Monte Walsh

by Les Weil

  They were at the doorstep. "What's for supper?" said Monte. "Damned if I ain't got an appetite."

  "It's not fixed yet," she said, sharp and a bit defiant. "I'm me. I can go traipsing around too."

  "Shucks," said Monte, taking her by the shoulders to turn her facing him. "Sure you can. Come to think about it, I'm hungry all right. But not for food." And again, as once before, he scooped her up in his arms and he kicked the door open and eased through, sideways, holding her, and closed it with one heel behind him.

  Supper was late that night, quite late, and they were still sitting by the little spindly table when what Hattie had always known would come came in the form of a rapping on the door and the voice of Old Man Hendricks. "Monte. Monte Walsh. Come on out here a minute."

  Hattie sat motionless on her chair. There was no need to move. Monte had not closed the door and after the first ex­change their voices rose and she could hear them talking out­side.

  ". . Like I say, Monte, I sure hate to be botherin' you this way. No, that's a lie. I'm right glad you're around to be bothered. I been short-handed ever since Chalkeye got hisself tromped some in a run a few weeks back. Had to leave him down below Denver. Now Shorty, you know him, always edgy he is, well he has to go mixin' with some damn mule skinner an' get hisself cut up. I can skip sayin' the rest of the boys took care of that skunk of a skinner so he won't be cuttin' any more for quite a spell but Shorty's laid up an' it leaves me in a hole."

  "Shucks," said Monte. "Just look around town is all."

  "What d'you think I been doin'? Can't find anyone loose around here right now I'd trust far as I can spit into the wind. Not a real rider among 'em. I got two men gone an' that's quite a hole. It'll take a right good man to fill it, meanin' you."

  ` Aw, shucks," said Monte. "I don't know. I ain't been figuring on anything like this. Not for a while anyways."

  "Why not? I hear you're not doin' much of anythin' these days. You tied down?"

  "No-o-o," said Monte. "No-o-o. Not exactly."

  "Come on then. Tell you what. I saw that black of yours at the stable. Heard you had to sell it. Ill just buy it an' throw it in as a kind of bonus."

  Silence. Then Monte's voice with a small wailing note of desperation in it. "Quit it, Hendricks. Why don't you just quit talking."

  "Because I got to have you, Monte. I only got five weeks left to make it on to Boise. Or forfeit the price. I lose this I'm licked. I'm countin' on you, Monte. You never let me down yet."

  Silence again. "Goddamn it!" said Monte, desperate. "You ain't the only one I got to worry about letting down."

  "Her, Monte? I hear she's regular, a good sport. She knows how things are. Why, doggone it, Monte, I never thought I'd see you hobbled by a skirt."

  "Christ a'mighty!" said Monte, almost shouting. "Shut up before I bust you one! Get out of here and leave me alone!"

  And inside the shack Hattie's shoulders straightened a bit for a few proud seconds before they sagged again in slow seeping knowledge of the inevitable, if not now the certainty of later and not so much later as soon, and of the rising tensions and bickerings slipping into meanness that could come between, and when Monte came in, tight-lipped, eyes hard, he was surprised to find her the same.

  "So I hobble you, do I?" she said, voice tight, brittle. "So I'm something you got to worry about, am I? You got another think coming. I'm me. I can get men better'n you any day I want. You go after him. You tell him you're riding."

  Monte stared at her, the line of his jaw stiffening, jutting. "Hattie! I thought you-"

  "You been taking too much for granted around here. You said long as it lasted and I agreed. Well, it's about gone. I got to think of myself. I ain't getting anywhere cooped up here with you."

  "Goddamn it, Hattie," said Monte. "If that's the way you-"

  "That's the way. I ain't saying it ain't been ... been something to remember. But a woman like me's got to look out for herself. She can't go .., go getting soft on any of you ... of you .., of you come-and-go deadbeats that ... that never have any real money and think . . . and think . . . just because . . ."

  "Quit it, Hattie," said Monte. "I got it. I'm blowing." Moving with swift precision, he took his hat from its nail in the wall and put it on, pulling the brim down, his gunbelt from another nail and buckled it around, his jacket from another and slipped into it.

