“Will you put it on for me? Just once?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” A lickerous gleam entered her eye. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
By the time she returned he had made the complete change: black suit, white silk shirt, high choker collar, gold cuff links, new black socks, drawers, new black patent- leather shoes.
She was taken aback by the transformation. “You really are a handsome man.”
“Cut it out.”
“When I finally turn you loose on the streets of Cheyenne, you’re going to be rough competition for the rest of the men.”
“I said, cut it out.”
She abruptly turned pensive. “Tell me something.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you ever lost someone you most wanted to keep?”
“Well … Sam, of course.”
“Oh, yes. Sam.”
“And you?”
“I wouldn’t even dare to begin to tell you.”
“It was that bad?”
“It was.”
Ransom placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry to hear it. Maybe someday you’ll find another to take his place.”
“Never. There was only one like him.”
“Is that the one who had to do with …?”
“My lost eye? Yes.”
He gave her shoulder a warm squeeze. “What was he like? Maybe I can help you find him.”
“He’s dead. At least so I think. Dead.” Her whole face wrinkled over with an old anguish.
He was moved.
She turned woodenly from him.
“Katherine.”
A tear appeared along the bottom edge of her black eye patch.
“Godsakes, Katherine.”
Abruptly she left the room. Her footsteps slowly faded away down the hall.
“Poor woman. She takes it pretty hard.”
He undressed and hung his new clothes in the corner closet. He stroked each piece, the coat, vest, trousers, silk shirt, neatly into place. “I’ll make sure to pay for them when I sell Sam’s mules.”
Naked, he stretched to his full height, up on his toes, chest out. “Ahh!” His biceps came up like risen dough and his thighs rippled like taut lariats.
He caught sight of himself in Katherine’s full-length mirror. He saw where his johnny-nods hung dreaming in its thicket of curly black hair. It resembled almost exactly his nose in the middle of his beard.
On an impulse he decided to go to bed naked, as he’d sometimes done on warm nights out on the prairie.
He blew out the night lamp. And, crawling into his suggans on the floor, was sound asleep in a minute.
After a while, body warming in sleep, an arm, then a leg, tossed the thick horse blanket aside. He lay exposed.
He dreamed he was swimming. He was paddling for all he was worth to get to shore. On the shore stood Sam Slaymaker. Sam was calling to him with warm encouraging words. Behind Ransom stretched a vast body of water. How he’d come to be in the water in the first place he couldn’t figure out. When his knee hit gravel, Sam had a hand up for him. Sam led him to a crackling fire. Sam fed him venison and coffee. By the time his clothes were dry, Ransom found he’d outgrown them and Sam had to cut him a new suit out of deerskin. In making them Sam hadn’t allowed enough room for his crotch. So Sam had to recut his buckskin pants.
Then Ransom woke up.
He lay musing and breathing for a while.
Poor Sam shot and killed.
Sam had loved him with a true-blue heart. Sam had loved him up when he’d felt down. Sam had scolded him when he’d felt antsy.
Goddam that Horses.
But Sam had been mostly wrong about Miss Katherine though. All that talk of hers about bundling, and keeping the white sheet between them, meant only one thing: she wanted a man, bad.
Fantasies of what he’d do with Miss Katherine someday drifted through his mind. He would stroke her shadowed gold hair. He would cup her breasts. He would hug her to him, warm and close and hard.
Again he dreamed he was swimming. This time it was under water.
He nosed into some dark water where the seaweeds stood thick. He swam with powerful stroking arms. The seaweeds kept trailing across his face.
He swam harder. Yet for all his stroking he just couldn’t seem to make headway. It was as if his body had sent down some kind of root.
He looked down. Yes. His body had sent down a root. It was his phallus. It’d grown to be as big as an elephant’s trunk, and where it’d been sucking at the bottom it had rooted in.
He was tied down. While he was swimming, his root had somehow anchored deep in the mud. Also, every little while, some goldfish, four of them along with a papa goldfish the size of a thumb, played around the root.
All of a sudden his root swelled up. And it began to burn deliciously. Deliciously. It was so delicious he had the feeling his phallus was going to back up on itself and turn around and swallow him complete. The end of it would be that he would disappear into the mud bottom.
“Wake up, wake up!” a doctor cried. “It’s going to get you. Hurry. Before it’s too late.”
He bumbled out loud. “I am hurrying.”
“Darling,” a woman’s voice said. “Darling, I know it’s dreadful of me to be so forward. But the thought of your sweet boy innocence, oh dear God, it drives me wild to think that someone else should have it first.”
“I’m hurrying, Doc.”
“Also, the Army has let me know that they know you’re only bunking in my bedroom and not sleeping with me as man and wife. So they’re coming to get you tomorrow morning.”
“Mum?”
“You’re awake, aren’t you?”
“Mam?”
“Darling, the sound of your voice drives me mad. I hear red when you talk. Lonely and red.”
It had to be a dream.
“It’s been so long, so long since I’ve done it. And I always loved it so. Even with that other. And even with shy little Dennis.”
