But, Fred—this is hateful of me, I know—the thing I told you about, the thing I used to wish for and live to remember, no matter what … it’s gone. That’s probably good, because of what happened between times.
But sometimes I’d trade my perfect husband for that louse and a wet handkerchief, if I could have the other thing along with it somehow.
There, I’ve said it.
Osa
The doctor galloped through the clinic until he found his head technician in the electrical lab.
“Tommie,” he said jovially, “did you ever go out and get drunk with a doctor?”
The tears were streaming down his face. Miss Thomas went out and got drunk with the doctor.
The Waiting Thing Inside
DELIA FOX STOOD IN THE CENTER of the saddle shed, her face pale, her thin lips sucked in and bitten on, invisible. The Circle F’s steady rider, Vic Ryan, squatted on his tall heels with his back to the wall and laughed at her. “All right, all right—I’ll raid, I’ll gun out your nester.” He laughed again. “But under orders.” He aimed the stem of his pipe at her. “The boss’s orders.”
“You know he’ll never!”
“If I raid, he will,” said Ryan easily. “And he’ll give me those orders right up to and includin’ the minute I kick in that nester’s shack door.”
“You mean you want him to go with you?”
“That’s about it.”
“That’s the same thing as saying you won’t go.”
Ryan shrugged and began to pack his pipe. “I reckon hell could freeze over.”
She stamped to the door. “Catch a lot of folks with some heavy hauling to do, the day it does,” she snapped, and went out.
Ryan took the pipe from his mouth and laughed again. He was not a jovial man and his laughter was ugly; but it suited his mood.
Through the open door he could see across the yard—see Delia Fox, stiff-backed, furious, as she stamped into the house. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face five years older and a body twenty years younger, and time was when Vic Ryan used to look at that figure with something besides the familiarity of contempt. He peered back over the years at himself, and her, and he wondered vaguely who those people were—the rawboned young cowboy who’d asked her to marry him, and the girl with ice in her eyes who had told him to own more than an old saddle and an iron skillet before he suggested such a thing to his betters. A long time ago … and never heard a word he had spoken to her since that wasn’t strictly business. Yet he’d stayed, year in and year out, holding the Circle F together against all comers—against the weather, against lazy cowhands they had to put up with at the rates the Circle F paid, against drought, landslide, botflies, and even Delia’s brother Roy.
At the thought of Roy he spat. Roy was younger than Delia, and that and his flabbiness were what had led Vic so far astray in the early days: Who could have guessed that it was Roy’s ranch—lock, stock, and chopping block? It had been Delia who handled the money, made the decisions, hired and fired. “Better see to the south waterhole today, Vic,” Delia would say, and Roy would chime in, “Yeah, Vic, go clean out the waterhole.” Always her order, her brother’s echo. So marry into it; you can’t do nothing to the boss’s relatives, but a no-good brother-in-law rates a boot in the tail right after the honeymoon. So Vic Ryan had tried it, and she had spat in his eye—Delia Fox, queen of the range, the bitch.
And a year afterward he’d fallen over Roy Fox on the town trail, belly-down and puking drunk, but bragging for all that. Vic had brought him home and slung him into bed, but not before Roy had dragged him into the parlor and showed him the will by which Roy Fox’s father, the old fool, had made Roy sole heir to the Circle F.
Something had happened to Vic Ryan that night, something so deep that he couldn’t name it if he wanted to. It had to do with a woman who’d refused him because he had so little, when all the time she had nothing; it had to do with a pig-eyed jelly-belly who’d order a better man to do jobs he wouldn’t do himself, any time his sister wanted something done. Whatever it was, it made Vic Ryan stay, not planning—because the thing was planned; not building—because it was built … just waiting.
A long wait.
And a longer one yet, he chuckled, before she gets Roy Fox to ride out with me to raid that nester. The nester had squatted in the narrow eastern end of the valley. There was bottomland there, dark and fertile, and good water. Circle F stock had winter-grazed there for years, although legally it wasn’t Circle F land. The nester, a heavyset, towheaded stranger with a spavined wife and a rickety kid, hadn’t sent any announcements around or even come calling; one fine day, there he was, with a dirty sod house and a plow and a team of oxen. Delia Fox wanted the nester out of “our” valley, boundary or no, and even if he was a full day’s ride away. Vic Ryan wanted him out too, for somewhat less emotional reasons: he knew a successful squatter would bring another, and then fifty more, and goodbye free range. He took the trouble to ride into town and find out quietly if the nester had filed any sort of claim, and came back with the news that the nester had not—too busy, too lazy, or too ignorant; it didn’t matter.
