Oscar shook his head. “Didn't guess you'd like hearing about it.” He pushed back his chair and went off to the bar.
“What are you going to do up there?” Rossie said. “Admire yourself in the mirror?”
“Better than looking at you.”
“Crybaby heart,” Rossie said when Oscar came back to the table, “where we going to sleep?”
“On the ground.”
And Rossie did. He woke up with his face in the sun as leaves along the southern bank of the Truckee fluttered in the bright morning. Sometime deep in the night while Oscar was trying to bum an after-hours drink from a bartender in a back-alley joint off Virginia Street, Rossie had walked away toward his mother's house, just on the other side of the river. But ringing the doorbell at three in the morning might wake Nito, and then there'd be hell to pay. Whatever happened next Rossie didn't remember, but now, awake on the lawn in front of the Blalock Mansion only half a block from his mother's house, he was stunned and sick. He'd lost his hat.
Light shone in colors off the cut-glass windows around the front door, and Rossie tried out his morning smile. Katrina in her lavender dress and yellow apron, her graying blonde braids curled over her ears as they always were when she was at her morning work, smiled in her way. “Aren't you cute?”
This was her for damned sure, Katrina. “Not much,” he said. “You got any coffee?”
“Come here.” She pulled him to her and didn't let him duck away from the kiss. This was ancient, his mother, her strong hands. “What you need is water, big glasses of water. Where'd you sleep?”
“Down on some lawn.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you going to be a hobo? Are you going to go down to the river and sleep with bums? One of those men could kill you and drag your body back in the bushes and steal all you've got out of your pockets. These are hard times. Some would do it. There's hundreds of them, coming on the railway, riding the tops of cattle cars, camping along the river, stealing and bumming and begging. This is not a ranch back in nowhere.”
“No shit,” Rossie said. It was an old line she was talking but he knew it wasn't altogether wrong-minded. A black-handed greasy fellow had come out of the willows along the Truckee one afternoon when he was a boy. “Kid,” he'd said, voice rasping, “you might as well figure. There are men out here who will fuck you to death, boy like you, right from behind.” The man had smiled like that was his own idea. Rossie told Katrina, and that was the end of his summer days along the river. “Lost men,” she would say, going off to California. What are they going to find in California? Why don't they go to China?
“You got any coffee?” Rossie asked.
Katrina led him to her stone-floored kitchen at the back of the house, and poured him a big glass of ice water. She watched as he drank, poured coffee thick with cream and two spoons of sugar, and fed him three eggs and fried sausage. “You left that girl,” she said. “You watch out. There's only so many. You can miss all the boats.”
“What do you think, I should marry her and turn into a cowboy with some pregnant woman?”
“Pregnant?”
“She won't be, not by me.”
“You know what you sound like? You sound like a boy trying to sound like an asshole.”
Rossie lowered his head. “Lost my hat. What I wonder is how I'm going to amount to anything.” He was thinking about how his mother had settled her life in this inherited house and married a Basque gambler. The ease with which she'd let him, her only boy, drift off to the Neversweat. If that wasn't coldhearted, what was?
“If you don't amount to anything?” she said. “That's not to worry about for a long time. You can break your heart on that one.”
“I never knew I cared. I just started thinking about it up there braiding ropes.”
Katrina stood and cleared his plate. “Your father's sleeping. Where are your things?”
“In that Packard of Oscar's.”
“You hope.” She studied him and shook her head. “You'll amount to something. Unless you never get over being a fool. You should learn to think. Don't get used to a woman unless you mean to settle. You'll need a place to rest. A good friend you sleep with.” She turned on her big smile. “A warm heart and babies. That's in the someday.”
Rossie wondered what she really meant as he drifted toward sleep in one of her feather beds in a high-ceilinged room at the back of the house. “You,” she'd told him the last time he was home, “you'll be our ranch man.” As if each family had a rancher, and that was the Nevada plan. She meant to tell him, he knew, something his father wouldn't, to bed his life in a woman—and in work.
