We hadn’t gone far before I seen we could trot, so I clicked up Sandy. But that old mule just stopped—stopped dead in his tracks.
Problem was that I had the rope wrapped around my hand—mostly around my thumb—instead of the saddle horn. There was this hard snap of my arm and then I was laying in the dust. My hand felt like it had been hit with a maul, but I didn’t know it was so bad till I pulled off my glove. My thumb was hanging down, kind of. It was starting to swell and turning a real light blue. I just sat there in the dust, hurting pretty bad. I remember I was thinking that it was a good thing it was my left thumb instead of the right, and had started to get up when I heard a horse coming from upriver. It was Mr. Pittman. He rode up and stopped. I tried to act like nothing had happened. He didn’t say nothing, just sitting there on this big mule he rides. I started to put the glove back on but that hurt, so I stuck the glove in my pocket, and felt that thing I’d put in there. I’d completely forgot it.
“What’d you do—forget to use your saddle horn?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, use it now before he takes a notion to head off again. Let me see your hand.” He clicked to his mule and took a few steps over close.
I held it out.
Jake snorted and did that damn little jump.
“Wrap the goddamned rope on the saddle horn,” he said.
I did. Jake dropped his head and started backing off. Sandy knew to hold. I felt pretty stupid.
“You bench-legged bastard,” said Mr. Pittman. He got down off his mule, walked right up to Jake and hit him upside the head with the heel of his open hand—hard, real hard—and then did it again. Jake’s head jerked back both times. Then he walked over to my saddle, untied the rope from the saddle horn, tied it to his saddle, got his rope, and then with one hand on the taut rope followed it to Jake’s head, which was rearing up and down considerable, and here he does this maneuver which went something like this. He looped his rope around Jake’s near front leg, went under Jake’s head to his other side, pulled the slack outen the rope, and grabbed the other front leg beneath the knee, lifted and pushed against Jake’s shoulder with his own so that Jake went right down onto his side with a thud and dust flying up and then and there he stomped twice on Jake’s neck while Jake is jerking his rear around trying to stand up.
“You goddamn hinny-head,” he yells. Then he walks over to me. “Let’s see your hand,” he says. I was a little scared of him. He’d gone kind of crazy, kind of in this mad-crazy way. Like something had took him over.
I held out my hand. “It’s out of joint,” he said. He told me to turn around and face away. I did, and he held my hand behind my back. “Look up toward that ridge there and start counting back from a hundred.”
He was holding my wrist and sort of rubbing my hand, getting the thumb in the right place, I reckon. I’d got down to about ninety-five when he jammed it back in place. I hollered. It hurt bad, but I could tell it was back in. But hurting. Then he got my wipe and wrapped and tied it so it was tight around my wrist and hand and held the thumb solid. So I couldn’t get in my pocket where that little pouch was.
“It’ll be tender for a while,” he said. “You learned a lesson—about as cheap as can be learned. There’s right many cowboys with nine digits. Fellow I used to know’d stick his nub in his ear and you’d think he’d sunk his whole finger in there.”
I didn’t say nothing about the thumb all afternoon, and that night I got the fire going like I had done the nights before. Zack cooked up some bacon and biscuits and opened some canned tomatoes. We ate good, then cleaned up, and went to lay down while Mr. Pittman talked to Redeye. I was finally able to dig the little pouch out of my pocket, given some time. When I went to untie the leather string that held it, it more or less crumbled. I pulled out a . . . a frog—a dull jet black, and the eyes were made from turquoise. I put my shirttail to it and in no time it was shined up considerable. I put it back in my pocket. I wanted it to be mine.
I woke up two or three times in the night with my thumb hurting and kept dreaming my hand had a rock in it.