But Roy—Roy had shrugged when he heard about the nester, changed the subject when he heard about the claim (or lack of it), and when Delia started getting waspish about it, he started drinking. Vic Ryan understood. He knew it was only a matter of time before Delia would lay her ears back and make Roy do something about the nester, and the idea of facing up to a stranger was more than Roy could handle. One day he came into the bunkhouse, mottle-faced, red-eyed, and sat down on Vic’s bunk. He started to call Vic a chummy “old boy” and Vic told him to get the hell off his clean blanket-roll and say what he had come to say. Roy said, “Sure, sure, boss,” soothingly, and got up and stood weaving in the doorway, and suggested that Vic ride over to the east pass and see if some Circle F stock hadn’t strayed up there, and on the way maybe warn off that nester, huh?
Vic told him to go do his own dirty work, whereupon Roy got up on his drunken dignity and said, “Damn it, Ryan, I can run things around here without you, you know.”
Vic laughed in his face and told him yeah, but his sister couldn’t.
But Roy had gone, all the same, and so had Vic Ryan. For at daybreak that next morning an infuriated Delia Fox had saddled up and galloped east, and a shaken and deflated Roy had crept into the bunkhouse to beg Vic Ryan to follow and stop her. For a long moment Vic stared at the quivering rancher and thought it over, and what tipped the scales he never knew, but he snatched up the fire-bucket, doused Roy Fox, and snarled at him to come on. They saddled up and got their guns and rode, and it wasn’t until afternoon that they caught up with Delia. She had nothing to say to them at all, but kept on riding east, and they followed.
When they crested the rise and saw, down by the cliffs, the sod shack, Roy suddenly spurred up beside his sister and said, “You really got nothing to say to that man, Dele. We’re off our land.” He was chalky and shaking. Delia said coldly, “You’re the one to say it. If you can’t find the words in your head, get ’em out of this”—and she handed him a bottle of whiskey from her saddlebag.
Vic Ryan, watching, felt all his scorn and disgust of Roy Fox melt and slump into a puddle of pity: for the sight of the bottle was a bigger thing to the man than any insult, and Roy took it, drank a third of it without stopping, then looked at his sister with his eyes steaming and told her she was a peach.
They rode down the slope. What looked like a scarecrow in the scratchy garden-patch froze and cowered and ran bleating into the shack. That was the wife. What looked like a small white ape scuttled in after her—that was the kid. They rode on, passing the brush margins, and there were the oxen, the plow, and the nester.
Roy took another drink. Vic Ryan got his carbine out of its boot and laid it across his belt-buckle. He’d always liked a carbine. Delia sucked in her lips.
The nester broke and ran, and Roy Fox laughed a rich, deep man’s laugh and spurred h
is horse. The nester turned to look as he ran, his foot caught a clod, and over he went, withers and rump. Roy let out a roar and a Rebel yell and the nester scrambled to his hands and knees and leaped downhill once, twice, three times like a huge hop-toad. Then he was at the shack and inside, and the crazy split-rail and cowhide door banged shut.
The three Circle F riders cantered up and crowded the door. Roy’s eyes were bright and his cheeks pink. “Outta your hole, gopher-boy!” he bellowed, and got maybe three syllables of the rich laugh out when the door swung again on its leather hinges and the nester stood there blinking at them. He was a big man, made even larger by the great mat of yellow hair and beard that surrounded his face, and by the tiny doorway that framed him. His thick left arm hung to the lintel above him, his right arm and shoulder were squeezed out of sight by the doorframe. Deep in Vic Ryan’s mind was an indelible picture, and this man brought it blazing to him again: a bear he had once hamstrung with a bad shot, its useless hind legs crowded against a rock, its foreclaws flexing, its little eyes, dark but also incandescent, hurt and hating, reading Vic’s face from side to side as it wagged its head; and it panted like this man—too fast, too hard, a harsh series of whispered moans.
