“Old Sloat.” He was shaking. “’Member him? my partner? Yours too ‘s I recall? Shot dead down the border. Maybe even by one of your got-damn brothers.”
“Oh, Deuce, I’m sorry.” Thought to put a hand on his shoulder, thought better. She knew she shouldn’t but guessed she felt more happy than otherwise to hear the news. Against the unwavering serpent glare, she tried to be reasonable. “He had a way of trouble finding him, you know, it could be nothing at all to do with—”
“You just keep bein faithful to that Anarchist shithouse you grew up in,” and that was it, he was out the door, no courtly kiss, touch of the hat, back-soon-my-darlin, only the surprisingly careful latchclick behind him.
The days would then proceed to drag their sorry carcasses down the trail of Time without word one from Deuce. Long as she didn’t brood too much about what it was he thought he was out there doing, it was almost a relief to have him gone.
Later, alone, gliding into sleep, she was shocked awake by a familiar, keen, anal memory and swore for a minute, sitting bolt upright with her nightdress up around her hips, that Sloat had returned from the dead for the sole purpose of fucking her in his all-time favorite style. It was not the fondest way she might have remembered the passing of a loved—well, now and then desired—one, but again, it was Sloat who had come to her from out of the howling leagues of emptiness, that penis, as she had suspected for some time, harder when it wanted to be than the most obstructive barrier death could come up with.
Tace Boilster dropped over, mostly to sit and smoke cigarettes without having to go through a whole Bible lesson about it at home.
“I can guess where he’s heading for,” said Lake, “is Texas. Might not be where he is, of course.”
“Somebody looking for him, Lake?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me, but this time he thinks it’s him out looking.”
“Oh, my. Then I take it this time ain’t the first?”
“He’ll be back. Either way, he finds another offender to kill or doesn’t, it’s not fixing to be no church supper around this place.”
“He better behave himself if I’m here,” Tace said. But she had taken off her Sheriff’s-wife face like a deputy might unpin a star. “Maybe you’d like to tell me a little what’s goin on?”
“See one those readymades?”
“Sure thing. Have one with you.”
“There’s one already in your mouth, Tace.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lake lit up and told Tace the whole sad story. Not so comfortable with it that her voice didn’t drop sometimes to a whisper and even a choked failure of voice altogether. Seeing at some point Tace’s expression grow alerted and careful through the veils of smoke, “Guess somethin’s really wrong with me, isn’t it.”
“What? you married somebody shot your Pa.” She shrugged and opened her eyes wide, as if in puzzled inquiry.
“You see a lot of that around here?”
Tace allowed herself a short sigh through her nose. “One way or another I get to see it all. Young beaus, irate fathers, nothin new. You two maybe pushed a little further, ‘s all.”
“That man kicked me out of the house. Just left me—I could have ended up in some crib in Mexico or dead, for all he cared. Should’ve been me that killed him.”
“And it turned out to be Deuce. And then later on you two met up. Well? Ain’t exactly like you planned it out together, is it?”
“Still bad enough. Pa’s dead and gone and I haven’t stopped hating him. What kind of unnatural daughter’s that make me? A girl is supposed to love her father.”
“Sure,” said Tace, “in those Elsie Dinsmore stories or someplace. We all grew up on that stuff, and it poisoned our souls.” She put her cigarette in her mouth and reached a hand gravely to rest on Lake’s. “Tell me somethin. Did he ever try to . . .”
“What? Oh—”
“Have his way?”
“Webb? Webb could be mean as they come, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“Mine did.”
“Your Pa? He—”
“Him, my brother Roy Mickey into the bargain.” With a peculiar smile, squinting through the smoke, as if daring Lake to say something.
“Tace. Oh, my dear.”
“Years ago, not the end of the world. And I was worried more for Ma, tell the truth. Didn’t last long anyway, they all got to bickerin amongst themselves, before I knew it Eugene come along and I was clear of that house, praise the Lord, no worse for wear.”
