“Do you think—”
“What, Frankie?”
They had themselves a good long silent look, not really uncomfortable, just itchy, as if it wouldn’t take much to break apart—one of those rare moments when both of them knew they were close to thinking the same thing, that Webb all along really had been that legendary Phantom Dynamiter of the San Juans—that troops of fancy ladies and poker colleagues, invoked to explain his absences over the years, were all fiction, and had best pack up their bright bengalines and taffetas and satchels of cash and pile on the next train out to the Barbary Coast or beyond, for all it mattered. And that in each explosion, regardless of outcome, had spoken the voice Webb could not speak with in the daily world of all whom he wished—wished desperately, it now occurred to Frank—never to harm.
“Ma.” He looked at the food on his plate and tried not to let his voice fade in and out too much. “If I keep on with this, if I try to find that Deuce Kindred and settle that up . . . way I did with Sloat . . .”
Mayva smiled grimly. “And what happens if she’s there when you find him.”
“I mean, it ain’t like fixin the porch or somethin—”
“How over does it have to be that we can finally all sleep, well,” patting his hand, “I sleep fine, Frankie. Sometimes a little lettuce opium just to get me into it, but don’t feel like that you need to give me no happy endings here. Sloat was plenty and I’ll always be proud of that.”
“Just that when I first heard, I hated her so much—”
“She had at least the spirit to look me in the eye and say she was marryin that little horseapple. I had my chance right there but was too shook to take it I guess, and she was out the door, and now it’s long over and done with.”
“I’m having some more of this pie,” Frank said. “You?”
“Sure thing. You boys were hard work, but that’s only hard work. A daughter pretends to be so easy, a little lady, smilin, dancin, all the time she’s waitin on that perfect moment that’ll hurt the most. And mercy, did it.” With a light in her eye now warning Frank it was all she had to say about it, at least to him.
FRANK TOOK THE NARROW-GAUGE out of Cripple, and it was some time before he noticed he was riding south. Something like a cloak of despair was settling down over his soul, useful, like a duster out on the trail. He still didn’t understand how much harder and less inclined to mercy it was making him. He looked around the train car, as if the Rev, out circuit-riding, might be about to show up with some useful thoughts. But either Moss Gatlin wasn’t there or he was choosing to stay invisible.
“I had this dream about running away with the carnival,” Mayva had told Frank in the lamplight one evening, both just keeping easy company. “Since the summer I was twelve and went to one down in Olathe. They’d set up all their pitches beside the river, and I got to talking somehow to this one fellow who ran that horse-race game they called the Hippodrome, he must have sure had a case or something, kept asking me why didn’t I come and work there, said he’d already been to the owner about me, and we could travel together all over the country, maybe the world, he understood my natural gifts and so forth. . . .”
“All the time we were growing up,” Frank said, “you wanted to run away and join the carnival?”
“Yes, and there I was with all o’ you, right in the carnival, and didn’t even know it.” And he hoped he’d always be able to recall the way she laughed then.
Down they journeyed, out of the mountains, seldom looking back, down through the prairie-smoke of eastern Colorado, onto a lowland that seemed to be awaiting reoccupation by ancient forces of mischief . . . in each face Deuce’s criminal palps could sense an imminence almost painful, unremitting, agents of a secret infiltration proceeding before the event.
For a while it seemed the only towns they ever came to rest in were ones that had picked up a bad reputation among those obliged to visit regularly—vendors of farm machinery, saloon musicians, pharmacy drummers with giant sample valises full of nerve tonics and mange pills that would pass for hair restorers. “Oh, that place.” Down the line and all across the land, you could find these towns it was better to keep clear of, unless you had grown long habituated to a despair that would someday be all defined by just its name, spoken among low-budget travelers in a certain way. There would be no laundries, bathing facilities, or cheap eats anywhere near the station. Well say, welcome to our li’l town, stranger, stayin long? In the train-station toilets, you could always find inscribed the last word in these matters—
Roses is red
Shit is brown
Nothing but assholes
Live in this town.
