Unfortunately, a propitious flash of forked lightning during an early preaching had convinced the country's shepherdless flock to open up their pockets. But it didn't take long for the Reverend Jack to fall back into his old sins of drinking, fighting, whoring, and gambling. Eventually even the most gullible sheep got wise, and the dollars stopped ringing in the old stovepipe hat. One day in the fall of 1881, he'd up and disappeared, and Gus had thought that at last his prayers had been answered.
Now here he was back again, as perennial and tormenting as fleas in summer. From the look of things, he'd given up on the sin-busting game and found another way to separate the world's fools from their hard-earned money.
The last hand had played itself out in a hurry and the deck had passed to One-Eyed Jack for the deal. Gus watched the graceful, long-fingered hands cut and shuffle the cards. When he was a boy the cards had seemed to take on life in his father's hands. Like magic, he could make them appear and disappear, turn a deuce into an ace, or shift a king from the bottom to the top of the deck. He had passed the tricks on to both his sons, but only Zach had had any talent for it. Gus thought of the hours he had spent watching Zach practice palming a card, learning how to cheat.
For the first time Gus took note of the other players in the game: Doc Corbett, Snake-Eye, and Pogey and Nash. The whiskey glowed like lampshine in their faces.
"They're playing no-limit straight stud, no joker," Zach said. He signaled to the bartender, who poured him another shot and drew a small glass of beer for a chaser. Zach took the makings of a cigarette out the pocket of his unbuttoned vest. "Big stakes and let losers cry."
"Big stakes?" Snake-Eye's livery was a mint in disguise, and it was said the doc had East Coast money. But all the two old prospectors had was their income from the Four Jacks lease, which kept them fine in whiskey and five-dollar-ante poker games, but didn't allow for any big-stakes doings. "What are Pogey and Nash playing with?"
"The old man bankrolled them. Five thousand dollars against their eighty percent of the Four Jacks claim. They've lost most it of back to him already."
"Lost it!" Gus's hands jerked into fists. "Lost it? My God, you know him, you know how he is. How could you just stand here and let it happen?"
Zach lit the cigarette dangling from his lips. "Because I don't fancy myself my brother's keeper like you do."
Gus growled deep in his throat and started to push past his brother, who laid a heavy hand on his arm. "You can't horn in on another's man's game," Zach said.
"I can if he's dealing from the bottom of the deck."
"He ain't."
"How can he not be? You know the man—he's as crooked and wily as a snake and always has been."
Zach's hat brim rose slightly as he peered at him from underneath it. "I've been standing here letting it happen, remember? He's shooting square."
"Well, hell." Gus shot a glare in the direction of his father and rubbed the back of his neck. He supposed that it took a scoundrel to know a scoundrel, and if anyone could tell if the old man was cheating, it would be Zach.
He also trusted his brother's sense of right and justice about as far as he could spit a brick. He narrowed his eyes the better to study the action at the table.
The Reverend Jack was drawing deep on his cigar, making its tip glow fierce. He nodded at Pogey, whose turn it was to ante or fold. Each man had one hole card and three cards showing. "It's back to you again, old-timer. Are you staying?"
Pogey took a peep at his hole card. He combed his beard, gave the hanging flap of his earlobe a tug, rubbed the shiny dome of his head, aimed a shot of tobacco cud in the general direction of the spittoon, then took another peep at his hole card.
Nash stretched and scratched at a fleabite on his skinny chest. "You foldin' or staying, Pogey?"
"I'm thinkin'."
"Well, think a little faster. You're so slow you'd miss your own funeral."
Pogey rubbed his nose. "Anybody ever tell you, pard, that it's hard to put a foot in a shut mouth?" He tapped his hole card with a gnarled knuckle. "A faint heart never filled a flush—I'm stayin'."
Every man stayed and every man held a pair in sight, except Pogey, who had three clubs. Nash had tens to a queen. Snake-Eye had a pair of jacks to a four. The doc had treys to a six. And the Reverend Jack had a pair of deuces to an eight.