“Never would’ve happened in our family.”
“Well don’t sound so forlorn, you didn’t miss much.”
SHE DREAMED ABOUT MAYVA.
Squirrel on a fence post. “What are you looking at, bright eyes?” The squirrel, standing up straight, angled its head, didn’t move. “Sure, easy for you, but wait ‘ll the weather turns.” All the while getting the wash spread out on the fence, being careful not to dislodge the squirrel. “Crazy in the head, every one of you.” That was always Mayva, who would get into these exchanges with animals, nearly conversations. A squirrel or a bird would sit for what seemed hours, while she talked to them, pausing now and then in case they had something to say in reply, which sometimes it appeared they did. Lake swore she’d heard creatures replying in their own languages and her mother nodding attentively, as if she understood.
“What’d that hawk have to say, Ma?”
“Range fire over by Salida. Some of her relations got scattered. She’s just naturally concerned, ‘s all.”
“And then later on,” the girl’s eyes as wide open as blue columbines in July, “somebody came in, said there really was a fire over there.”
“Sure, Lake,” the boys holding out their fingers Mexican style as if to say atole con el dedo, “but Ma could’ve heard that anywhere. She knows you believe everythin she says.”
“No way she could’ve heard anything before the mail wagon came in.” They’d go off laughing.
“She was only a dynamiter’s daughter,” Mayva was singing in this dream, “but caps went off, where’er she passed by. . . .”
“You do your best,” she cried out at her mother, “to wreck us, and then you run away, out of reach, behind the wall of death.”
“You want to come out after us, out there beside the old dark river, find us, read us off your list of complaints? Somebody sooner or later’ll be happy enough to he’p you do that. Swear, Lake, you’ve gone sour in your old age.”
Lake woke up, but so slowly it seemed for a while that Mayva was really there in the room.
“YOU COULD WAIT for him to come back,” Tace advised. “It happens sometimes. What you might not want to count on is ever gettin back to that old domestic bliss.”
“You mean put up with the son of a bitch again, maybe again and again, ‘cause I don’t have that much choice.”
“And Eugene is gettin grumpy with all the extra chores.”
“Oh that case I guess I better pray extra hard.”
And then one day the wind was howling up in the telegraph wires and Deuce came riding back into Wall o’ Death. Hadn’t come close—no surprise—to finding out who got Sloat. Only out there a week or ten days, but it looked like a year’s worth of weariness, head all hanging down, sort of a pale indoor look to him.
It didn’t end anything, of course. Sloat would start coming in the window, off the empty night plain, going “Whoo-oo-oo, you little piss ant, how come you never saw it? Was I always supposed to be the one protectin you?” To which Deuce, if he was not by then too paralyzed in fear, would reply, “But, well but, I thought that was the deal, I mean you always said—” and so it would go back and forth till Lake struggled up into yet another day’s first drift of unpromising light, muttering, “Person can’t get no damned sleep around here. . . .”
“ALWAYS THOUGHT there was this great secret. The way they looked at each other when they said certain things in a certain way. . . . And now I’m being let in on it at last.”
“Oh, child,�
� said Tace Boilster. “You’re sure of that, now.”
Lake gazed at the Sheriff’s wife. At their feet Boilster babies crawled and stumbled, dropped, picked up and threw things down again.
“Like that all you have to do,” Tace went on, “is let go, let it bear you up and carry you, and everything’s so clear because you’re not fighting back anymore, the clouds of anger are out of your face, you see further and clearer than you ever thought you could. . . .”
“Yes.”
“Inspect your shoes, Mrs. Kindred, it’s gettin deep around here.”
“He can change, Tace.”
“And you’re just the angel o’ damn mercy’s going to change him?”
“I know I can.”
“Sure.” She nodded, beaming, till she thought the girl was lulled, then snapped, “Into what?”
Lake only angled her head a little downward, pretending meekness though keeping her eyes onto Tace’s.