  She sat on her chair, unable to move, rigid in her own resolution, and she watched him move to a corner of the room and take his blanket roll and bridle in one hand, his saddle with the other.

  He stopped in the doorway against the darkness of the outside. "So long, Hattie," he said. "You been mighty good to me."

  She managed to say it. "So long, cowboy. See you again sometime."

  And in the first light of morning she climbed the long rise behind the shack, past the quickie structures of the growing town, and stood still and quiet and saw the long straggling line of cattle stringing out northwestward and watched till it was lost beyond the limits of vision the tiny dwindling shape that was Monte Walsh on a big rangy black, a match for any man in the workings of his trade, where he belonged, moving into distance across the big land.

  * * *

  The third time was at Trinidad. Monte was coming twenty­six and he had been siding Chet Rollins for three years now and the two of them were Slash Y down in New Mexico territory. They came into Colorado with foreman Hat Henderson and two more of the home crew and Sunfish Perkins along to do the cooking, the six of them taking a small herd on consignment up and over Raton Pass and on to a rendezvous with a government agent near Trinidad. They delivered and collected and Hat counted out six small piles of accumulated pay and tucked the rest of the proceeds into a money belt he wore under his shirt and suggested drawing straws but Sunfish said he would take the short one without drawing and stay with the wagon and extra horses and the others jogged away into town for some celebrating, not much because this had been a short drive, but concentrated because they would be leaving in the morning.

  They did not think much of Trinidad, it being mostly a mining town and coal mining at that, but as they moved from bar to bar, testing the liquor, they began to feel better and then they hit one that had enough of the right flavor and suggestion of possible things happening.

  Monte leaned back against the bar, fifth drink of the evening in his hand, and looked about. Chet started to say something to him and he did not hear it. Across the room he saw a piled pompadour of yellow hair.

  Not the soft color of the corn tassel now, yellower, unnatural, and the sheen had the streaky metallic gloss of the artificial. Under it the lines of the broad plain face sagged definitely, almost a grimace behind the calculated layer of powder and paint. The once trim figure had settled into heaviness, bulging against the tight corset under the low-cut dress. She sat alone at a small table in a corner tracing with a finger in spilled liquid on the table in front of her, and only a worn weariness seemed to emanate from her.

  Monte stared at her though the warmth of the whisky in him and years dropped away from him and he saw only what he wanted to see and memories meshed in his mind and he moved toward her, unaware of the movement. "Hattie," he said, slipping into the chair across the table from her. "Hattie."

  She raised her eyes from the trailing finger and shock showed in them, fading into full awareness. "Hello cowboy," she said. "If I dared do it, I'd say it was you."

  "It's me all right," said Monte. "And I ain't forgot. I ain't forgot anything. You was always good to me, Hattie. Good to me. And good for me." He leaned forward, talking, he could always talk to Hattie, and she leaned forward too, listening, not saying much, and it was almost like old times, the two of them across a small table together and she felt the lean vital aliveness of him reaching again to her and the harsh lines of her face under the mask of makeup softened and her eyes brightened and like a slow tide rising in her an echo of the old inviting animal warmth seemed to emanate from her.

  Monte leaned back in h
is chair, aware of a pulse beating in one temple. "Hattie," he said, low, eager. "Have you got a place here?"

  Her face paled and she looked down, tracing again with one finger in the spilled liquid. "I've got ... I've got a room in back."

  "Lovely," said Monte, all male and dominant in his male­ness. "Just lovely."

  She did not raise her head. The broad plain face was dead white behind its mask. Her throat worked and the words came out, dull, tired. "No. Not you, Monte. Not you."

  He stared at her and slow seconds ticked past and her voice came again, harsh, bitter.

  "Leave me alone. I'm sorry I ever seen you. Leave me alone."

  And a little later Monte stood by the bar, morose and sullen, paying scant attention to Chet beside him trying to cheer him some, and he stiffened in sudden flaring anger as he saw Hattie with a dirty coal-dusted miner moving toward the rear door of the room.