He began to deal around the fifth card. "Here comes the train, gentlemen, rolling down the track. A queen matches a queen and two pairs in sight. A five to the jacks and no visible help. A heart for the clubs and the flush goes bust. Another trey and the doc is sitting pretty with three of a kind. The dealer draws a deuce." He set down the deck and looked over at Nash. "Your bet, sir."
Pogey pitched in his ruined flush. "I'm busted."
"Amen to that," Snake-Eye said as he turned over his cards.
"Three lousy treys don't like the odds of bucking two pairs in sight," the doc said. "But I'll ride 'em for a while yet. I'm in for a hundred."
Nash added a wad of crumpled bills to the pile in the middle of the table. "Call and bump five hundred."
Nash might have been an owl sitting on a fence for all the expression he wore. But his bet revealed what his face didn't. He had a full house, either queens and tens or tens and queens.
The Reverend Jack contemplated the coal of his cigar. From what showed on the table he couldn't beat Nash's full house, unless he had a fourth deuce hiding in the hole.
"I will see you and raise it fifteen hundred," he said.
"He's bluffing," Gus said out the side of his mouth. "He always could run a bluff and make it stick."
A half smile flicked across Zach's mouth. "Brother, never bet your convictions against a bluff."
The doc pulled a disgusted face and tossed in his hand. "I knew these treys would last about as long as shit in a goose. I'm out."
Nash peered at his cards with his large liquid eyes. "What's it to me, then?"
"Fifteen hundred," the Reverend Jack said.
The money left at Nash's elbow looked shy of the bet. A silence settled over the table, as thick as the smoke puffing from the end of One-Eyed Jack's cigar. Pogey flipped through what was left of his stake and passed most of it over to Nash, leaving only a few forlorn bills.
"I'll see ya, then," Nash said, and the last of the Four Jacks silver mine went into the pot.
Jack McQueen blew another plume of smoke over the table and then slowly, drawing out the drama of it, turned over his hole card. It was the fourth deuce.
Chairs scraped across the rough floor as the game broke up, and players and spectators alike crowded around the bar in a hurry to make up for lost drinking time. One minute it seemed to Gus that Zach was finishing off the last of his whiskey, and the next thing he knew, his brother was so close to disappearing out the door that Gus had to take long strides to catch up with him.
He grabbed him by the shoulder. "Just where do you think you're going?"
The face Zach turned to him was as blank as a fresh snowdrift. "I thought I'd go and watch the fireworks."
"You send for me to come down and witness this... this travesty, and now you're going to sashay on out of here as if nothing's happened?"
"What do you want me to do—play a funeral dirge for you on the piano? I told you he wasn't cheating. Those two old fools fell into his hands like a couple of ripe peaches on a hot summer day, and he ate 'em all up but for the pits."
"Then you can just go and win it all back."
"Now, how in sweet hell am I going to do that? I've got maybe all of ten dollars to stake. That and my share in the ranch."
"You could cheat." Gus's mouth pulled into a tight smile. "I heard you were taught by the best of them."
Zach's dark brows lifted in eloquent mockery. "I ain't believin' I'm hearing this out the mouth of my big brother, who wouldn't say boo to the devil—"
"Dammit, Zach."
"Like you said, I was taught by the best of them and so were you, though you never were much good at
it. Maybe I've picked up a few tricks he doesn't know. But then, maybe he knows a few tricks he never showed me. You want to bet the ranch on which of us is the sharper blackleg?"
Zach held his gaze for a moment, then turned on his boot-heel, slapped open the door, and disappeared into the twilight.
"It looks like you and I are partners in a silver mine, son. Would you care for a cigar?"
Gus looked down into the open silver case, at the expensive cigars banded with silk, then back up into his father's canny blue eye. "You give up preaching to take up gambling full-time now? What happened—did the power of the Spirit desert you in the middle of the night?"
The reverend shook his head, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Gustavus, Gustavus. For all your dreaming, you simply never have had any vision. T am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.' Except there isn't any wilderness anymore. It's been ruined by all these committees of elders with their building funds and membership drives. Organized religion has come in and taken all the fun and money out of preaching. So I followed the good Lord's holy promptings and took the pasteboards back up again in a serious way." He clamped his teeth deep into the butt of the cigar and looked himself up and down, his eye twinkling with mischief. "From the appearance of things, I would say I've found my true calling in this latter half of my interesting life."
