The long, melancholy blowing came down behind the wind.
Curt was out of his bunk and standing before the wind had lifted onto the mountain again.
"How 1ong’s that been going on?" he asked, accusing them both with the question.
Arthur, still smiling, shrugged his shoulders a little, but Harold said quickly, "We’ve only been awake a minute."
"And doing what?"
"I thought you’d want to know," Arthur said.
"You thought," Curt said. "The hell you did, ever." He pushed past Arthur, saying, "Why the hell wouldn’t I" and took his clothes off the wall and threw them onto the bunk and began to dress.
"Get your clothes on," he told Arthur. "Do you think it’ll wait for us?"
Arthur stood there with his head turned away, as if he were still listening, but for something farther away than the bawling of the cattle now. He was close to remembering whose voice it was that had called to him out of the chasm below the cliff.
Curt had his shirt and pants on already. He sat down on the edge of his bunk and pulled his boots on, and stood up and began to pound the heels again the floor to get them clear on. He saw Arthur still standing there listening, and asked sharply, "What ails you now? Gettin’ Joe Sam’s second sight?" He picked up the scarred bat-wing chaps, and, when Arthur didn’t reply, stood holding them and staring at him.
Finally he said softly, "I bet it’s that black cat, eh? That awful black painter, big as a horse, and you can see through it? Sure," he murmured. "What the hell’s the use of hunting a cat as big as a horse, especially when it hates men worse than anything, and lives forever, and a slug just goes through it and it keeps a-comin'? That it?"
He pulled on the chaps, wrenching angrily at them when they caught. "Do you see the black cat out there, medicine man?" he asked, his voice louder. He jerked the big nickel buckle of the chaps to lock it. "So you’d like to go back to bed?"
Arthur looked at him then, still smiling, but as if at something else. "I had a dream," he said. "I was just trying to remember . . ."
"You had a dream," Curt said. "He had a dream," he told Harold. "Look, dreamer," he said to Arthur, "I know what really ails you, if you don’t. You know damn well it’s a cat, and no dream cat either, and you’re afraid dear pussy’ll get hurt. By God, if I don’t believe you’d give ’em our best beef, and bottle-feed the cubs too, if you could."
Arthur smiled, and studied him with his eyes in the way Curt couldn’t stand. "I might at that," he said. "Slaughter for the joy of it is a thing comes back on you, in time. It’s a matter of numbers. The cats were here when we came, and still there were more deer than there are now."
Curt made a short laugh, and would have answered, but again the wind turned down and struck the house like a slide of earth, and the three men looked away from one another and listened. The flame of the lamp shook and dwindled in an errant draft, and their three shadows danced in changing shapes on the walls. The wind went off crying under the eaves. The flame rose again, and the three shadows became steady, but this time no sound of the bawling followed.
Curt said suddenly and loudly, "Yeah, and the Indians was here first too, preacher, and they’re goin’. What’s left of 'em in these parts? Joe Sam. One crazy old Piute that thinks he’s a hundred, and chuck full of kid’s lies, that’s what’s left. And good riddance, I say. What the hell good are they? And the same for your cats. You and your dreams," he said contemptuously. "Yes, and the old man and his wonderful Comstock; the good old days. You’re both the same kind now. Can’t see what’s in front of your nose, but, oh, the good, old days. Well, once I’m out of here, you can have your good, old days; you can hand-feed your cats, if you want to, yes, and your Joe Sam's too. You can marry your goddam dreams. Lay ’em every night and see what it gets you, besides weak knees and whining in the morning. And don’t worry, once I get a stake big enough to work on, I’ll get out of here, too, so fast you won’t even see me gin'.
"But until then, by Christ," he said more heavily, making each word count, "we’ll raise cattle, not dreams, and we’ll kill whatever kills cattle. Get that, and don’t forget it. You can breed your dreams later, and welcome. I’ll have better things to do."
"Meaning if one Comstock’s used up, there’ll be another?" Arthur asked softly. "A bigger and better one?"
"You goddam right there will," Curt said, "for the guy that knows it when he sees it, and has the cartwheels to buck it. Is 1900 the end of the world, old whisker-face?"
