by Les Weil
He hadn't eaten since early morning, after Little Lat, bright as a button, had awakened to the new day. He wasn't hungry now. He went to Soo Son's and spent time over what was said to be pot roast and rice pudding. It was dusk by the time he got out. Maybe, just maybe, by this time? Maybe she waited.
He walked up the street to the hotel bar. No one was there but the bartender, Herb. Good men and true had their feet under the family board. He asked for a beer that he didn't want and took it to a table. A man's mind got exhausted. There was nothing in his, it seemed to him, but the passing of time, but the float of half-thoughts, nothing but another beer, a cigar, a third beer, nothing but men coming in and trying to make talk. The clock, when he looked at it, had wiped out two hours.
The door squeaked open and shut. A voice said, "'Y God, Lat, you're a hard man to find." The smooth cave of the mouth was wide in a smile. "Even your woman didn't know, so I been to the ranch by shank's mare and all the way back the same way."
Grandpa McBee took a chair. The pat of his hand was too friendly.
Evans didn't speak.
"Oh, I had a horse once all right, and it's a sad story."
"Tell a funny one."
McBee lowered his voice. "Not faultin' you, for you're generous, but that grubstake was a mite skimpy. Still I wouldn't dream then of askin' for more. Only thing I could do to piece out my funds was to come to town and have a go at the pasteboards. Monte's my game." The mouth closed and drew down, riffling the whiskers. "You know, 'y God, you ought to do something about these crooks."
Evans held his tongue.
"For a minute I had a notion to tell them sports we was connected and watch 'em take cover," McBee went on, too softly for others to hear. "Then I says to myself, nope, Hank, it ain't for you to claim kin but the other way round. Right, huh?"
Evans looked into the sly old eyes, by his silence making McBee continue.
"Now, son, I hate to ask for more, but it's just a loan till I get on my feet, comin' to only two hundred in all besides a couple of horses."
Here again, Evans thought, was a problem shriveled to nothing. Here now he held the upper hand, here alone. He said, "Not a cent."
"Now think it over, Lat. It ain't fittin' to treat your old grandpappy like that. Me without money to get out of town or buy even a bait, and what would people think, knowin' you're rich-like and me pot-poor and the same blood in both of us?"
"Not a cent."
McBee shook his head. "I'll be mortified to tell folks we're kin."
"Tell them!"
"That's final?"
"Absolutely."
McBee quit play-acting. "I'll say to you," he said while a new glint came to his eyes, "your mother birthed a bastard."
"Names are safe at your age."
"Not you." The wizened, whiskered face was one mean blur. "Not you, but your older brother, him that's dead. Easy now! I ain't a fightin' man! But what I know I know, from back there on the Oregon Trail. The good Lord gave me eyes to see with and a mind to figger, and your ma was my own daughter and got herself knocked up, and not by Brownie, either."
Evans had the beard in his fist, had the head yanked up and then the body upright. He backed it to the door and with one hand reached ahead and found the knob. He spun the body around and kicked it out.
Only then did it come to him that the deed had been automatic, without thought -muscle anticipating mind. He stiffened himself against a bare nudge of doubt. A man stood so much, then no more. He stepped back to the bar, ignoring the eyes cast his way. Some of the beard was in his hand. He snapped it off and wiped his fingers on his pants. "Whiskey," he said.
"Served him right." The bartender was nodding. "I know him. Stinkin', exasperatin' old bag o' bones. Everyone's a crook but-"
"My grandfather," Evans said. The shot glass felt cool.
Herb wiped the bar.
Eighteen forty-five. The Oregon Trail. Pa and Ma, young then and blooded and unwed. Somewhere, some night, some man, on the long grind from Missouri. Take the word of a lying old blackguard of a grandfather!
The door opened and let in Tom Ping. It opened again and let in Carmichael. Ping's eyes swam around the room and fixed and, having fixed, swam on. He hitched up the high side of his cartridge belt. His walk, as he went to the far end of the bar, was the bold gait of a man who'd had a few. His face, reflected in the rear mirror, looked loose and ornery. Carmichael had let himself down at an empty table.
"Set the bottle out," Ping said. "I'm howlin', Herb." He spoke so loud that a watching silence settled on the room. While it lasted, Evans felt again, felt beforehand, the raw, unreasoning need of action. He breathed deep. He shook himself. He studied the bottles ranged beyond the counter. For what it mattered, Old Crow whiskey was a favorite.
"Herb?" Ping had his glass lifted and was squinting at it. "Y'ever heard of a one-horse rancher?" The voice was still loud. "My ass to him!" He swung around. "Drink up, boys!"
