“That’s what made me think of it …,” Snuff said. He stood behind her.
“Think of what?”
“Here.” He led her away from the window onto the middle of the scarred linoleum dance floor. “Come here.”
She was almost as tall as he was and did not have to bend her head back to look into his eyes. Yet she had always avoided them. Then she remembered her New Year’s vow. “I must break myself open,” she thought.
“Are you cold?” Snuff asked, because she was shivering.
“No.” Was she afraid of him or afraid of herself, she wondered.
When he took her in his arms, she gasped, then burst out laughing.
“Oh, Snuffy, what are you doing? It’s eight o’clock in the morning.…”
He released her, knowing how fearful she was, even though, the night before, she had had more than usual to drink and had screamed out with pleasure.
He pulled two chairs to the middle of the floor and they sat facing each other, under the bent chandelier. He cleared his throat. “This year has gone awfully fast,” he began badly. He felt like a boy at confession. “It’s because you’ve been here all along. Now I can’t remember …”
“What?” Carol asked.
“How I got along without you.”
She turned her head from him. He thought she looked like a statue. Her long, birdlike neck stretched as if she were about to crow.
“Let’s get married; what do you say?”
Carol’s head swiveled. “Oh, goodness,” she began. “I’ve embarrassed you into …,” she began, swallowing hard. “I shouldn’t have spent the night.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She looked down at his hands holding hers. “What do you want with someone like me? I’m just a spinster,” she said, shrinking from him.
Snuff leaned toward her, smiling. “I like spinsters,” he said.
Carol had trouble catching her breath. She put one hand to her chest but couldn’t speak.
“You’re not unworthy,” Snuff said. Her eyes met his. “I’ve watched you … since the first day you wandered in here. For God’s sake, no one ever said you have to believe what you think about yourself.”
A smile came slowly over Carol’s drawn face. Snuff continued. “You’ve had some bad luck, is all. You’ve been nursing your grief like a damned sheepherder, rolling it over and over in that head of yours. And I’m not saying it’s self-pity either. You’ve been hit hard a couple of times and you raised that boy alone and you didn’t hide him away. But that night with Carter Heaney—that was twenty-three years ago, Carol.…”
Her eyes moved quickly around the room, then Snuff brought her hands to his lips as she watched. It was excruciating for her. Those hands, she thought, aren’t mine. He’s not kissing me.
“It’s over now,” he said softly.
Carol took a deep breath. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise as it did before a close lightning strike. They stood. She let her eyes go into his and the sensation was not terrifying as she had expected—some kind of tumbling plunge—but, rather, one of rest and ease.
They held each other as if to dance.
“I think we’re like two storks together,” Carol said. “The way we’re both built …”
Snuff smiled, but they didn’t move.
That night Carol went home and the next day returned to Snuff’s to work. She didn’t know what came next—what she should feel or say or do. When she opened the door a woman sitting on the end bar stool swung around.
“Hello, honey,” she said. “I suppose Snuff hasn’t told you about me.…”
Carol’s eyes darted between the woman and Snuff.
“I’m Venus,” she said, standing with her arms outspread.
“Oh, goodness … yes. Well, you threw me for a loop there.” She gave Snuff a look of astonished relief.
“Prince Charming here hardly recognized me. See, I’ve gotten fat,” she said and pulled the flesh at her waist, laughing heartily.
“Don’t be silly … he told me about you the first thing … we were sitting on the floor under that table …,” Carol said, pointing to the oval oak table Snuff had taken from the lawyer’s office in town.
Venus leaned forward. Carol could smell the liquor on her breath, and the low-cut angora sweater revealed a voluptuous chest. “You’re not really going to marry this gambling fool, are you?” Venus whispered, then erupted with laughter again.
“I thought you would be older,” Carol said. “He said you raised him.”
“Hell, I did, but we were both just kids. I knew more, that’s all.”
Venus set her empty glass out in front of Snuff for a refill.