———
The next day we was in some low mountains and saw Leesville down below us. I was looking forward to some good grub, something different anyway. We followed a switchback road down the mountain and could see the town below every once in a while. It was smaller than Mumford Rock by about half. I was thinking hard about some good food, and thinking maybe we’d find a saloon and that maybe things would work out for me and a woman maybe. Towns sometimes had new girls in from places like Chicago. I figured maybe it was about time for me.
When we got to the bottom of the mountain there was this marsh that we somehow got on the wrong side of. All the water was alkali and it smelled . . . bad. We had to backtrack, and when we finally got into town it was pretty late. Zack had been there before and so he knew where to deliver the blankets. We got Jake and the other mule and the extra horses and the cattle all corralled and went in the Twisted Stem Saloon for a drink.
It was a big place inside, bigger than I’d expected, and with a kind of yellow glow, and smelled damp, like something stale. There was one table of three cowboys playing cards, and two cowboys at the bar, big mirror with whiskey bottles in front of it, and some Kodak pictures of dead bears hanging from tree limbs under this giant picture of a naked woman laying down. There was elk heads on the walls, and antler racks.
“I’ve walked that rail more than once,” Zack said, pointing up to this little balcony.
“What you mean?”
“I mean I’ve walked that rail. Like a tight wire.”
The bartender was . . . a kind of old woman with big eyes and hair piled up on her head. “Is it Mr. Zack?” she said. “What’ll you take—the old thing?”
“I reckon so. What you been up to, Vida Lou?”
She poured him a drink and slid it to him. “Running this place the last two days. Fuller’s got stomach pains. He’s in bad shape. What’ll you have, young man?” she asked me.
“Whatever he’s having.”
“He’s having the old thing—cheap whiskey.” She laughed, then coughed, put her fist to her mouth, looking at Zack. I figured she had to be a whore. She had all this black stuff around her eyes and a lot of red paint and you could smell her perfume across the bar. She looked like she was probably more fun than anything in the world.
She poured me a little glass over half full of whiskey and slid it to me. By this time Mr. Pittman was in there. He’d been outside talking to Redeye and tying his leash to a post. He said he tied him to a table one time and Redeye started out after something pulling the table and broke it all to pieces.
“I’ll take a whiskey,” he said.
She slid him one.
Mine burned all the way down and my stomach got warm and my head got light. Then she slid us another one and her and Zack went into talking about some people I’d never heard of, and so I walked down a little ways to see what was going on in the next room. I’d heard some laughing in there.
It was a restaurant, but what got me, from head to toe, was this girl sitting facing me. There was one cowboy beside her and two across the table with their backs to me. She had on a white high lace collar and her eyes were very dark and her hair was piled up on top of her head, too.
I went and stood in the doorway with my drink in my hand just the way I figured a cowboy would. She looked at me and her eyes stayed on me longer than you’d expect. She had a lower lip that drooped a little bit like somebody I knew, but couldn’t place. She looked at the cowboy that was talking to her, then she looked back at me again. And my mind flashed to what if she fell in love with me and married me and I took her back home and Star got jealous because she’d secretly hoped that when I got older she could marry me. I’d been to look at Star through her window and I’d seen enough to know I better not look again because I guess it was a pretty crooked thing to do. I wadn’t old enough for Star. She didn’t pay me no mind except as somebody to talk to
.
I went back to the bar, put my glass down beside Zack’s and said, “I’ll have another drink.”
“That’s my boy,” said Vida Lou. And she poured me one.
“I think I’m going on in there to eat,” I said.
“Boy’s hungry,” Zack said to Vida Lou.
“I am too,” said Mr. Pittman.
In the restaurant we all three settle in about two tables over from her and she looks at me again. The cowboys are all laughing about something.
For some reason, I don’t know why, about then I thought about how Zack didn’t know me—not much at all. He didn’t know if I’d ever done it and all that. And of course Mr. Pittman didn’t. Brownie Taggart had took me behind a corn crib where I used to watch them do it with the Dunbar girls for a nickel but I hadn’t done it because I was too little back then. Mr. Copeland didn’t even know that. Nobody did, but Brownie.
