Trask, the yard-goods merchant, an ex-sailor and a crack shot, reined in beside the glowering Fellows. Around them jogged the rest of the Tamarisk posse. A crescent moon showed the Well City trail vaguely, and pointed up the twin ruts of a wagon that had passed earlier.
“Hell of a note,” grunted Trask. “Skedaddlin’ around this time o’ night. I tried to turn in after the meetin’ an’ didn’t know whether I should stay up late or git up early. Turned in an’ tried to sleep, still couldn’t make up my mind, an’ now”—he yawned hugely—“I don’t rightly know if I’m awake or not. Way I feel, I wouldn’t know silk f’m sailcloth.”
“You damn well better be awake when we ride into Well City,” said Fellows.
“Now, look, puppy,” said the grizzled Trask. “Maybe you set this here forest fire, but just because we think you was right don’t say you kin snap an’ snarl at yer betters.”
“Ah, it’s that lousy Zapappas,” said Fellows. “All this time claimin’ he’s a friend o’ mine, an’ then pullin’ a thing like this,” and he nodded at the wagon tracks. “What was it you tol’ me about rats leavin’ a founderin’ ship?”
“Don’t blame him too much,” said Trask. “He’s stuck with Tamarisk longer’n any of us an’ he rates a break from it. You know what they say about little fat guys. They’re all good-natured because they can’t fight an’ they can’t run.”
“Thet’s all right s’far as it goes,” said Fellows. “But he didn’t have to tote all thet likker over to Well City to grease his way into their gold mine.”
Trask gave a reluctant, affirmative snort. “That was sorta small.”
They went through the draw and emerged on a shelf overlooking Well City. There were two guttering fires to be seen north and south of the town, which was dark and still under the bright stars and the weak moonlight. The posse milled together and drew up.
“What time is it?”
“Not four yet.”
Whup-whup-whoo-oop!
“Whut’n blazes was that?”
“A drunken poke if ever I heerd one.”
There was a blaze of light in the largest building as the door was flung open, apparently blown by a gust of loose laughter.
“Ev’vy man Jack in th’ town must be in there gettin’ fried,” somebody said.
“Yeah, on Zapappas’s likker, the skonk,” said another.
“Thet’s one feller we’ll squar’ with, whatever.”
“I brung a rope.”
Somebody cracked a bullwhip. “This is better.”
Trask spoke up. “It won’t get Tamarisk a thing to stampede that little coyote. Let’m alone. He don’t know what he’s doin’.”
“Feelin’ real friendly, ain’tcha?” said an anonymous voice from the rear ranks. “Why don’t you go on down and have a drink o’ whisky?”
“Stow that,” barked Trask. “We git to pullin’ an’ haulin’ amongst ourselves, we won’t get no town records out o’ Well City. Now settle down fer about forty minutes. Mickey, get that there phony seizure paper of yours ready to whip out. You sure it’s got enough ‘Whereas’s’ on it to keep ’em puzzled ontil we get clear with th’ records?”
“That it has,” said Mickey Mack. “And a gold seal. With ribbons.”
“Good. Relax, boys. Talk quiet an’ try to keep your hosses offen the rocks.”
The posse dismounted and hobbled their mounts. Fellows lounged over to the Well City side of the draw and stood looking out at the half dozen shacks that were the county seat. A few feet down the slope from him were the shadowy masses of a large boulder and a small one. He felt the scalp muscles behind his ears contract at the faint hiss that suddenly reached him from the rocks. He froze, stared. Nothing. As he relaxed, the hiss was repeated.
Now, any other man there would have reported the matter and gotten cover for an investigation. But Fellows’s approach was always a direct one. He tiptoed forward, gained the small boulder, waited tensely, then moved on to the larger one. Bracing himself with his hands, he peered carefully around it. Behind him, and between the two boulders, an extension of the black shadow reached out and lifted his gun from his holster, to jam it firmly into his spinal column, just below the shoulder blades.
“Walk,” said a faint whisper.
The bruise-making solidity of the gunsight in his back was completely convincing. Without a sound he walked downgrade, without attempting to turn around or to make a sound, and the gun shifted only enough to steer him. His captor kept him to the blackest shadows, and turned him into the mouth of a dry gulch that opened on the draw a hundred yards away. He won’t shoot me if I don’t make him, he thought desperately. The posse—
The gun turned him to the wall. He stopped, his hands up. This was it, whatever “it” might be. “Well?” he said softly.