“Venus, you lie like a …”
Venus drank, then set the half-empty glass down. “I raised him good, too. Made him into a good Catholic, made him good with women.”
“Ohhhh …” Snuff turned his back to the women and shook his head with embarrassment.
Venus finished off the Manhattan, then stood under the chandelier and looked up at the bare bulb hanging down through the middle. “Fancy,” she said, then crossed the scarred dance floor and sat at the blackjack table. She reached up and switched on the green lamp.
“Snuffy … you come over here and deal me and Carol a game.”
Snuff reached in a drawer for a fresh pack of cards, pulled on his visor, and escorted Carol to the table.
“I’m going to powder my nose,” Carol said.
Venus watched her go. “God, Snuffy, you’ve got her skinny as an old rooster. Don’t you take care of her?”
“She has her own place … and a son.”
“I mean in bed.”
Snuff looked at Venus’s bare shoulders. The rhinestones on the angora sweater caught light and sparkled like stars. He saw her breasts swell, almost lifting above the neckline, and shuffled the cards.
“I think I’ll go powder my nose too,” she said winsomely.
When Venus opened the bathroom door she saw Carol’s face in the mirror, and the hand that resembled a claw, and the red tube of lipstick moving across her mouth.
“Oh …,” Carol murmured when she heard Venus coming in. Venus hiked up her skirt and sat on the john.
“I’ve always thought this was the best place to talk. Those other rooms are too big … everything gets lost in them.…”
Carol tried to smile with the lipstick still applied to her upper lip. “Uh huh …,” she agreed.
“My room used to be down the hall two doors. I worked here for a couple of years.”
“I know,” Carol said, licking her lips together, then blotting them with a rumpled handkerchief. “I’ve been in that room. Aired it out one day when we had people staying over. An old Indian. I don’t think he ever went to bed. Just sat in that booth out there while this young kid went and fetched him drinks all night. Just sat there kind of chanting … had to carry him to the funeral.”
“Who kicked the bucket?”
“Pinkey’s son … Vincent.”
“Oh my God … no one told me.”
Carol turned to her. “I’m sorry.…”
Venus wiped herself and pulled the chain on the toilet. The tiny room filled with noise. Carol stepped back from the mirror as Venus moved closer, stood in profile, and examined herself out of the corner of her eye.
“Look at all that fat,” she exclaimed, then clamped her hands on her voluptuous breasts and laughed. Carol stared frozenly.
“He’ll be loyal to you,” Venus said. “He almost became a priest … did he tell you that?”
“Yes.” Carol leaned against the wall.
“I guess he should have, really … but it’s a long way from Venus Alley to the Vatican. I didn’t push too hard. Then he got wound up with Daley and that gang, and got to running race ponies, but he wasn’t like all the rest. You see these other fellows were always acting out of desperation; that’s why they came to me. They were on the downside of life. I mean, they were falling … they
didn’t really believe in life, and that’s what you’ve got to believe in. They think they do something and then life is over; for men like that it’s over as soon as they come, which is always too fast. But Snuffy, he was different. Even as a kid he could see things. It was kind of spooky, like he was an old man inside a little boy.”
Venus stood back from the waist-high mirror, then made a face.
“I let them use me … but I did it with revenge …,” she said, smiling. She flipped up the back of her hair and let it drop two or three times. “I could have done other things. Lordy, when I think of it … I was good in school, but where’s a girl going to get a job that pays anything decent? I had mouths to feed and I wanted to work for myself. I could have raised myself up … oh hell, that’s water over the dam, isn’t it? And there were always these,” she said, putting her hands on her enormous breasts again and laughing hoarsely. “Oh, they were in demand. First they all wanted to get a peek at them, then they wanted to touch them, then … but I tricked them … you know what a trick is, don’t you? What that really means is that I turned their attention back on them … I turned it into a kind of power over them. They were always at my mercy,” she said, dropping her hands and smoothing the angora sweater at her waist. She gave Carol an assessing look. “You must think I’m some kind of freak.”