Each meandering river presented a distinction between the two sides, prosperity or want, upright or immoral, safe as Heaven or doomed as Sodom, sheathed in certainty or exposed in all helplessness to the sky and a tragic destiny.
When Deuce had left this part of the world, just a youth, geography had favored the vectorless. From any patch of these plains, there was more than enough compass for vanishing, roads of flight could just aim off along any heading, into terrain far from mapped even yet, Wild West or decadent East, north to the gold fields, down into Old Mexico, all angles between.
Former bank officers whose sleeping heads were pillowed on satchels of U.S. currency, fifteen-year-old gold prospectors who inside were already old and crazy, with growing into it just a bothersome detail, girls “in trouble” and boys who’d got them there, wives in love with clergymen, clergymen in love with clergymen, horse thieves and stackers of decks—and every last sinful absquatulator among them somebody’s child, not so much gone as consciously committing absence, and folded that quick into family legend. “Then that one day they all just showed up again out of the blue, no more’n an hour on the road, he said, he’d met her in a drugstore, just over in Rockford, and before that weekend they were married—” “No, no, that was Crystal’s cousin Oneida, string of little ones like elephant babies at the circus—” “No, now I’m sure that one was Myrna—”
The farther into it they moved, the deeper Deuce felt he was descending again into all he had ever wanted to rise above, to those unfairly walked out on as well as those he prayed he’d never see again. It was the light kept reminding him, yellow darkening to red to bitter blackness of the whirlwind brought among the sunlit, wildflowered meadows, thunder that began like the rumbling of sash-weights locked with old death-secrets of some ancient house back behind the sky’s neatly carpentered casementing and soon rocking like artillery.
“And back down in slow dumb old ‘Egypt,’” his sister Hope would tell Lake over a potato-salad recipe unvaried for generations, popovers and sweet corn and a chicken roasted straight from the yard, “we went on with our days, children of a captivity some escaped as Deuce did, while others of us never will. For there have to be our kind, too.”
“Sure,” said her husband Levi, as they were having a smoke out back, “but Deuce what’n the hell ever took you out that way?”
“Looked west, saw those mountains . . .”
“Not from no Decatur you didn’t.”
“Most times it was clouds, thunderclouds, so forth. . . . But sometimes when it was clear.”
“Dipping into Mother Kindred’s laudanum again, eh—”
“Leave her out of this if you wouldn’t mind.”
“No offense, just th’t people with stories like that tend to end up in California, they’re not careful.”
“That could happen.”
“Let us know.”
And thanks and so forth, but they’d sleep in town. It would be impossible for him to sleep in that house, ever again. . . .
FOR A DAY OR TWO after they got married, Deuce had kept repeating to himself, I’m not alone anymore. It became a formula, something to touch to make sure, too hard for him otherwise to believe that she was here, inside the angle of his elbow, far down the line as anybody cared to look legal as you please. Course, there was that old Sloat, and he had t
o admit, well, maybe he hadn’t been all that alone, really. . . . And then the activities among the three of them that followed, and after months more of domestic apprenticeship, the formula he found himself muttering, not always silently, had become, shit and when was I ever not alone?
But along with that, as time passed, he had also found himself engaged in pursuit of her forgiveness, as if it were a prize being held carefully as maidenhood—hungering after it the way some drover too long out in the brush might after the unspoiled object of his desire. Deuce, feeling this need, till recently unsuspected, slowly beginning to eat its way into his brain, would find occasion to blunder in small, stupid ways, breaking the Mexican flowerpot, forgetting to fix the roof before the next storm rode in, staying out at night pissing away the rent, just so there’d never be a shortage of things he could beg her forgiveness for.
What he didn’t quite see was how little it mattered to her by now. If the marriage was coming more and more to resemble a kitchen-table poker game, why, she valued her forgiveness at not much more than some medium-size chip. She had allowed the immediacy of Webb’s death—Webb’s life—to pass like smoke into the steadily darkening air between them. From a thousand small tells he had remained too unschooled in deceit to know how to keep from letting slip, Lake in fact already knew, or suspected too much by now not to know. But it would have to be Deuce who turned all the cards face up. And the day, before they knew it, had accelerated upon them, avalanche style.
