Roughhound squats down in front of her. “Little girl?”
She continues making the sign of the cross until he grabs her hands.
“What are you praying for, little girl?”
Her eyes open a slit, and she offers him an angelic smile. “For your soul at the moment of your death.”
He rocks back on the heels of his cowboy boots.
“What’s in the box, mister?” Len asks.
Roughhound gives Sis a long look, but he stands up and moves to the box on the chair. He opens the box and reveals a long barreled pistol.
“German,” Roughhound says.
Len whistles. “It’s a beauty.”
Roughhound laughs. “It’s just a pellet gun,” he says.
“I knew that.”
Roughhound laughs louder, sounding like a kid on the playground who’s pulled off a good trick. “You didn’t neither.”
“I did.”
“Naw, you did not. You did not. You admit it now.” Still laughing, a great horsy laugh, he takes hold of Len’s arm and twists it behind his back until Len winces. “Admit it, now, you admit it. Go on.”
Jim touches Len’s leg, signaling him to answer. “I admit it,” Len says in a tight voice, and Jim knows that if it were just Len there he’d never admit it, never admit it even if Roughhound broke his arm.
Roughhound releases his arm and gives a laugh. “Got you that time!”
Len shakes his head. “You sure did.”
Roughhound removes a silver pellet from a small red tin can and loads the gun. He goes to one knee, using the arm of the chair as a brace. He takes aim at the can, squeezes the trigger, and the pellet whizzes out in the high grasses somewhere behind the firepit. “I nicked it,” Roughhound says.
He loads another pellet and hands the gun to Len, who holds the gun out with a straight arm, squinting an eye.
“Naw, that ain’t the right way,” Roughhound says. “You need a brace for your shooting arm.”
Len squeezes off the shot and the can spins off the brick wall.
Roughhound blows air out of his mouth. “Dumb luck,” he says. But then he laughs. “Double or nothing. Like to see you do that again.”
He loads the gun for Len again, then Roughhound walks out to the fire pit. He grins, sets the can back up, stands off to the side a little. “Try it again.”
Len fires and the can just sits there. Roughhound laughs. “Told you it was luck.”
Len loads as Roughhound starts walking back to them. “Hey, I didn’t tell you you could load.”
“Sorry,” Len says. When Roughhound is five feet from them, Len raises the gun and fires into the center of his face.
Roughhound screams and falls backwards, clutching at his head. “Run!” Len commands them, and they scamper from the porch and bolt off below the now darkening sky.
Roughhound shouts, “You want to play guns?”
He goes inside the cabin to a chest and comes out with the .357 Magnum. “I’ll play guns you little sons of bitches!” he cries, firing into the sky.
*
Len pulls them along through the brush, leading them away from the dirt road, figuring Roughhound will expect them to head that way. Their friend is the coming darkness. “Keep going,” he orders Jim and Sis. He breaks away from them, running back toward the road but staying hidden in the brush, making as much noise as he can so Roughhound will follow him away from Len and Sis. He stoops down, picks up a rock and hurls it far ahead and he hears Roughhound’s footsteps run in that direction.
Roughhound chases after the sound but then he whirls about. Those young punks aren’t heading toward the road. Trying to fool him. They sure are, they sure are. They got gumption, though, he’ll give them credit for that. He sort of wishes they really were his kids. Danny doesn’t deserve this crew. Danny got all the credit back in high school. Quarterback, my ass, couldn’t throw worth a shit! Fucking war hero. Hero. Bullshit. Does a guy get any credit? Crawling up that goddamn hill and the bullets whizzing through the grass and looking over and seeing Big Lou with a hole in his head, still climbing. He climbed another three feet on his belly with that hole in his head before he knew he was dead. That was the thing that got me. I think I was all right until then. It was looking over at Big Lou and realizing he was dead and still crawling. I screamed then. I screamed and ran at the bastards and then I pitched the grenade and came in firing and cleared out the bunker and then the next bunker of guys came out with their hands up as if they knew I was coming, as if the word had spread that old Paul Rittendorf himself was charging the whole goddamn hill by himself. They came out and threw up their hands and I shot them and stuck the fuckers with the bayonet . . . Surrender? Fuck you! Does a guy get any credit?