  Monte too was in motion, hands clenching into fists, and Chet's arms clamped around and held him. Behind the bar the bartender looked at them and then toward the rear of the room. "Poor Hattie," he said. "She has to take what she can get these days. Most everybody knows about her."

  The bartender picked up a glass and began polishing it. "Yep," he said. "It don't show much yet. But she's visiting the doc twice a week."

  A few minutes later Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins strode down the street and stopped by the little frame house with the cupola the bartender had described. "All you've got," said Monte. "All of it." Chet reached in his pockets as Monte reached in his and Monte went up to the door and knocked and when it opened a short plump goateed elderly man was surprised as a fistful of bills and change was forced into his hands.

  "For Hattie," said Monte. "Hattie Kupper. Yellow-Hair Hattie. Do the best you can for her, Doc, the best you can."

  * * *

  The fourth time was at Las Vegas. Monte was coming thirty, losing a little of his hair up from his forehead from always wearing a hat and he was adding some flesh to his leanness but all of it rawhide hard. He and Chet were still Slash Y and Chet and the others were out working somewhere and he was alone at the ranch headquarters except for Skimpy Eagens in the cookhouse and he was busy teaching proper manners to a big-boned young sorrel in the small corral when the word reached him.

  It came by jackrabbit telegraph, from rider to rider across the big land, not one of them thinking anything unusual of going twenty to thirty miles out of his way to pass it along. Chalkeye Ferrero, currently with the Triple Seven to the north, brought it the last lap to Monte.

  He came fast and his horse was well lathered, but when he swung down he was in no apparent hurry. He perched himself on a top rail and offered remarks on the sorrel and the weather and the general condition of the range. Such amenities out of the way, he pushed his hat up and talked some more.

  "Hattie," he said. "Hattie Kupper. You remember her. All that yella hair. She's took bad up at Vegas. Out of her head most of the time. Maybe she won't make it."

  Chalkeye took off his hat and put it on again, pushing it up, and he looked off into space. "Yeah," he said. "Out of her head. Damned if I see any sense to it, but she keeps asking for somebody she calls Monte."

  Chalkeye thought of a few more things to say but he would have been wasting his time saying them. Monte Walsh, tight-lipped, was dropping off the sorrel, stripping his gear from it, striding away, opening the gate into the big corral and entering. Chalkeye shrugged and jumped down outside and stripped off his own saddle and bridle and turned his horse into the small corral and watched it roll away sweat in the dust. He hoisted his saddle on a rail and hung his bridle on a post. He ambled over to the cookhouse and poked his head in the doorway. "Hi, Skimpy," he said. "I'm figurin' on stayin' for supper." He stepped up into the doorway and turned to see Monte Walsh on a deep-chested leggy dun with a small bag of grain tied to his saddle horn and a blanket roll lashed behind ramming northeastward into the first mile of the one hundred forty across rugged almost trackless terrain to Las Vegas.

  That was midafternoon. Early the next evening the dun, gaunted and bone weary but still responding to the urgency along the reins, staggered into Las Vegas and Monte left it in good hands at a livery stable and asked sharp questions here and there to little purpose until he finally found the right doctor at home at the supper table.

  "Easy now," said the doctor. "I'll take you to her soon enough. There's no hurry. I've had her moved where I can keep an eye on her. You're a pretty sight, you are. You're going to clean up and unwind a bit and join me for some food or I'll be having you for a patient too."

  And after Monte had scrubbed the dust out of the light bristles on his face in the kitchen and gulped some coffee and food, not tasting any of it, the doctor led him down a short hallway and opened the door to a small back room.

  "See what I mean," said the doctor gently. "There's no hurry. She doesn't recognize anyone."

  In the light of the one lamp on a washstand she lay on an old Spanish bedstead, wasted body shapeless and lumpy under the bedclothes, eyes open and staring, blinking now and again and staring, unseeing, upward, mouth sagging open and breath coming in long slow labored sounds. The broad plain face was gray-toned, shrunken, collapsed. Monte would not have known her except for the hair straggling out on the pillow, all artificiality gone, dull gray with the few lingering still-defiant streaks running through it the color of the harvest corn tassel.

