There was only about three hours of sun left by the time we had done with the unloading, so there wasn’t a liver left to play with. Heflin was out with his wagon and teams, tightening the leather, while Billy and me stood in the doorway of the shack. There was the two of us, and that meant there wasn’t a person in that room who was easy with show-off farewells. I rubbed him on top of his head, and he told me to take it easy on Rooney’s bottled rot, and we laughed at nothing in particular, so I rubbed on top of his head one more time and moved off to the wagon, after Heflin popped a whistle to get me moving.
I tied Geezer off at the back of the wagon and climbed up next to Heflin on the seat. The team leaned into the traces like they was eager, grateful not to have to heft on down what they just got through hauling on up. We bounced along for a minute or two before I switched cheeks and edged around to look back.
Billy was standing in the door of the shack, the light from the fire behind him, looking like he was cut out from the mountain air itself. Had one hand on the door frame, the other holding on to the crutch. He was all crookedy with his leg the way it was. If he was a doll, you’d tell your little girl there wasn’t any way to put it right. Broken means broken for good. Bounced along in the wagon for a few ticks, still looking back, with Billy never moving out of the door, looking after like he was being his own carpenter, putting together a memory from scratch and for good.
He looked real small by the time we rounded the first downhill and couldn’t see him anymore.
Mind: He wasn’t really small; he just looked it.
IV
Nobody ever fell in love in the dead of spring. White weddings don’t happen in the dead of summer. No perfect pink baby ever got born in the dead of the fall. No, it’s the “dead” word and winter that dance together long time after the fiddler’s gone home. I figure that’s because the winter’s a cold time and we know dead is the time when we’re all going to be cold for the rest of forever.
And Salt Springs was in the dead of winter. It was a time we all turned into moths, scurrying from one warm light place to another, pulling ourselves in tight during the between times, goin’ from Rooney’s potbelly to Cookie’s stove, rubbing our bottoms, wringing our hands quick against each other. The wind was a cold sound, a ghost call, and there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t looking for the thaw to come.
Some didn’t last long enough to see it, and went and got dead during the winter. I hated to hear of anyone dying in town, because Mr. Starett called himself a civil-minded man and it turned out to be our job, as his hands, to dig the graves, and Wyoming loam in the winter is what people call granite in other places. If any of us had had a heart burst while we was digging, the others would have just rolled the body in on top of the coffin goin’ into the dark part. Waste not, want not, and no having to dig a second hole.
Sweetheart Mary Harper was the first dying we had, and you don’t know her because nobody did, because she was only two days old when she turned as cold as the sheet ice on her family cabin roof. Her momma was Hannah and she was eighteen, though the look in her eyes when she was at the graveside was a whole lot older. One point, she looked away from the grave, up to the way-off mountains, capped white and hard, and I knew she had to be wondering why. Why me at this place, why me standing next to a baby didn’t ever get the chance to see the sunshine or run through a meadow? Why me at this age in this godforsaken, goddamned place? Why Sweetheart Mary?
There wasn’t any answer, of course, least not one Hannah could have heard. She couldn’t know the place wasn’t all that godforsaken, just a place where you had to be as tall as the cold mountains killing you, as deep as the black canyons and jaws squeezing the life out of your heart. If you could get that tall and go that deep, you might just find you were the climber for that hill. At least, it was a small grave me and young Thorpe had to dig.
Willard Ganeel’s grampa was the next one to go, and it was a mercy that he was free of the growth. Night, Grampa. Rest now.
The next hole we had to dig was the hardest. It was the Coughing Girl at Honey’s. Somebody snuck into the room, or so Honey said, and put a quick pillow over her face before he used the pillow to muffle the shot that sent a bullet through her brain. Whoever done it went out the window then, left it open, and when Nicholas went in to wake her the next morning, the blowing-in snow had covered her all up like a comforter. The blood soaked through the snow, like a red cherry into a milk puddle. Honey and all her girls were at the puttin’-in, standing there in their best, shivering, leaning in against each other birdlike. I didn’t see a one of them cry. Their faces were stiff and set hard. Looked down into the hole but never at each other. I guess there was a lot of snow when the Coughing Girl got killed, on account of no one ever found footprints in the snow under the windowsill.