“Hey, boy. Don’ be mad, hey.”
“Zapappas!”
The gun muzzle rammed in agonizingly. “You be quiet with you mouth.”
There was a tense silence, and then Fellows, breathing hard, whispered, “All right, Peri. You talk. I’ll listen.”
“At’s good, boy,” said Pericles in a low voice. ‘Hey, you t’ink they goin’ hang me?”
“Reckon they will, Peri.”
“Oh no. No. This wrong. You tell ’em.”
“Me? I’d help ’em ef you’d get that equalizer out’n my back.”
Surprisingly, Pericles’s voice was gentle, and the gun was removed as he said sadly, “Sit down, Fellows. Here. Tak you gun.”
Fellows stayed, stunned, where he was, face to the rock wall, hands raised, until Pericles’s hand on his shoulder turned him around. The little man, he could see dimly, was extending the gun to him. “Sit down, Fellows.”
Then he talked. He talked for seven minutes, and it was not a gunshot, but a shout of laughter that brought the posse tumbling down the draw. There was no attack at four o’clock.
The bar of morning sunlight had crept so gradually onto Barstow’s sodden face that it had not awakened him. He lay unbeautifully on his back, his collar and belt open, his Eastern clothes rumpled, and his chin higher than his nose.
When the sunlight was abruptly cut off, however, he twitched, turned his head from side to side, moaned, clasped his temples, and sat up. Keeping his eyes tight shut, he shifted his hands cautiously over them, and in the soothing shade, ventured to ease the lids up. A vast throbbing inside his big head nudged another moan through his dry lips. “What a shindig,” he muttered, “for a county seat. Hate to think of the high-jinks when we get to be a state capital.”
Then it was he realized that there was someone standing over him, blocking the sunlight. He looked up quickly, wincing from the effort.
“Git up, Barstow,” said Trask. “You’re done.”
“What are you doing in my—”
“Move,” said Trask, and in such a tone that Barstow, without a second thought nor another syllable of bluster, moved. Trask waited while he pulled on his boots, and then stood aside, nodding toward the door. Barstow’s gun belt hung over a chair near the window. Trask stood between it and the door. The belt stayed where it was as Barstow walked out.
The Easterner stopped dead as soon as he could see in the light. There was a clump of silent men around the well, watching him.
“H-How—what—” goggled Barstow. He turned, bellowed, “Smith! Oviedo!”
“They took off at daybreak,” said Trask quietly. “The rest of your boys are with us, only maybe a little bit madder.”
“I don’t—I won’t—” Barstow began, turning back toward his shack. Trask spun him around, placed his boot in the small of Barstow’s back, and shoved. Barstow staggered a few steps, went to his knees, scrambled up again, and went toward the well, purely because the men there seemed less menacing than Trask, who followed close behind.
“Wh—what are you going to do?”
“Jest show you something,” said Trask grimly. “Show him, boys.”
Rough hands propelled Barstow through the crowd
to the well. Fellows caught him there, put a hard young hand to the nape of the flabby neck, and shoved Barstow’s head over the coping. “What do you see, Barstow?”
Barstow squirmed. “Nothing.”
“Speak up, Barstow.”
“The well is dry,” said Barstow hoarsely.
“Why, Barstow?”
“Those drunken—s!” swore Barstow. “They forgot to fill the well!”
“Filled it every night, didn’t they, Barstow?”
“They—I—” He looked around at the men, some grinning, some glowering. He gulped and nodded his head.
Fellows guffawed. “That’s it, boys. This swamp-frawg had men a-haulin’ water from the spring, every night, when the rest o’ his crew was sleepin’. Figgered to make this place the county seat, get the railroad through here, an’ then sell his holdings an’ clear out, leavin’ someone else to worry about a dry well an’ a useless town.”
Barstow put his hands up to his face miserably, and slumped against the well. “What are you—” He licked his lips. “What are you going to do?”
“With you?” said Trask. “Why, we talked it over some. At first most of the boys wanted to throw you into your hole in the ground and fill it in. But we figger we’ll do better to tell you how we found out about this, and then turn you loose. We like to think of you rememberin’ it.”