  The doctor saw Monte's face. "What did you expect?" he said, a kind of resigned anger in his voice. "The life she's had. Her lungs are all shot. She's rotted inside with what you men gave her. Now I'm not sure but I think it's cancer killing her. She has nothing left to fight it. All I can do is try to keep her resting easy."

  "Goddamn it," said Monte Walsh. "And she made a man of me. What there is of me."

  The doctor turned away. "You can go now," he said and a small dark Spanish woman who had been sitting silent on a chair in a corner rose and brushed past them by the doorway and was gone.

  Monte moved on in and stood by the bed. "Hattie," he said. "Hattie." He stood, staring down, and the doctor brought the chair from the corner and Monte sank onto it, leaning forward. "Hattie," he said. "Hattie. It's me. Monte."

  Her mouth closed some and her breathing quickened and her head turned a little toward him and out of a dark drugged somewhere a focus came briefly into her eyes. Her body shook under the bedclothes, struggling to achieve something, and did, and one hand emerged, thin and mottled, and moved clutching along the cover. Monte reached and her fingers closed on his hand, grasping, holding. A long sigh came from her and her eyes closed.

  The doctor bent down. "Sleeping," he said. "The first time in days. You're better than anything I can do for her."

  And the hours crept along to the rhythm of the slow labored breathing and the doctor left soon, returning now and again from catnaps in his own bedroom and shaking his head and leaving again, and Monte Walsh sat on the chair, bent forward, one hand out on the bed clutched in thin mottled fingers. And the hours crept along and then he was aware, in slow emergence, that the lamp had burned down and out and another dimness filled the room, the first light of day through the one window, and that he had toppled sideways against the edge of the bed and that someone was disentangling the thin fingers from their hold on his hand and laying the thin arm again under the covers and pulling these up over the still set face.

  "She's gone," said the doctor.

  And a little later Monte gulped coffee again, not tasting it.

  "Doc," he said. "I came away fast. I ain't got much of anything on me. But I Sure-"

  "No," said the doctor. "Everything's taken care of. She had some money in an old stocking in her trunk. She's paying her own way to the grave."

  Monte wandered out through the old town, aimless, wandering, and he passed a few men he knew who, speaking once or twice and seeing his face, left him alone. Along toward noon he joined the meager procession following the wagon to the old Spanish cemetery and
when the earth was heaped in the small mound he wandered away again, aimless, and behind a low picket fence he saw a row of flowers along the front of a house and he stepped over the fence and moved along the row, snapping the stems. A man came around the side of the house, starting to shout, and stopped, seeing the close-triggered deadliness confronting him, and backed away and Monte stepped over the fence again, carrying the flowers, and to the cemetery again and laid them on the small mound of earth.

  "Hattie," he said. "Hattie." And suddenly he turned away, moving more rapidly now, aiming, and went into the first saloon along the main street and to the bar.

  A half hour and he stood there by the bar, unsteady, swaying, watched in admiring fascination by the bartender, and still the hidden ache in him held out against the whisky and he fumbled in his pockets. Nothing. Movement at the blurred edge of vision turned him, swaying, and a few feet away stood Chet Rollins, worn and dusty and unshaven, holding out a hand and on the hand a few crumpled bills.

  "Buy it by the bottle," said Chet.

  Monte wandered, swaying, out through the old town, a bottle in his hand, and Chet followed, leading a thick-necked black, tired and gaunted, and Monte stopped well out past the last buildings on a low rise where the ground fell away into the harsh broken beauty of the big land beyond. He sank down, sitting, and raised the bottle and wiped a hand across his mouth and stared into distance and raised the bottle again. It was half empty when he sank back, limp and sodden, and liquid gurgled from the bottle as it slipped to the ground and long heavy snores came from him.

  Chet carried him to the shade of a clump of brush oak and took the blanket from behind the saddle of the black and rolled him onto it and folded it over him. Chet stripped the gear from the black and picketed it on fair grass nearby and he walked back into town and came again after a while riding a leggy dun with a small partly-filled flour sack hanging from the saddle horn. He stripped down the dun and picketed it too nearby. He sat by Monte and stared off into distance and the hours crept past and the sun slanted down the sky and dusk dropped gently.