The final grave we dug was the one we least of all expected to, and that was the hole that got put aside for the wife of Fergus Blackthorne. They had gone to bed and when Fergus got himself awake the next morning, she was white and cold as the frost on the window. He went running out into the street in his nightshirt, wailing and crying loud for help, but Salt Springs didn’t have any resurrectors living there, and Mrs. Fergus Blackthorne was going to be looking up at the underside in her very best dress. Everybody who came to see her before the planting said she looked just like she did in life, and I thought that was an uncommon cold thing to point out. Mr. and Mrs. Starett both come to the puttin’-in, but that’s because Blackthorne and Starett pretty much run what running Salt Springs needs, and that’s like being eyes at an ear party; you just naturally hang together and figure you know more.
What happened next wasn’t about anyone dying, but I think it went more than a couple rods toward helping Salt Springs die. Most didn’t hold with me. Most thought it was a fine thing when they discovered we was sitting on a pond-ful of oil under our very feet.
No one said it was oil at first. It was just this sliming slippery shine on top of the water on One Legged Indian Crick. It was one of Blackthorne’s teamsters who had Texas time, and said he thought he’d seen it before and if he was seeing it again, then he said it was oil, dirty gold. Blackthorne and Starett had people come in from out of state to put a name to the slimy shining scum, and when they was done, oil was the name that fit. Which opened the shithouse door and sent word to all the out-of-state flies, so in they come. The engineers and the railroad transit peepers, not to mention the tent city workers and the card-playing maggot poppers.
Rooney’s started staying open twenty hours a day, and would have stayed open longer, but he needed the off time to restock and mop up the puke and tobacco juice. He covered up the mirror behind the bar and took down the naked lady pictures. No truth to the rumor the naked lady was Rooney’s sister.
Honey’s business picked up similar and the few times I saw Pearline, she had deep black rings under her eyes and didn’t smile at all, though she hadn’t smiled hardly a bit since the Coughing Girl got killed, now that I think of it. Her lips’d turn up like a skinny smiling moon, but it wasn’t a smile that ever got to her brown eyes. She looked older and she looked more scared, which hardly ever goes together right.
There started to be talk that Salt Springs was going to have to have a city setup, a mayor or a council or both or something in between. There was talk about all the planning and backfill that needed doing, and I stayed out of all those talks. They pointed to puff-belly importance and complications, and I know enough about the West to know it’s not a place that gives easy seed to complications. It only seems to make things fester and grow crooked, if they manage to grow at all. Strikes me that if the answer you got is complicated, then what you really got is just a whole new set of questions. There might be places where it’s right, places where people get easy in that chair, but one of those places is damn well not Salt Springs. Not now. Not ever if they was to make Wilbur Moss king. That hasn’t happened yet.
Not that there was any stopping what was going on; there wasn’t. Peo
ple were making plans and repainting signs, figuring on new people due to arrive who wouldn’t know about Rooney’s and Honey’s and the livery and General Store and such. Struck me that if that was so, then we were expecting a whole parade of pretty dumb-betted people, but that happens when complications check in.
Important as the oil lure was, even it couldn’t seem to stop the thaw from taking the stage, and Mr. Starett started to look up to the mountains, telling me it was close to time to get the high-side wagon and head on up to fetch Billy. We had to wait till the mud turned regular and would take the wheels, but I started to feel an itch to see him, find out how he got through all those long dark times and whether or not he thought out any plans for how he was going to keep his skinny butt full enough to keep his drawers from sliding to boot tops.
I couldn’t know the answers to all them questions and that Billy Piper had changed even more than Salt Springs itself.
I give out with a whistle call when the high-side got over the final rise and I got my first look at the line shack since we left Billy standing in the door six months back. The cabin looked pretty much like I remembered it. Weathered a little bit while winter was there, but the same thing was true of Wilbur Moss, come down to that. Then I saw Billy come out from behind the shack, and what I saw let me know we were done with one song and I didn’t know the words of the one to come. That was on account of the fact that Billy was walking towards me and waving his hands and smiling that sloppy puppy smile of his, and doing all of that without any crutch being anywhere in sight.