“It was that little guy you were tryin’ to buy into your county seat,” grinned Fellows. “Pericles Zapappas, his name is. He got to figgering. He’s been in this country a long time, longer’n any of us, an’ he knew damn well that there ain’t no water to be dug for hereabouts. So he took up your invite an’ came over here to look at your well. He was so sure there was somethin’ wrong with it that he loaded his mare with two cook pots full of some stuff he brewed. After he left you he circled back and headed for th’ spring. He seen enough of a beaten track up there to make him think he was right. He dropped his pots into th’ spring. They wuz covered with sheep parchment and th’ stuff in ’em leaked through real slow and flavored up th’ water jest fine.” He laughed again.
Trask took over. “He loads up his buckboard with hard likker last night and comes over here to help you celebrate gettin’ the county seat—after goadin’ Fellows here to git up a posse to shoot you loose from the county seat records. So thanks to him, all your hands got drunked up. Once he has you all nice and wound up, he takes a drink of water from the well. It tastes just like he knowed it would—like the stuff he put in the spring. That clinches it. He leaves y’all to waller in his likker and goes up to the draw yonder to wait for us.”
“We was goin’ to hang him,” said Fellows with awe in his voice.
“Tell’m what Zapappas put in the spring, Fellows,” said Trask.
“Tamarisk,” said Fellows solemnly. “He’s a great hand with the spices, he is. Stripped the bark of tamarisk and biled it down. It’s bitter as hell. He uses it in his stew.”
“Let’s go, boys,” said Trask. “Zapappas is back in Tamarisk by now, fixin’ up the damnedest celebration breakfast this country has seen yet.”
“What about me?” asked Barstow.
“You could drop dead,” said Fellows helpfully.
“Yer county water commission,” said Trask, “seems to of stole your hosses. You should be glad. Gives you a chance to walk off some o’ that blubber. They’s a tradin’-post forty mile up the valley, and a fort thirty mile the other way.”
The last they saw of Barstow was a deflated, dejected figure squatting on the sand by his dry well, in sole possession of a county seat—a ghost town.
Riding through the draw, Trask said thoughtfully to Fellows, “It’s a wonderful thing how a man’ll fight with his own tools. I seen many a sailor brain people with a fid, and I seen a seamstress run a hatpin into a drunk. Zapappas, he fights right out’n his kitchen.”
“Yup,” said Fellows. “Usin’ only kitchen tools.” And he swore to himself to keep his bare back out of sight until those ring-shaped bruises on it disappeared.
Hurricane Trio
YANCEY, WHO HAD once been killed, lay very still with his arm flung across the pillow, and watched the moonlight play with the color of Beverly’s hair. Her hair was spilled over his shoulder and chest, and her body pressed against him, warm. He wondered if she was asleep. He wondered if she could sleep, with that moonswept riot of surf and wind going on outside the hotel. The waves blundered into the cliff below, hooting through the sea-carved boulders, frightening great silver ghosts of spray out and up into the torn and noisy air. He wondered if she could sleep with her round, gentle face so near his thumping heart. He wished the heart would quiet itself—subside at least to the level of the storm outside, so that she might mistake it for the same storm. He wished he could sleep. For two years he had been glad he did not sleep. Now he wished he could; it might quiet his heart.
Beverly, Beverly, he cried silently, you don’t deserve this! He wished the bed were larger, so that he might ease away from her and be but a shriek among shrieks, melting into the hiss and smash and ugly grumble of the sea’s insanity.
In the other bed, Lois shifted restlessly under the crisp sheet. Yancey looked at her without turning his head. She was a thing of long lines under the dim white, her face and hair two kinds of darkness on the pillow. She was lean and somber. Beverly was happy and open and moved about like the brightly colored bouncing ball which used to lead the singing at theaters, leaping along the lyrics. Lois walked as if she did not quite touch the floor, and the tones of her voice were like the tones of her skin and the clothes she favored—dark and smooth. Her eyes were long and secret and her face was a floe. Her nostrils, and the corners of her mouth, and sometimes the slightest concerted movement of a shoulder and an eyebrow, hinted at a heat submerged and a strength relaxed and aware, not asleep, not a sleep. Lois … a synthesis of subtleties, of mysteries, of delicate scents and soft puzzling laughter.