“You got to get off this land, gopher-boy,” Roy exulted, still full of downhill speed and whiskey.
Delia said, out of the side of her tight mouth, “Three weeks.”
“Yeah, three weeks,” Roy said.
“Or we’ll be back,” spat Delia.
“Yeah, back,” said Roy, “with a keg of gunpowder and a—”
But just then the nester said hoarsely, “No!” and pulled out that right arm and hand; and in it was a single-barreled shotgun which, at that range, looked like a field-piece. “No,” the man gasped, “you go.” He moved the gun. “Go, you go.” His own huge inhalation sucked his lips shut with an audible slap, and they could hear the rest of the breath hiss into his nostrils; he could say no more with words, but only with the mad hurt-animal eyes.
Roy Fox squeaked like a booted mouse and rocked back in the saddle, to wheel; but he jerked the lines so hard his horse squealed and reared high, staggering forward. The nester stood right under the flailing hoofs (and if he won’t back up for that, thought Vic, he won’t for anything on earth) until, for balance, the horse fell away sidewise, barely keeping its feet, and streaked away grunting and bleeding from the mouth, with Roy crouched low in the saddle and roweling away like a cyclist.
Delia’s mount skittered and danced and then followed Roy’s, less frantically. She cried, in the rusty, taut tones of a sparrowhawk, “Three weeks!” and let her horse gallop.
Vic Ryan cantered away from the shack slowly, half-turned in his saddle, his carbine ready, all his attention on the shack and none for his horse, which he knew would follow the others. He sat that way, cramped and concentrated for an uphill mile, and still the nester filled the doorway, the shotgun in his hands, and they filled the air with hate and fear, until the hill crest intervened and Roy could turn to find the others.
Roy was just throwing his empty bottle at a hornet’s nest. He missed it. “I guess I told him!”
Delia didn’t say anything. Vic blew, short and sharp, from his nostrils, so hard he hurt his ears, but he didn’t say anything either.
They rode three miles and camped, and in the morning dark, Vic rose and left them. He got back two hours before they did, kicked the hell out of Kewkie, one of the worthless drifting cowhands they had to hire, and got some sleep in the bunkhouse …
And now the three weeks were gone, and three days more, and Delia was trying to get him to go raid the nester and gun him out. She loco? He thought wonderingly. Seen her hot after things before—might’s well try to turn a stampede with a willow switch; but nothing like this nester business, the way she’s got her ears laid back. Vic shook his head slowly, rose and stretched, and went to bed.
It was the darkest predawn when he jolted up to a roaring and chattering. He sat up grunting, peering at the color of the night through the open door, sorting out the time of day from the noises he heard, then sleepily pulling the noises apart. It was Roy Fox, charging around the bunkhouse in the dark and calling him. He heard the flat of a hand strike flesh, and Roy’s roar, “There you are, Ryan! Come up out of there,” and the whimper, “It’s me, Kewkie, Mr. Fox.”
“I’m over her,” growled Vic, and his nose confirmed what his ears had told him: Roy Fox was crazy drunk.
“Well, come on,” Roy yelled. “We got a chore to do.” He started one of his Rebel yells but got to coughing.
“Come on where?”
Roy Fox aimed himself at Vic’s voice. “You told Dele you’d take my orders, right from here to that gopher hole?”
“The nester. My God, Roy—”
“Put up or shut up. You got my orders, you’ll have ’em all the way. Come on now, jump, damn you! I’m go’ git me a yella pelt and nail it up in the honeywell an’ use it to—”
“Your sister ready to ride?”
“What you think I am? This here’s a man’s chore. She can stay here and keep house.”
“Well, hell just froze over,” muttered Vic. He pulled on his Levi’s and hung on the holster. He saw it all—his flat refusal to do this job unless Roy bossed it, Delia’s determination to find some way, somehow, to make it happen. Enough of her rasping nag, enough firewater, enough—well, that would be enough. He sighed and got his hat. “Come on then.”
They saddled up and rode.
