What cheek, Phil thought. ‘Why, son, I haven’t got any marbles.’
‘I could sort of lend you some of mine.’
‘Now, how could you “sort of lend” anything? I’ll tell you. Suppose I buy a couple off you?’
The fat kid got a hooded look; you could see that fatty mind grinding and figuring. Just so the father wrote on the pad, mind grinding away. There were those marbles made of baked earth: he could sell them, win them back, and make a clear profit of whatever he could cheat out of Phil.
Sure enough, the kid pawed apart a few clay marbles.
‘How much you want for them, son?’
His old man had taught him well. ‘They’re worth a quarter.’
They weren’t worth a dime, Phil knew. ‘All right, son.’ And Phil took out the little purse he carried with him with its bits of silver and some double eagles in the depths.
‘You go ahead and shoot first, mister,’ the kid urged.
‘My,’ Phil said. ‘I couldn’t let a guest shoot second. You go ahead, son.’
The kid was pretty good. He got four of the marbles Phil had bought before it was Phil’s turn. Phil picked up a little stick and ran it around the circle the boy had traced in the earth. ‘Now it’s my turn, huh?’
‘Your turn, mister,’ the kid said, and licked the sweat off his upper lip.
‘Is this how to hold the marble when I shoot?’ Phil asked.
‘More like this,’ the kid said.
‘Oh,’ Phil said. And then Phil got down on one knee, like he used to, and my, if it didn’t bring back being a boy again, the feel of the old sun, Old Sol, on your back, the grit of the earth on your knuckles, the breath you heaved before you whammed the marble into the ring. ‘Here goes!’ and he whammed out ten of the cheap marbles. ‘Want to trade these ten for one of your flints and play flintsies?’
Round-eyed, stunned, the kid nodded.
Well, sir, Phil took every marble the kid had, and when he got them all before him, he scooped them up and put them back in the kid’s bag. ‘Now you take your marbles back,’ he said. ‘Your old man maybe showed you a few tricks about bein’ sharp, but he didn’t tell you the works by a long shot.’ Now when the kid held the bag he didn’t pass it back and forth, but just held onto it for dear life. Phil liked to teach people a lesson. He got to his feet and walked to the car where George and the buyer were still jawing. ‘I figure you don’t want these cattle,’ Phil drawled, and put his eyes on the buyer. ‘I figure you’re just taking up me and my brother’s time.’
Phil could still construct a kite, and fly it. Until lately he and George played a little catch out back, Sunday; used to be a crackerjack first baseman. He could spin a top. He was ageless, and never lost his boyish air. Others wondered what had happened, whence the rheumatism, the aching bones, the burgeoning paunch; and where was the lovely old flavor of the world they’d lost?
In a boyish mood Phil now drew Peter’s attention to a cottontail that had skedaddled under the poles there where they worked, fencing haystacks. It was an old pile, unused for several years. The hired men had hauled new sharp-smelling pine poles in the wagon and piled them there; they hadn’t yet hauled the old ones to the house for firewood. The rabbit had maybe had the poles to himself for some years, from his unconcern. He hopped around, mind you, as if he owned the place and Phil had first glimpsed him when he and Peter paused for lunch. The sun was bright, and so hot they had moved into the shade of the stack, backs against the stack, legs stretched out. Phil selected a cured blade of timothy from beside him and sucked and nursed the end of it, thinking how curious that Peter’s face and arms seemed to glow. He coughed and removed the blade of hay from his mouth. ‘You’ve got quite a tan there,’ he said, and fell silent. Then, ‘What it was about Bronco Henry, is he never did any roping, never any riding till he was anyway your age. Hey, look at that rabbit.’
It might have been tame so bold it was. Phil smiled, removed his hat, took aim, and shied it at the rabbit; like a hawk, the hat rose, its shadow a hawk’s shadow, and it descended. The rabbit cowered at the shadow, then leaped for the poles. Phil unfolded himself and sauntered into the sunlight and retrieved his hat, knocked the dust off. Then, frowning, he stooped and shook the top pole of the pile, and the sound of it rattling, the heat of the sun and the smell of the afternoon made him smile and moved him to long, long thoughts. ‘Hey, Pete,’ he called. ‘Let’s see how long it takes before Peter Cottontail makes a run for the open.’ That’s what boys used to do, bet on how many poles they’d have to move before the animals ran for it.