“Let me guess. Into somebody so much better’n he is right now, that you won’t have to think no more about what he did. Save yourself all that trouble.”
“Why not?” Lake whispered. “Anythin wrong with wanting that?”
“Wanting? Well, wanting . . . if it was me, see, I’d be lookin to change him into somethin worse. Weaker, slower, bad enough judgment that I could just do the deed on him whenever I felt like?”
Lake shook her head. “Tsk. Law-enforcement wife, too. Well sure, don’t think I haven’t thought about it—just go find his pistol some night, put it down onto that snorin little head,” clapping her hands once, “amen. Even with the blood and so forth to be cleaned up after and your Mr. B. to worry about, sure—but I don’t, do I?”
Tace thought she might have caught a look, a shadow moving across the younger woman’s face so fast, proceeding from some deeper source of sorrow that later she couldn’t swear that she even saw it. And Lake meanwhile, perhaps after all a touch too cheerfully, was going on, “But supposing . . . what he did . . . was a kind of mistake, you know, just a mistake, Tace, didn’t you ever make one of them?”
“Hires on to kill your Pa, some mistake.”
Yes, one of the big questions, which just went on sitting there, and she wouldn’t ask, and Deuce sure wouldn’t bring it up—namely, how much did Deuce know before he went and did it? Had he signed up to just be their all-purpose gun? or to go after Webb in particular?
“You think he’s so good,” Tace went on, “just a boy that’s lost, that it? and you can bring him back, all you need to do’s love him enough, love your enemy into some kind of redeemin grace for the both of you? Applesauce, young lady.”
“Tace, you’d ever been up in those damn mountains you’d know, it was just so hard, never let up, you worked at all, that’s who you worked for. Them—that was it. They’d tell you to trust their judgment, and what choice did you have? Even if it was something bad, folks took what they could. Deuce was all ready to do it, I wasn’t there and neither were you, maybe he thought he saw Pa with somethin in his hand, those were desperate days, miners gettin shot all the time, if you were legally deputized, they tended to let you off.”
Now, it’s not as if this was a courtroom and Tace was the judge. No reason Lake should be trying this hard to convince anybody. Was Webb heeled that day? was it conceivable Webb went for Deuce first and Deuce only acted in self-defense?
Knowing Webb was gone was hard enough, but worse was this queer coldness, this lost trail back to what should have been unsoiled memories, to her whole childhood brought so brutally to an end, meantime having to live with somebody she had come to hate everything about, except when he put his hands onto her, and then. Oh, then.
And I can never leave him, she wrote in the little school copybook she used for a diary, no matter what he does to me, I have to stay, it’s part of the deal. Can’t run . . . sometimes like I’m trying to wake up and can’t . . . and I already knew didn’t I, long before we married, who he was, what it was he did, and yet I went ahead and married him. I didn’t know, but I knew . . . maybe from the first time I caught him looking at me, there was that bright-eyed excuse for a smile, like we were well-known figures of public life and each of us was supposed to know who the other was, and not lift a finger, either one, even with all we knew. Some deal we made. With the empty spaces always in between how I ought to be feeling and what I was really up to, it was sneaking away to Silverton all over again, and nobody saw it, they thought it was just grieving for Pa or trying to keep busy, they told me time would pass and I’d get back to daily life . . . but I think I’m dreaming and can’t wake up. . . .
Wish it could be Denver . . . be a saloon girl. . . . She crossed out the words, but went on daydreaming about it, whole dime novels full of lurid goings-on. Chandeliers and Champagne. Men whose faces were never too clear. Pain that felt just so good, imagined in detail. Girl intimates who lay around in fancy linen sharing laudanum on long slow winter nights. A loneliness nothing could touch. An embrace of distant, empty rooms, kept clean by the wind forever blowing through. A high-mountain sunlit spareness, a house framed in absolute rectilinear purity, dry, bleached, silent but for the wind. And her young face, remembered by a hundred no-goods all through the San Juans for its clean delicacy, unshielded before the days and what they were doing to it.