He wasn’t walking like you or me; he had to kinda throw one hip out to the side and yank the bad leg along after him, but if it wasn’t walking like you or me, it was still walking and the damned crutch was stacked somewhere in some corner and God bless it, likely to stay there.
The sloppy grin was the same as it used to be before Black Iodine frog-flipped, and all I could think of at first was how happy Pearline would be to see that smile on her right-hand pillow. I drew rein and Billy looked up at me from over the rump of the back horse.
“Hey Wilbur,” he said.
“Billy.”
“I don’t want you to get killed, Wilbur.”
“It’d be good if we both knew what you were talkin’ about, Billy.”
He tilted his head back, peered up at the sky, lifted a hand to shade his view. “Lots of gear to load in the wagon and the sun’s slipping all the time and looks to me we might lose the sun halfway back down the road. That’s hard driving, Wilbur, even for you. Don’t want to see you get killed. Might be better to load on out and then spend the night. Leave in the morning.”
He nodded. “That’d give us a chance to lighten the load going back to Salt Springs.”
“How we goin’ to lighten the load?”
Billy Piper’s smile went from sloppy puppy to wolf cub. “We could get rid of the bourbon Mr. Starett sent up here with me. I’m about half a jug to the good on that, and I don’t know if you know it or not, Wilbur, but unused bourbon is heavier than devil dung.”
Him and me looked at each other for a time; then, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. Sonofabitchin’ kid coulda sold fire to a dry forest. “Suppose you tell me where you’d like me to tie down this team a horses?”
So he did.
We were done with eating and the fire shadows were bouncing all over the ceiling. The jug was still making gurgling noises when we rocked it, so we took the time to sip and spit there in the night. Most of the talk was nonsense and lyin’, but when the cold set in and the wind began its terrible dirge, it all got quieter between us, with the silences filling up the time more than before. Like I remembered the look of Billy standing in the door when we drove off, he remembered the same time from his end of the time.
“Don’t know how long I stood there after you and Heflin went down over the other side of the rise, but it was a considerable chunk. You know how the mountain is, and I could hear you going down the trail for a long while. The wheels, the horses snorting and snorfling. Even the reins creaking sometimes, so help me God. Even the reins. And then there was nothin’. Just the empty road, the wind, the creaking from the limbs and hawks crying out way high. I felt like I was dead but breathing.
“Went on into the cabin and started to uncrate what got brought up. Lots of tinned beef and some dodgers and biscuits that looked like rocks or rocks that looked like biscuits; I never could tell which. The one crate I already told you about, the one with the bourbon jugs.”
“The last soldier of which we’re killing now.”
“That we are, anything to make it easier on the team going down.”
“Poor horses.”
“Makes their load lighter. We’re both doing our part, Wilbur. A man’s got a hard road to go, looking after the horses like we do.” Billy reached over and got the jug, adding another layer of gold on the gold on his cup. “You want to help more, Wilbur?”
I took the jug. “Love those horses.”
“Poor things.”
We clinked. “To the horses.” It warmed all the way down. “Least, Starett took care of you being stocked with what you needed.”
“He did good. Mrs. Starett did better.” He saw my look and stood up slow, wobbled a bit, then went to one of the crates shoved up against the far wall. His dragging leg made a draggy noise on the dirt. He put his glass on a shelf and lifted the top off the crate. His hand waved me on over.
I heaved me up and went over to stand next to him, looking down into the crate. What I saw went far to telling me why Heflin bitched and moaned about his back being ruptured out all the way on the ride back down to Salt Springs. The crate was stacked from one side to the other with books, red-spined, blue-spined, purple-spined, thick and thin and thumb-thick, most with yellow glitter printing, titles and writers and such, or so I figured. I laughed, coughing up a teaspoon of bourbon bile to the back of my throat. “What the hell was she thinkin’? What the hell she have in mind?”
