by Leif Enger
“I got no expectations,” Glendon replied. “I plan to say my piece and leave.”
The vaquero appraised him. “If that’s all you mean to do, I will tell you something. She is no longer in Mexico. She and her husband bought the orchards in California, on a river called the Rienda. Last I heard, that’s where they were.”
Glendon was startled; he’d been set on Mexico, on the Blue of his memory. This seemed a large adjustment. “How’d you happen to find that out?”
“From that friend of hers, Marcela. She came up here a few years ago and watched me ride. I bought her lemonade; we had a picnic,” said José, becoming wistful. “I thought something might come of it, but nothing did. That Marcela was a cutie, though.”
“I remember Marcela,” said Glendon.
“There used to be lots of cuties coming through this place, but not anymore. Not for me, at least. I’m leaving here. Colonel Miller gave me the boot.”
“He fired you? How come?”
José shrugged. “He isn’t himself. The river is up to its banks. He’s afraid the rain will be the end of him.”
“The lower pens are getting spongy,” Glendon agreed.
“Last night the colonel asked a few of us old ones up to drink his whiskey. He asked us when it will stop. Who can say, but he’s the boss. Everybody else predicted sun in two days. That’s what I should’ve said too.”
“What did you say?” Glendon inquired.
“I said it looked like it might rain forever. Did you ever see a flood? It’s uglier than fire and makes a worse smell. I didn’t try to make him mad, but he said I should go, so I’m going.” José got up, pulling on a slicker. “Are you going to pay for the coffee?”
“All right.”
“Good, thank you, I’m saving my pennies.” At the door José paused. “If you find her, tell her you saw me. You should leave soon, though. That river is losing its patience.”
8
Now comes a distressing part of the story, and not just because Charlie Siringo shows up. As Glendon said later, Charlie had to show up; it was necessary for Charlie, for Glendon himself, and even, finally, for me, that Siringo wash into the Hundred and One on the edge of the coming deluge.
No, the distress was all Hood’s. And the actor Ern Swilling’s. And Alazon’s. Certainly Alazon’s! For she did fall swiftly in love with our Hood Roberts, just as he hoped. It seemed perfect to me, I’ll admit, their sudden romance—the kind of story we all want in dispiriting weather. Hood’s sensational ride made him briefly luminous. People reached for his shoulders as he passed, little boys ran at his legs; vaqueros touched their hat brims. Alazon too was entranced. Who can blame a girl for returning the affections of the sudden champion? Besides, hers was no fleeting regard. I’ll remind you she liked Hood well enough pre-heroics, and she would like him still when the heroics were forgotten. As for Hood—this boy who claimed an alias, who laughed in his sleep—he was on the hilltop we all remember or believe we remember. He talked about Alazon until Glendon’s ears pinked. Her little waist! Her fine wrists! Sometimes she sang him jubilant Mexican rhymes; when she held his hand, he thought he was going to fall down. She had called him her paloma, Hood said, asking Glendon what it meant. Glendon replied that it meant dove, an expression of true tenderness; Hood’s expression revealed he knew this already but only asked because he wanted us to know his joy.
“Then I guess I’m her dove,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
* * *
A few days after his famous ride Hood paid a visit to the movie set. Would he had not done it, but what else was there to do? Rain had put a stop to cowboy work and the Hundred and One was beginning to empty; Glendon and I would’ve left too, except that he seemed suddenly averse. I had the grating sense that Darlys DeFoe was the holdup.
In any case, here we sat. Where to go but toward the lights and the noise? I was at the set when Hood came in. Ignacio and several others were with him, happy for idleness, shaking their ponchos and laughing; but the movie set, like any foundering ship, was a perilous place. The cloud and the rain had bred an atmosphere of pestilence: Actors thrashed about in desolation; the weaselly director was out of sorts. They were shooting the scene where Ern Swilling strikes down the villain, a lecherous bank officer named Rance. Ern then kisses pale Selma and carries her out the door. A straightforward scene from every picture ever made; but they were having a miserable time getting it right, the kiss in particular. Ern would take a swing; Rance would stagger back, cracking his head on the wall; then Ern would sweep up old Selma and plant one on the lips while the director gnashed in torment.