"It’ll do for the end of one, anyway," Arthur said, and then, smiling, and as if to stop the quarrel, "We1l, a life’s a life, and you can’t buy more than one, no matter how many Comstocks you own. I’ll stick to ranching the dreams then, and thanks."
"You think there won’t be more, eh?"
"One kind or another, one man at a time, or in little gangs, sure, plenty, I guess," Arthur said slowly, as if thinking it out for himself, and seeing it as it would be. "But for everybody? No. That was a kind of dream too, a big, fat one, and it’s over. We’ve gone from ocean to ocean, Curt, burning and butchering and cutting down and plowing under and digging out, and now we’re at the end of it. Virginia City’s where the fat dream winked out. Now we turn back."
"So there’s nothing left now, you think?" Curt asked.
Arthur shook his head. "There’s us," he said. "We can start digging into ourselves now; we can plow each other under. But not so many men will like that for a hope. Even a good dream, backed up, turns nightmare, and this wasn’t a very good one to start with. A belly dream."
"It isn’t all like that, Art," Harold said.
"You’re damned shootin’ it isn’t," Curt said.
"No," Arthur said, looking down, and speaking as if to himself again. "Or it wasn’t, anyway. There were good dreams too, little ones that got swallowed up by the fat one. And even the fat one made some good lives, before it got backed up."
"You’ll eat air from now on, I suppose," Curt said.
"Somebody’s going to have to," Arthur said, "and I’m built for it, I guess." He grinned and pulled out the slack of his underwear from his flat stomach.
Curt made the short laugh. "I’ll leave you the air then. That’s a divvy I’d like fine."
Arthur let the slack of his underwear back slowly, and peered at Curt from under his eyebrows, still grinning. "And the dreams, Curt? Not the fat one. All the little ones?"
"And all the dear little dreams/’ Curt said. "I don’t want anybody sayin’ I’m close-listed with my own brother."
Arthur nodded. "Thanks. They’re going to multiply."
Curt laughed again. "Well, you should know," he said. “I told you he’d breed ’em," he said to Harold. "Every night he’s at it, and most days too. His own herd bull. I don’t see how he stands it. But for now . . ." he began, looking at Arthur again, but the wind returned, thundering, and he broke off, and they listened. The wind gave way to the lull they were waiting for, but there was no blowing of the sad horns.
"I’m gettin’ as bad as you are," Curt said to Arthur, and turned to the pegs by the door and took down his mackinaw, a bright red one with a wide, black stripe around the middle and on the sleeves. He took down his scarf and his big hat with the rattlesnake skin band on it too.
"Get your clothes on, will you?" he said, with his hand on the latch of the kitchen door. "You’ve laid enough dreams tonight to. . ." He stopped there and stood listening. In the kitchen, someone was moving the stove lids.
"Kee-rist," Curt said, but not loudly. "We’ve woke the old lady up. Now there’ll be two of you, and we’ll never get out of here. Get a move on, will you?"
"I’ll go," Harold said. "I’m all set."
Curt had opened the door a crack, but now he closed it again, grinning, and shook his head. He watched Arthur cross slowly to his bunk and take his blue flannel shirt from the wall, and then he looked at Harold.
"I gotta have Art," he said, "in case the cat’s black, and big as a horse. I wouldn’t know
what to do with a cat that was black and big as a horse. And Joe Sam won’t be any good this mornin’. He was already talkin' to himself last night, before the snow’d even started. Besides," he added, looking back at Arthur, and still grinning, "he’d be for the cat."
"You can’t blame him," Arthur said mildly.
"Don’t even know as I can trust Art, for that matter. He’s gettin’ awful fond of that black painter himself."
"I am at that," Arthur said, "I was just dreaming it was loose."
"Gee," Curt said, making the big eyes of a child in awe.
"No wonder you’re in no hurry. "I’ll tell you what, Art," he said confidentially, "I’ll make me a special bullet. I’ll melt up some of your dreams—they’re plenty heavy enough—and make a magic bullet, and you can put the medicine on it, huh? Only," he finished sharply, "do it some time this week, will you?"