Peter on one end of the pile, Phil on the other, they removed first this one and then that, and set it aside; at the end of the tenth pole the rabbit still cowered underneath somewhere, waited. Phil thought he saw it once; he probably had, for his eyes seldom failed. You can bet your sweet life on that.
‘Gutty little bugger, ain’t he,’ Phil breathed. It was like pulling teeth to get Peter to talk. You had to toss the kid direct questions. When Peter spoke, he felt curiously rewarded.
‘I guess he has to be gutty,’ Peter said.
‘I thought he’d’ve made a break for it by now,’ Phil said.
They removed two more poles; the second disturbed the precarious balance of others that collapsed like huge jackstraws to a new pattern; then underneath there was a wild scurrying that was drowned out by a clap of thunder.
And what’s this? The rabbit emerged with a broken leg; flopping, thrusting at the earth with the one good leg, it had a hard time of it. Phil watched while Peter picked the thing up, holding it in the crook of his arm. ‘The poles fell on it,’ Phil remarked.
‘It seems they did,’ Peter said.
‘Well, put the thing out of its misery,’ Phil ordered. ‘I guess the quickest way, knock its head in. Funny, ain’t it? If it hadn’t been so damned gutty, it wouldn’t have got itself hurt.’
‘It seems to show the way things work,’ said Peter.
So the kid was some kind of philosopher, was he? Phil smiled. ‘It seems to show that you never can tell,’ said Phil.
He watched Peter smooth his hand over the rabbit’s head, calming it, and the next minute he was wringing its neck, and so deftly that Phil couldn’t help but admire — he’d never seen anything quite like it. Now the rabbit’s hind legs, free at the severing of the spinal cord from the tensions in the brain, relaxed and hung still in the boy’s hand, the eyes glazing over in death. There was no blood at all! It was Phil himself who was bloody, hooked himself on some sharp thing.
Peter looked at the oozing blood. ‘That’s deep,’ he remarked.
‘But what the hell,’ Phil said easily, and took out his blue bandanna and swabbed off the wound. The thunder boomed and echoed over the vast valley; black clouds hid the sun. Phil wet his index finger and held it up. His spit made it feel the slightest breeze. ‘Won’t get this storm,’ he announced. ‘Wind’s south.’ But he felt thwarted and grumpy. The rabbit thing hadn’t worked out. He’d failed to capture the nostalgia his heart required; when they went around to the far side of the stack again to finish lunch, he spoke again of Bronco Henry. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Bronco Henry came to these parts ignorant of every damned thing about riding and roping. Knew less than you, Pete old dear. Why, you’re sitting up there these days on a horse good! But by God, he learned. Oh, he taught me things. He taught me that if you’ve got guts, you can do any damned thing, guts and patience. Impatience is a costly commodity, Pete. Taught me to use my eyes, too. Look yonder, there. What do you see?’ Phil shrugged. ‘You see the side of the hill. But Bronc, when he looked there, what do you suppose he saw?’
‘A dog,’ Peter said. ‘A running dog.’
Phil stared, and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘The hell,’ he said, ‘you see it just now?’
‘When I first came here,’ Peter said.
‘Well, to get back. I think what a man needs is odds against him.’
Peter’s knees were drawn up with his arm arou
nd them. ‘My father said, obstacles. And you had to remove them.’
‘Maybe another way to put it. Well, Pete, you’ve got obstacles, and for a fact, Peter-me-bye.’ He sometimes lapsed into a brogue, for the Irish amused him, their pluck, their roguishness.
‘Obstacles?’ Peter’s eyes were mild.
‘Take your maw.’
‘My mother?’
‘How she’s on the sauce.’ Phil held his breath. Had he said too much? Too soon? Had he maybe alienated the boy before the entirety of his plan had unfolded? Continuing to smile in a pleasant and understanding way, he wondered why he had spoken as he did. Had he perhaps spoken from some motive he himself didn’t wholly understand? Son of a bitch!
‘On the sauce?’ Peter asked, pretending, Phil thought, to look puzzled, as if he didn’t savvy that old expression.
