by Les Weil
Carmichael had taken it quietly. "What's the real trouble between you and Lat? No one ever told me."
"Just say he's too good for the likes of us. That's all. A high-toned son-of-a-bitch."
It was all that Tom would say, but it was enough to give a general idea, enough to show how unlike one was to the other. Unlike in situation, too. Tom was freighting coal and seemed hard put to support a wife and child.
Now Godwin was saying, "'Course, Lat knows we know about that towhead chippie. Not as his little secret can be kep' forever, but we try to hold our tongues, for it's the public that he's touchy on, for reasons all his own." Godwin shook his head slowly. His finger made a small circle on the bunk where he sat. "Oh, I s'pose I understand, but it wasn't until white wives and picket fences began comin' in that a man got damned for actin' the man." He thought about the question some more. "No one hates a whore like a cold wife unless it's the husband she won't let out of sight. So we got vice for a word."
"I'd be proud to show that Callie around," Whitey said.
Carmichael smiled. "Not if Lat's pa had broke you to harness."
"Don't even mention it! No!"
The door opened almost too soon on their words, and Lat came in with a bottle under his arm. "Hi, Mike! Glad to see you! When'd you get in?" He came over to shake hands.
"Yesterday. Your ears burnin'?"
"Should they?" With what Carmichael could tell was real welcome and not mere politeness Lat shook with Whitey and Godwin.
"We were wonderin' about you. No bull."
"No bull, huh?" Lat's smile disappeared. He gestured with the bottle. "I saw a bull yesterday! A buffalo bull!"
"Where in hell's the circus?" Godwin asked.
"On the range, for a fact!" Lat pointed the bottle at Godwin.
Listening, they grinned at him, not quite believing. But Carmichael believed.
"So he reminded you of me?" Godwin asked. "Don't match him with me. I ain't the last nor on my last legs."
"I am," Whitey said, "unless you open that bottle." He didn't look so far gone. He had lost some of the whiskey bloat of stomach and face, due maybe to Lat.
Lat peeled off the paper and set the bottle on the table; and here, Carmichael thought, was cowpunchers' ease, with friends at his side, with nothing to do but lie around and sip whiskey and trade lies and maybe have a go at the pasteboards, letting happen whatever happened outside. The stuff in print made it out that a man couldn't have any fun on account of Indians and stampedes and weather and rackets with bad men, whereas a rider alone on a drift line could polish up stories and try them out on his horse and get tickled by looking ahead. Here, now, even Lat appeared free of his fret and ready for lazy fun.
"Alongside me," Whitey said, moving up to the table, "a desert is flooded. I'm witherin' like a burnt vine."
Lat handed over the bottle and drew on his training. "The last shall be first."
"Sounds holy." Whitey took the cork out and sniffed and lowered the bottle. "But don't Christ me or I'll Christ you back. You're too young to hear, Lat, but I call to mind the elder that prayed for rain and got a cloudburst and, seein' his chickens floatin' away and his outhouse torn down to the roots, you might say, he says to the Lord, 'I wanted a rootwetter, not a gulley-washer, just a gentle sizzle-sozzle. Cravin' Your grace, but this here is plumb idiotic!' " Whitey measured the bottle. "Not as this drop will give us the squizzles." He drank and started the bottle around.
Lat took off his coat and hung it on a wall spike, and, watching him from the bunk, old Godwin asked, "Dressed for a buryin', are you?"
Lat was dressed to lay corpses, all right, or whatever white Stetson, white shirt, red silk neckerchief, horsehair chain looped from his neck to his watch pocket, California pants, boots that looked made to order. He ought to have added a six-gun.
Godwin went on, looking at the ceiling. "A funeral is final, and thank God! But a weddin' is everlastin' unless the good Lord cuts the rope. It means wipe your feet good before you come in the door. Take your hat off inside the house. Don't set on the bed, it messes it. Eat like you wasn't hungry. Sleep without snorin'. Hang up your duds. Go to bed in a night bib and freeze your bare tail in the mornin'. The idee, sleepin' in what you've wore so's not to get cold by changin'! Don't matter if it is, don't call it shit!"
"You been married?" Carmichael said.
