The Jump-Off Creek

by Molly Gloss

  Tim drank the beer and then took his kit bag and went out. He didn’t have anything in mind. He just walked. They had brought electric lights into the city two or three years before. There were street lights on Adams Avenue. He walked down that street until the walks and the lights gave out and then walked back in on Washington. Eventually, without deciding to, he went over into the alley where the woman’s house was. It was little and shabby. When he saw it he remembered her name was Margaret or Madeleine. He went up slowly onto the narrow porch and rapped against the door. His belly felt a little sour, from the beer.

  The woman who answered the door had a face he did not know. He stood there dumbly, holding his kit bag with both hands. After a moment, she smiled slightly, questioning, and said, “Oh I guess you are looking for Madeleine.”

  “Yes.”

  “She has gotten married you know.”

  He stood again silently, embarrassed. The woman kept smiling in that uncertain way. “You can come in if you want, though.”

  She had yellowish skin, but her hair was clean, a good honey color, and she didn’t otherwise look sick. She smiled and talked to him a little, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then stopped talking when she saw he had little to say. She took off her dress and a soiled little shift and lay on the bed with her legs open, waiting for him. She kept smiling, but she watched him in a cautious way, because of his silence. She wasn’t fat, but now he could see her belly looked swollen, as if she was pregnant, or tumorous. If he had seen it sooner, he might not have used her. But he couldn’t keep himself from her now she was lying open and naked in front of him. He lay down on her gently, and then urgently, and afterward dressed and got his kit bag, put a dollar on her nightstand, and went out of her house onto the dark street where it had begun again to rain.

  Blue was standing at the bar in the Bullshead. He had struck up some talk with the thin young kid standing next to him. Tim stood on his other side and drank a beer. He drank it slowly, running his fingers up and down in the dampness on the outside of the glass. He half listened to Blue and the kid. They talked about horses, and about outfits that were going broke, and the kid told a story about a big bull that split open every cow he covered. Tim had heard the story three or four times before, told better, and the kid didn’t know a damn thing about horses. He quit listening.

  “You’re not saying much,” Blue said. The kid had gone off. Tim looked after him.

  “I guess I’m getting too old,” he said.

  Blue shrugged his shoulders, smiling. “A kid like that doesn’t even know enough to put his boots on before his spurs.”

  Tim laughed. “I guess you were never that green.”

  Blue shook his head, smiling wider. “No I never was.”

  They drank one more beer and then Tim said, “I believe I’ll go upstairs.”

  Blue looked at him. “You sick?”

  “No. I guess I’m tired out.”

  He climbed the stairs to the beds they had rented. He put his kit under a bed and sat on the edge of the thin mattress and looked around in the darkness at the other cots. The low ceiling sloped lower to join the wall behind him. He’d have to watch his head, getting out of bed. The attic smelled of sweat and foul breath and urine. He lay down on the bed without taking his boots off. In a little while he began to smell the stale sex on himself. He stood again and left his damn kit bag where it was and went down the narrow stairs. When he didn’t see Blue there, he went through the crowd and outside onto the porch. He stood with the noise and the lighted windows at his back and sucked the damp air.

  “You the guy with that Indian?”

  It was the thin kid who had stood talking to Blue. His face was pink.

  “Yes.”

  The kid gestured with his head. “Seen him getting beat up in the alley behind here. You know where I mean?” He looked away, embarrassed.

  Tim went down the wet planks and around the corner into the mud. There was an alley alongside the saddlery and he turned up it, going past the trash bins and an outside stair. At the back, where the outhouses stank in a row between the buildings, there were three men hitting each other.

  “Hey,” he said, and all of them turned toward him. Blue, once he had had seen it was Tim, looked back at the other two, who stood huffing and watching Tim, letting their hands hang down. One of them spat once—maybe it was blood. Blue looked hunched. Tim heard him wheezing a little.

  “It’s an Indian,” one of them said to Tim. He shifted his weight, smiling enough so Tim could see the white edge of his teeth in the darkness.

  “Not much of one,” Tim said. Blue laughed, or anyway made a sound that was like a laugh, short and low. He didn’t have that much Indian in him, a Salish grandmother married in a church to a Catholic Englishman. He looked more Indian than he was. He looked like his grandmother, maybe.

  The two men watched Tim. “I know him,” Tim said. “He’s just a poor old cowboy.” He lifted his hands, making a gesture like he was sorry.

  The one who had smiled, smiled again. He looked sidelong at Blue. “He looks Indian,” he said.

  Tim lifted his hands again. “Yeah, he does.” Then he said, “He was raised up by wolves, though. I guess there’s no way of telling what breed he is for sure.”

  Blue laughed again. Tim began to smile himself. It had been a while since he had made that joke.

