by Téa Obreht
She tried. “I’m that sorry for all this trouble, Desma,” she said. And then: “In fairness, I doubt you’ll ever get another letter again.”
But Desma wasn’t smiling. The back of her hand touched one cheek and then the other. She went on looking at the ground.
Was it possible, Nora thought. It couldn’t be.
“Oh Desma,” she said. “You aren’t crying?”
Comets and two-headed calves were a sight more common than this. She couldn’t remember the last time it had happened—if it had ever happened at all.
Already, it was gone. Desma sat up. She was back to her stone self again.
“Don’t you got somewhere to be, Missus Lark?” she said.
NOONTIME BROUGHT HER IN SIGHT of maintown Amargo. The hills, with their few remaining headframes, were bald and flat-topped and broadly streaked with ore, black bands swooping from ridge to ridge. Rockspurs leapt up out of the sage along the canyon rim. It still surprised her to see roofs in the Big Fork Creek bottomland. Every now and again she half-expected to clear the rise and find the place restored to its primitive state: both shores thick with tents and laundry lines and gambling layouts; the nascent thoroughfare choked with wagons; the bummers hovering over stinking cookpots; sun-roasted men panning the glittering current. Most of these seekers of fortune had moved on when the silver played out. The few that got their feet under them had raised houses and bought bowlers and taken to calling each other Mister—until now.
What a thing to have gotten all the way to Desma’s and then found herself too provoked, too besieged to ask for water. Never mind the elk steaks—they could be managed without. But to leave Desma’s house, in the aftermath of a quarrel, feeling for the first time that she really must not, dare not, ask for anything. Well, it struck her cold.
She had fled—yes, fled—with no water at all. Now she was at the mercy of the town’s mercurial cistern, and it was nobody’s fault but her own.
She rode over the bridge. The faintest shadow of last year’s waters dampened the creekbed below, making a liar of Moss Riley, whose joint, The Paloma House, still boasted river views from every room. It was a sin, really, how Moss had let the place fall to ruin. Sure, the sun and dust wrought their worst on everything out here, but one did not have to go along with it. He could at least freshen the place up a bit, add a dab of paint, straighten those shutters. Not everyone coming into town by this road should be subjected to the sight of all his broken tables, shattered mirrors, and stained chamber pots. What in hell was his wife about, letting that deluge pile up on the back porch? Too busy idling on the creekbank behind the hotel, it seemed, with her forehead on her knees and the last vestiges of a cigarette disappearing between her fingers, to bother keeping house. She was a loud, insipid Tennessee girl who proved incontrovertibly that a bettered station in life could not necessarily make every woman a lady, nor lighten her hand with rouge. Perhaps, by some miracle, she might not raise her head until after Nora had already moved on. But then old Bill went clattering over the end of the bridge, and up came Millie’s face like a damp balloon. She wiped her eyes hurriedly with her apron. What was she crying about now? She was young enough yet, and could have done a lot worse than Moss Riley, given her starting position in life.
Millie made the grievous error of calling out. “Oh, Missus Lark.” Still wiping her eyes. “How’s Rob doing?”
All the rage she’d been damming since Desma’s place flew out of her at once.
“What’s it to you, Millicent Riley?”
The innkeep’s wife had the decency to look stupefied. “Missus Lark! I was only asking after him. I didn’t think—”
“Just because you’re not calling down from balconies anymore don’t make it fine for you to mention my son to me by name!”
“I didn’t mean nothing by it! I only want to know he’s alright.”
“Of course he’s alright!”
She might have felt less sheepish about the outburst had she not found Moss instated in his usual porch chair just around the corner. He had evidently taken Doc Almenara’s suggestion about cabbage to heart in the weeks since she’d last seen him. His clothes drooped like dead sails.
Nora was already shouting, “The place looks a disgrace, Moss—I was only telling your wife, why don’t the boys help you paint it up?” just in case he’d overheard her wilding back there.
Red in the face, unaided by the spectacles he refused to wear, Moss squinted bleakly in her direction. “Who the hell is that?” he said. “Nora!” He gripped the railing and staggered to his feet. “Nora, what are you doing in town?”
“Bringing the boys their lunch—why don’t I send them round here after?”
“The boys?”
“Yes, Moss, the boys.”