An immaculate blue-striped dress shirt that belonged to his father lay folded on a chair when he awoke. So she'd been in while he slept. After making sure the door was locked, Rossie walked around naked in the room and sneaked a look through curtains to see the divorcées gathering on the slate terrace outside the kitchen for evening cocktails, laughing, midlife women in his mother's house, where his father came and went without paying them much attention. “You don't try to remember their names,” Katrina would say, smiling like that was a good thing. Nito would reply that it was like living in a hotel, laughing so as to show he didn't necessarily think that was bad. These woman came on the railroad from the faraway east, and Rossie had grown up listening to their endless talk of returning to shaded streets in Cincinnati and Syracuse and Cambridge. They'd tousle his hair and rub his shoulders and tickle his ribs and go on about how he was handsome. By the time his voice changed Rossie had seen more than one woman weep because a cowboy hadn't come around to say goodbye. He'd learned to spy on them and told boys in his school a thousand jack-off stories about the divorcées. Once he'd said to his mother that these women were like cats, complaining around the kitchen and wanting to be fed, and she'd slapped him. Then that night she'd gone up to his attic bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. They're swell, she said. When the legalities finish they go home. They send me Christmas cards. They're interested in another try at life.
Rossie started hot water into the big lion's-claw tub and poured lavender bath salts and laughed at himself and soaked and ran more hot water until his mother was rapping on the door, calling him out for drinks. So he dried with one of her heavy, green towels and combed his hair and took his time buttoning the blue-striped shirt, because this was the first time she'd offered him a shirt that had been worn by his father. Looking in the mirror, Rossie wondered if he was his father's boy.
A horse-faced man had joined the women by the time Rossie made his way out onto the terrace.
“There he is,” Katrina said. She brought him a cold drink in a tall glass. “This is my Rossie. Gin. This is his first drink with gin in his mother's house.”
Rossie lifted his glass to the women and the horse-faced man, who looked away, as if not quite sure of his part in this moment.
A pale-eyed old woman rested a papery hand on Rossie's shoulder. “I suppose that we should start locking our doors from now on.”
“Wouldn't that be wonderful,” Katrina said. “What you should do,” she said to Rossie, when he was finished with his gin and already feeling it, “is go down to the Riverside and join your father. He's expecting you for dinner. So you get out of here. But come back tonight. You come home for one more night.”
The elegant new Riverside, poised beside the river on the west side of Virginia Street, was a hotel for wealthy men and divorcées. Rossie put his hands on his mother's shoulders and smiled down the way he thought a man would smile.
She shook her head. “You think you're a movie star. You want to outsmart some poor girl.” She ducked away as he moved to kiss her.
“Katrina,” he said. This was a joke. “I'm not Katrina,” she said. “I'm your mother.”
Decades later he recalled this evening to a reporter in Montana, who studied him through glasses tinted blue. “Those were the days,” he told her, “although nobody thought of it that way. I was nineteen years old, had just left my fir
st love to go on down the road. There was my drink of gin in my mother's house and a night with my father. Initiation into the rambling life and enough booze to numb the fearfulness. Two days later I was helping drive two hundred fifty-seven head of saddle horses to Calgary, a boy joining the free men.”
“Fear of what?” the young woman asked.
“Bootlessness, too much of it.”
“Bootlessness?”
“Freedom,” Rossie said. “Sometimes there was more than you wanted. But those were the days. Or so we think.”
“What do you really think?”
“I think,” Rossie said, “that those were the days.”
Rossie found Nito in the art deco lobby of the Riverside, watching as tuxedoed white musicians syncopated their rackety way through “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
Nito touched Rossie on the shoulder, his firm touch. “A fine shirt. Those old fellows, they're playing new music, not worrying about a thing. We could take a lesson.” This sounded like an idea his father had been thinking about and waiting to lay out.
“Hell of a shirt,” Rossie said. He would fold it carefully the next morning, and tuck it into his bedroll, to travel with.