  The other two looked from Tim to Blue. After a while Blue made a gentle movement, maybe he was walking off, but the smiling man put out a hand, catching him by the elbow. Blue made a slight hissing sound and threw off the hand and the man grunted, surprised, and swung his hand up in a fist that hit Blue on the ear. Tim jumped for the other one, the big one who had spit. He grabbed hold of him by the lapels of his coat and hit the big reddish face. That was the only good blow he got. Something struck him on the forearm, it felt like a piece of metal, and his fingers, his whole arm, went numb, prickling, and then blossoming with pain. He hit with his other hand, his good hand, clumsily, and then he got hold of the coat again and wrestled until they tripped and fell rolling in the stinking mud under the stair risers. The man’s breath whistled shrill next to his ear. Mud was in his teeth, he wanted to spit it out but he couldn’t get the air to do it, the man had got around on top of him, pushing his big chest down over his face. The smell of the man’s sour sweat and breath gagged him. The man hit him three or four times in the side, short soft blows, no leverage, then brought his knee up suddenly between Tim’s legs. Tim’s stomach came up.

  “Ah, Jesus,” the man said, rolling off him.

  Tim rolled over too, spitting to clear his mouth of mud and the bitter vomit.

  “Ah, Jesus,” the man said again, and stood up, scrubbing his chin and his shirt front with his hands.

  Tim lay where he was, drawn up protectively around his genitals. His ears rang. He breathed carefully through his mouth. After a long time he heard a Pianola playing through the wall of the building next to him, and after that Blue said, “Shit,” on a high laughing gasp. Tim made a small sound too, meaning it to be a laugh, but it came out soft, a sigh.

  33

  In October the weather for the most part stayed clear and windy. It was very cold at night, and whenever the wind fell away, the grass in the mornings was frozen hard, painted white with rime. She had no instinct yet for the weather in this country, and when it clouded over she looked for snow. But under the low overcast the air warmed and only a little rain fell, making no sound at all, puddling in the dead brown prints her boots had tracked on the frozen grass.

  In the thin drizzly daylight she squatted under the sloping roof of the shed, out of the rain, and let the goats down. She didn’t see Mr. Odell until his horse blew air and signaled her. He had by then come most of the way up the long clearing toward the house. He sat on his horse in an odd way, arms held down stiffly, and in a moment she made out the big bundle he was holding up on his lap. It was a moment more before she saw a dog’s legs dangling below a blanket edge.
>
  She went over to him without a word. He gave her an apologetic look, no part of his wide smile. “He’s dying, I guess, but I brought him over here in case there was something you knew to do for him.”

  She reached up for the dog, and Mr. Odell gave the weight over gently to her. The dog’s body inside the blanket was slack, cumbersome. She held him up against her chest and carried him into the house, put him down on the floor on the braided rug. Mr. Odell had followed her in. He stood next to the door, looking at the dog.

  “I imagine he got hold of a strychnine bait,” he said in a low way. When she looked back toward him he said, “Tim’s out looking for Hangdog. We figure they both got hold of it. Hangdog always would eat anything and Tag was more particular. If Tag only took a lick off it, he’d have had time to walk home before it started to kill him.” He said it flatly, without tenderness, but he kept his voice low as if he meant not to wake the poor dog.

  She had not seen how strychnine killed an animal, only the bodies of the long-dead ravens and the fox kit on the trail beside Buck’s Creek. She looked at the yellow dog. He breathed shallowly with his mouth unshut, his swollen tongue pushing against his teeth. There was bloody slobber and vomit crusted on his muzzle, bloody feces soiling his haunches and his tail.

  “I don’t know what to do for him, Mr. Odell. I don’t have any experience with strychnine.”

  He nodded. “Well I didn’t expect you would. But I thought I’d ask about it.” He made a small motion toward the dog, an incomplete gesture, and then kept standing there.

  “We can see if he will take a little warm water,” she said, because he seemed to expect her to take some action. “Or at least bathe his gums with a blackberry tea. Maybe he is over the worst now and if he is kept warm and left to rest, he’ll take a favorable turn.”

  The man did a short sidestep, rustling inside his damp coat. “I guess that’s not too likely,” he said, without looking toward her.

  She did not answer.

  He kept looking at the dog with no particular feeling in his face. “Well then if you don’t mind, I’ll let him stay where he is until there’s a change.”

  “Yes.” She stood and put water to heat and broke a few dry blackberry leaves in a bowl.

  “I’d better turn out that horse,” Mr. Odell said, and went out side. He was gone quite a while. She rubbed the dog’s gums and poured a little of the tea behind his teeth, sitting down on the rug with his bony head in her lap. After a while Mr. Odell came in again. He had her two pails in his hands.

  “I figured it couldn’t be too far off from how a cow gets done,” he said. “So I went ahead and finished those goats.” He let out his wide mouth somewhat without fully smiling. It made her think suddenly of his face, the constrained look he had kept all the while she had sewed up his bloody back.

  “Thank you, Mr. Odell.”

  He put down the pails and rubbed his palms along his pants. “I’ll sit down with the dog if you’ll show me what to do.”

  He sat as she had been, holding the dog’s head, and from time to time dribbling a little tea down the back of the swollen throat. She gave him a wrung out wet rag and he daubed at the crusty nostrils and under the filthy tail. In the tiny room Lydia stepped over the man’s legs repeatedly and over the body of the dog. She did it in an offhand way, not apologizing, so that after a couple of times he quit apologizing himself, maybe understanding he was an obstacle of no great matter to her.