A dream.
“And I know I’m breaking my own rule. Because I once swore on my own soul that I’d never do it again until I’d found him. But, oh God, it’s been so long.”
It had to be a dream. In dream it would be all right. In dream one couldn’t help it.
“But seeing you I now know I’ll never find him. You’re even better, darling.”
He fought to stay as asleep as possible. “Mussent wake up.” He struggled to stay down. “Or it ain’t a dream.”
“All those years denying it. Keeping myself pure for the day when I might find him again.”
He found himself floating. And he let himself go on floating.
“We’ll start over. A sweet little nest somewhere in the West. Make a new start.”
A face nuzzled his beard. Full soft lips found his lips. Hair trailed across his nose. The fishes played.
“Darling, you are awake, aren’t you?”
“Mum?”
“My husband. My dear daddy husband.”
“Mam?”
A woman smiled in his ear. “Dear old Aunt Agnes might not approve.” The fishes played. “But we don’t care, do we?” “Who?”
“I can’t help it, sweet, but I never did think tubers were unsightly.”
He suffered his lips to be parted and the tip of a tongue touched the tip of his tongue.
“Come, wake up, darling. Nnnh? Under that black patch I’m really a honeypot, you know. The stamp of a passional nature is set deep in me.”
Again the tip of a tongue found him. Then the last of what he’d hoped was a dream was gone, and he found himself being hugged by a wonderful woman. Naked. Now. A rush of red from a new spring swept through him.
Suddenly he threw his arms around her, and hugged her hard in turn, and kissed her compulsively.
With his fingertips he touched all of her. He felt the tender skin of her and the supple flesh of her, and under them the surprisingly hard female hipbones of her.
“At last, at last, to be doing it doing it. After so many years.”
“Nnn.”
“My husband.”
“Kathering.”
“My King.”
“Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.”
She heard red in the sound of his voice.
He smelled puccoons in the loose strands of her hair.
4
Later in the night he carried her to the four-poster bed and crept in beside her.
She murmured sleepily. He murmured sleepily. And before they were comfortably settled between the sheets, he was upon her again.
“Come.”
“Husband.”
He’d swum his river finally. And once across he couldn’t get enough of it.
As he dozed off he promised himself to look into why it was that something about her scent always set off a trigger in him.
It wasn’t just that she smelled of puccoons. It was more than that. It was as if he knew already beforehand that he’d smell the puccoons on her. Somehow he’d been there before, in some other kind of life if that was possible, before he’d been born into this life, with the edges of the being-there-before resembling the vaporings of a horizon on a hot summer day.
Vaguely he was aware of footsteps going away from their door.
He fell asleep.
After that the Army left them alone.
An unlabeled bottle of perfume always stood on her dressing table.
One day he saw her touch a drop of it to her ears.
He went over and stood behind her. There it was. That special Katherine scent. The one that always set him off.
He picked up the bottle. It was half-full of something that looked like light beer. “What’s this?”
“A perfume I make.”
“What from?”
“Puccoons.”
“So that’s why I always smell them on you.” He uncapped the bottle and took a good whiff. “Mmm. Let me give you a word of advice.”
“Yes?”
“See to it that you never run out of this and then you’ll never lose me.”
She laughed. “Maybe it’s more the perfume you love than me.”
“Just don’t you ever run out of it. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
“You like it that much?”
“It’s the key to you.”
She told him how she made the perfume, from the squeezings of puccoon blossoms and the dregs of boiled puccoon roots.
The next day he took a stroll out on the prairie. Look as he might, he couldn’t find any puccoons.
He remembered then that on that first ride into Cheyenne with Sam he had seen some growing off to one side of the trail.
He saddled his tan mustang Prince and went to look for them.
He found them. The stalk and the leaves were still green, but the topmost flowers were edged with a withered brown. Only a few of the lower trumpet blossoms, much smaller, still had the true golden-orange color.
He picked them all. He also dug out several roots.
He carried them home to Katherine.
She was touched. She bit her lips to keep tears from starting.
“They are the right kind, ain’t they?”
“Yes.”
“I just didn’t want you ever to run out of it.”
I won’t.
She was gone uptown much of the day. She came home just before supper, tired, shadows under her eyes, face gaunt.
“Where you been, my lady?”
“Let’s have a bite first. Then I’ll tell you.”
She had on new black button shoes. She reached down to rub them over the toes. After a moment she took them off.
“Your new shoes are too tight for you, eh? I bet you’d like to soak your feet in warm water awhile, wouldn’t you? And have me rub them down?”
She drew in a sucking breath. “Why, Ransom, how nice of you to notice.”
“I’ll wash them for you if you want me to.”
“No-o. But it’s nice of you to think of it.”
After supper, sitting on his lap in their bedroom, she told him. “We’re moving tomorrow.”
He stirred under her like an uneasy horse. “What?”
“What would you say if I told you I’ve given The Stinging Lizard away?”
“You gave it away? To who?”
She blew her nose with a scented kerchief. “Well, to Hermie.”
“Why her?”
