting at one end of the improvised festive board, George at the other, just as they sat for breakfast at the back dining room table now that the Old Lady and the Old Gent were leading the social life in Brigham Young’s paradise, as Phil called Salt Lake City.
Now at that table in the town of Beech in the year 1924 at around eight of a fall evening, he reached across the table and picked the paper flowers out of the painted milk bottle; they did look absurd in his cracked, chapped, long-fingered hands. He had cut himself at noon opening a sardine can, and had neither mentioned the fact nor wiped off the blood. So there the flowers were, helpless in that marvelously clever hand.
‘My, oh my,’ he said, ‘but I wonder what young lady made these pretty posies?’ And he leaned to smell them, brought them to his thin, sensitive nose.
It surprised him that the boy didn’t color. The pale face remained pale, and Phil noted only the slight throbbing of a blue vein in the boy’s temple, a vein that emerged suddenly, like a worm. The boy then turned and marched right over.
‘The flowers? I made them, sir. My mother taught me how. She has a way with flowers.’
Phil leaned over and elaborately put the flowers back, and touched them, pretending to arrange them. ‘Oh, do pardon me,’ and he made a broad wink at the company around.
‘Would you care to give your order now, sir?’
Phil leaned back on the hind legs of his chair. His voice was a drawl. ‘I thought we had that settled. I thought we’d made previous arrangements.’
Now George spoke, first harrumphing. ‘It’s the chicken we want, boy.’
The men had decided to ignore the napkins. George did with his what you’re supposed to do. Phil then tucked his own under his chin and leaned forward to enjoy his chicken. He was bound to admit it was good, but maybe because of hunger sauce. The party of six had pulled their freight, hightailed it, and the kid fussed over there clearing up and putting out their candles. Phil felt a lot freer with the party of six gone, and he told an amusing story of Bronco Henry who had got himself plastered there in Beech one time years ago after they’d got the cattle loaded, and he woke up next morning in the barn across the road with a halter around his neck, tied up like a horse to the manger. One of his pals had pulled the trick on him. ‘And let me tell you,’ Phil laughed, ‘he looked pretty sheepish.’
‘Well,’ George said, ‘you fellows go on over, and I’ll settle up here.’
‘Ain’t he brought you the tab yet?’ Phil asked.
‘No, you all go on over to the lights and the music,’ George said, pretty fancy talk for him, ‘and I’ll settle up.’
So they scraped their chairs back and went over. The girls from upstairs had come down and stood at the bar smoking cigarettes and smiling around and cadging drinks and Phil watched the young fellows oblige. He felt strangely remote, even lonely, and sort of wished he wasn’t a Burbank, something like that, something. Those kids’d all have big heads in the morning, loading cattle, and maybe pick up the clap or syph, but they were sure kicking up their heels now, and maybe, who knew, maybe it was worth it. They threw their little bit of money around and loved up the ladies, and then they began to sing.
… hot time in the old town, tonight.
Most of them didn’t know the words, just went la-la-la, but Phil remembered them, and he looked into his empty glass and moved his lips with the
true words. How he recalled being a punk kid at the time of the Spanish War, brass bands in those days in every park in every city, fireworks every Fourth; gone, proud, dead days. Wasn’t it on such a day he’d first laid eyes on Bronco Henry?
… hot time in the old town tonight.
Phil went out to take another leak, and looked off toward the east where the moon was about to rise. He sighed and shivered, buttoned his pants and when he was through, he walked around the saloon, all through with them in there, and across the sagebrush space to the hotel — Red Mill, for a fact. Nobody there at the desk, so he just went to work and picked up the pencil and wrote his name and George’s because George had apparently forgot that little nicety.
Upstairs, Phil peeked in first one room and then another, but George wasn’t in any of them, so he went into the last one he looked into, took off his shoes and pants and slid into the hay. He’d have to stay awake until he heard George’s heavy, familiar footsteps on the stairs, and then call him in there.