‘Drinking, Pete. Boozing it up.’ The boy winced at the word booze. A little too strong for him that word? But damn it, it was precisely that little old wince he needed to see. Maybe to gauge the wince, to judge it, and when he saw it, he knew he had not said too much, that it was impossible now to say too much. ‘I guess you know she’s been half-shot all summer.’
‘Yes. Yes I know she has. She didn’t use to drink.’
‘Didn’t she now?’ A bit of the Irish accent again, to keep things on a light plane. But were they?
‘No, she never did.’
‘But your paw, Pete?’
‘My father?’
‘Father. Paw. I guess he hit the bottle pretty hard? The booze, Pete?’ Phil’s heart was racing a little. Said too much? Didn’t the boy grow a little rigid? Phil tasted his upper lip.
‘Until right at the end,’ Peter said. ‘Then he hanged himself.’
Phil started to touch the boy, but drew back his hand, and dropped his voice. ‘You poor kid,’ he said, and Peter made a faint smile. ‘Things will work out for you yet.’
‘Thanks, Phil,’ Peter murmured.
The thunderheads rolled away as Phil said they would. Riding home through a little patch of sagebrush at one corner of the field they came on the abandoned nest of a sage hen, nothing left in it but a few shells. You hardly ever run across a sage hen’s nest. You’ve got to keep your eyes peeled. Phil always did.
So good God, he noticed the hides were gone from the butcher pen long before they rode past there. Phil’s mind was photographic; each detail that passed before his eye was etched deep in that dark recess where, for the rest of us, float and drift those pointless hairlike shapes, where lights flash off and on, and some amorphous shape slides across.
Phil saw the hides were gone, and Phil saw red. He rose in his stirrups. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!!’ he said, and spurred his sorrel who began a long strong pace into the barnyard.
‘Phil — Phil what’s wrong?’ Peter asked. ‘Phil is something wrong?’
‘Wrong? Wrong for Christ’s sake?’ Phil said. ‘Every God damned hide is gone. She’s really put her foot into it this time.’
‘You think she did it, Phil — sold them?’
‘You’re bloody tootin’,’ Phil said. ‘Or maybe gave them away.’
‘Why would she do that, Phil. Why? She knew we needed the hides.’
‘Because she was drunk. Pie-eyed. She was stewed. Why sonny, I’d think you’d know from them books that your paw left you that your maw’s got a whatyoumacallit alcoholic personality. In them books of yours, it would come right under the letter A.’
‘Phil — you’re not going to say anything to her?’
‘Say anything?’ Phil barked. ‘I won’t say nothing. It’s no skin off my ass, but sure as one good hell brother George will. High time that bozo got next to a few whatyoumacallit facts.’
They entered the long, dark barn that smelled of dust and manure and hay. Yes, and of years. Pale light knifed down from the crazy high windows.
‘Phil?’
Phil’s tongue had now swollen with anger. ‘Mmmm?’
And then the boy touched his arm — touched it. ‘Phil — I’ve got rawhide to finish the rope.’
‘You’ve got it? What you doing with rawhide?’
And the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘I cut some up, Phil. I wanted to learn — to braid like you. Please take what I’ve got?’ They were facing each other, and the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘You’ve been good to me, Phil.’
Take what I’ve got. You’ve been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he’d felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.
Oh, sure. Could have been the boy’s offer was but a cheap means of getting his pretty little mother out of the soup. But wanting to braid like him! What reason for the boy to have rawhide but wanting to braid like him! To emulate him! Why else would he have cut up strips of rawhide? The boy wanted to become him, to merge with him as Phil had only once before wanted to become one with someone, and that one was gone, trampled to death while Phil, twenty years old, watched from the top rail of the bronc corral. Ah, God, but Phil had almost forgot what the touch of a hand will do, and his heart counted the seconds that Peter’s was on him and rejoiced at the quality of the pressure. It told him what his heart required to know.
Please, was it not Fate (because a man must believe in something), was it not Fate that the boy had looked on him in his nakedness in that hidden place known only to George and to himself — and to Bronco Henry? Just so, he had looked on the boy’s nakedness in that eternity when the boy had walked proud and unprotected past the open tents, jeered at, scorned — a pariah. But Phil knew, God knows he knew, what it was to be a pariah, and he had loathed the world, should it loath him first.