“She’s about the only one who’ll know how to keep things running. For the other girls’ good.”
“The house too?”
“All of it.” She turned in his arms. She sought his lips in his beard and kissed him. “I was practically given it free in the first place. So I decided I should give it free to somebody else in turn. So, I gave it to Hermie. I signed the papers today.”
“Good riddance, I say.”
“You’re glad?”
“Where are we going to move to now?”
“You are glad. Good.” She sighed, relieved. “Well, I rented an upstairs floor on the north side of town. In a nice brick house. We can move our bedroom stuff over tomorrow.”
He shook his head. “Let’s start fresh. With everything new. Bed and all.”
“Earl Ransom, why, I can’t do that!”
“Why not? Let’s wipe the slate clean all around.”
“Ransom.” She looked around at the four-poster bed and the love seat and the vanity and the rugs and the curtains and the movable closets. “Why, Ransom, dear, these came all the way from Chicago. Why, it took me years to find and order them. And I’ve come to love them.” She hardened a little. “What have you got against them?”
He pursed his lips under his gambler’s mustache. “Nothing.”
“Darling, these things … why, they’re me! They’ve come to mean home to me.” Her brown eye beseeched him to understand. “There’s nothing wrong with them. Nobody’s ever been … nobody’s ever seen them except you and me. And Hermie.”
“Yeh.”
“They are fresh with us.”
“Nnn.”
“But they are. I just got them.”
A silverish gleam danced in his green eyes.
“You’re jealous.”
“A little.”
At that she suddenly seemed pleased with him. She kissed him. “Did you really mean that about washing my feet?”
“Of course.”
“You darling.”
He got up with her still in his arms, placed her on the settee, went over and got a pan of warm water and a cake of white soap.
She laughed like a young girl. “You foolish boy you.” She drew up her skirt modestly around her knees and took off her stockings. Her toes wiggled in anticipation.
He took first one foot, then the other, and set them in the water. He soaped them thoroughly. He rubbed them. He ran his fingers in and out between her toes.
She laughed and giggled. She laughed involuntarily every time his thumb happened to stroke the sole of her foot. “Don’t tickle so much.”
“What long toes you have, lady.”
“Don’t you like them?”
“Now I see why you walk the way you do.” He stroked her big toe in particular. “Leverage. It gives you that extra little jump in your walk.”
“You’re tickling again. Ha ha. Ho ho. He he.”
“You know, my lady, it’s like it was meant to be by God Himself that I came to Cheyenne. So that I could wash your feet for you. Like the draw of an ace to fill out a straight in an important game.”
She leaned down and kissed his nose. “We’re perfectly matched. You’ve got a long nose and I’ve got a long big toe.”
He spotted a shadow under her bright manner. He wondered what sad memory of another time was crossing her mind. It probably had to do with that ot
her fellow. He was instantly jealous of that memory. He gave her feet a rough massage.
“I like that,” she said in a low voice.
He loved her voice when she spoke low and husky.
He decided to swallow away any regret he had that he hadn’t been the first with her. “It’s like I say. Yessiree. Any time you want to put your shoes under my bed, why, go right ahead, I won’t stop you.”
She had to laugh in spite of herself. “Ransom.” She leaned forward to kiss his brow. In so doing one of her feet slipped on the bottom of the white pan and water sloshed onto Ransom’s buckskins over the thigh.
“Hold’er, neut,” Ransom cried.
“Now look at what I’ve done.”
“It’s nothing.”
They laughed together, forgetting the shadow.
She kissed him. He returned the kiss. Lips became tender with lips. Soon a hammer beat on an anvil.
Life upstairs in the brick house was hardly different from life at The Stinging Lizard. The bedroom furnishings were exactly the same.
Ransom liked to take short rides on Prince out over the countryside.
Sometimes Katherine came along. She was a good horsebacker and rode Sam’s mustang Colonel. They cantered east and had a picnic in Pine Bluffs. They rode north to see the aftereffects of a cloudburst on Lodge Pole Creek. They galloped west to see the sights of Granite Canyon.
Katherine was always radiant after the rides. The shrew’s wrinkles at the corners of her lips vanished. There were times when she looked like a younger sister of Ransom’s.
She did the giddy things of a just nubile girl. She fluttered about in their bedroom, trying on new skirts and blouses, trying out various hairdos, trying out different perfumes and sachets.
She also did tender things for him. She made him mush and milk for breakfast, which he loved. She trimmed his beard. She taught him how to knot his tie neat and square.
Ransom rode alone one day out to Lone Tree Creek south of town. The sky was high. There appeared to be no atmosphere at all. To breathe was to taste what seemed to be the fumes of fermenting barley.
He found a single cottonwood and got off and lay down in its shade. He kicked off his boots and drew his sombrero down over his nose.
Prince cropped curly buffalo grass nearby. A vulture hung in the dry air above.
Within his closed eyelids Ransom watched a floating mote become a wriggling maggot. It drifted down and down. He kept it from sinking out of sight with a toss of his eyes, up; then once again watched it sink until it was almost out of sight.
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