“What for?”
Another man, a stranger, now emerged from the cool darkness of the hallway and stood on the porch behind Moss. It struck her suddenly that this man might be that rarest of all entities—a lodger. And if there was one thing Moss was likely to appreciate even less than having his young wife roared down, it was having his establishment’s deficiencies enumerated in the presence of a paying customer. Though by the look of the fella, he had likely surmised them by now. It would take some effort to keep that suit looking so black at Moss’s.
She backtracked all the same. “Welcome, mister,” she said helpfully. “Don’t mind a bit of banter between neighbors. You’ll find it customary in Amargo to jape each other a little about the state of our brickwork and so on. You’ve chosen right—I wouldn’t lay my head on any pillow that weren’t my own, save for Moss Riley’s.”
The stranger touched his hat.
She turned to Moss. “So I’ll send the boys round later?”
“Are they with you, then?” Moss asked. “The boys?”
“They’ll finish up at the Sentinel around three—I’ll tell them come by?”
Moss went on squinting.
This was when the stranger came to the railing. “Don’t hold up any work on the place for my sake, Mister Riley,” he said. “I don’t mind a bit of noise.”
“There!” Nora said. “You see? A game soul. Hope you gave him a good room, Moss.”
“What’s that?”
“I said: hope you’ve put this gentleman up in the turret, so he can see the old mines.”
“Ah!”
“Indeed, he has,” the stranger put in. “Thank you.”
She smiled broadly through the sudden, indelible feeling that this man had not only never seen the turret, but had perhaps never ventured any further than Moss Riley’s hallway. Here she was, bulling through one conversation, while all this time the two of them had been having another.
“Three o’clock all right, then?” she managed.
“Superb,” the stranger said. “We’ll be waiting.”
Moss took a moment. “All right. Thank you, Nora. All right.”
She found just about time enough to say, “All right, Moss—all right,” before they disappeared inside.
What had he managed to get himself into this time? What a twitching, careless little duck he was—darting and conniving and locked in a seething contest, since the instant his boots had touched this soil, with Walt Stillman, proprietor of The Bitter Root Inn just across the street, over whose boardinghouse had first welcomed wanderers and inebriates. The object of this honor was a mystery, but apparently important enough to ignite a come-to-blows hatred in both men. Over the years, they had replaced their respective shingles at least a dozen times, racing each other backwards, bypassing first the foundation of the town, the establishment of the Territory, and the War of the Rebellion. The new steel plaque suspended over The Bitter Root Inn now read AS OLD AS THE REPUBLIC—which felt like a pointed full-stop at the end of an interminable sentence.
If Walt emerged before she moved on, she thought
frantically of japing him, too—since it had gone so well just now. She might say, “Which Republic is that, Walt?” Just to rile him to hell. She slowed her horse, but he did not appear. The solitary man on his porch was as much a stranger as the black-coat back at the Paloma had been—a tall, lank rake with a baroque pocket square and boots so clean they could only be new. He kept his heel up on the porch chair and nodded at her, standing there with his pipe lit and his duster hanging straight. More of his ilk moved about within. One of them was clanging out a graceless rendition of “Laredo” on Walt Stillman’s precious piano—which, like Walt Stillman’s girls, was unaccustomed to being handled before four o’clock. Another man stood in the upstairs window beside a woman’s bare arm.
One more of these well-clad strangers was pacing the Mercantile porch, evidently waiting on Juan Carlos Escondido to open up. To reach the cistern, Nora now realized, she would have to come past him. If today was one of the five days out of six that the lever pumped only creaking air—which seemed likely, because she could tell even at this distance that the ground beneath it was pale and dry—this hardly seemed worth it.
But her thirst, her thirst—it had made her so rough and angry already, and there was still so much of the day left to endure.
“Any water today?”
The fella looked at her and then down at the self-incriminating spout. “Don’t look like it.”
“Give it a try for me there, would you, sir?”
He slowly depressed the handle. It let out a blurt of compressed air.
“Please pardon it,” Nora said, “it never did have any manners.”