“No,” Carol said solemnly. “Quite the opposite. I’m the freak. Truly.”
Venus looked Carol up and down. “Well, he’s got you too skinny, that’s one thing.”
“What else?”
Venus put her hand on Carol’s hair. “You need some curl in here or something, something soft around your face.…”
“I know. I’m just not very good at these things.…”
“Oh, honey, it doesn’t matter anyway … sometimes it just helps your outlook on life. You’ll need that after you’ve been married for a while. I don’t know why you girls do it—”
“Do what?”
Venus shook her head.
The day Venus left, Carol unlocked the door to the room that had been Venus’s for those two years. She knelt by the bed. When she was seven, she had said her prayers that way, but by the time she was ten, she had given up any notions of safekeeping or delivery through divine intervention. Now she knelt at the bed of a whore and asked for something quite different. “How can I be a person someone could love?” she entreated, not God, but herself, because she did not feel sufficiently significant to presume any God could be bothered with her.
She smoothed the green wool blanket with her hand as if to feel the backsides of all the men who had lain over that one woman, then leaned back. The blanket was cold against her skin. She lifted her hips a little to hike up her skirt, closed her eyes, and tried to conjure up the feeling of a small room with a man in it, a strange man whose mouth she had never tasted, whose thoughts she knew nothing of. What would he do? What would he say? Where would he put his hands first? Where would she put hers?
She lay for a long time in the half-dark, with her long legs sticking straight out from her skirt. She could not even allow herself to bend her knees, and her hair spread across the pillow like needles. She thought of the difference between the birds who sought out the upper currents of air and glided gracefully and the earthbound ones—like grouse—whose short flights looked fettered.…
“Carol?” She heard Snuff calling and lay rigid. He walked past the room to the back door and yelled her name, then came back. He paused in front of the door, walked away, then opened it slowly. The light in the hallway made a fan shape on the far wall.
Carol swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Carol?” Snuff said softly.
When he saw her, he came to the bed. Carol’s eyes widened.
“Carol?” he said again. He sat beside her. “What’s wrong?”
Carol looked at him. “I know you love me,” she said, “but I don’t know how you could.”
In March the wind came like a claw that loosened every stick and string of human civilization. Carol and Snuff had made a date for the wedding—April 21—and she had already begun looking through magazines for a wedding dress. It was a Thursday and she and Willard would drive somewhere, she decided. Anywhere. Just drive until she felt like coming home again.
“Hurry up,” she snapped at Willard. “We’ve got places to go.”
He looked at her quizzically and did as she said.
They drove southeast out of Luster. The narrow road finally crossed the river at Meeteetse. The black coupe continued south, down to the town with the hot springs, across a wide plain where antelope ran parallel to her car but faster, over the Medicine Bow Mountains, past the hotel where Owen Wister wrote part of The Virginian, south, but upward in altitude, onto the Laramie Plains. Here, she was stopped by a roadblock. She had run out of “A” ration cards for gas.
“We can’t allow you to go any farther unless it’s an emergency,” the uniformed man said.
“But it is—” Carol pleaded. “My sister is sick in California.”
The man scowled at her.
“My son and I are going to take the train from Laramie,” she continued, and the man let them through.
“But I’m warning you, there’s another roadblock on the other end of town,” he yelled after them.
Carol drove obediently to the train station. An east-bound train had just arrived and the platform was filled with returning soldiers. She told Willard to stay in the car. Inside the station she looked at the big board by the ticket office. There was a west-bound train in two hours.
“How long will it take to get to Los Angeles?” she asked.
“Twenty-six hours, ma’am.”
“I’ll need two tickets then,” she said. “On that train today.”
After, she sat in the car with Willard.