Her table and ours are the only ones anybody’s at in the whole place. But I ain’t had nothing to eat since breakfast and I’m about to starve. We missed our dinner getting around that smelly marsh. About time we get settled in, she stands up and comes over to our table. She’s taller than I’d reckoned.
“We got some oyster pie tonight, boys. We got a load of oysters in on ice from San Francisco.”
“Sounds good to me,” says Zack.
Mr. Pittman nods his head. He’s taken his hat off—his hair is straight back, slick.
Zack is still wearing his hat. And besides leaning one shoulder forward when he’s standing, he does it when he sits.
“Then you’re in for a treat,” she said, “at a right reasonable price: three bits.” The whole time she was talking she was looking at Zack and Mr. Pittman almost like she didn’t want to look at me, and then when she did look at me it was almost like she was trying not to smile while she was smiling, and then she does this: she steps behind my chair, puts her hands on my shoulders, pinches down hard—cold chills run all over me.
“Relax, kid,” she says. “You look a little tired.”
“You got any bearded oysters?” says Zack.
“Nosir, we haven’t. ‘Bearded oysters’? Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She squeezed my shoulders. “And who is this one under my hands, Billy the Kid?” she asked Zack. I did relax and it was like I turned into a rag. I couldn’t think of a thing to say but, “I reckon I am a little tired.”
“What’ll it be?” she says. “Three oyster pies and trimmings and three cold beers?”
We all said yes, and I said, “And some more of that you just done to my shoulders.”
“That’s just a sampling,” she says. “The next will cost you. What’s wrong with your eyes, honey?” she says to Mr. Pittman.
I felt like she’d totally turned away from me somehow. Had done forgot me. That quick.
“Eye disease,” he says.
I was trying to think that maybe she was a waitress, or the owner’s daughter, but I couldn’t hardly believe it—she was so forward, and had said that about costing. Right out of the blue.
As soon as she was gone through this swinging door and into the kitchen, Zack says, “Want some?”
“What?”
“Bearded oyster.”
“What?”
“She’s a goddamn whore, son.”
“How do you know that?”
“I been here before. Hell, ask her if you want to know. Ask Cobb.”
Mr. Pittman was wiping his eyes. “I don’t keep up with that stuff,” he said.
“Ask her if she’s a dancer,” said Zack. “Same thing. And if you ain’t careful, what she’ll do is get you to buy her about fifteen drinks of weak tea. But in the meantime—in the meantime, you’re having a drink every time she has one and pretty soon you’re knee-walking and she agrees to take you to your room after you’ve done tried to go upstairs with her six or eight times but she keeps saying buy me one more drink. Finally she says, ‘Let me take you and tuck you in, honey, upstairs,’ and you say, ‘Sure thing, honey.’ So then she says, ‘Why don’t we stop in here and have a bath together first, and you say, ‘Oh sure,’ and you go in this room and there’ll be dividers and she’ll say, ‘You go behind there and get out of them old clothes and I’ll do the same and then I’ll meet you in that little room back there—the room with the tub. You go ahead and get in and wait and I’ll be in in just a minute with two big buckets of warm water from across the hall.’ And so you get undressed and go back and get in that tub and wait and wait and wait and wait and then you get a little worried and call out, ‘Dovie Ann, oh, Dovie Ann.’ And so you get out of that tub and look around and there won’t be nobody in there but you. You’ll go to put on your pants and they’ll be gone along with everything else and if your money was hid in your boots it’ll be gone too. Well, you won’t go looking for her with your pants off, and you sure as hell ain’t going nowhere with them on to announce what happened.”
“That happened to you?”
“Friend of mine.”
Out she come with some carrots and some crackers and three Mexican beers and set that down in front of us and said, “You boys munch for about fifteen minutes and then I’ll bring you your hot oyster pie.” She looks at me and says, “Hot and tasty.”