In her own way of knowing and not knowing, she would say something like, “Your father still kickin, Deuce?”
“Someplace back here. Last I knew.” Waited for her to go on with it, but only got the careful face. “And my Ma, she died in that hard freeze in double-ought. Couldn’t dig her a grave till spring.”
“You miss her?”
“Guess so. Course.”
“She ever cry on your account?”
“Cry, not when I was around.”
“Anybody ever cry for you, Deuce?” Waited for him to shrug, then, “Well I hope you’re not countin on much from me, I’m done ‘th all my crying. Must’ve been that my Pa took the last of it, what d’you think? for my tears have all run and the drought has set in. Whatever happens to you, guess I won’t be crying. That be all right with you?”
He was giving her this peculiar look.
“What,” she said.
“Surprises me is all. Tears and so forth, thought you and him didn’t get along.”
“Did I tell you that?”
“Well no, not in so many words.”
“So you got no idea how I felt and come to that still feel about him.”
He understood by then that he’d do better to cut his losses and just dummy up, but he couldn’t, something stronger than simple self-interest was pushing him, and he didn’t know what it was but it frightened him because he couldn’t control it. “You remember what it was like up there. Wasn’t just the mountain trails where you ‘s only a step from the edge. Those Association boys, it ain’t like once they hire you on that you have the choice. Wa’n’ nothin special about me, just I was there. They would’ve hired anybody.” There. That was way too much.
But how ready did she feel to say, “You could’ve stood up.”
“What’s that?”
“Could’ve been a man instead of crawling like a snake.”
Then he might’ve taken in a short breath but no more. “Yeahp, that’s what your Daddy tried, and look what they did to him.”
“Excuse me, ‘they,’ what ‘they’ was that again, Deuce?”
“What are you tryin to say, Lake?”
“What are you trying not to?”
BEING AFRAID OF GHOSTS, Deuce had been waiting for Webb to find him. In dreams no different from his cursed youth, he left her in the night, went calling into the unmeasured shadows deep inside haunted barns, daring what was there to come out into the open country, which itself had grown malevolent. He waited up into the clockless nights for mountains miles high that only came out at night, waiting to drive an ownerless wagon straight uphill into autumnal graveyard terrain and be found by the man he had killed. Mosquitoes big as farm animals, with eyes as reincarnate and expressive as a dog’s, and bodies warm and squeezable as a rabbit’s, bumped slowly against him. . . .
Deuce sometimes felt like he had put his head into a very small room, one no bigger, in fact, than human head size, unechoing, close and still. “Well . . . maybe,” he could hardly hear his own voice, “I could go out and kill a whole lot of other folks? and then I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad about just the one. . . .”
AS MUST HAPPEN to all badmen early and late, Deuce one day found himself putting on the deputy’s star. Back in the mountains, right up till the day the Owners turned and came after him, he had felt not so much working on one side of the Law or the other as protected from the choice itself. Now, on the run, secure only in forward movement, he found the decision so easy that for a minute and a half one sleepless middle of the night he was sure he’d gone crazy.
One day, out in some haze-horizoned piece of grassland, Deuce and Lake noticed unexpectedly up ahead in the green circumference this narrow smoke-colored patch, and feeling peculiarly drawn, decided to have a look. As they rode closer, architectural details emerged from the bunchgrass and the dazzle of sky, and soon they were entering Wall o’ Death, Missouri, built around the remains of a carnival, one of many inspired by the old Chicago Fair. The carnival after a while had moved on, leaving ruins to be converted to local uses, structural members from the Ferris wheel having for miles around been long incorporated into fence, bracing, and wagon hitches, chickens sleeping in the old bunkhouse, stars wheeling unread above the roofless fortune-teller’s booth. The only structure not fallen all to pieces yet was the Wall of Death itself, a cylindrical wood shell, looking fragile but destined to be last to go, weathered to gray, with ticket booth, stairs winding around, chicken wire that once separated the breathless tip from the spectacle inside.