Within the first hour Vic Ryan was so heartily sick of the whole project, and everything and everyone connected with it, that it took an effort of will not to cut away and head straight over the mountains to the south, leaving the valley forever. He had help, however, in keeping the course with Roy. It was that thing within him, waiting all these years, waiting for a certain something from Roy, a certain something from Delia. It had divined that he need not wait much longer.
It had better not be much longer.
Roy’s voice went on and on in the dimming dark, exultant, laced with that rich, deep laughter, avid, eager. “… woman’s fine in a kitchen and not too bad with her nose in a ledgerbook, but the fightin’ and the ridin’s not for them. You been the places I been, Vic ol’ hick”—this brought on a paroxysm of alcoholic appreciation from its author, but nothing from the audience—“you learn about ladies. They have feelin’s. Sensibilities. Now that nester froggin’ and’ hoppin’ down the hill, they can see a thing like that and only laugh.” He laughed. “But the job we’re gonna do, a little hollerin’ when we stick ’em, a little red ink splashed around—you know—we wouldn’t want the ladies in on that. For men’s work—men,” he boomed. He got the cork out of a bottle with his teeth. “The ladies, bless ’em!” He gurgled and went ahh shrilly; the sound recalled to Ryan the hoarse panting of the nester (or was it the hamstrung bear?). In revulsion he learned, on the instant, a trick of voluntary deafness, so that the universe contracted to the trail jerkily unrolling under the horses’ hoofs, sealing seethings from that impatient thing inside of him, and Roy Fox’s voice became just a drone conveying nothing.
When next he tuned in the voice, the melody had changed. “You’d never know it to look at me,” Roy was saying sorrowfully, “but I’m a man of culture, having received, back East, an enviable education, among people among whom, my sickly-hickly friend, you’d be lost among …”
“Give me a drink, Roy,” said Vic, and took the proffered bottle and hurled it against a rock. “By gosh, it slipped right out of my hand,” he said.
Roy Fox looked deeply injured. “I shall not chastise you for that, Ryan. I shall simply withhold my gentlemanly instincts and refrain from sharing the next bottle with any such piebald pismire as you.” He broke out another bottle, drank, and dramatically corked it. Ryan disconnected him again, and lapsed into the jogging miasma he had just invented.
The growling of his stomach at length became noisy enough, and a midmorning sun high enough, to call him back to an
earth on which he had saddled up without breakfast. He pulled up and dismounted.
“Whassamatta?” Roy wanted to know.
“Eat something,” said Vic shortly.
“I give the orders around here,” said Roy Fox in an ugly voice.
“Order us to pull up and spread some chuck then,” said Ryan wearily.
“Very well,” said Roy with a grand wave of the hand. “You will halt here an’ prepare shushtenance.” He fell off his horse.
Ryan let him lie there and got a fire going. He broke out some Arbuckle coffee, put it in a can, filled it from the nearby brook, and set it on a flat stone in the fire to boil. He tore up some sourdough bread and put some bacon in the skillet. Then he stepped over Fox’s prone figure and went through the man’s saddlebags. He found one bottle, two-thirds gone. He put it back. He saw to his disgust that the man’s rifle boot was empty; on a hunch he felt down inside it and found a pint flask of whiskey. He hurled it away into the woods. Then he bent over Roy Fox and pulled him to a sitting position.
“Come on, Roy. Soup’s on.” Fox merely mumbled incoherently and hung his head; when Ryan released him he sagged like a half-bag of oats. Ryan cursed and went back to the fire and ate.
For two endless hours Roy lay like that, defying shouts, slaps and the smell of the powerful coffee. At last Ryan squatted on his heels and did nothing but wait. When Fox stirred at last, Ryan arose, grunting from pins-and-needles in his legs, and got the can of coffee. He handed it over without a word, and Roy Fox bent his head over the fumes. Without drinking any, he set the can down delicately and said in an apologetic tone, “Li’l eye-opener, y’know?” and pulled himself up beside his horse. He found the remaining third of a bottle, drank it thirstily, and said in a strong clear voice, “Now for some of that coffee—go just right.” He sank to his knees, sipped twice, then gulped down the coffee. He was quite still for a time, then threw up his head, belched loudly, started at the sound, and looked all around him. “Where am I?”
And Now the News Page 24