"Wherever she is, she's got the place tidy."
Whitey walked over and took the bottle from Lat, who had perched himself on a stool. "We make out without women," he said, wiping his mouth. "Godwin, he burns the mulligans when I'm workin', and I take a hand when I ain't, and let us get r'iled at each other, and we don't either one weep. If I want a drink, he don't holler, and if somethin' I et disagrees with me, he don't pertend that it's whiskey."
"Not when you're cookin'," Godwin put in.
Tom Ping came again to Carmichael's mind as he glanced at Lat, but a story pushed ahead. "I been halfway weaned from the bottle," he said. "Not that tellin' the how of it will make you booze-fighters swear off."
Lat said, "Go ahead."
"It's thanks to a friend of mine that I'm so temp'rate."
"Who?" Whitey asked.
"Acey Duncan was his name, a good man drunk or sober, though I'm guessin' at that last. The two of us set out one time to drink Ogallaly dry. Five or ten days we were at it. The count is mixed up in my mind. Anyhow, in tryin' to drain the supply, we got separated, which didn't matter. By that time we'd forgot we started in harness together. Then come a night of such terrible cold that spit froze on a stove, and old Acey, whose heart was touched easy, ran into a sheepherder with whiskers enough for a hair blanket but nothin' else that stacked up as assets. Acey asked him was he thirsty, which was a fool question. He asked him did he have a bed, which he didn't. So Acey saw to his thirst and by and by bedded him and his whiskers alongside himself in the spot I forgot to come back to. Next morning when he woke up, Acey had come to himself, more or less. He turned his head careful, like a soft-shelled egg, and spotted those whiskers spread long on the covers, and he reared up and tooted, 'In the name of God, Mike! Carmichael, how long we been here?'"
When the laughs had died out, Carmichael said, watching Lat just with the tail of his eye, "I forgot to tell you. Tom Ping's liable to move out this way. Got a job promised from the TS outfit, and he's thinkin', besides, of stakin' a land claim hereabouts."
Lat answered up. "There's good land still open to entry, and the TS is all right. I hope he does fine."
The thing was, the point was, Carmichael thought, that Lat meant it.
23
HAPPY came in the back door, carrying what he called his tote sack, and set it on the floor and began taking the things out.
"Mist' Lat's in town," he said, lifting the jug to the work table.
Callie swung away from the dishpan and the little stack of soiled dishes. "Lat's in town!"
"Sho' is."
"Then he'll be here tonight!"
"He di'n' say, but he sho' will."
"Tonight!" she said again, more to herself than to Happy, and looked out the window where the sun dawdled on the snow. "Happy, I'm sorry, but you'll have to go back. Get some peaches or berries in airtights, something good for a pie."
"It ain't no bothah, Miss Callie."
"You know how it is living alone. Men crave something sweet."
"Yas'm." Happy took the last article out of the sack and made for the door, slow as molasses, slow as the long afternoon.
When he had gone, she finished the dishes and then got out flour and lard and a dough board and rolling pin. It was good to have something to fill in the minutes and better yet to be doing something for Lat. Later tonight they'd slip down the back stairs from her room, she in her wrapper and he just half dressed, and they'd talk and eat pie and afterwards, without any need of suggestion by either,
go back to bed.
The girls were upstairs. She had this time all to herself, if some man just didn't knock at
the door. She found herself humming a half-remembered song. "Fair, fair, with golden hair . . ." Lat liked her hair. ". .. sang a fond mother while weeping ..." She laughed. "Fair, fair ..." Did a wife feel like this? She fed the wood range and turned up the draft and rinsed off her hands and mixed the pie dough and rolled it out and was about ready when Happy came back. "Man don' have nothin' but peaches," he said, "but I brung along a scrimption of cheese."
"That's fine. And, Happy, you can kind of pick up in the parlor and answer the door if anyone comes."
He answered, "Miss Callie, shuah," and moved out.
She mixed sugar and flour, using plenty of sugar, and opened the peaches and stirred in the mixture and filled the pan. For a surprise, then, she cut LAT in the top crust. She laid the crust on and crimped it and looked at the oven. It was hot enough. She put the pie in.