Lois moved again. He knew that she too was staring tensely up into the mottled darkness. The spume-flecked moonlight was intolerant of detail, but Yancey had memorized her face. He knew of the compression of her lips, and that the corners of her mouth were softly turned despite the tension. He was deeply troubled by the sound of the sheet as she moved, for if he could hear that over the storm, how could Beverly miss the throb of his heart?
Then he all but smiled: of course Beverly did not hear as he did, nor see, nor feel, nor think with all her mind. Poor Beverly. Poor bright, sweet, faithful bird, more wife than woman, how can you compete with one who is more woman than … anyone?
Better, this was better than the fearful joy that was like rage. His heart began to obey him, and he turned his cheek slightly to touch her hair. Pity, he thought, is a sharing sort of thing—you can feel the helplessness of the unarmed—whereas rage, like passion, stands apart from its object and is a lonesome thing.
He settled himself now, and without moving he went limp in the thundering night, giving himself up to the glimmer and shift of his thoughts. More than anyone else on earth, he was sure, he enjoyed being alive, and his perpetual delight was in being alive altogether, awake and aware, conscious of his body and how it lay, and where, and at the same time afloat like a gull on the wind of his thought, yielding, controlled. Perhaps he enjoyed the dark part of his unending day the most, camouflaged by a coverlet and the closing of eyes. In the day he lived with that which, if he wished, he could command; at night he lived with that which he did command. He could call a symphony to heel, and make a syllogism stand and wait. He could cut a stack of places, fan a hand of faces, choose his pleasure of them and discard the rest. His recall was pinpoint perfect back and back to the point where he had been dead; before that, only excellent. He used it now as a measure against his heart’s rebellion, so that Beverly could sleep, and, sleeping, not know.
And because the idea of Lois, here, was unbearable, he let his mind take him back to Lois when she was only a secret. She had been an explosion within him, a pressure
and a kind of guilt; but all the things she had been were things he could contain, and no one knew. So back he went, to his renascence; back through the time he had been dead, and still farther to Lois-first-seen, to a time when a man with a job and a wife and a settled gray life found this special astonishment.
There was a lake, and small cheap cabins crouched in a row to sip its shores. There was a “lodge” with its stilted forefeet in the water and its rump on a hillside. There were boats and a float, a splintery dance floor and a bar which purveyed beverages all the way up to beer.
Yancey, with little money and only two weeks’ time, had rented a cottage here sight unseen. He expected little of it, being resigned to the truism that a change of surroundings constitutes a vacation all by itself. He expected little of anything in those days. His life had reached a plateau—a long, narrow, slightly downgraded plateau where the horizons were close and the going easy. His job was safe and, by the chemistry of paternalism, would increase in value as it aged, for all a large business requires of the bulk of its employees is that they stay just as they are.
He had been married for seven years to the blithe and patient Beverly, who was content with him. There had been a time when they interrupted one another in the rush to share themselves, and a longer time when there seemed very little to say, which made them both vaguely unhappy, and they lived with a mild and inexpressible sense of loss. And at last they had discovered that coded communication devised by most folk with their unexciting familiars: small talk, half-finished sentences, faint interrogative and exclamatory sounds, and present—as opposed to absent—silences. Life for Yancey and his wife was not dull—it was too unplanned for that—but its pulse beat between comfortable limits.
This unplanned quality (for why make plans when life is basically so certain?) was responsible for their late arrival at the lake. Last year’s map did not include the dozens of roads closed by the Thruway; somehow Yancey had never gotten around to having the spare fixed, so of course they had a flat; then they had to drive back for the checkbook Yancey had forgotten; and naturally it rained. It had rained all the previous night and all day, and when they turned into the lake road it was past eleven at night and still raining. They pulled up beside the lodge, where a glistening faded sign proclaimed OFFICE, and Yancey turned up his jacket collar and plunged out into the rain and floundered up the wooden steps. When there was no answer to his knock he noticed a soggy pasteboard stuck between the doorframe and a loose pane. He tried to read it and could not. He went to the head of the steps and called, “Bev! Turn the spotlight up here!”
Thunder and Roses Page 25