*
Jim steps on a cactus and the sharp points penetrate his tennis shoe. He hops a few feet, then sits down on the ground.
Sis stands above him. “Get on my back.”
She carries Jim, bouncing him along.
They hear Roughhound crashing through the brush. Sis tries to run faster. Then she’s not going anywhere, running in place as Roughhound holds onto Jim’s belt. “Gotcha!” Roughhound says. Jim pitches off Sis’s back, falls to the ground, and Sis runs at Roughhound, punching at his groin and yelling, “Run, Jim!” He crawls into the brush, but Roughhound smacks Sis down with his hand and then he grabs her up by her hair. “You better come out, kid. I got your sister. I’m going to tug on her hair a little bit here . . . ” Sis screams and Jim comes out of the brush. Roughhound hauls him in, throwing him over his shoulder and carting him off like a sack of wheat, as Sis follows, beating at his back. He knocks her down. “One kid will do,” he says. “You’re all starting to get on my nerves.” He looks around. “Where’s the tough kid? Hey, tough kid,” he calls into the brush. “You ain’t so tough, are you? Scared to help your little brother. You see that, kid, he’s scared to help you.”
He carries Jim back to the cabin. He throws him into the front seat of the car. “Stay put.”
He goes inside the cabin and as he’s coming back out with his arms loaded up, a shadowy figure in a white T-shirt steps onto the porch, and plunges something into his thigh. Roughhound screams and staggers, clutching at his thigh, the knife buried in it.
Len runs to the car and Sis hops into the back seat. Len turns the key in the ignition and steps on the gas, sending Sis flying against the front seat and Jim slamming into the dashboard. “You don’t know how to drive!” Sis screams.
Roughhound staggers after the car, weaving in a strange lopsided run in the moonlight. He fires the gun as the car bounces ahead over the rocky pitted road, rounds a bend and leaves him behind.
The windows are down, the wind sails through their hair, the car cuts down the narrow dirt road as Len’s hands hold steady on the steering wheel, his face set tight and grim and resolute. He says quietly, “Everybody all right?”
They bounce on, and by the time they hit the paved road, Len seems like he’s been driving for years, didn’t just learn it from watching their father. They see the lights of a country store up ahead, but Len says, “I’m not stopping at the first place, just in case. Let’s keep moving a little down the road.”
And for a little while, Jim thinks they’re setting out on their own, Len and Sis and him, and he’s okay with that, if Len is there. But at the next lighted store, Len stops the car. Before he goes inside to call the police and their parents, he puts his hands to his face, and Jim sees that Len’s shoulders are shaking. “Stay here,” Len says, but they won’t. As he opens his door, they’re already following him into a warm, moonlit night in the country.
Out on the Lone Prairie
The hard winter sets into the high canyonlands. Will and Tom hunker down in a wickiup out near the horses, barely alive, burrowing against one another for warmth. Will’s developed a cough. He spits up blood. Tom wakes with a
startled scream as a terrible painted face hovers over them.
But White Crane’s paint is not the paint of war, but of grief. He has lost his family to the plague. Lost his wife, lost his wife and precious son. He is alone, the most alone man in the world, and he wears the savage face of lamentation, a hideous clown’s face of woe.
The wild tear-streaked face hovers above the boys. With his knife he lashes, not the boys, but his own ear. He hands a bloody hunk of ear to Tom, who whispers, “No thanks. I don’t want your ear.”
White Crane closes the boy’s hand over the bloody hunk of ear. He speaks no English, but Tom understands him.
Take my ear, he says.
“All right, thanks,” Tom says.
White Crane disappears into the vast, dark night. The boys hear him off wailing beneath the half-moon.
He sleeps again and when he wakes up, he and Will have been covered in warm buffalo skins.