He opened the door again, and through the opening they could see the mother standing at the stove in her old gray flannel bathrobe, with her gray hair still hanging loose down her back. The light from the lamp was on her back, but her face was toward the stove and in the dark.
Harold looked at her out there, and said, "I’l1 go, Curt."
He grinned. "It’s a hundred to one anyway it’s not black."
"I don’t know, kid," Curt said seriously, still mocking Arthur. "It’s the first snowstorm, and you remember how upset Joe Sam was last night. No, kid," he said, grinning back at him, "you gotta stay here and tend to the future. You’re the white hope of the Bridges. You don’t think she wants to talk to Arthur, do you?" He laughed, and went into the kitchen, leaving the door open.
Arthur sat down on the edge of his bunk to pull his boots on. "He’s right about that, Hal," he said. "You better break Gwen in to the rest of us kind of gradual, and you better do it yourself."
Min the kitchen Curt was saying, "Something’s at the stock, Ma."
"I heard ’em," the mother said.
"I’m goin’ up there."
The two in the bunk-room could see him taking the lantern down from the shelf behind the stove. Then he went out of sight toward the table with it.
"By yourself?" the mother asked.
Curt’s voice, half laughing, and muffled by the wall, answered, "No, ma’am. I’m takin’ Art with me. We got a notion it might be the black painter."
The mother set the stove lids back on and pulled the big iron skillet over onto them, and without looking around said, scornfully, "Black painter." She moved away toward the sink in the far corner, saying, "It might as well be, though, for all you’ll ever find, goin’ out there now."
Harold said, "He’ll be like that all the way, if you go."
Arthur stood up and stamped his heels down into his boots and crossed to the big pine chest in the corner beyond his bunk.
"I’m used to it," he said. "After about so long, you don’t hear it."
He lifted the lid of the chest and began to search down through the blankets and clothes packed in it.
In the kitchen the mother’s voice was saying, the little Arkansas drag in it, slow and fflat, "You’ll put some food in your stomach before you go," and then, after Curt had answered something they couldn’t understand, "It won’t even be daylight for an hour yet. Shut that door, will you? There’s a draft comin’ in here like out of an ice-house."
Curt’s boots sounded across the kitchen floor and the bunk-room door was closed.
Arthur let down the lid on the chest and straightened up with the cowhide parka in his hands. He held it up and sniffed at it.
"Mother goes a little heavy on the camphor," he said. He took the camphor bag out of one pocket, and poked it back under the lid of the chest. There was more than a camphor bag in the other pocket, though, and when he had emptied it, he stood there looking at what he held on his hand.
"Got some unfinished whittling," he said. "This one’s an Indian skinning something, you can see that. But this one," he said, smiling and holding it up between his thumb and forefinger for Harold to see. Only the first cuts had been made on it, many small, stubborn cuts, like ripples on a wave, but all going with the grain and the shape of the wood.
"Might as well be God, for all I can make of it now," he said. "Mountain mahogany," he added, letting the piece down into his hand again and staring at it a moment longer, trying to remember. "Probably I just got worn out tryin’ to whittle it."
He dropped the two pieces of wood back into the pocket of the parka and poked the camphor that had come out with them into the chest. He remained there, bent over and holding the lid of the chest up, as the wind returned, wrestling the house and chafing the window with snow, and then rose roaring into the steep of pines. There was no other sound behind it, and he let the lid down and straightened up. He looked at Harold and smiled and shook his head.
"There won’t be many tracks left in that," Harold agreed.
"It’s not the little dreamers that hunt black painters," Arthur said softly. He crossed to the table, carrying the parka over his arm, and turned the lamp down.
"Get the door, will you, Hal?"
Harold went to the kitchen door and took hold of the latch, and Arthur curved a hand around the far side of the lamp chimney and leaned over and blew against it. For a moment the huge shadow angel his shoulders made across the beams of the ceiling fluttered wildly, and all the tiny, watchful, metal eyes winked rapidly, and then the room was dark.
"Curt generally gets what he goes after, though," Harold said.
