by John Larison
I didn’t want to make no issue about keeping on my clothes. I didn’t want her to see that being bare scared me. So I stripped down and hung my things from the wall behind the stove as she done. I pulled up the other chair like it wasn’t no big deal and asked after the sugar so I’d have something to busy my hands. It was the first time I’d ever been bare before another.
“Pass me that rag first. Is the water hot?”
I dipped my finger in the pot. “You could try it.”
“I don’t want to if it ain’t hot. I aim to scold off this drought.”
“Well, it ain’t hot.”
Annette sat back. She sighed. “You gonna pass me the sugar or I gotta kill you for it?”
She licked a pair of fingers and buried them in the satchel and then sucked them clean like they was short ribs. I reached and took the bag for my own self and done the same. I sat back in my chair. “Damn it, give me the tobacco.”
She tossed me the pouch.
I rolled up one but it broke and so I dumped its guts back in the pouch and started again.
“You a fool at rolling them things.”
“I am not. Not on a given day.”
“Look at them fingers. They clumsy as clubs. Here.” She leaned across me and took back the pouch. I let her take it. My fingers was too nervous for careful work. She rolled us two in no time. “See, ain’t hard. You just got to own your fingers is all.”
She sparked a match and cupped her hand over it and leaned and lit my smoke and then hers and then waved out the match and flicked it into the corner. She was all the time lighting my smokes. I didn’t recall ever seeing her light nobody else’s smokes.
That’s what I was thinking but what I said was, “Don’t you worry you gonna burn down this place flicking matches like that?”
“Nah.” She was sitting close enough that I could smell her skin. Like dust before a thunderstorm, with some cedar in the mix. She was going at the sugar, three fingers at a time now, and I wanted it to rain.
Her skin wasn’t so different in hue. Not so different from the girl I left out.
“Why you looking on me like that?” she said in that voice of hers heavy with Indian sounds.
Somebody loved that girl I left out.
Without the whiskey to dilute it or the uniform to dam it, what I done flooded through me. Who was I to feel anything joyous in this life after I stole from that girl? After I stole that girl from one who loved her?
Annette frowned. Her cigarette burned unsmoked. She pushed the sugar to me but I was too far gone now. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s more whiskey in the world. We just got to find it is all.”
“I ain’t told you this. I ain’t told nobody.”
“What ain’t you told nobody?”
I had spent these months trying never to think of that girl. But she was always there, lurking just out of sight. And all my dodging had done nothing to age or dim her. I know it don’t make no sense, but I swear, on that night with Annette, the girl was in the room with us. She was sitting there and she too was bare to the world. Her ribs shown from where the magpie picked. Her eyes was gone, just dark holes, looking.
“I killed her, a girl, younger than us. I shot her from behind. She was stealing Ingrid and I broke open her head.”
The girl put her fingers in her sockets and removed the top of her skull as my bullet had.
Annette shrugged. “Some problems only a bullet can solve.”
“You don’t get it. I left her out for the scavengers. I just left her. No grave or nothing.”
Annette licked her fingers. “A grave ain’t for the dead. They work good, but if you miss your chance, no sense beating yourself over it. It’s all the same far as the dead concerned.”
“I killed her and I don’t know nothing about her.”
She waved to clear the smoke between us. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “If’n she was stealing your horse, she was prepared for what might come. She mighta done worse for you, you don’t know.”
“That don’t make me feel no better.”
She laughed. “Shit. What makes you think you get to feel better? Listen, you didn’t make the rules of this world. You was just dropped in it. What you and me know that the boys out there don’t is that we ain’t nothing special. Nothing we do will matter either way.” She slapped my knee. “That there is good news. That there means you and me is freer than wind. We look after our own selves. We look out for each other.”
I remembered the cigarette in my fingers and drew from it. The heat of the ember warmed my fingertips and dried my eyes. “It must matter.”
“Folks put too much stock in death. It don’t matter. You die, I die, we all die. You wanna die as some old hag all busted up and no teeth? Not me. I wanna die in a gunfight. I wanna die at the peak of living. You know?” She touched my knee. “Only one thing in this world better than a gunfight, and it’s harder yet to come by.”
“How can you say such awful things?”
“You so damn dramatical when you straight. I ain’t sure I like you without whiskey.” She winked and leaned past me and dipped her finger in the water upon the stove. “Here, turn around.”
“What?”
“Just do it.” She dunked a rag in the hot water. “Go on now. Have some sugar and then turn around. This here rag is getting colder by the second.”
I done as she asked and she put the hot cloth to my neck. The water run down my front and back at once, its warm streaks splattering on the floor. The cloth passed down my shoulders. Its course was slow and its warmth spread through me.
She dipped the cloth again and wrung it out and put it to my neck. “Now turn around so I can get at your front.”
“I’ll do my front,” I said matter-of-fact as if we was talking about cleaning stalls. In truth my heart was pounding louder than fists on a door. “I can reach my front just fine.”