A day, a night, another sleep. In his sleep, Tom feels himself lifted by strong arms. He imagines that it is father, Edmund, the happy singing man with the strong arms who would throw him up in the top bunk at bedtime, giving him the “fisherman’s toss,” as they called it.
But it is White Crane, carrying him into his tipi. He puts Tom down amidst soft hides and furs. A small fire glows in the center of the tipi, the smoke carried toward a hole in the top.
Warmth. Delicious, wonderful warmth.
White Crane takes his own place across the tipi, grunts, lies down, as if something is settled. Tom is home. He is no longer prisoner now, no longer slave. White Crane is his father now. He is family. White Crane’s son. A member of the tribe.
He yearns to stay in that warmth. But he rises, crawls toward the flap opening in the tipi.
White Crane rises to an elbow. What are you doing? Tom knows he’s asking.
“I’m going back to my brother.”
White Crane shakes his head and Tom knows he is saying: Too late. He’ll die. He unties the sash. White Crane jumps up, pulls him away from the opening. He lies in bed until he hears White Crane’s steady snores.
His feet trail blood all the way to the wickiup. He staggers through blowing snow and howling wind. He lies down beside Will, snuggles into him, covers the barely breathing boy with his own body, breathes his own breath against Will’s chest. He shuts his eyes, says the prayer of death, asks God to take them into His home.
In his sleep, he’s being lifted again under one strong arm and as his eyelids flutter, he realizes White Crane is carrying something under the other arm. He carries the boys back to the tipi, drops them side by side on the soft furs. White Crane looks at Will, at the blood seeping from his mouth, and he lets out a yelp of despair, disappears through the opening, going back in the frigid night.
A few minutes later he slips back into the tipi, followed by an ancient-looking woman, an old crone with dried, wrinkled skin. Over the fire she brews a foul-smelling concoction. Pours some steaming fluid into a hide cup. Kneels over Will. Puts a gnarled hand under his neck, lifts his head. Presses the cup to his lips.
“Get that out of here,” Will mutters, eyes closed.
“Drink,” she coaxes.
“No,” Will says. An absolute no. A no that bears no hint of yes. No. Will’s no.
Tom knows the woman doesn’t speak English, but he tries to explain about Will. “There isn’t any use talking to him. We’ll have to tie him down.”
But she tries again, tilting the cup, raising his head a few inches. Will left hooks the cup out of her hand. The hot liquid flies through the air and spatters White Crane.
The old woman laughs. She looks at Tom and speaks in the Comanche tongue. He seems to understand her. “Your brother is a crazy wild man,” she says.
“Sorry. He’s always been that way.”
With his eyes closed, Will says, “I’ll kill you.”
She laughs. “He might live,” she says.
She goes out in the darkness. White Crane sticks his head out of the tipi, calls in a wailing voice, but she does not come back.
She’s left some of the concoction. Tom pins Will’s arms and White Crane holds Will’s chin, lifts the cup to his lips as Will bites at the air like a rabid dog.
White Crane gentles the hot liquid into him, sip by sip. He holds his hand over Will’s mouth to keep the foul brew in, howls once and jumps back as Will bites his hand. But he resumes, more careful now, pouring the liquid in sip by sip as Tom holds Will’s struggling arms.
When they are through forcing the brew into him, they step back. Tom prays, and he hears White Crane chanting softly, and he realizes White Crane is praying in his own way.
The wild Indian prays over his brother. He should never have taken them, and Tom reminds himself to hate the Indian, but he listens to White Crane chanting and he has to force the hatred up. He cannot let himself forget the hatred. He must hear his mother reading to them at night, hear his father’s singing voice, feel the lift of his real father’s arms giving him the fisherman’s toss.
White Crane rubs Will’s face, his arms, his legs, his chest. Rubs to bring the life back. He cries as if Will is his son now, too, made his son the moment he carried him into the tipi.