Visited by motorcycling pilgrims, as if it was a sacred ruin, scene of legendary daredevilry, when viewed from overhead reminding widely-traveled aeronauts of ancient Roman amphitheatres strewn across the old empire, empty ellipses at the hearts of ancient fortress towns, the onset of some suburban fatality in the dwellings presently appearing at human random around it, treeless perimeters becoming shaded boulevards astream with wheelfolk and picnickers, while around the dark corners, under the new viaducts, in the passages greased with night, the gray wall, the Wall of Death, persisted in the silence and forced enigma of structures in their vanishing. . . .
“Maybe there’s an employee entrance around back somewhere,” Lake offered. They eased their horses to a fence-riding gait.
And, well it was peculiar, but the folks inside did turn out to be expecting them, it seemed—they appeared bearing casseroles, pies, chickens plucked and otherwise, selected members of the Methodist choir lined up and sang “For It Is Thou, Lord,” the Sheriff, Eugene Boilster, who’d been standing at the front sill of his office all morning scanning the grass-scape, likely the sky as well, stomped forward with both hands out in welcome.
“Glad you didn’t get lost. The last two, or do I mean three, got lost.”
Deuce and Lake understood inside of the next breath that they were being taken for some deputy peace officer and his missus supposed to be showing up today, who as it turned out never would, and maybe they exchanged a quick look. “Snug little community,” Deuce said. “Forget to adjust for windage, you could miss her clean, never know it.”
“Artillery fancier, eh?”
“Last resort if reason and persuasion don’t work, of course, sir.”
“You’ll see.”
BUT IT WAS NOT the minutiae of the day’s offenses, the penises caught experimentally in laundry wringers, repeated thefts of the only automobile in town, willing victims of the formulations of Happy Jack La Foam, the local pharmacist, who’d have to be rescued from up telegraph poles and belfr
ies, from temperance meetings or the unsympathetic weaponry of spouses in pursuit, not the fabric of the municipal day Deuce was really there to attend, he discovered, so much as to be on call around the clock for the more abstract emergency, the prophecy which loomed out beyond the sensible horizon of daybook fact, the unspoken-of thing they had hired him to deal with, which he came to fear could only be regarded—like you’d need a telescope to look at another planet—by way of the police ticker or printing telegraph in the back of the Sheriff’s station. A specialist’s apparatus, the next step on into the twentieth century from wanted men’s faces on penny postals.
Out from under whose glass dome one day came ratcheting unwelcome news, from Mexico by way of Eagle Pass. Reporting officer C. Marín, responding to a report of firearms being discharged within town limits, found in the cantina Flor de Coahuila a northamerican male about twenty-five years of age, identified as (converging letter by letter as Deuce watched to the inescapable name) Sloat Eddie Fresno, dead of gunshot wounds inflicted according to witnesses by another northamerican male, no good description available, who then left the premises and had not been seen since.
Deuce’s eyes were filling unexpectedly with salt water, some outrush of emotion trapped prickling just behind his nose, as he imagined himself on out to some picturesquely windswept grave, head bowed, hat off, “Big slow lummox, couldn’t get out of your own way, they were bound to find you, shouldn’t even been you, you were just along for the job, coverin your pardner’s back, maybe deserving of hard labor but not to be shot down in some cantina surrounded by language you never learned much more of than señorita chinga chinga and más cerveza maybe, you old fool—damn, Sloat, what’d you think you were doing?” While creeping into him came the rectal message that somebody might be more than willing to do him up too, along with the quickening heartbeat of hatred, a co-conscious witness of all their past together violated and death’s sovereign bobwire run straight through. Deuce needed to be the fuck out of this office, out the door saddled up and raising dust, finding and gut-shooting the sumbitch killed his runninmate, again and again, till there’s more shit on the walls than blood. . . . Lake arrived in the middle of these reflections with a couple armloads of laundry full of sunlight and smelling like the first day of the world, the frail suggestion that none of this needed to come to pass. . . . “What is it now, my own guardian of the Law?”
Against the Day Page 62