Gus shook his head. Although he hadn't had so much as a beer all day, he felt a little drunk. His father could do that to him—confuse him until he didn't know which end was up. "The only calling I've ever known you to follow," he said, "was to stir up trouble just for the sick joy you seem to get out of watching it mess up other people's lives."
"I suppose you'd rather see me spend my days facing the ugly end of a mule, busting sod, or button-holed up in some tiny room bent over a ledger, getting ink stains on my cuffs and putting a strain on the only good eye I got left. Why, if you had your druthers—"
Gus sputtered a hollow laugh. "If I had my druthers I'd see you run out of Rainbow Springs on a rail."
Jack pressed a hand to his heart. "You wound me, son— grievously, most grievously. And what have I ever done to deserve it? What have I ever done to you boys except allow you find your own merry way to hell?" His mouth pulled into his wily smile. "If you go around seeking the light, Gustavus, you must also be willing to face the darkness."
Gus breathed a weary sigh. "I don't suppose it's ever occurred to you to try and earn your living by honest means?"
"'He that walketh uprightly, walketh surely.'" He took the cigar from his mouth, examined it, and tossed it into a sawdust spit box. "Maybe I will, now that I own a silver mine. Are you looking to unload your twenty percent? If you are, I'm buying."
Gus anchored his hat down on his head and put the flat of his hand on the door. "Too bad for you, because I'm not selling—"
He was interrupted by gunfire.
It was just a bunch of miners, who'd had a little too much beer and sunshine and who'd taken a notion to anticipate the fireworks display by displaying a few fireworks of their own. They'd hitched up an empty lumber wagon, climbed into the box, sent it careening down the street, and tried to see how many windows and signs they could kill. Bullets rained into the Gandy Dancer, clattering like hail, splintering tables and chairs, slapping into the walls, and busting open three full kegs of not-yet-diluted whiskey.
After the gunfire stopped, Gus picked himself up off the floor, brushed the broken glass, wood chips, and whiskey out of his hair, knocked the sawdust off his knees, and looked around, his heart pounding, to see if the old man had gotten himself shot.
But wild and ricocheting bullets weren't known for their discrimination. It was Nash who was laid out beneath the shattered front window, a dark red stain spreading over the lighter, faded red of his shirt. Pogey knelt over him, a look of disbelief on his face.
Gus slopped through gushing streams of whiskey to get there just as Pogey gripped his partner by the arms and shook him. "Nash, Nash, damn you, say something. God almighty, but if this ain't the one time in yore life when yore jaw ain't a-flappin', and I'd give my left nut just to hear you grunt."
Nash stirred, grunting loudly. "Pogey?" He started to sit up and then looked down and saw the blood leaking out of a hole in his chest, and his eyes opened wide. "Pogey, them sons of bitches went and kilt me."
Pogey rocked back on his heels. He scrubbed at the wetness on his face, which was about half and half tears and whiskey. "Your timin' stinks, ya know that, compadre? You go an' get yerself kilt on the day it decides to rain bug juice."
By this time Doc Corbett had made his way through the rivers of whiskey and the men who were trying to drink it up fast before it evaporated or got soaked up by the sawdust or ran down into the cracks between the floorboards. He hunkered down next to the gunshot man and peeled back the striped suspenders and blood-soaked shirt. He tsked and shook his head, and Pogey choked down a sob.
"He's not going to die," the doc said. "You're not going to die."
Nash creaked his head up, the better to aim his glare at the doc. "What d'you know about it? I'm gushing blood like a Yellowstone geyser and I hurt worse'n a blue bitch. If anybody oughta know when a feller's dyin', it oughta be the feller what's dyin'."
Just then someone with a bit of sense must have figured out that alcohol, burning coal oil, and flying bullets were a dangerous combination, for suddenly the lamps went out.