I got up my nerve. “Is your name Dovie Ann?”
“That’s right, honey. Zack, don’t you tell him nothing bad about me.”
“I couldn’t do that,” says Zack.
STAR
I was on the porch with the children on the afternoon Bumpy, Zack, and Mr. Pittman rode back in from their cattle drive. Mr. Pittman had that dog, Redeye, in the bag tied to his saddle. If that dog turns the right way and you can only see that red eye, he looks like something straight out of Hades.
It wasn’t much of a cattle drive. Just a few cows.
They were as dusty as they could be and hadn’t shaved, but with Bumpy you could barely tell. Maybe he did shave. He had him a new hat, black, with a wider brim than his old one, and a new yellow bandana around his neck.
The children were under the cottonwoods playing on a hammock, and some Indians were camped at their usual place. It was awfully hot, but not stuffy at all like back at home.
“How did everything go?” I asked Bumpy.
“Pretty good. Pretty good.”
Zack had dismounted and started into Mr. Merriwether’s office without so much as a nod. Just as he got to the door he stopped and said, “Oh, by the way, Miss Star, ask Billy the Kid here what happened to his pants.” Then he went on inside.
Mr. Pittman had let down Redeye and they were walking off for Redeye to take care of his business. Of course I didn’t ask Bumpy what happened to his pants. Likely as not it had something to do with a woman of the night at some hurdy-gurdy place up in Leesville. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m afraid Bumpy is becoming one of the common breed of western men. They use foul language, even in the presence of a woman. They stay on the plains for long periods of time. They carry running irons while they’re out there and brand any cows without a brand. They wear their hats inside the house. They have no desire for weekly worship. They have little or no formal schooling. They pass through these mining towns not unlike Mumford Rock where bawdy houses beckon them, and because of these places they lose all touch with gentlewomen and thus have not the slightest idea about how to court or behave properly. It’s just a shame about how the West denudes men of manners, and it does lead me to understand better how a woman might be drawn to a serious Mormon. Outside the Mormons, religious feelings seem to have slipped through the fingers of most western men. Even though the Mormon ways are sometimes odd, they do have a cleanliness, an orderliness that is comforting in a new country. And the new laws seem to have brought them to their senses about polygamy, thank goodness.
The Indians staying in the tents, three of them, had come out to look at Redeye and were crowded around Mr. Pittman, talking to him. I believe he speaks several Indian languages.
BUMPY
In a few minut
es Zack come out on the porch from the dining room where he’d been inside talking to Mr. Merriwether and said Mr. Merriwether wanted to see me. I’d never really talked to Mr. Merriwether much before, so I figured all he was going to do was give me my pay. When Zack passed me on the way in, he handed me my black frog.
“You son of a . . .,” I said. I put the frog in my pocket, looked at Star, who was standing there. My pants. He must have got the frog from Dovie Ann after . . . If he was a Mormon, I was a antelope. I wondered if he’d showed it to Mr. Merriwether. Or what he’d told him. He could have brought me my pants, too. What the hell did she do with them? The next time I went back there I’d be ready. I’d be different.
Zack just laughed.
Mr. Merriwether was sitting on a couch at one end of his office that’s off the eating hall. He had his feet up on a low table. The eating hall is like a big, long train car and his office is tacked on the end, crossways, and is like a little train car. It’s just wide enough for the settee up against the wall at one end where he was sitting. He won’t wearing boots; he was wearing lace-up, high-top shoes. The room was full of all this Indian stuff. He had a big pot, or jar, or something, on the floor beside each end of the table where he had his feet propped. There was shelves of pottery and relics and things along the walls. He’s a little man with a bushy mustache.
“What was that about exploding the Chinaman?” he said.
I was glad he hadn’t said anything about the frog. I figured Zack hadn’t told him.
“Oh, it was just something happened.”
“My guess is that Blankenship more or less planted it.”
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