“We’re going on a trip,” she explained to him. “I have a sister, Aunt Emily. She lives in the desert. She says there’s sand and cactus and date palms and a place where we can ride camels. She has a swimming pool. We’ll teach you how to swim.…”
Willard grinned. He made motions to get out of the car and go to the train.
“It won’t be here for a while, Will …,” she said patiently.
She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. Why am I running away? she wondered. She thought of the moment she had allowed herself to look into Snuff’s eyes. The thought made her smile. She was not frightened by him. Yet, she wanted to be alone. “My my, perhaps loneliness has become a habit with me.”
She roused herself and went back into the station. This time, Willard tagged along. She asked to use the phone and placed a call through an operator who sounded nothing like Velma Vermeer, but rather, young, and sweet, and helpful.
“Snuff? It’s Carol. I’m in Laramie. How? I drove. Willard and I are going to California. My sister is sick … I don’t know … I know you do … I’m fine, Snuff. No, I don’t need anything. Yes, I will. Goodbye.”
She sat with Willard on a hard, polished bench until the train came.
The wind stopped and it began raining. A yellow Dodge convertible pulled up to Snuff’s. The Wild Man stood at the bar.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” he asked.
Snuff turned and smiled. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Here. Have one on the house. You drinking these days?”
“Champagne,” the Wild Man said heedlessly.
Snuff set two glasses on the bar top and filled them with whiskey. “It’s good to see you,” Snuff said.
“I need something,” the Wild Man confided.
Snuff nodded his head. Under his blue eyes, the skin was dark. He had lost weight and his face looked wrinkled. The Wild Man stared.
“You don’t look too good yourself.…”
“Naw.… here’s to …” Snuff raised his glass.
“My brother,” the Wild Man interjected. “He’s making bombs,” he said bitterly. “Here’s to all the killers.”
“No. Le
nny, come on.…”
“Who’s Lenny?”
“You are.”
“No, I’m not,” he yelled and took a swipe at all the glasses on the counter. An ashtray broke.
“Hey, now … what’s got into …”
The Wild Man stretched his arms in front of his head and squeezed the palms together hard. “She’s going to have my baby,” he yelled shrilly. “And my brother’s making bombs.…”
Snuff looked at the Wild Man, whose beautiful face had become transfixed with a bitter grimace. “Take it easy … okay?”
The Wild Man opened his eyes and let his arms drop. When Snuff held out the bottle in a friendly gesture, the Wild Man looked as if he were being accosted and backed up across the dance floor.
“Ow …,” Pinkey said. He had just ridden in.
The Wild Man had stepped on him.
“You stuck in reverse or something?”
The Wild Man stepped forward without an apology.
“I’m going now …,” he said blithely and made his way to the door.
Snuff followed him outside. He could see the empty bottles and some dirty clothes strewn in the backseat of the convertible. The canvas top was torn and the floorboards were thick with mud. The Wild Man started the car and backed in a half-circle around Snuff. He rested his elbow on the rim of the door.
“Los Alamos,” he yelled, then spun his wheels on the cobbled parking lot and drove north toward the dark rain clouds that reached all the way back to Billings.
When the rain came, Snuff ran for cover and shook himself inside the door.
“I knew it was going to storm,” Pinkey said. “My bones told me so I thought I’d get a little head start on it,” he announced. He pulled up a stool as Snuff went behind the bar. “What’s got into him?” Pinkey asked, looking in the direction of the highway.
Snuff looked up wearily. “The same as the rest of us. He’s lost his marbles.…”
Pinkey howled with laughter, even though it wasn’t intended as a joke.
A bottle of Cobb’s Creek sat on the counter in front of the old cowboy.
“Might as well bar-up until this sonofabitch is over,” Pinkey said, then looked at Snuff. “What’s eatin’ on you?”
“You’re looking kinda rummy …,” Pinkey continued, pouring himself one shot, then another. The wind shifted and rain slapped at the windows. “I better get to drinking before this baby gets over with,” he said and tipped his glass.
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