The moon was up, the room full and bright with moon. It caught the white pitcher and basin, the tall narrow wardrobe, caught the coil of hempen rope underneath the window; Phil turned this way and that way in bed and then on his back he stared up and thought about how they tell you when you’re a punk kid that the moonlight will drive you batty. He got up, tall and thin in his long underwear and walked to the window. The moon was strange on him. Where in hell was George? He suddenly smiled to himself, remembering the Old Lady’s words.
Go find George. Go find your brother. Different as they were, they were both brothers. And one thing at least they had in common — a blood tie.
George was probably with the telegraph fellow. Phil walked in his stocking feet to the opposite window. Hey, Georgie boy …
The windows in the upper part of the station were dark; in the moonlight the arm of the semaphore was raised to signal the power when it came, and the moonlight quarreled with the pale white eye of the lantern on the switch. Beyond, the moonlight lay like water on the stubble that grew on the hill that rose behind the town, and it picked out the gravestones at the bottom, stones like a handful of dice rolled down.
Had he dozed? Had Phil dozed? For George was standing in profile in the room, simply standing, but Phil felt he had caught George at something. Something, for who would stand still in the middle of a room?
‘George?’
‘Mmmm.’
Phil felt George’s weight sag the bed. Then George leaned over and pulled off his boots, grunting at the effort; then George rose, to loose his belt.
‘Where you been?’ Phil whispered. ‘The others bedded down yet?’
Came a long silence. Then George spoke. ‘What you said tonight, Phil, said about her boy, made her cry.’
Her?
Her!
Well, then. So the kid had run to mama, or mama had been eavesdropping at the swinging door. Her! Phil snuffled up an obstruction in his nose and swallowed. However George had been concerned about ‘her,’ Phil was not concerned that George would blame him. Far as Phil knew, George never blamed anybody, a virtue so remote and inhuman it probably accounted for the discomfort people felt in his presence; his silence they took for disapproval and it allowed them no chink to get at him and quarrel with him. His silence left people guilty and they had no chance to dilute their guilt with anger. Inhuman! But Phil felt no guilt. He always called the cards as they fell, played the cards as they were.
If she was behind the swinging door when he’d spoken — well, she shouldn’t have been listening, and if she had, what of it? Wouldn’t hurt her to know what people thought of the kid. Maybe she’d get hep to herself and put a bug in his ear, get him straightened out.
But what had kept George down there so long? Had he stood and talked to her? Had she cried on his shoulder? Had he touched and fondled her? The idea of such a thing made Phil wince. As George climbed into bed, Phil licked his lips. Damned if he could imagine George touching and fondling a woman.
Phil spoke into the moonlight. ‘Hear anything about the power?’
‘Nope,’ George said.
She was crying.
She!
4
Phil saw George.
Phil’s eyes were day-blue. Expressionless? But some said innocent. But they were sharp, very sharp eyes, and the iris was no less sensitive than the cornea; so the subtlest change in light or shadow alerted Phil. Just as his bare hands sensed the hidden rot at the heart of the wood, the secret weakness, so did his eyes see around and beyond and into. He saw through Nature’s pathetic fraud called protective coloring, saw the vague outline of the stock-still doe, camouflaged against dry, thick branches, leaf and earth; smiling, he shot to kill. He knew if a timber wolf was lame, noted the fainter print of the favored paw in dust or snow, saw a quivering in the stubble and watched the grass snake unhinge its jaws and bolt down tiny new mice while the mother leapt in circles, screaming. His eyes followed the ragged flight of magpies seeking carrion, the bloated animal, the leg of beef gone rotten and dragged out behind the woodshed. In the sudden elbow of a stream where the baffled water turned upon itself he watched the trout ‘conceal’ itself in the shadow of a rock. But he saw more than Nature’s creatures. In Nature herself — in the supposedly random and innocent way she disposed and arranged herself — he saw the supernatural. In the outcropping of rocks on the hill that rose up before the ranchhouse, in the tangled growth of sagebrush that scarred the hill’s face like acne he saw the astonishing figure of a running dog. The lean hind legs thrust the powerful shoulders forward; the hot snout was lowered in pursuit of some frightened thing — some idea — that fled across the draws and ridges and shadows of the northern hills. But there was no doubt in Phil’s mind of the end of that pursuit. The dog would have its prey. Phil had only to raise his eyes to the hill to smell the dog’s breath. But vivid as that huge dog was, no one but one other had seen it, George least of all.
