Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

by Lonesome Dove

  Lorena knew the cowboys were near, but she didn't look out of the tent. Gus had assured her he would be back soon, and she trusted him-- though sometimes when he was gone for an hour looking for game, she still got the shakes. Blue Duck wasn't dead. He might come back and get her again, if Gus didn't watch close. She remembered his face and the way he smiled when he kicked her. Gus was the only thing that kept the memories away, and sometimes they were so fresh and frightening that she wished she had died so her brain would stop working and just leave her in the quiet. But her brain wouldn't stop--only Gus could distract it with talk and card games. Only his presence relaxed her enough that she could sleep.

  Now and then she peeped out and saw the wagon, with Gus standing by it. He was easy to spot because of his white hair. As long as she could spot him she didn't feel worried.

  Call let the men camp--they had had a rough twenty-four hours. A big steer had crippled itself crossing the river. Bert roped it and Po Campo killed it efficiently with a sharp blow of an ax. He butchered it just as efficiently and soon had beefsteaks cooking. The smell reminded the men that they were famished--they went at the meat like wolves.

  "A cow don't go far with this bunch," Augustus observed. "If you boys don't learn to curb your appetites you'll have eaten the whole dern herd before we strike the Powder River. It'll be a big joke on you, Call," he added.

  "What will?" Call asked. His mind had been on Blue Duck.

  "Think of it," Augustus said. "You start off to Montana with a bunch of cattle and some hungry hands. By the time you get there the hands will have et the cattle and you're back at nothing. Then the Cheyenne or the Sioux will wipe out the hands, and that'll leave you." "What about yourself?" Call asked. "You're along." "I'll have stopped and got married, probably," Augustus said. "It's time I started my family." "Are you marrying Lorie, then, Gus?" Dish asked, in sudden panic. He was aware that Gus had saved Lorena from a bad fate and supposed she might be going to marry him in gratitude.

  "No, Dish, I've someone else in mind," Augustus said. "Don't run your hopes up no flagpole, though. Lorie's apt to be skittish of men for the next few years." "Hell, she always was," Needle observed.

  "I offered her good money twice and she looked right through me like I was a glass window or something." "Well, you are skinny," Augustus said.

  "Plus you're too tall to suit a woman.

  Women would rather have runts, on the whole." The remark struck the company as odd--why would women rather have runts? And how did Gus know such a thing? But then, it was a comforting remark too, for it was like Gus to say something none of them expected to hear. Those that had night guard would be able to amuse themselves with the remark for hours, considering the pros and cons of it and debating among themselves whether it could be true.

  "Dern, I missed listening to you, Gus," Pea Eye said as Augustus was mounting to leave.

  Call rode a little way out of camp with Augustus. A flock of cranes came in and settled on the banks of the river.

  "This trip is hard on boys," Augustus said. "We've lost two already, and the young sheriff lost a boy and a girl." They stopped for a smoke. In the distance the night guard was just going out to the herd.

  "We should have stayed lawmen and left these boys at home," Augustus said. "Half of 'em will get drowned or hit by lightning before we hit Montana. We should have just gone ourselves and found some rough old town and civilized it. That's the way to make a reputation these days." "I don't want a reputation," Call said.

  "I've had enough outlaws shoot at me.

  I'd rather have a ranch." "Well, I got to admit I still like a fight," Augustus said. "They sharpen the wits.

  The only other thing that does that is talking to women, which is usually more dangerous." "Now you've ended up the caretaker of that girl," Call said. "She ain't the woman you're after." "Nope, she ain't," Augustus said. He had been pondering that point himself. Of course, for all he knew Clara was still a happily married woman and all his thinking about her no more than idle daydreams. He had long wanted to marry her, and yet life was continually slipping other women between her and him. It had happened with his wives, earlier.

  "I wish you'd been married," he said to Call.

  "Why?" Call asked.

  "I'd like your thoughts on the subject, that's why," Augustus said. "Only you ain't got no experience, so you can't be no help." "Well, I never come close," Call said.

  "I don't know why." "No interest," Augustus said. "Also, you ain't never figured yourself out, and you don't like to take chances." "I could argue that," Call said. "I've taken my share of chances, I guess." "In battle, not in love," Augustus said.

  "Unless you want to call what you done with Maggie taking a chance." "Why do you always want to talk about that?" Call said.

  "Because it was as close as you ever came to doing something normal," Augustus said. "It's all I've got to work with. Here you've brought these cattle all this way, with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don't have no reason in this world to be doing it." Call didn't answer. He sat smoking.

  The Irishman had begun to sing to the herd.

  "Since you know so much about me, have you got any suggestions?" he asked.

  "Certainly have," Augustus said. "Take these cattle over to the nearest cow town and sell 'em.

  Pay off whatever boys is still alive." "Then what?" "I'll go deal with the ladies for a while," Augustus said. "You take Pea and Deets and ride up the Purgatory River until you find Blue Duck. Then either you'll kill him or he'll kill all of you." "What about the boy?" Call asked.