“Tonight,” Nito said, “we're going to Madariaga's.”
The Madariaga was a three-story brick and white-frame hotel and rooming house on the eastern fringes of downtown, which served as the unofficial headquarters for Basque culture in northern Nevada. Lifetime bachelors might live there for months when they'd had enough of herding and isolation on the deserts, talking to dogs and sheep. They'd stand ranged along the hardwood counter his father called the bar of justice and trade homeland stories about northern Spain.
This was Rossie's first trip in Madariagas's as more than a boy, as a man alongside his father. Black-haired women and their hard-handed husbands were setting down for early dinner in that big, plain room with benches and trestle tables covered with oilcloth, while the waitresses hustled ironstone platters—heaped with steaks and bowls of bean soup and iceberg lettuce salad with chopped eggs and fresh peas— to married couples with children in arms, and to grandfathers and aged women. Men in off a ranch-hand job—faces washed and hair combed while their worn shirts showed sweat stains—were talking and laughing and finishing with peach pie and coffee. Nito led Rossie on through into the back room to find two of the old herding men, in from the distances to spend a few weeks living upstairs in one of the rooms, silent and alike, perched on stools apart from one another, their eyes fixed on their dark, thickened hands, one with a double shot of rye and the other with Picon punch. The bartender, a heavy-wristed man whose bald head looked to have been polished, was reading the Reno newspaper.
Nito leaned his elbows on the counter, put his hands out before him, flexed his fingers, and brought them together to form a child's steeple. “Louis, this is my son. His name is Ross. Have you seen him before?”
The bartender folded his newspaper and smiled. “Never. Not standing up to this rail. What would he like to drink?”
“Do you think he's man enough for whiskey?”
“He wouldn't be here with you if he wasn't.”
The pride was doing its talking, this first time with his father, in this barroom among men, where women did not often go, nor stay for long if they did. “What are those fellows doing in there? Making theories. Nothing,” his mother would say. But she would seem bemused, her eyes bright, as if she knew they were doing just what she wanted them to do, holding up their end of the bargain.
“Louis,” Nito said to the bartender, “do you have a package for my son?”
“First, let me shake his hand. Then I will serve him. Then I will bring his package.”
So it was with a shot glass of whiskey in front of him, and a glass of beer to back it up, that Rossie confronted this surprise wrapped in plain paper.
“Tear it open,” Nito said.
Woven of the finest white Panama straw, the hat was unlike any Rossie had ever seen.
“A New York hat,” Nito said, “for chasing horses. Imported from Honolulu.”
Rossie saw himself in the mirror behind the bar, the brim just above his nose. He met his father's eyes in the reflection. Nito was seeing him as someone to be envied.
The surprise lasted as the bar filled with Nito's friends, men from Reno who bought drinks and more drinks. Rossie had not expected that this would be anything more than dinner with his father. But a dozen tables had been set up. Men carried their drinks with them as they went to sit with their backs against the walls. Serving girls distributed white bread and bowls of the garlic soup that was said to be a stay against morning hangovers.
Nito tapped a knife against a glass. “Wearing his hat indoors, this is my son, Ross.” They toasted Rossie, as they would again later when the steaks were served. “The end of his being a boy. We've all suffered. No more mother.” Some men laughed, but they raised their drinks. “Now, my son.” Nito lifted his hand to Rossie. “Remember that these are men you can count on all your life. That's a lesson to learn.”
The lettuce salad and sizzling rib steaks and rounds of drinks came and were cleared, and musicians among the men brought harmonicas and tambourines out from behind the counter, along with a violin and a guitar. Six Basque women, wives of the musicians, came in and sang “Pretty Baby” with their arms around each other, taking elaborate sideways steps as they moved. Then they stepped into traditional dances with their husbands. The two sheepherding men went on the floor together and cavorted with each other. Bright-eyed single women came and joined the men. A thin black-haired woman asked Rossie to dance, and as they waltzed she kissed him flat on the mouth and whispered, “Vaquero.”