“You sure?” She passed her finger over my marks.
“No, I ain’t.”
When she was done she dropped the rag in the pot and sat back and drew from a cigarette. Her eyes studied my person.
“Your turn. Do my back. And do like you mean it. Do like I done yours. Put some feeling into it. This is what we got. Make it matter. All that out there? It don’t matter. Not like this.”
I dipped the cloth in the water and then wrung it out and she said, “No. Don’t wring it out. I want it to run all over me. I want to feel it everywhere.”
She turned and spread her arms and I saw wounds to her flesh old as she was. Craters and faults where I was smooth. I put the cloth to them and let the water run about her and she sighed at its heat. “More,” she said. “I want it everywhere.” Her fingers come up sparkling in sugar and she took them in her mouth.
“They tell me I was three years old when the soldiers come through camp,” she said to the table. “They tell me . . . I don’t remember nothing. None of it.” She looked at me now. “But sometimes if all goes still and there ain’t nothing to chase and no whiskey to drink dry, well sometimes the smell comes back to me, and then I hear everything I didn’t see. I hear my ma’s voice. That morning never stops chasing me even though I ain’t got no memories of it.”
I put the cloth back in the pot and brought it dripping to the skin of her chest. I passed it down that most ragged scar and rivers run her length and spilled upon the floor.
“Burn me with it. I ain’t afraid of fire,” she said.
I put the scolding cloth to her face and passed it over her brow and then about her eyes.
She said, “Make it hot and then open it and lay it over my face. I want sugar on my tongue and I want to feel that heat on my lips and everywhere all at once. Can you do that?”
I done that for her.
“What we gonna do for clothes?” I whispered when we was d
one.
She tossed the rag into the pot and water sloshed over the edge and went to hissing vapor. Even the air was wet now. She shrugged. “Maybe I should go ask Jane for a dress.”
At this we laughed so hard we got to coughing.
We crawled under the warm quilt and listened to the cracking of the wood fire and for a long time neither of us said a word.
“If you ain’t afraid of fire,” I whispered, “what you afraid of?”
Her eyes opened. Tears glistened in the dark. “Honest?”
“Honest.”
“Being without a side.”
Even without whiskey, sleep always comes, and when it come for us it come deeper than in all my life before or since.
Annette was curled for warmth, her arms wrapped in the ancient posture of mother and child and lover and loved, and her breath was in my hair and we slept past the dawn and into the day. We rode the same dream from one day into the next.
Annette and me didn’t have long together, but we did have deep.
* * *
—
It was Noah who finally woke us. He beat on the door. “You in there, Net?”
“Sure.” Annette sat up and yawned, her arms out wide as if taking this whole world in her grasp. “Is it morning already?”
My brother’s voice through the door, “It’s damn near noon.”
Annette looked on me. “Oops,” she lipped. “Be right there, pardner.”
“You seen my sister this morning?”
I waved my hand to say no. So Annette called, “You wanna come take a peek for your own self?”
There was a pause. “She on duty up top?”
Annette made a joshing face and I nearly laughed out loud. “Must be. Is her shift and all.”
“You hurry up, Net. We’s got to race Blackie against Youn’s mare. I put it off last time but that Chinaman has got to talking madness again. Net?”
“Blackie’ll show him.” She winked at me. “Ain’t nobody luckier than Blackie.”
After he left, Annette pulled on her sweat-stiff jeans and tied her green bandanna about her neck and belted on her Remington. She smelled my stinky clothes on the line and shook her head.
“What’s we gonna do?” I asked in a hushed voice.
“About the whiskey?”
“Yeah, about the whiskey.”
“We got to get to town and stock up for winter.”
“I’ll talk to brother.”
“We should wait on rain,” she said. “Erase the tracks. Noah was sure about that.”
“Might not be any rain this autumn. Might go straight to snow. It’s got that feel about it.”
She pulled her hat on low and tipped it to me. “All I know about today is I aim to get back here with you.”
Nobody ever said nothing like that to me before. I didn’t know how to say what I felt, so I punched her in the shoulder.
She made like she might tackle me, but then held up and smiled.
After Annette left I warmed my hands over the woodstove and smelled the brown water that still steamed on top. My mind was clean in a manner I wasn’t accustomed to and I took that steam deep. It smelled of her, and it smelled also of the earth that had washed from us.
With my eyes closed I saw a garden, and us barefoot in it.
* * *
—
I found Noah outside the Rock with the boys, preparing to race Blackie against Youn’s mare. I pushed him from behind and he turned with his hand on his pistol. “What in the name . . .”
“Howdy, brother.”
“Don’t go pushing me like that. I shoot too quick. You liable to end up aired out.”
“I owed you one for slapping at me them nights before.”
The boys was watching. They all had quit their talking and was staring at what I done.
Noah said, “Jess, you can’t be pushing me.”