His voice was husky, ‘That’s damned kind of you, Pete,’ and he slid his long arm about the boy’s shoulders. Once before that day, he’d been tempted, and desisted, because he’d always sworn out of that old loyalty never again to make that move. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. Everything’s going to be clear sailing for you from now on in. And do you know, I’m going to work and finish up that rope tonight. And Pete, will you watch me do it?’ So that night the boy watched while Phil finished it off, scorning his fresh-wounded hand.
Peter was moved, too. In some astonishing way far beyond his pagan petitions, his poor mother had taken his own plan right out of his hands, and as he stood feeling the hand that gripped his shoulder, he seemed to hear a voice whispering that he was as special as he believed himself to be.
It was a matter of pride with Phil to be first at the breakfast table.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he’d say with mock formality as they ambled in the back door. ‘We got through another night. Good morning to yez!’
Or he might say ‘Gut’ Morgen’ in memory of a Dutchman who once worked on the place. He delighted in dialect. He liked a good big breakfast, and had no patience with people who had but reluctant stomachs. ‘Have another coupla eggs,’ he’d urge a sick young fellow who could scarcely hold down coffee. ‘Come on, now.’ And he’d wink at the other men. Oatmeal and cream, pancakes, fried eggs, rose-hued slabs of ham, coffee with thick cream. The meal never varied, and never would. No young fellow ever disobeyed Phil, and the men seemed to get a kick out of the show. Phil did like to josh people, and he liked to jolly people, too, and during breakfast he jollied them, including George.
George, a heavy sleeper, had not even in the old days appeared until the others were seated and fixed on their food, and his silence was as contagious as Phil’s morning bounciness. Sometimes Phil found himself irritated with George, and he needled him.
‘Have a bad night, George?’ he’d ask, winking at the others. ‘Get tangled up in the arms of Morpheus?’
George, since his marriage, might be five minutes late for breakfast, and the faster eaters had already cleaned up their plates and pushed back their chairs and begun rolling smokes.
Recently, when George was more than five minutes
late, Phil had remarked, wide-eyed and innocent, ‘’Strouble, George? Your old lady roll over on your nightshirt?’
Phil could laugh at the memory of the shocked silence, for to these men, these drifters, these homeless wanderers, there were but two kinds of women, good women and bad women. Bad women had no more right to respect than animals, and as animals they were used and discussed.
Ah, but good women! Good women were pure, sexless and as holy as God. Good women were Sister, Mother, and the childhood sweetheart whose glance melted the heart. The pictures and photographs of these good women the men kept in their suitcases, their icons and altar stones.
The little slip of a woman they saw occasionally in the yard, or recently tugging at pieces of trash almost as big as herself, a funny little hand around her head to keep the hair out of her eyes — she was a good woman, hardly to be considered in terms of beds and nightshirts.
George blushed in that silence that contained the mousy sounds of forks and knives and the plink of china. The men held their eyes on their plates, and the moment passed while Phil reached long across the table for the hotcakes — his boardinghouse reach, he called it, that caused the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt to slip far up on his wrist revealing skin that was shockingly white, such skin as might be found under a stone. How red and chapped his hands were, his worldly, scratched and damaged hands.
One comes to count on the usual and the expected, the appearance of the sun, the chilling voice of wild geese wedging south, the breakup of the ice, the shy green grass on the south slopes, the heady breezes that disturb the purple camas. Sun, geese, ice, grass and waving camas all point to the knowable future, and the world was well.
But now Phil was late. No cheery greeting for the cook, no ‘Good morning to yez,’ no good morning in any of the dialects that amused him.
Mrs Lewis brought in the first round of pancakes, slow and heavy on her unsatisfactory feet.
Neither George nor Peter had yet appeared. There was a curious animation among the men, a nervousness they hoped to conceal by continuing to belabor a joke that had sprung up a few moments before in the bunkhouse — some one of the men had got hold of a water snake, surely one of the last of the season, for the frost was now everywhere. The man — just who nobody yet knew — had put the snake into the bedding of a sleeping man. The man had waked, felt something, touched it, and knew a snake was coiled comfortably and torpid close against the hollow of his throat. He alone was now sullen and angry, taking it as the sort of joke you play on a child. Since his only achievement, so far, was that he had grown up, he was jealous of his dignity. When he found out who had done the thing, he had some plans of his own, and don’t you forget it.
The Power of the Dog Page 23