The words took Evans down the bar. "What you have to say, you can say to me, Ping."
Ping turned his head. "That talk of yours, now, is hard for common men to understand. Ain't it so, Herb?"
Herb's eyes went to the floor and moved uneasily along it. Behind him Evans heard the stir of movement. He said, "Go on!"
"I'm particular who I talk to."
Evans kept silent, watching Ping, waiting to catch and hold his gaze, knowing only that what came must come at last. He could hear his own breath, hard but even. It seemed to him he could hear the held breath of the room.
Ping jerked around. "You're a goddam high-winker."
"Get it all off your chest."
"You never made good on a friendship yet."
Beyond the dark face, behind the waiting time, Evans for an instant was in Fort Benton again. He had come from the bank, and Tom was heeling from him with hurt and anger in his look and on his lips a foul goodbye; and McBee came from the years to say there'd been a bastard in the family. "Go on," Evans said.
A little twitch had begun to work at the side of Ping's mouth. He put up a quick hand to smooth it out. The hand was unsteady. Ping said, while the twitch worked again, "Do I have to tell you what you really are?"
As if unseen before, Ping's face came sharp to sight, scarred and trembling with its ancient wound. There, too, were the poor and later years and the ways of a life that his upbringing had blazed in advance. The thick black forelock, close up like this, looked thin and showed hairs of silver, and his eyes might never have laughed.
Evans said, "You'd better tell me, Tom."
"All right. You're a son-of-a-b itch!"
Evans heard the scuff of feet, the scrape of a chair, the opening whine of the rear door. "That says it, I guess," he answered without moving.
"Well?" Ping had taken a step from the bar and stood with his hands clear. Time passed. Out of the unsteady mouth came, "I never took you for a coward before."
Evans nodded and turned away and walked slowly to the door.
Watching, while men too afraid to sit tight and too curious to leave had shied off, Carmichael had thought without comfort that his was the right hunch all along. Or one of his hunches was right. No shot had come from the dark, fired by friends of the rustlers. No put-up job had been tried. But here was Tom Ping as imagined, made too big for his britches by a favor and whiskey and a loco quirk of the mind, and here was a set-to closed to third parties.
Lat had called Ping's hand. Not that he'd had too much choice, but still he'd forced the showdown. Then something had come over him. Carmichael didn't know what. He only knew it wasn't fear. He only knew the Senate was gone sure enough then. He only knew, this above all, that Lat could have killed Ping -and didn't.
Now, as Lat passed on his way outside, Carmichael had an impulse to get up and take his arm. Lat went by unseeing, his step heavy but unhurried, his gaze fast on the door, his shoulders held back as if beneath a burden. Something in his face, in the mold and set of it, stirred Carmichael more. A man laid bar
e, he thought, peeled to the bone, without explanation or apology carrying his skull on the skeleton that was left of him. There was a word for it. Magnificent. That was the right and crazy word.
The door closed. Somebody snickered. Somebody said, "Senator!"
Ping flung around. "He's not a coward," he shouted at them. His mouth worked. "You cheap chippies, he's a better man than all of you."
Crying jags, they called them.
37
THE WIND was hard, so hard that Evans had to hold to his hat going home. Even the stars looked wind-blown, soiled by the leavings of winds. In his mind, it seemed to him, were only leavings, only the tatters and dusts of old storms, whirled again by the gale that was blowing.
Nothing mattered; all explained. Now was then, and then was now. Old wounds into new. A man tried. He kept trying.
To be right, he told himself, but to be right for the right reasonsl To square things up, he told himself, but to square them only by squaring himself with himselfl He couldn't go farther. He was too played out even to walk.
He went on. In winter the wind would have been welcome. It tore at him now, trapping his breath, driving grit in his face. He turned his back to a gust and walked backwards, holding tight to his hat. In the southeastern sky, over the old Oregon Trail, the stars were bright. When he turned, they were bright over Fort Benton. Old stars. The trusted starsl To the west, over the dark mountains, reared the dark mother cloud of the wind.
Home was a little star, not fallen yet. He stopped at the gate and wiped the hard dust from his eyes. He could see only shadows inside. He went to the door. It opened before his hand reached the knob. He couldn't make out her face at once, only the hand that came out in a gesture brave and little and pitiful. The loved voice came to him, reciting. "'Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest . . .' "
He saw the face then and the smile that couldn't hold to its smile. He never had thought her ugly before, or so beautiful.
Her voice cried to him, "Come in! Come in out of the wind!"
For just an instant he waited. The wind whipped him, the warm wind, the sweet wind, the wind with the bone of winter in it unnoticed till now.
Then he went in.