“But I got your attention.”
“Just say my name and you get my attention.”
I spat. “All right, brother. I’m going to town today. These skies smell like snow, and I’ve seen the supplies and counted the mouths and I know we ain’t got enough.”
“You and Annette just want whiskey,” he said.
“True. And I’ll get you some of that rollie tobacco you favor. But it’s flour and beans and salt pork we need. Let Annette and me go and we’ll come back with a wagon full. We’ll need six or eight more loads by my count, if we’s to stay fed until that baby comes.”
“Ten,” he said. “We need ten loads.”
“So let us get one, and also a feel for the heat on the roads.”
He turned from me and looked toward Youn. “Now he’s braiding that goddamn critter’s . . . Come on now!” he shouted. “This ain’t no beauty pageant! Let’s race these animals!”
“Brother, you listening?”
He glanced on me but then give his attentions back to Youn. He hollered, “You think a braided tail will help her run faster? Nothing could help that pony!”
“Brother!”
“Have you seen the reward on our heads? No wagons until the rains come. I ain’t bending, sister. Not for whiskey.”
“What if the rains don’t come? What if the snows come instead?”
“It’ll rain any day now,” he said, while looking at Youn.
“I don’t understand you, brother. How you can game with all these folks counting on you.”
He flicked off my hat. “Appreciate me for it, sister. I do the thinking so you don’t have to. Now stop jabbering and watch me outpace Youn and that pony he treats like a girlfriend. I promise, you’ll want to tell this story.”
* * *
—
I found Annette and held the pink dress Jane had given me up to my body.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Ain’t nothing more natural in the whole world than a husband and wife stocking up for winter.”
A big old smile come across her face. “This his idea or yours?”
“The dress is my idea,” I said. It was as close as I come to lying to her.
She looked about us. “I’m surprised he folded. You must hold some pretty high cards.”
“Sister cards.”
She laughed. She pointed with her thumb. “Let’s pick me out some attire and do this right.”
* * *
—
Annette wore a round hat and waxed coat that made her shoulders appear wider. I offered her a woolen beard but she refused it. She had removed her gun belt and hidden the pistols in the crevices of the wagon. Annette looked me up and down in that dress and bonnet and whistled. “Boy, howdy! Now that there is a lady.”
“I hate pink.”
“Don’t hate it. It don’t hate you.” She felt the fabric between her fingers. “Don’t move just yet. I want to remember this for some time.”
We climbed atop the wagon. I wore a quilt over my legs to ward off the chill. I almost told her then, but I didn’t. Maybe I worried she’d pick him.
Annette clicked and gave the reins a flick and the wagon rolled. There come the welcome music of metal rims on stone and hooves on earth and the shifting mass of a hearty wagon. We rolled into the windblown sage. I thought of Ma and Pa crossing the mountains all them years before.
Our timing was right. Noah and the boys was off on the back side of the Rock.
“Where’s your guns?” she asked.
“A wife never tells.”
We was across the valley and out of sight when I said, “Give me some your rollie tobacco.”
She looked me over. “That ain’t no way for a gal to talk.”
I thought on how Jane would ask. “Might I taste those smoky leaves you hard men so fancy? Trade you for a biscuit and jam.”
Annette laughe
d.
I said, “Well, give it to me.”
She shrugged. “I’m plum out. Tell me you got a pouch hidden somewhere.”
“Plugs. But I’m in the mood for rollies.”
Annette flicked the reins and sighed. “Maybe it’s a sign. I’ve been trying to quit them rollies. They get their claws in you deep.”
I retied my bonnet so it would conceal my marks. “Quit smokes? Good heavens, why?”
“I kind of think they make me smell a little queer.”
“You don’t say.”
“My fingers mostly. I don’t like my fingers smelling queer. I like them smelling like horse sweat or gunpowder.”
* * *
—
We rode into the dark and as the moon rose and thrust shadows upon the earth I found myself full of contradictory notions. The wagon rocked and clanked and I spread preserves on bread and fed the bites into Annette’s mouth. The lantern swung on its hook and the squeak of its handle set a fine rhythm to our travels.
We kept on without hardly a pause but to water the horses. We took double plugs to keep awake and stared out at the darkness. There come the sound of the creek for a time where it rushed on below. It faded off and then was gone and soon after we broke from the warmth of the pines and into the chill open and saw then the expanse of stars from horizon to horizon.
We needed supplies and we was out of whiskey, but in truth, I reckon, I wanted to know Annette outside the shadow cast by my brother.
“How’d you come to be the boss of those boys?” I asked. “They don’t doubt you at all.”
Annette shrugged. “They did at first. Doubted hard. But you ever seen a turkey in springtime? That’s every boy you ever met.”
“I guess I don’t see your point.”
“There ain’t a turkey in the whole world who can stay puffed up all day, now is there? And after he lets down, he’s always gonna be a touch unsure of his honest size. So that’s when you show him.”