“What’s the matter?” Ern demanded, after three or four abortive embraces.
“You’re kissing her wrong,” replied the director.
“She’s kissing me wrong,” Ern complained, and though it sounds whiny, I must take his side. The girl kept moving her head in sly fashion: Though I am not the world’s expert on kissing it was clear to me this Selma was a reluctant participant. Moreover, it wasn’t hard to see why. Selma, Hood had informed me, was keeping company with Ignacio; well, Ignacio had just appeared with some of his damp compadres to watch the filming. If there was one thing Selma did not want Ignacio to think, it was that she was kissing Ern Swilling with anything like actual passion. Thus she thwarted Ern at every pass. That’s how it looked to me: down would come his pooched lips, and Selma would tip her face at the tiniest angle. She’d stiffen, cheeks all waxy and pink, and Ern would just glance off. It didn’t look like kissing at all. It looked like a girl deflecting a neighbor boy who had been carried away by amor and whose feelings she wished to salvage.
“Sel, kiss him right this time,” the director instructed, but by now Selma was habituated and again poor Ern slipped off to the side. Can you imagine the cowboys’ delight at this development?
“Ach!” said Ern, missing again and dropping the girl’s feet to the floor, at which the vaqueros cheered without restraint and Hood called through cupped hands, “It’s all right, Selma, pretend he’s a cowboy,” transgressing the iron decree about quiet on the set. The vaqueros hooted for joy. Ern Swilling looked humid and confused. I saw Hood wink at Ignacio—Ern saw it too, I suspect.
“Ten minutes,” cried the director, shying from the lights like a crab.
Even now things might have righted themselves. The vaqueros climbed up to mingle with cast and crew; Alazon appeared from behind a partition, looking for Hood; to credit Ern Swilling, he straightened and nodded and seemed even to laugh at himself while Selma drifted toward Ignacio.
I had a tablet along and was content to stay on the bench—I was muddling around with a description of the place for Susannah. When the first shouts erupted I didn’t even pay attention; I was trying to get the colors right. Then boots scuffed and I peered up to see Ignacio take a swing at Ern Swilling. He missed as Ern moved aside, knocking a chair off the raised set. The lights were still on, and as they jockeyed to and fro dust rose from the floor around them. I remember wondering if this was a real fight or a staged one for the entertainment of the cast; wondering, in the unattached way a mind has, how dust could rise anywhere after so many days of rain. I never learned what started their dispute; probably something indelicate got said.
“Fight!” yelped a glad cowboy. Ignacio was made of scrap iron and the smart money would’ve been on him, but nature had been ridiculously kind to Ern Swilling—besides his marquee appearance he was strong as a bear with the easy world-beater genetics we were all to encounter in coming years. His movements were fluid and abruptly Ignacio was down on his back. Oh, he popped up in a hurry, but Ern stepped forward all business and Ignacio’s knob flipped back twice as though hinged and down he went again. The vaqueros stood perplexed—an actor!—while Ignacio rolled to his stomach and lay on his elbows. He seemed to be casting about for answers to critical questions. Ern watched a moment, then turned away only to be hit on the nose by Hood Roberts. Hood hit him once. Ern reeled backward and fell off the
set. It wasn’t the blow, it was the fall that got him—a mere three-foot drop. It testifies to our frailty how a specimen like that German boy could hurt himself in such a paltry mishap. The floor wasn’t stone or cement, either; it was soft pine boards. You could bounce on the balls of your feet and feel them give.
Even so, Ern Swilling’s neck broke so neatly he didn’t know it right away. He lay on his side expecting any second to bound up and fight Hood Roberts fair and square.
“Come on, then,” he said, in a tone so awfully upbeat someone started to cry.
Hood stood looking down in bewilderment. Of course there was an instant gathering round the crumpled Ern, who gave no sign of understanding what had happened.
“Give a hand up here,” said Ern, but no one offered Ern a hand. It was a sight to unman the toughest witness. Even if someone had offered him a hand, Ern couldn’t have reached for it.