In the morning, Will’s fever is broken and his cough is better. He keeps getting better. The winter snows melt away, and spring comes beautifully on the high plains. They are White Crane’s children now, members of the tribe, and the children love the tricks they know—the boxing and wrestling and gymnastics Edmund had taught them. Will can stand on his hands and walk around the entire camp as they cheer. He can do back-handed flips and land on his feet. The children have never really seen boxing. They marvel as Tom patters them about the head and stomach.
The years go by and they live as wild Indians. Tom fights it inside, clings to the pictures of home, but Will’s letting it go. What good is the past to him now? What good are his parents? They never came for him. He cannot even see their faces anymore. They are part of an old dream, and soon he will lose even the dream. Tom fights for him, reminds him of the old days, but Will runs from him or covers his ears. He does not even like the old language anymore. He refuses to understand it. But inside Tom has not forgotten his promise. He will take Will home.
Of Quilting Shows and Counseling
In the makeshift room above their garage, Jim lies on the old couch as dust motes drift in the sunlight, and appearing through a glint of light, the therapist sighs, arranges one thick buttock in the swivel chair, crooks his torso, settles in the other thick buttock. He folds his hands over his plump belly. “So,” he says in his stentorian voice, “what do you have for me today?”
“I wake up all night long, imagining someone breaking into my house. I guess it’s not all that unusual. I was kidnapped as a child and I guess that had a damaging effect on me.”
The therapist clears his throat. “Are you a trained therapist?”
“Why, no.”
“Then why would you leap to the conclusion that the kidnapping damaged you in some way? Doesn’t that strike you as a flimsy excuse? People go through much worse things all the time.”
“I suppose so.”
“Repeat after me: I was kidnapped as a child.”
“I was kidnapped as a child.”
“Okay. Now how did you feel, saying that?”
“I felt a little sad.”
“Sad? You got away, didn’t you? Case closed.”
“And a few years after Roughhound, there was the Major.”
“The Major?”
“A child molester.”
“Oh my God,” he mutters. “Next you’re going to be telling me that boring story as well.” He rubs his head. “I don’t think I can stand this. Let’s change the subject. Tell me about that golf quilt again.”
Jim sighs, but recounts the last summer’s vacation from the college
. In a sleepy town in Oregon, Jim’s wife forces him to go with her to a quilting show at the Town Hall, which serves as a combination central meeting place and the fire station. A long time ago, when they were first married, he served as a volunteer fire fighter. When the siren went off, he’d boldly throw down his dinner fork. They had an unreliable car in those days, so he’d leap a wooden fence and sprint a half mile across a meadow to arrive panting at the station, ready to strap on the heavy yellow jacket. He dreamed of coming home to tell his wife how he’d dragged someone out of a burning home, but many of the fires involved uninhabited dwellings. He was mostly relegated to the inglorious role of “broom man,” where he would sweep up ash after a fire. He was relieved when a more professional crew took over the firehouse and released the volunteers from service.
The quilting show is not the sort of thing he goes to willingly, but they are visiting relatives in this bucolic town in Oregon and attendance at the Fourth of July weekend quilting show is a requirement. He survives the annual ritual by imagining Comanches laying siege to the Town Hall. His wife even makes their two teenage boys attend. But there is a payoff. They know, from previous years, that once they pass through the quilting show in the front of the Town Hall, they will come to the pancake and bacon breakfast. The boys speed through the hanging quilts at a dead run and arrive safely at the pancake table.
Jim is not so lucky, though. His wife captures his arm and makes him walk beside her as they study each quilt hanging from the rafters. His wife envisions buying one for their bedroom at home, solicits his opinions. He is neutral about their aesthetic appeal, mostly checks price tags, shakes his head no. As his stomach growls, he wonders what’s taking the Comanches so long to strike. But then he draws up with a sudden stop, eyes widening in awe. There are squares in the quilt and in each square there’s a man golfing. In each square, he’s in progressive stages of his swing. How glorious is the quilted little golfer’s swing! The sunlight beams on the quilt.
The therapist works his thick buttocks around on the chair. “Here, get up. Show me the swing. Slowly now.”
The Western Lonesome Society Page 3