“Don’t know clean what she had in mind, but she saved my life, Wilbur. That woman saved my life.”
He ran his hand over the backs of the books, the way you might pet a dog you loved that was sleeping by the fire; soft as stroking a soap bubble, don’t want to wake the critter. He started to talk about his first days in the high mountain cabin, about the gray and the bone-deep cold, about how quick the dark came once the sun was behind the North Peak on Jupiter View. First coupla nights, he just bathed his brain in bourbon, he said, but he knew that was heading for a cliff, so he sliced back on that. And pretty soon, he started looking through that big crate that had tormented Heflin’s back so bad.
“Didn’t know you liked to read so much, Billy.”
“I didn’t. I could read store signs and wiggle my way through the chalkboard at Rooney’s, but that was pretty much what it was. But up here it was just me and nothin’, and the books were the only other somethin’ there was.”
So he read. Found one of the books was a schoolbook reader and he used that one a lot, so much that he started reading the real books, the ones with people and stories and big killings and such. He yanked one up and looked at it like it was an old friend. Billy opened it to the first page with all printing on it. He read out loud. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
“Billy, that don’t make no damned sense.”
“Sure it does, Wilbur. Right down to the boot heel, it does.”
I reached out for the jug. This road was turning in ways I didn’t feel good about. “Tell me how that makes any sense.”
He stared at the air for a second, then looked back at me. “Suppose you’re pump-humping some sweet soft lady, and just as it happened that you were going to start to geyser in her, your heart exploded and you died. Wouldn’t that be the-best-a-times-worst-a-times?”
“I don’t know about that, Billy, but I know you just put a thought in my skull that’s gonna make my next time at Honey’s more interestin’ than I’d like it to be.” I looked a
t the crate. “You read all these damned things?”
“Most, but I couldn’t get around the knitting books and the ones about baking pies. Miz Starett must love baking her pies.”
“Or Mr. Starett likes pies and he keeps giving her books to nudge her into the light.”
Billy smiled and nodded, then said something that made me think I might have been struck by the apoplexy. “Sprechen zie Deutsch, Wilbur?”
“What?”
He said it again. Then he went on. “That’s German for ‘Do you speak German?’”
“You get that out of a book?”
“Did.”
“You speak German now, for God’s sake?”
That sloppy puppy smile of his, then: “Just a little bit. There was a book in the crate. Phrases for the Traveler in Europe. Germany’s in Europe.”
“You goin’ to Germany?”
“Probably not.”
“Then how come you’re learnin’ German?”
“Learning is its own ‘how come,’ Wilbur. That’s one thing came clear up here for me. You don’t necessarily learn a thing because you can lever that learning to accomplish a thing. When you learn a thing, the learning is the accomplishment all by itself. Unless it’s about knitting or baking pies.”
I took a pull on the bourbon. I wasn’t liking any of this. The Billy Piper I was talking to wasn’t the Billy Piper I left behind the whole long time ago. I was losing my pardner, in a way. Didn’t sit well with me. “Why would you ask somebody if they spoke German in German? If they didn’t, they wouldn’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Well, if they wouldn’t know, then that’s how you would know.”
“Dammit, Billy, you’re doing riddle talk again.”
He laughed at that, drained his cup, went on talking, looking at all the books in the crate and making gestures in their direction, like you’d do if you wanted to make sure nobody felt left out of the conversation. The book was his friend and he was trying to introduce his new friend to me, was what it seemed like. Doncha see, Wilbur, I kept hearing him say, and he’d tell me about one of the books and the people who wrote them. Defoe and Whitman and Longfellow, who I’d at least heard of. Doncha see, Wilbur? Doncha see? Well, I didn’t, not the way he wanted me to. What I saw was that he had himself a new friend and I thought that was my job. I told myself I’d keep working at it, that I wouldn’t jump too quick, that maybe Billy was telling me a thing that was true and that I ought to know about, but remember what I said about the West not being a place that was easy with complications. That was still so, to my way of thinking, and the books that had Billy thinking like a still-wet Baptist come up from the crick looked to me like they was going to complicate things.
A Cold Place In Hell Page 4