He nodded a little and went back to studying his fingernails. Still more galling than his single, hapless attempt at the pump—didn’t he know the thing had to be forced?—was how immune he seemed to her charms. She was not devoid of them. A young woman yet, still mostly in color. Not so long ago, her hesitation to speak with this particular type of man, on this particular type of expedition, would have been rooted in her unwillingness to insist that she was already married. Well, fool her for making a joke. She swung out of the saddle and came up the steps, fumbling with the water bladder, which had got all tangled up in its own bindings. The fella deigned to shuffle aside and let her by.
“Sometimes, you have to give it a few pumps,” she explained. She could feel him watching her as she bore down on the handle once, twice, three times. For a hopeful moment, she felt resistance as the lever caught something below, but it was only more damp air. “It knows to be fickle,” she said nervously.
“Ain’t it just the way.”
“Suppose I’ll have to try again later.”
“I reckon so.”
* * *
—
The printhouse sat just past the jail at the far end of the thoroughfare. It was a low, squat building, fronted by a crooked tract of boardwalk. Between its dismal color and small windows, it tended to remind her too much of Morton Hole. But the absence of the usual crowd on its porch waiting to buy newspapers, or complain, or post their adverts, was a great improvement.
She rummaged through her saddlebags for the lunchpails. The sun had scorched them through. She remembered suddenly Rob’s inexplicable amusement with this in his more agreeable years. Whenever it happened—which was often—he would pat her on the shoulder and say: “It’s all right, Mama. You ain’t ruined the lunch—you just cooked it on the way!” Remembering this felt like flinging wide the door of a forgotten room. The phrase seemed so inextricable from his boyhood self—where had it been these last few years? She doubted he would recall it. He seemed to spend the balance of his life sloughing off every part of himself that predated his first shave. But she would try him anyway. She would come through the door saying: “Beans, boys—cooked on the way!”
It might at the very least stun them into a smile.
The gold-lettered Lark & Sons shingle had slipped off its hook again. She was stooping to pick it up when she noticed the storefront window.
A craw of ruptured glass was still suspended in the pane. The edges of the cut caught the entering light and twisted it throughout the office, spangling the press and the aprons on their hooks and Emmett’s desk under its mountain of papers. She went in to stillness and the sour smell of ink and paper. Nobody answered her. The press was hinged wide, interrupted in its downward stroke. A composite still lay on the platen, a tumble of inky metal letters. Last week’s copies hung on a laundry line from wall to wall.
She returned shakily to the window. She’d seen the wreckage of a round coming through glass, most lately at Escondido’s Mercantile. This break did not have the same clean, striated outburst. And there was nothing embedded in the opposite wall. There should be, in the aftermath of gunplay: didn’t the front of every joint in town still bear the scars of the camp’s early days? The round at Escondido’s was stuck so deep that Juan Carlos had given up trying to gouge it out, and rearranged his pictures and signage in an even more awful configuration to cover it up.
No, this hole was much too big. Her fist fit easily between the glass points without touching them. Whatever had done the damage must have been about that size. A rock, perhaps deliberately hurled. Perhaps by one of the strangers watching her from across the street—but to what end? An accidental deployment of some innocent projectile was far more likely, for she could find no further evidence in here save for tiny, sharp shards interspersed among the bristles of the broom in the corner, the sight of which slowed her heart a little. Somebody had swept up. Well, that couldn’t have been her boys. They would never have tidied after a fight. They would have gone straight over to the Paloma for a nostrum to numb the resetting of their teeth, and then tried in vain to lie about it later.
The back room was just as empty as the front, though strewn with unmistakable signs of Rob: balled-up pages, cigarette ends (God help us, Evelyn muttered, he’s some fool smoking around all this paper, Mama!). An inexplicable pair of decaying boots lay felled under the chair. On the desk sat the handwritten template for this week’s front page, outlined forward and then shakily, uncertainly, in reverse. That Rob had lied about being able to composite without the aid of a draft was obvious enough. His frustration manifested in the dark loops of his heavily weighted script. Every few sentences saw him reversing an R or a K and scratching it out in darker and more exasperated gray cyclones.
She slid the desk drawer open and felt through the papers for Emmett’s old Colt revolver. Nothing—save a poorly hidden whiskey bottle.
They been drinking, Evelyn said. A lot.
An ellipse of light hurried around the final brown dram at the bottom of the bottle. She could not help herself. It went down like fire, but was worth the pleasant contraction of her throat, the momentary illusion of relief.