“His head’s on backward,” whispered a vaquero.
“I’ll bust your rump, Roberts,” Ern said cheerfully. For a few seconds his good humor was so intact none spoke for fear of reality.
Then Ern fell quiet.
Then he said, “Say, what’s this?” which I suppose is a common question at moments of discovery.
The right thing for Hood Roberts to do would’ve been to leap down and reassure Ern Swilling; to shout for doctors; to exemplify comradeship and good form. He didn’t, because he was frightened. Before us all lay the hopeful film star with his face turned east and his body west. Ern, whose voice abruptly lost hold of sensible words and became a choked howl as he got his first grip on the transformed world; on the fact that he was no longer a sought quantity or screen actor but a handsome young paralytic with no prospects whatever for fame or wealth or for that matter much of a lifespan.
I said, “Where is a doctor on this place?”
“Right, and where’s that Hood Roberts?” someone asked. I looked round, but Hood was gone: a full adult now, you see, and newly adept at the furtive departure.
9
So Hood fled in the rain with the girl who loved him. They stole two horses from the Hundred and One and set out southwest for the great fugitive destination of Mexico—that’s what Glendon believed, at least. The going couldn’t have been easy, either. Minutes after Ern’s ghastly fall I stepped from the building into violent rain. Gone was the almost sleepy shower that had been constant nearly a week. This was a cascade, a monsoon. The street was a brown canal. I held out my hand and drops pounded it white in seconds.
“I can’t bear thinking of those youngsters, on the run, in this,” Glendon grieved, back in his room.
“He shouldn’t have run anyway,” I said. “It was only a blow with a fist. He wasn’t looking to break anyone’s neck.”
Glendon stalked the room, running a hand back and forth over his hair. After some minutes he said, “Well, now he’s taken flight and taken those horses, which makes him a wanted article. You think I ought to go after those two, Monte, and bring them back?”
“That would be an irony, wouldn’t it?”
He scowled at me. “What’s ironical about it?”
“Well, you’re a wanted article yourself.” I shrugged. “That’s a fair irony.”
He wasn’t amused. I shut my mouth, too late like always, and went back to my room to bed.
In the morning he knocked before it was light. I was glad to get up—I hadn’t slept. Neither had Glendon, to judge from his pallor, but his voice was decided and strong.
“Well, I’m not going after them,” he announced. “Much as I want to, I can’t carry the boy.”
“Come in,” I said.
“Be awfully hard to follow them anyway,” he said, and a crack appeared in his tone.
We sat by the window with no light in the room, rain penny-striking the glass. It was impossible not to think about Hood and Alazon out on the oceanic plains, the two of them wayward and bone-sodden and lost. We didn’t talk about them, though.
“I dare not be sidetracked,” Glendon said. “There’s Blue to see about.”
“Right.”
“Also, there’s Darlys to look after,” he added.
I knew it. “How much looking after do you intend to do?”
Glendon now revealed that Darlys had asked him for money—enough for a train ticket east.
“But you did that once before. She didn’t go, if you’ll remember.”
“Things have changed. She wants to go.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I got to help her if I can, Monte.” He didn’t actually have the money but had promised Darlys DeFoe he would try to get some.
I am guilty of chronic bad form in the matter of Darlys DeFoe. No doubt I rendered the weary put-upon sigh so despicable in other people.
“Don’t fret—she won’t take any money from you,” Glendon said. “She heard what you said, about her looking like a man.”
I ignored that and asked Glendon how he meant to get the money.
“I’ll talk to Jos Miller. He’s in straits, you know. A lot of his help has gone. There might be something I can do.”
That reminded me that Darlys herself was employed by Jos Miller and had been for some time, so I asked the question that occurred to me: “Why does she have no money?”
Glendon lifted his head and looked at me in wonder. “That don’t matter. Why don’t matter. Isn’t that clear to you yet?”
But it wasn’t clear. I was not always a man to grasp the obvious. We sat together as the darkness thinned and became morning. Eventually a ragged line of kerosene torches appeared in the rain. “Come on,” Glendon said. “People are leaving—let’s go down and help.”