ONCE IT WAS CLEAR to him that she knew, and to her that he knew she knew and so forth, once they found themselves passed somehow through that fatal gate they’d both been so afraid of, opened as if by invisible guardians and shut again behind them, and she went on as always and didn’t give any sign of fixing to shoot him or anything like that, Deuce must have felt easier about surrendering his hardcase ways in favor of helpless, unmanly pleading, couldn’t stop offering his explanations, not that she was that interested, less so as time went on. “They told me he was a Union dynamiter. Was I supposed to ask him if they were right? They said they had proof, a whole secret life nobody ever saw. Course I believed it. Anarchist, no conscience at all. Women, children, innocent mine workers, didn’t matter. They said—”
“I can’t help you out, Deuce, I never knew that much of what he was up to. Talk to a lawyer, why don’t you.” Was this her own voice?
But even in her silences, he thought he heard something. “It was to save lives, that’s how they saw it. I was only their instrument—”
“Oh—there’s ‘at whinin again.”
“Lake . . . please forgive me. . . .” Down on his knees again with another display of the eyeball hydraulics, which was not as becoming in a man, she had discovered, as tales of romance in the ladies’ magazines would lead you to think. Fact there were times it could be downright repellent.
“Maybe my mind was wandering those fateful moments, but I never heard that Swede say love honor and forgive. Get up, Deuce, it ain’t working.” She had chores to do anyhow—there was no way around that.
But the really strange thing was, that with all there was to send them off down forever separate tracks, he continued to desire her, as much—no, more than ever now—and she finally started paying attention as she felt it turning to power for her, flowing out of the invisible unknowability of men like bank interest into some account in her name she hadn’t known was there, growing with the days—she learned how easily she could ignore his heated eyes across the room, slide away from his hands, choose her own moments and try not to smirk too much at how grateful he was, and not be assaulted for any of it, nor even screamed at. What was not so clear was if and when he’d wake from this obviously short-term opium dream, or how far it might be safe to push before he did wake up, maybe even too quickly for her to get to a safe distance away . . . skillful stepping, at least a sensitive touch, would be needed—she could not afford to relax, when any unguarded word, eye-movement, routine flash of jealousy, might trip the latch and send him back to good old Deuce, blind crazy out of the chute and looking for blood at long last.
AFTER WHAT HAD added up to years of dodging, false uttering, and hard riding
to escape it, Deuce was relentlessly being delivered into his own life, and what a dismal prospect it was turning out to be.
Out there doing what each day demanded, he understood on one of them whose date he didn’t record that the Furies were no longer in pursuit, Utahan or any other kind, that some statute of limitations had run and he was “free,” though it felt like anything but.
Him and Lake, they had both wanted children, but as the days lengthened out, wheeled, the seasons repeated, and no little ones appeared, they came to fear that this was because of what lay poisonously between them, and that unless they could do something about it, no new life would ever be possible. They went out in the middle of the night to a distant riverfront hovel, Lake down on the dirt floor while a Sioux shaman with a look of incurable melancholy sang, shaking articles of feather and bone above her belly, Deuce forcing himself to sit clenched in a multiple humiliation—another man, an Indian, his own failure. They spent unreasonable sums on patent medicines that ranged from ineffective to dangerous, sending Lake more than once to Happy Jack La Foam for an antidote. They went to herbalists, homeopathists, and magnetists, most of whom ended up recommending prayer, which different sorts of Christer in the neighborhood were always happy to offer advice about the exact wording of. Their local reputation solidified, after a while the whispers stopped, and there was only small-town condescension to worry about.
“You can’t let these other women get you down, child,” said Tace. “You don’t owe them one damn thing, sure ‘s hell not children. You live your life and hope they’ll be busy enough with theirs not to be putting in so much with yours.”
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