She got on her knees to look under the desk, but found only a few scattered letters of type and a flattened beetle. A crumpled, dust-hardened telegraph slip was wedged far back against the wall. The effort of retrieving it crooked her neck.
She smoothed it out on the floor. The wobbly type of the Ash River telegraph office meandered across the page. It was addressed to the care of Misters Robert C. Lark and Dolan M. Lark. Dear sirs, it read:
Have received your petition formally querying Marshal Office investigation into whereabouts of Emmett Seward Lark. Lack resources at present to do the same re: whereabouts of Paul Griggs (waterman, Griggs Water of Grayson Co.). Have forwarded your description of Mr. Lark’s dray, and the location of your reported sighting near Sanchez ranch in Grayson County. Have confirmed with Sheriff Harlan Bell there exists no such conveyance on or near Sanchez property or any place thereabouts. At this time we believe no indication of foul play is evident. For further discussion we invite you to rendezvous at the Office of the Marshal Prescott Az Territory. Sincerely, Marshal Dance Prescott Az Territory.
THE UNHELPFUL STRANGER WAS STILL peacocking around Juan Car
los’s porch when she got back outside. He did not seem to intuit her distress, and she stood there with her hands half-raised—whether in greeting or in demand of an explanation, even Nora didn’t know.
“What happened here?” she said stupidly, at long last.
“Where?”
“There’s glass everywhere, the window’s broken.”
“Is it?” He seemed unperturbed by this news.
“Did you see anything?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well how long you been standing there?”
“Awhile.”
“You been standing there awhile and haven’t seen nobody throw aught through this window?”
She knew now that she was trying to ingratiate herself to him. She reviled this tendency in herself. But even the contrivance of poor grammar did not penetrate his nonchalance. He shrugged. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“Well that’s a wonderment.”
“Sounds like you got it all pretty well figured, though. Nice work, ma’am.”
It struck her suddenly that this was deliberate. He was not the dimmest man in Creation after all—he was taunting her. “Well I’ll go get my friend the Sheriff, then,” she said.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
She could feel him watching her as she moved down the street.
The jailhouse door was locked. She dragged the porch chair over and climbed up to peer inside. Harlan had battened the place down at the start of his tenure as though the entire Apache nation were liable at any moment to break in or out of it. She could hardly see anything. A few bars of sunlight pooled on the fore-office floor. A belt and mismatched pair of boots were heaped by the corner basin, but it was the hat she finally recognized as belonging to Armando Cortez. Here he was, back again, sockless and sunburnt, laid out on his side and alternating his ragged breathing with somnolent utterances while the jailhouse cot creaked beneath him.
Nora called his name until he sat up. Sometimes he could seem like his old self. The man who would arrive in the cool of the evening, after walking the three miles from his place to theirs, in his good clothes, always with a loaf in one hand and some oddity he’d picked up for the boys—a bird’s egg, a petrified pine cone, the odd tooth—in the other. When had she last seen the old naturalist anywhere but here? Probably before Agnes had herded their girls into the Santa Fe stage and left him to that empty house, with its dry well, and his tab at the Bitter Root Inn, which only lengthened once she was gone. Every now and again, Harlan said, the Profesor roused up and gave the impression of having suddenly improved overnight, for good, and Harlan would permit himself to hope it might be true. Perhaps this time evening wouldn’t find him draped over the bar, furthering his debts while he grew more and more agitated—the weather, goddamn them, hadn’t anybody else in this town read an almanac or history in their lives? What were they all doing here, watching the sky, farming rock and dust? Didn’t they realize the only reliable harvest was death? Once Armando landed on that point, Harlan would walk over and fetch him back. Self-solution, he reasoned, could be managed a lot more easily at home than in a jail cell. And at least here, Armando could weep out some of the horrors that clouded his mind: the rot of mankind, the eventual, inevitable death of his daughters. He was lucky, Sheriff Bell, not to have children. He would only spend his life imagining them dead. Nora had told him the very same thing. And indeed, on those rare occasions when the evening pressed in on her, Armando Cortez was always within it. They were aligned, she and Armando, in their thinking and in their grief, for all time probably, thanks to Evelyn. She considered herself fortunate to have learned not to think of him most days.