  "Newt can go with me and learn to be a ladies' man," Augustus said. "You won't claim him anyway, and the last boy that got near Blue Duck had his head smashed in with a rifle butt." "Nope," Call said. "I'm primed to see Montana. If we're the first ones there we can take our pick of the land." "You take your pick," Augustus said.

  "I'm in the mood to travel. Once you boys get settled I may go to China, for all you know." And with that he rode off. Call smoked a while, feeling odd and a little sad. Jake had proved a coward and would never be part of the old crew again. Of course, he hadn't been for twenty years--the old crew was mostly a memory, though Pea and Deets were still there, and Gus, in his strange way. But it was all changing.

  He saw the girl come out of the tent when Gus dismounted. She was just a shape in the twilight.

  Gus said she wouldn't talk much, not even to him.

  Call didn't intend to try her. He loped a mile or two to the west and put the mare on her lead rope. The sky overhead was still light and there was a little fingernail moon.

  Jake spent most of his days in a place called Bill's Saloon, a little clapboard place on the Trinity River bluffs. It was a two-story building. The whores took the top story and the gamblers and cowboys used the bottom.

  From the top floor there were usually cattle in sight trailing north, small herds and large.

  Once in a while a foreman came in for liquor and met Jake. When they found out he had been north to Montana, some tried to hire him, but Jake just laughed at them. The week after he left the Hat Creek herd had been a good week. He couldn't draw a bad card, and by the time the week was over he had a stake enough to last him a month or two.

  "I believe I'll just stay," he told the foreman. "I like the view." He also liked a long-legged whore named Sally Skull--at least that was what she called herself. She ran the whoring establishment for Bill Sloan, who owned the saloon. There were five girls but only three rooms, and with the herds coming through in such numbers the cowboys were in the place practically all the time. Sally had alarm clocks outside the rooms--she gave each man twenty minutes, after which the big alarm clocks went off with a sound like a fire bell. When that happened, Sally would throw the door open and watch while the cowboys got dressed. Sally was skinny but tall, with short black hair. She was taller than all but a few of the cowboys, and the sight of her standing there unnerved most of the men so much they could hardly button the
ir buttons. The majority of them were just boys, anyway, and not used to whorehouse customs and alarm clocks.

  One or two of the bolder ones complained, but Sally was unimpressed and uncompromising.

  "If you can't squirt your squirt in twenty minutes, you need a doctor, not a whore," she said.

  Sally drank hard from the time she woke up until the time she passed out. She kept one of the three rooms for her own exclusive use--the one with a little porch off it. When Jake got tired of card playing he would come and sit with his feet propped up on the porch rail and watch the wagons move up and down the streets of Fort Worth. Once Sally had the alarm clocks set she would come in for a few minutes herself, with a whiskey glass, and help him watch. He had hit it off with her at once, and she let him sleep in her bed, but the bed and the privileges that went with it cost him ten dollars a day--a sum he readily agreed to, since he was on a winning streak. Once he had got his first ten dollars' worth, he felt free to discuss the arrangements.

  "What if we don't do nothing but sleep?" he asked. "Is it still ten dollars?" "Yep," Sally said.

  "I can buy a dern bed for the night a sight cheaper than that," Jake pointed out.

  "If it's got me in it, it ain't just a bed," Sally said. "Besides, you get to sit on the balcony all you want to, unless one of my good sweethearts is in town." It turned out that Sally Skull had quite a number of good sweethearts, some of them so rank that Jake didn't see how she could stand them. She didn't mind mule skinners or buffalo hunters; in fact, she seemed to prefer them.

  "Hell, I'm the only one of your customers that's taken a bath this year," Jake complained.

  "You could take up with bankers and lawyers, and the sheets wouldn't stink so." "I like 'em muddy and bloody," Sally said.

  "I ain't nice, this ain't a nice place, and it ain't a nice life. I'd take a hog to bed if I could find one that walked on two legs." Jake had seen hogs that kept cleaner than some of the men Sally Skull took upstairs, but something about her raw behavior stirred him, and he stayed with her and paid the daily ten dollars. The cowboys that came through were very poor cardplayers, so he could usually make his fee back in an hour.

  He tried other whores in other saloons, skinny ones and fat ones, but with them a time came when he would remember Lorena and immediately lose interest. Lorena was the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and her beauty grew in his memory.

  He thought of her often with a pang, but also with anger, for in his view it was entirely her own fault that she had been stolen. Whatever was happening to her, it was her punishment for stubbornness. She could easily have been living with him in a decent hotel in Austin or Fort Worth.

  Sally Skull had bad teeth and a thin body with no particular beauties. Her long legs were skinny as a bird's, and she had nothing that could match Lorena's fine bosom. If anyone said a wrong word to her they got a tongue-lashing that would make the coarsest man blush. If one of her girls got too sweet on a cowboy, which could always happen in her profession, Sal promptly got rid of her, shoving her out the back door of the saloon into the dusty street. "Don't get in love around me," she would say. "Go do it in the alley if you want to give it away." Once she fired three girls in one day for lazing around with the boys. For the next week she serviced most of the customers herself.