"He generally does," Arthur said, and his boots sounded, coming slowly toward the door. "But he likes a few tracks to go on," he added.
"They help, all right," Harold said, and opened the door and held it, watching Arthur come up the shaft of light it let in.
2
The kitchen was already full of the sound and smell of the bacon on the hot pan. The mother was standing at the stove, cutting chunks of potato into the pan with the bacon, and she didn’t look around when Arthur, and then Harold behind him, came in.
Curt was sitting facing her at the round table in the middle of the room, with the big east window full of darkness behind him. He had his red coat on, and the old black sombrero was on the back of his head. The lighted lantern stood on the door beside his chair. Its flame appeared small and smoky in there, making only a little pool of orange light in the shadow under the table.
The ceiling of the kitchen was very high, to make room for the stairs that went up against the north wall to a small landing with one closed door on it, and there was only one lamp, with a china bowl and a big china shade, hanging from a long, spring-chain over the center of the table. The walls and the ceiling were whitewashed though, and all the doors, the outside one in the corner behind Curt, and the one on the landing, and the two in the north wall, one under the landing and the other at the foot of the stairs, were painted white, so the room seemed full of light after the bunk-room. There were small, hand-painted flowers scattered over the shade of the lamp that made separate, fluttering shadows, like moths, on the walls and ceiling, and the bowl of the lamp made a circle of shadow on the table. Curt peered across through the shadow of the bowl when Arthur came out, and saw him stop for a moment to get used to the change from the bunk-room. He looked at the cowhide parka over Arthur’s arm and grinned.
"My God," he said. "I ask for a medicine man, and what do I get? A priest again. A damned monk. Well that’s next best, I guess, ain’t it? Not too much difference. Especially when the monk’s a prophet too. Did you know your monk was a prophet too, now, Ma?"
"Don’t blaspheme," the mother said, but she spoke flatly, as if only out of habit, and she didn’t look around this time either. "You may as well set down," she told Arthur and Harold. "There’s nothing to hurry for, that I can see, and I’ll be a few minutes yet with your breakfast."
Harold closed the bunk-room door and went around the table and sat down with his back to the stairs. Arthur, moving more slowly, came to the chair on the near side and hung
the parka over the back of it and sat down. He leaned both elbows on the table and rubbed his eyes slowly with his long hands, and then sat there with his eyes still covered by his hands.
"He really is, though," Curt said. "He had a dream that showed him it was the black painter out there. That’s why I gotta take him along."
"I had a dream of my own," the mother said, "and it ain’t left me much in the mood for jokes."
"More dreams," Curt said, chuckling. "And Joe Sam was at his before he went to bed even. The place is crawling with ’em. Did you have bad dreams too, young ’un?" he asked Harold.
Harold smiled a little and shook his head.
"Good ones, eh? By Chrimus, so would I, if I was you. I w0u1dn’t want to ever wake up. If I had a girl like . . ."
"Watch your mouth," the mother said sharply.
"Now, what did I say to make you go jumpin’ on me like that?" He winked at Harold. "It’s not as if Hal, here, hadn’t ever heard of such things. Or Gwen either, as far as that goes," he added judiciously. "Now I have a notion, just to look at her, that. . ."
The mother turned around with the knife and a potato still in her hands and looked at Curt. Her face was like Arthur’s, long and narrow and tired-looking, with deep hollows at the temples and under the cheek-bones, and her eyes set back in deep hollows. The lines across her forehead and beside her mouth were much deeper and less broken than Arthur’s, though, and her tired look wasn’t gentle or quiet. It wasn’t the look that comes from lack of sleep, or from too much work, or from struggling against someone else’s will. It was the look that comes from war inside which is never ended, but never lost, either. When the will that sustained her in this war was turned outward, free of the enemy it had inside, it became like the threat of a weapon. No matter who she was looking at, everyone there would feel that she was looking at him, and that a weapon was pointed at him.
It was like that now. She was looking at Curt, but Harold, seeing her face, laid his big fingers over the edge of the table and looked down at them, and Arthur, almost at once, looked away from her and watched the shadows like moths on the wall.
The Track of the Cat Page 2