By and by it would be cooked. By and by the sun would go down. In time, darkness would come. After supper she'd part her hair in the middle and draw it back snug and tie it at the neck with a bow and let it fall in a tail, the way that Lat liked it. And she'd put on the new dress with the shawl collar and the skirt with two rows of ruffles. On the kitchen wall the banjo clock that had belonged to Aunt Fran said 4 o'clock. After a long time it said 4.01.
It was past 7 o'clock when the first knock came at the front door. It wouldn't be Lat, though. He always came to the back. Happy showed in two men, one tall and one medium. In the manner of so many men they stood with their hats on and grinned with uncertainty while they sized up the girls and the place. It was a good-enough place, clean, orderly, furnished with Aunt Fran's piano and sofa and mirrors and chairs and pictures and lamps, and a carpet she'd paid for herself. It was better than the bunkhouses they knew, she thought without faulting them.
Amy Lou walked to the tall one and said, "How, Sugar Tit?"
His eyes slid away from her. It was mostly the drunks that Amy Lou got nowadays and the men who'd rather take her than wait. Aunt Fran, already grumbling before her heart quit, would have put her out of the house long ago, huffing off the idea that Amy Lou was more than age, teeth and a thirst.
Callie said, "Happy, see if the gentlemen don't want a drink. Won't you boys sit?"
"Yas'm." Happy looked nice in his white coat.
"Whiskey for us." The medium man took a seat on the sofa by Daisy. Daisy smiled the smile that struck men as shy. A new girl, she was gypsy-dark and smooth-skinned and knew the trick of making her eyes wide and inquiring like the eyes of a rabbit.
The tall man maneuvered around Amy Lou and sat down.
They had come from work, these two, and had the marks of work on them. Their collars were ringed darker than the rest of their shirts. Their pants showed wear and stain. On their boots were corral flecks. Young, unknowing, so awkward as to be rude, they were like many another. There was nothing bad in them, nothing at any rate to be seen. A house took such boys, for a price small compared to their hunger, and sent them out eased, ready again for line camp or ranch.
Happy brought in the drinks, and Callie collected. Over his glass the tall man let himself look at her. "Now you're real pretty," he said and caught himself and turned quickly to Amy Lou. "No offense, ma'am."
Callie smiled. "Not tonight."
The man moved his eyes to Amy Lou by degrees, as if hoping she'd changed since 'he examined her last.
Amy Lou came over and sat on his knee. Her hand went up and pushed back his hat and fingered his hair. "I'm a good girl, Sugar Tit."
Something Daisy said made the medium man laugh. "You're a daisy, all right," he told her, "a plumb daisy-do." His young eyes drank her in. His hand touched her leg as if he couldn't quite believe a touch was allowed.
The tall one didn't look happy at the way they had happened to pair off. He swallowed his drink and swallowed a sigh. "Come on, then." Amy Lou got off his knee quickly and led the way to the stairs. Daisy and her man were slower, but they followed after a minute.
They had just gone from sight, just clicked their doors shut, when another knock came at the front. Callie started up before she remembered it wouldn't be Lat. "See who it is," she asked Happy.
The door swung open before Happy could get there, and Whey Belly Hector came in. "Howdy," he said. "How's the boss of the roost?"
"I -wasn't expecting you, Heck."
He didn't notice her tone. "No business being here. You play hell with the ranch." He walked over and let himself down in a chair and told Happy, "Bring me a drink!" It wouldn't, Callie thought, be the first.
Happy went out without speaking and would take his time coming back.
Under her lashes she looked at Hector, at the big bulb of his stomach, at the powerful shoulders and arms, at the broad set of his jaw and the head that narrowed up from it. A rude, demanding man but natural to himself, honest as cactus was honest, or animals. A steady customer. There was a time, she thought, looking back to her green and notionable days, when she would never have taken him on, but a girl naturally got over being so picky. It was just that she wished he hadn't shown up tonight, though sooner or later it was certain to happen.
"You can dock off the other boys," he said. "I'm staying the night. Where's that nigger?"
"He's coming."
"So's Christ."
"It can't be tonight, Heck."
"Can't? How come can't?" Little veins ran in the eyes he lifted to hers.