Not everyone left the Hundred and One—in truth the boardinghouse soon brimmed with guests, as it was the only building besides the Millers’ own residence that floodwaters did not reach. Oh, it was near—at high tide the basement was full and we had a quarter inch of mud slip where the floor sagged—but overall the boardinghouse stayed dry, and diehards appeared with blankets and bacon and mordant smiles, and people camped in the stairwells. The Salt Fork Flood was a horror for the animals; though the cowhands rode out and cut many fences, several hundred pigs and more than a thousand turkeys and a great number of cattle perished. Some were swept down the streets while we watched from the windows; dead cows wearing the Hundred and One brand were found bloating across the countryside for weeks afterward—it was said one Miller steer washed up on a reach of the Salt Fork more than fifty miles away. The rains dealt the mighty ranch a blow from which it was to make only fractional recovery; still, no people drowned, and none fell into despair beyond convalescence except for Ern Swilling—of course, in his case the flood was not to blame.
We helped all morning with the final exodus. Strangely, it was not depressing. The people leaving on the wagons had lost homes, possessions, wherewithal: most of them climbed up holding no more than a grubby blanket or two, yet there was endurance in their postures. Cowhands and journeymen, wrinkled and smooth, some with families, men and women stricken by loss which for many of them was neither the first nor the hardest. Trounced again! Yet their shoulders refused defeat. Among those assisting at the wagons were Darlys DeFoe and José Barrera—apparently he’d been forgiven by Jos Miller, who worked at his side, gallantly handing people their beloved wreckage. And away they went, some waving goodbye as the drafters bowed their heads and bent forward following the memory of a road. Out they rolled in a languid, soaking caravan: a sorrowful day but not a hopeless one. Glendon, checking harness and soothing the animals, seemed especially glad for the work. He stood in the street with the water eddying over his ankles; he hummed to the horses, and they calmed themselves.
10
A dozen men gathered that night in the narrow lobby of the boardinghouse; José was there, and a brilliant soak named Bodes who repaired engines, and an old Ponca Indian chief named Iron Tail whose face you may still see on what is called the Buffalo nickel. Those of us with
booked rooms gave them up for the women and brought our things downstairs. There’d been some consternation over this arrangement because of the monkeys. Did I mention the monkeys? The ranch had a variety of these hairy fellows, large and small, chained here and there for the entertainment of visitors. When the waters began to rise it seemed only right that the monkeys be unchained to fend for themselves. But an unchained monkey will seek a high place; a number of them had ascended by rainspout and trellis and were sitting in misery on the boardinghouse roof. You could look out the upper windows and see them crouching in the lee of the dormers. They weren’t chattering or performing, just climbing about slowly on their spidery hands. It was unnerving to the ladies, who locked the windows and shut the blinds.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised us to hear an anxious pitch issue from upstairs; the pitch rose quickly into a screech.
“That’s Melva,” said a young ranch hand, popping to his feet in the dark—his name was Lehi, a boy in his early twenties. “There’s an attacker,” Lehi cried. I learned later that Melva had long suffered from dreams of attack; she would wake screaming if anything unusual happened, sometimes even if Lehi just rolled over in his sleep. Up those stairs he flew like a witch, with two or three young men right behind. Later, Melva herself admitted the truth: It was warm and damp up there. With so many women sharing the same air, she felt she could hardly breathe. While the others murmured in sleep, Melva rose and opened a window. That improved things; the sweet air helped her sleep. She was dreaming of a beautiful child, a perfect blond cupid who curled into her soft neck, when something went awry. Melva had handled many a clean baby and knew their smell to be of warm cinnamon or nutmeg—this baby didn’t smell like any good spice, and it wasn’t warm, either. The screech was already coming out when she opened her eyes and saw the terrified monkey retreating with its white fangs exposed.
“She’s going to remember them fangs a long time,” mourned Lehi, back downstairs. He’d got hold of the twisting monkey, heaved it back out on the roof, and closed the window. “There’ll be no more sleep for Mel tonight,” he added.