  When the milk was put up, she made a corn mush breakfast enough for both of them without asking if he had eaten, and he accepted it without a false show. The smell of the dog in the close room was rank, sour, but neither of them referred to it. They ate in silence, listening to the dog’s terrible wheeze, and the rain dribbling off the eaves of the roof. Afterward she sat on the camelback trunk, using the time as well as she could to finish the edge of a piece of flour sacking. The man watched her openly, as if he would learn the stitches from following them.

  “What is it you’re sewing?” he asked her after a while.

  “It will serve as a curtain for that little window, if I can get it hemmed straight. My embroidery is not very accomplished.”

  “It looks like a good neat stitch to me.”

  She had learned her sewing late and poorly, it was a slight embarrassment to hear him uphold it. She pushed the needle through silently.

  “I’ve sewed up a lot of stirrup leather,” he said, “but with a fine needle about all I’ve done is tie down buttons and darn up little holes.”

  “Well if you can darn, you can embroider,” she said frankly. “Though it may not be any better than mine.”

  He tipped his head sidewise skeptically. But he said, “That could be. Maybe I just never had anybody show me.”

  She didn’t know if he expected her to make the offer, or hoped she would not.

  They were both silent for a while, and then he said, with a slight sound of apology, “I guess this is keeping you from work.” It was plain what he meant.

  She shook her head once impatiently, without speaking. In spite of the rain, she had planned to make a start today at burning out the stumps, wanting to clear a little of the space given over to garden, now that the potatoes had been dug up and the yellowed vines dug in. But a dying dog shouldn’t need his apology.

  He watched her. Eventually he said, “You have got a lot done to this place. It was in a bad way when Claud had it.”

  “Yes.”

  Perhaps he took that to be ungracious. He didn’t say anything more, and her single curt word hung on in the silence.

  She said, finally, “I have just got the shed done. I believe I’ve never worked as hard as I did cutting and notching the logs for that little leanto. I planned to have a fence done by now but the shed has taken so long doing.”

  He nodded, as if he agreed that, yes, it was hard work cutting logs. Then slowly he said, “You did well by it as far as I could see.”

  She did not answer that, but she looked over at him and then away. She said, after a silence, “I haven’t caulked the walls. I don’t know that I will. They’ll cut the wind enough as they are, and the roof is tight. A goat will stand the cold better than a cow anyway.”

  “I guess they will. I’ve heard that.” He let out his slow, wide smile. “Though it may have been you that I heard it from.”

  She smiled slightly also. “It’s true, I defend goats rather more often than I’m asked to.”

  He gave her a look that was like Mr. Whiteaker’s—timid seeming and sideward. “I wonder you didn’t buy a place there in Pennsylvania where you were, and commence raising goats in earnest.”

  She examined the needlework, frowning, while she thought whether or not to answer, and how. Finally, firmly, she said, “I had it in mind to come West and take up ranching.” She meant to keep out any sound of childishness, of foolish romanticism, though some of that had inspirited her once.

  She could not tell what was in Mr. Odell’s look. He kept silent, watching her, as if he thought she would say more. She did, finally, smiling at him deliberately. “The truth is, Mr. Odell, when my husband died I sold every last thing of his just to get the money to come West. I suppose I was seeking the boundless possibilities that are said to live on the frontier.” She kept her stiff smile. “I imagine you have never been that foolish.”

  He looked at her in surprise. He may have misunderstood her. He said, “Tim and me had a friend for a couple of years, Andy Mayes. He got killed, drowned, in a river crossing when we were all working for the Double M up in the Spokane country. Andy had some money saved up in a poke inside his boot, and the boss said we ought to take that, and his gear and his horses too, because he didn’t have a family that anybody knew about and we were his friends. So we sold all his stuff and took the poke. We had money of our own we’d saved up, and we put Andy’s with it and bought our first cows. The boss let us run our cows with his for a couple of years, and for a few years after that we wrestled with the sheepmen fo
r the free grass over on the plateau. Then we bought up here. But it was Andy’s money that got us started.”

  She saw what he meant by it, that he was offering it to her in a comforting way, perhaps as an ease for guilt. She looked down at her needlework and let the smile go, without an answer.

  The dog’s wheezing had quieted somewhat but he could not swallow past his swollen throat. When Mr. Odell trickled a little tea down the back of the dog’s throat, he retched weakly and the thin green water ran back out the edges of his mouth. Lydia carried on deliberately with the sewing, only watching the dog and the man from an edge of her eye.

  The man’s face kept its steady look. But in a moment, without looking at Lydia, he said, “I wonder if I shouldn’t put him out of the way. I hate to see him suffer this way, and if you say there is nothing you can do for him . . .” He let the words trail off.

  “I believe he is bound to die soon,” she said. The man’s steadiness kept her from too much pity. She felt sober, reasonable, talking with him about the dog’s end.

  He nodded. “Well,” he said. He sat with the dog’s head in his lap, one hand resting lightly on the dog’s shoulders. Almost as he said the word, the yellow jaws moved, the dog made a long, rattling sound letting out his breath.