  Jake decided he was crazy for taking up with Sally--she lived too raw for him. Besides the drinking and the men, she also took powders of various kinds, which she bought from a druggist. She would take the powders and lay beside him wide-eyed, not saying a word for hours. Still, he would be awakened at dawn when she pulled the cork out of the whiskey bottle she kept by the bed. After a few swigs to wake herself up, she would always want him, no matter that she had serviced twenty cowboys the night before. Sally flared with the first light--he couldn't think what he liked about her, yet he couldn't deny her, either. She made a hundred dollars a day, or more, but spent most of it on her powders or on dresses, most of which she only wore once or twice.

  When the Hat Creek outfit passed through, some of the men came in and said hello to Jake, but he froze them out. It was their fault that Lorena was lost, and he had no more use for them. But tales about him were told, and they soon got back to Sally Skull.

  "Why'd you let that Indian get your whore?" she asked him bluntly.

  "He was a tricky bandit," Jake said. "For all I know she may have liked him. She never liked me much." Sally Skull had green eyes, which dilated when she took her powders. She looked at him like a mean cat that was about to pounce on a lizard.

  Though it was barely sunup they had already been at it, and the grimy sheets were a puddle of sweat.

  "She never would mind," Jake said, wishing the Hat Creek outfit had kept their mouths shut.

  "I wouldn't mind you either, Jake," Sally said.

  "I wish I could trade places with her." "You what?" he asked, mightily startled.

  "I've went with a nigger but never an Indian," she said. "I'd like to try one." The news about the nigger was a shock to Jake.

  He knew Sal was wild, but hadn't supposed she was that wild. The look on her face frightened him a little.

  "You know something else? I paid that nigger," she said. "I give him ten dollars to turn whore and then he never got to spend it." "Why not?" Jake asked.

  "He bragged and they hung him from a tree," Sally said. "Wrong thing to brag about in Georgia. Some of them wanted to hang me but they didn't have the guts to hang a woman. I just got run out of town." That night there was trouble. A young foreman gave Sally some lip when she tried to rush him off, and she shot him in the shoulder with a derringer she kept under her pillow. He wasn't hurt much, but he complained, and the sheriff took Sally to jail and kept her. Jake tried to bail her out but the sheriff wouldn't take his money. "Leave her sit," he said. Only Sally did more than sit.

  She bribed one of the deputies into bringing her some powders. She looked a mess, but somehow it was the mess about her that men couldn't resist. Jake couldn't, himself--somehow she could bring him to it despite her teeth and her oniony smells and the rest. She brought the deputy to it, too, and then tried to grab his gun and break jail, although if she had waited, the sheriff would have let her out in a day or two. Somehow, in fighting over the one gun, she and the deputy managed to shoot each other fatally. They died together on the cell floor in a pool of blood, both half naked.

  The deputy had nine children, and his death caused an uproar against whores and gamblers, so much so that Jake thought it prudent to leave town. He searched Sally's room before he left and found six hundred dollars in a hatbox; since Sally was dead and buried, he took it. The whores who were left were so scared that they hired a buggy and came with him over to Dallas, where they soon found work in another saloon.

  In Dallas Jake won some money from a soldier who reported that he had met a deputy sheriff from Arkansas. The deputy was looking for the sheriff, and the sheriff was looking for a man who had killed his brother. The soldier had forgotten all the names and Jake didn't mention that he was the man being sought. The information made him nervous, though.

  The sheriff from Arkansas was evidently in Texas somewhere, and might show up any time.

  While he was pondering what his next move might be, a hard-looking crew showed up in the saloon where he was playing. It consisted of three brothers--the Suggs brothers. Dan Suggs was the oldest and most talkative. The younger two, Ed and Roy, were sullen and restless, always watching the doors to see who might be coming in. Dan had no interest in doors, or any apparent concern other than a need to have his whiskey glass filled rather often. All three were scraggly-bearded men.

  "Didn't you ranger?" Dan asked, when he heard Jake's name.

  "I rangered some," Jake said.

  "You run with Call and McCrae, didn't you?" Dan said. "I've never met Call or McCrae but I've heard they're hard men." It irked Jake a little that those two had such reputations. It seemed to him that he had done about as much as they had, in the rangering days. After
all, he was the man who had shot one of the most famous bandits on the border.

  While they talked and played cards a little, Roy Suggs kept spitting tobacco on the barroom floor. It irked Ralph, the man who owned the bar. He brought over a spittoon and put it by Roy's chair, but Roy Suggs looked at him with a cold eye and continued to spit on the floor.

  "Roy will spit where he pleases," Dan said, with a mean grin.

  "Spoon, how'd you like to be a regulator?" he asked a little later. "I recall from stories I've heard that you can shoot a gun." "What is a regulator?" Jake asked.

  "I've not heard the term." "Folks up in Kansas are getting tired of these Texas cattle tramping in constantly," Dan said. "They want this trail-driving business regulated." "Regulated how?" "Well, taxed," Dan said. "People can't go on driving cattle just anywhere. If they want to cross certain rivers at certain crossings, they've got to pay for the privilege. If they won't pay in cash, then they've got to pay in cattle." "Is it the law in Kansas, or what?" Jake asked.