Nash's head fell back and he moaned. "It's growing dark. Give me your hand, Pogey." His own hand groped along the whiskey-sodden floor. "I'm fadin', fadin' fast now. I can't hardly see a thing—" This last word ended on a cough and he moaned again. "The death rattle, Pogey... she's a-buildin' in my chest. It won't be long now."
Doc Corbett looked up at Gus and grinned as he pulled at one end of his waxed handlebar mustache. "The bullet's lodged against the collarbone. Soon as I fetch my instruments I'll have it out quicker and slicker than a greased pig."
A tenor broke into a song about smiling Irish eyes and was soon joined by a bass and a baritone.
"I hear angels singin'!" Nash exclaimed.
Pogey snatched off his hat and whacked him on the leg with it. "Will you quit it, you larruping ol' fool? The doc says you ain't dyin'."
Nash, who'd had his eyes squeezed shut in anticipation of the glories of heaven, popped one open and then the other. "I ain't? Well, hellfire, what for are you dripping all over me like a wet blanket, Pogey? Push me on over beneath that there barrel. Time and whiskey's a-wastin'!"
Rapt faces turned toward the heavens, and mouths fell open in breathy oohs and ahs as the rockets burst into noisy rainbow blossoms in the deep blue well of darkness that was a Montana night.
Gus picked his way through the shadowy figures sitting on the grass. He reeked of whiskey, and he wondered how he was going to explain it to Clementine. She had expected him back in time for the fireworks, but he'd figured the least he could do was see Pogey through the trauma of having a bullet dug out of his collarbone—not only because the man was his friend but because it was his father who had cleaned out the poor old prospector's pockets just minutes before he was shot.
He found her sitting on a blanket with his brother. Charlie lay between them, so worn out he was sleeping through the noise. Zach leaned against the trunk of a cottonwood, one leg bent, his wrist resting on his knee. Clementine was leaning back on her braced hands, her face turned toward his brother's. They weren't talking, though. All they appeared to be doing was looking at each other.
"There you are, Gus," she said as he came up to them, and a sweet smile softened her face. She looked beautiful, her hair shining and her eyes sparkling with the bursts of colored fire.
Gus sat down and slipped his arm around her waist. A ball of fire streaked across the sky with a shrieking whistle and an exploding hail of sparks. Light rippled across the blanket in intermittent flashes of red, white, and blue. His brother turned his head and their eyes met, and Z
ach's face lit up with a splendid smile that was brighter than any rocket.
And yet, and yet... A thought came to Gus, came more as a feeling, as a tight ache in his chest. A thought that there had been something in the air between them, between his brother and his wife. Something he had shattered when he stepped into the circle made by the blanket they shared. Like taking a mallet to a sheet of the thinnest ice.
But the thought slipped away and was forgotten as Clementine put her hand on his knee and leaned into him, and he breathed deeply of the wild rose smell of her, and he felt the warmth of her body.
"Look at our Charlie," she said. "Sleeping like a little angel while the sky rains fire." And she laughed her laugh that was as soft and pure as a fresh snowfall. Together they looked at their son, and together they smiled.
CHAPTER 22
Their Charlie died on a day in late August when the chokecherries hung fat and black on the trees. The sky was so deep a blue, the air so clear, the mountains had that sharp, transparent look, and the river caught the sunlight, reflecting it back to the heavens. And the grass was long and soft, and the color of his hair.
In the days that followed, Clementine held the moment of it in her mind and lived it over and over, and the memory of it was like the loop of a lasso, twirling, twirling, twirling through her head. It always began with her standing at the kitchen window and the men in the corral mating a stud horse to a mare.
The kitchen smelled of the oatmeal she had fixed for breakfast that morning. The day was warm and the cottonwoods were turning their leaves up to the sun. Thieving jays were raiding the chicken feed scattered over the yard, and Charlie was pretending to shoot at them from between the porch rails with his wooden gun. "Bang!" he would shriek. "You're dead! Bang! Bang!"
The men had brought the stud into the corral. The mare stood with her hind legs spread, her tail raised to one side, winking her female opening. The stud pranced and strutted and whistled, for he had done this before. He advanced on the mare, his organ large and proud. He mounted her and bit her neck, and she screamed.
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