"But one of the other girls-"
"I've paid for an interest in you."
"You should have let me know."
His big eyes slitted. "So now I got to sign up in advance!"
"It's just tonight, Heck."
He came to his feet and stepped to her, slowly. "A goddam way to act with me!"
She hadn't thought of him as mean. She teetered up from the chair, crowded by the thrust of his stomach, her breath quick in her throat.
Happy came in with the drink.
"Set it down and get out!" Hector said.
Happy's wide gaze came to Callie.
"Get out, you nigger pimp!" Hector took half a step around, his shoulders hunched beyond the bulge of his stomach. Happy looked frail beside him.
"It's all right, Happy. You can go." Her voice came clear and firm and wasn't hers.
Hector took another step. It put him between Happy and the kitchen. "Get, I said."
Happy sidled to the front door and turned the knob and sidled out, his face turned backwards on them.
She didn't see it coming. She stood dizzy and confused and spun about while the blow came to life on her cheek as the leavings of his open hand.
"There, sister!"
She braced herself and turned and stood straight and met his eyes. "Good night!" She gave her back to him and started to the rear, walking slowly with her head up.
She heard his boots then, clumping after her, and caught herself hurrying, almost running. She slowed down to the inner whisper that the show of fear would make him worse. Step by step, to the kitchen, to the butcher knife, the heavy pots and pans.
There was the butcher knife! The simple, rightful selfprotectionl She might have reached it, but she swung around and met him coming in. "It's my time, Heck! Don't you understand? It's my time!"
He stopped. He gazed around. His large eyes steadied, fixed-and understood. She knew why before she looked. On the table the pie, with the LAT baked ragged in the crust. "So!" he said.
She felt herself reeling, falling to the hoof of his hand, heard herself yelling from the floor, "You can't! Not tonight! You can't make me!"
"Go to hell!"
The belly swung away, and the back marched from sight while inside her she cried, "You bastard! You dirty bastard! You'll have to come back!"
She didn't know Happy had entered the back door until his voice sounded. "Callie! Miss Callie!" She felt his hands on her arms and the lift of his old-nigger strength and the steadying hold of him after she had got to her feet. "You all right, Miss Callie?"
She was solider now. Sh
e pulled away from his hand and breathed deep. "I'm fine. It was nothing much."
Over her voice came the goodbyes of the tall and medium visitors and the made-cheery goodbyes of the girls and the clunk of the closing front door.
When she looked at Happy again, she saw the butcher knife in his hand and his head bowed over it. He was trying the edge with his thumb.
She said, "Put it up, Happy! Don't be crazy!"
He said, "Yas'm," and laid it away.
She went into the parlor where the girls waited customers, carrying her head high. She dug out the work book and steadied her hand for the entries.
Daisy $3.00
Amy Lou $3.00
"I'll be in my room," she said and mounted the steps without hurry.
In the bedroom mirror one cheek appeared thickened, though hardly enough to be noticed. She washed her face with cold water and smoothed her hair and lay down to wait.
She closed her eyes and, keeping them closed, opened them on a ranch where there was a garden to tend and a calf orphan to mother and Lat first of all to take care of, and she could step out of the house and let the wind blow her the wind that would whisper of the old Saturday-night parties, the old talk of men, the old live news, the old power over men!
A madam had no business crying.
24
IT WAS 6 o'clock sharp by his Waltham when Lat knocked at Marshall Strain's door. A fine home, he thought while he waited, white clapboard, green trim, enclosed by a white picket fence.
The knob turned. "Welcome, Lat." Mr. Strain put out his hand as if they hadn't seen each other today. Behind him Lat caught a glimpse of a man and a woman. "Let me have your hat and coat." Mr. Strain hung them up. "Come on in. I want you to meet Mr. Gorham, A. L. Gorham, attorney-at-law."
The man got up, six feet two or three of him, and shook with a firm hand, saying, "It's a pleasure. I didn't get your name?"
"Evans. I'm sorry," Mr. Strain said.
"Evans." Gorham had a manner. He was maybe thirty or thirty-five but already a little gray at the temples.
Mr. Strain went on, "And here, Lat, is my niece, Joyce Sheridan. She just arrived from the east, from Indiana."