Nito caught his arm. Rossie was surprised at the strength in his father's fingers. “I'll take him home,” Nito said to the black-haired woman. “His mother waits.”
“His mother waits,” Rossie bellowed in a big voice, echoing and mocking his father, making a little fun. Nito turned serious, and Rossie shrugged. This was foolish. His father was known for style with the women. Everyone knew it. Katrina knew it. Rossie was going off to be his own man, to have his own style. He would be that man of his own making if he ever came home.
Nito smiled. “You are one smart-assed baby.”
Katrina fed Rossie three eggs and a slab of ham and made him drink water instead of coffee. “You'll thank me,” she said, “when you're asleep and Oscar's driving.”
But Rossie wasn't hungover. He was giddy and not entirely sober. Katrina poured herself a cup of the French-blend coffee she served, and was sitting across the table as if to study him, when Oscar Dodson knocked at the kitchen door.
Shaved and slick, ironed top to bottom, Oscar was wearing Levi's creased from the laundry and a dress shirt of a reddish color Rossie had never seen, cuffs buttoned and boots shined. “Where's your gear? Lost your gear? That high-cantle saddle?” But he was grinning.
“You.” Katrina pointed to Oscar. “There's the coffee, and there's the cups. You're a big boy. Get your own.”
Oscar poured for himself and sat across the big, round table from Rossie. “If I was a big boy you'd bring it to me.”
“But you're not. You're like him.” She nodded at Rossie. “A big baby.” She was smiling altogether at Oscar, flirting.
Rossie didn't enjoy watching.
“Sons of bitches,” she said. “What you don't want to be, big boys, is one of those sons of bitches.” She turned to Rossie. “You. Go shave and comb your hair. It's time you were leaving.” She smiled at Oscar, looking entirely happy. “Me and the big boy will talk while we're waiting.”
Nito was at the table when Rossie came back. His black hair was slicked down, as immaculate as his new, white shirt and heavy, gold cufflinks in the shape of tiny dice. His dark precise hands folded softly around a steaming mug. Nobody was looking right or left, nor were they talking. Something had happened.
“You know what I'll remember from last night?” Rossie said. “I'll remember wearing
my father's shirt.”
Nito looked up. “Do you have any money at all?”
“Fifty-three dollars.” Rossie slipped a flat little fold of greenbacks from his hip pocket and lay it open for his father.
“If I gave you a hundred, would you make me a promise? No whorehouses? Not a nickel for whorehouses?”
Rossie shrugged, like maybe this was a joke. “That's a tough one. But sure.”
“I'll give you fifty.” Nito fanned out five unfolded ten-dollar bills and eyed them for a moment. Then he fanned out five more crisp tens. “Fifty more for the whores.”
Oscar drummed the table with his fingers and gave a whistle. “Mr. Benasco,” he said. “How about poor Oscar? The crippled fellow doing the driving?”
Nito stood and looked down on them. “What you are, poor Oscar, is shit out of luck.”
“Whores?” Katrina asked. “What about this house, where you live?” This didn't seem entirely to be a joke.
Nito pulled a snakeskin wallet from his hip pocket and took from it a perfectly new hundred. He smoothed a single fold from the bill and dropped it onto the tabletop. “For the house.”
“What about the woman?” Katrina was not smiling.
Nito gazed down at them with what looked to be fondness. “The woman, the boy, the house. They have all my cash. Now I must go earn more. My son, stay with the horses. Leave the women alone, or you'll come home broke. Or broken.”
“Pretty advice,” Oscar said. “I can tell you that.”
So they were all smiling when Nito had one more thing to say. “That girl.” He looked directly to Rossie. “She'll keep until winter.”
“Mattie Flynn. She has a name.” Katrina was not smiling and this was no joke at all.
Nito ducked his head and grimaced, and was out the kitchen door. Trouble had been edged around but not missed altogether.
The Willow Field Page 3