‘What do you see up there?’ George had once asked.
‘Nothing.’ But Phil’s lips were twisted in the faint smile of one who is in close touch with the arcane. So Phil lived — watching, noting, figuring — as the rest of us see and forget.
Now he stood at the forge in the blacksmith shop, gazing out through the wide doorway; one foot up on a block of wood he’d nailed to the side of the forge, he rested an arm along the smooth, worn beam of the bellows; he bent his long body easily at the waist; the bellows expanded, collapsed, a huge leather lung forcing the flames that heated strap iron for a sled runner. He watched the coal smoke drift out and settle low over the dry ryegrass, a dirty gray quilt. He sniffed, and scented certain snow.
It was a Sunday. The night before the young hired men had run off to town with friends who’d come in old used cars, gone off in their cheap suits with a check in their hands they’d cash at one of the saloons in Beech or Herndon — if they got that far. Phil smiled. Before breakfast Monday they’d be back — sick, hollow-eyed, broke, maybe diseased. Phil heard the bright clink of the latch on the bunkhouse door, saw the door open and two of the older men haul out a washtub of water and dump it; he watched them watch the water run and spread, sink into the earth. Age had taught them abstinence, if nothing else. Sundays they used to bathe, to wash clothes, pounding their socks and drawers with a coffee tin tacked onto the end of a shovel handle; they shaved, slapped on bay rum and then sat and rocked. Those who could write wrote letters, squeezing the pencil, squinting and forcing the cranky ABC’s between the wide lines of their coarse tablets. Later, they would shoot a few games of horseshoes or take a twenty-two rifle and pop off magpies back in the willows near the secret place where Phil bathed himself. Near there he had once in the late spring found a ramshackle nest — twigs every which way — and four young ’pies just on the verge of flight. The old ones coaxed the young, yammering away calling, encouraging. For the fun of it, Phil captured the young ones, took them back to the barn in a gunnysack — an idle thing to do, and once he got them ho
me, he lost interest in them. They say if you slit their tongues, they’ll talk, but Phil had long ago found out that isn’t true.
It was a Sunday (like today) and he turned them over to one of the men in the bunkhouse who said he knew right well what to do with them.
‘Miserable bastards,’ the fellow had growled. For magpies ride about on the backs of horses and cattle and pick at sores they find there and eat the living flesh. They light on the ground in the spring and walk perkily forward, eyes bright, twisting their heads, seeing everything; they mean to pick a newborn calf’s eyes out.
The fellow had some dynamite caps, the size of twenty-two cartridges. ‘Naw,’ the fellow said, ‘I used to do some blasting.’ Up the anus of each magpie, he shoved a cap, and then a short length of fuse. Everybody gathered out behind the bunkhouse to watch. The sun was warm and promising; some men were called from the barn where they sunned themselves and chewed on matches.
‘What’s going on?’ Phil asked.
One of the men, a card, chuckled. ‘Ass-ass-ination,’ he remarked.
‘Well, you miserable bastards,’ the ass-ass-in said. One by one he tossed the young ’pies into the air. Their strange chance to escape gave them a brief skill and they soared, and leveled off, and then one by one they exploded up there; a few feathers drifted down like ash. Well, it was a quick death, quicker than shooting them or wringing their necks, and not a purposeless death either, like most, for it had afforded a little fun on a Sunday, Phil thought. ‘To be perfectly frank,’ he nodded to himself, moving his lips. Alone, Phil often talked or laughed to himself, aware that he did so, knowing it was not the speech of madness but merely his way of heightening or giving permanence to some thought as others will take a pencil and write it down. But he wasn’t sure he approved of what the fellow had done, and after the first two birds had exploded, he frowned and walked away.
‘What are they doing out back there?’ George had asked.
‘Usual thing,’ Phil had said. ‘Shooting at targets.’
The Power of the Dog Page 6