Читать книгу Peace River Country - Ralph Allen - Страница 5

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If it had been anyone else at the door, Lonnie Rivers would not have opened at that hour of the morning. A village bootlegger, like a village doctor or a village lawyer, had certain responsibilities to his community. The responsibility of seeing that no one was permitted to buy a drink before sundown, except on Saturdays, was one of these.

Now, as he looked through the tiny square of glass in the pounding storm door, Lonnie Rivers saw that it was barely dawn. After a moment he recognized the face on the other side as the face of Chris Sondern and he acted on a higher responsibility and opened the door. It was to be expected that Chris Sondern would call around. It was to be expected that he would require a drink and that after he had had a drink or two he would throw enlightenment on the tumultuous mysteries of the last sixteen hours. It was to be expected that any public-spirited citizen of Dobie would welcome this enlightenment, rather than repel it, and see that it received its proper place in the history of the town.

He opened the door.

“Hello”—he hesitated very briefly over the form of address—“Mr. Sondern. If I hadn’t heard you was in town I wouldn’t have known it was you.” He spoke the truth. Sondern was much thinner and older than he had been thirteen years before, but the dimensions of time and physical change were not fully adequate to describe what had happened to him. He looked as shrunk and beat-up as a stillborn calf. Lonnie held the phrase in his mind, not precisely with pleasure and certainly not with malice, but confident that it would serve well later. Sondern’s face was pinched with cold and thirst and his eyes were so watery with the cold that when he reached up to dry them the water sloshed off the back of his thin white hand and made a dark patch of wet the size of a small saucer on the sleeve of his overcoat. The coat itself was both grotesquely large and grotesquely insufficient, one of those frail dark, genteel velvet-collared garments that were seen in their days of full splendor only on the very rich, and in their days of ultimate decay only on the very poor. With the coat he was wearing a worn gray tweed cap with one ear flap down and the other apparently wasted away, leaving a gap of space between a part of the cap and a part of his head. When he saw Lonnie staring at the cap he took it off, put it on a chair beside the kitchen table, and pushed the chair out of sight beneath the table. The gesture was unconscious, but it was a gesture. It seemed to remind him that he had the power of movement. He walked with surprising briskness around the table, stamped his feet loudly, and sat down in a chair on the other side.

“How’s it going, Lonnie?” he asked in an astonishingly quiet and ordinary voice. He did not wait for an answer, however, or act as though he expected one. He reached quickly into the breast pocket of his overcoat and extracted two carefully wadded two-dollar bills with the air of a man who always knows exactly how much money he has and what pocket it’s in. He laid them on the table challengingly, as though grown accustomed to a minimum of attention until his money had been produced and examined.

“You don’t need to do that,” Lonnie Rivers said.

“Catawba.”

“I don’t sell it. I sometimes keep a little extra for my friends.” Lonnie made the demurrer through force of habit as he moved toward the open pantry at the end of the bare, dawn-lit kitchen.

Sondern sipped the first glass slowly, fondling rather than gulping the dark native wine, but holding the glass at the level of his lips, never more than an inch away until it was empty. His hand was surprisingly steady as he refilled it from the quart bottle Lonnie had placed on the linoleum-topped table.

“Mind if I take off my coat?”

“Well, gotta get to work pretty soon.”

“You still at the livery stable?”

“Uh-huh. I don’t know why he keeps it up any more. Maybe one team a day. Three—four on Saturday. That’s in winter.”

Sondern took off his overcoat, shrugging its armpits across the back of his chair. His blue suit was dirty and creased, but it was a reasonable fit. The removal of the overcoat presented him for the first time in a manageable medium of comparison. He still looked shrunk and beat-up, but not grotesquely so, not much more so than other men Lonnie had seen going on for forty, for baldness, and out of the last hangover into the next.

“Say,” Lonnie said, “you ain’t changed so much.”

Sondern poured his third glass of wine and drank it down.

“Who said I had?”

“Funny how many people’s left since you did. Dobbs, he retired. Gone to Vancouver Island. Up the coast some place. Man named Ellis got the bank now.”

“Who said I had?”

“Said what?”

“Changed?”

“I donno, Chris.”

“I guess we better have another bottle.” Lonnie went to the pantry.

Sondern drank again.

“How did you know I was in town?” Lonnie couldn’t tell how the wine was sitting on him. He spoke slowly, but quite clearly.

“Oh, I donno. Somebody was saying up at the post office last night.”

“I’ll bet they were saying plenty up at the post office last night.” Sondern subsided into a gloomy petulant silence. After a while he sprang excitedly to his feet and said eagerly: “Got a pack of cards?”

“What——?”

“Come on, let’s have the cards. Let’s have them.”

Lonnie went to the pantry and came back with a limp handful of blue-backed Bicycles. “There’s only forty-eight or forty-nine,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter.” Sondern took the cards and shuffled them with clumsy haste. Two or three fell between his excited fingers to the floor. “Doesn’t matter a bit,” he said. He offered the pack face down to the other man. “Take any one,” he said. “Go on, any one at all.”

Lonnie took a card from the middle of the pack and stole an uncomfortable look at it.

“Now put it back.”

Sondern shuffled the cards, holding their faces away from him at arm’s length and squeezing his dark eyes tightly and ostentatiously shut.

“Now,” he said, “now we’ll see.” He opened his eyes and ran eagerly through the cards. He held up the five of hearts.

“That it?”

“That’s her.”

“You damn right that’s her!” Sondern rasped grandly. “Try another.”

He repeated the performance several times. Then he handed the pack to Rivers. “You try it,” he commanded defiantly.

Rivers backed away from the proffered deck. “Hell, I couldn’t do it,” he mumbled.

“Well, try it. Try it anyway.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Sondern threw the cards carelessly to the linoleum-topped table. “You damn right you couldn’t do it!” he said exultantly. “Nobody in this whole town could do it.”

He sat down and refilled his glass. “Not a one of them could do it. Lousy little hole. I always said it was a lousy little hole.”

He took a pencil stub out of his pocket and held it across the table under the other man’s nose, making plucking movements at the air with his hand. With each new movement the pencil disappeared or reappeared. “Strictly one horse. Stinking little one horse.”

He took a long drink. “Where’d they go, Lonnie?” he said imperiously. “Where’d my wife and kids go?”

“They got on the night train. That’s all I know.”

“A great thing,” Sondern said heavily. “A great thing.”

“How’d you happen to come back here after all that time?” Rivers asked.

“There’s no law. There’s no law at all.”

“No, hell no, but it must be three-four years since they came here.”

“There’s no law.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do?” Sondern shook his head vacantly. Then he said splendidly, “I’ll do what I want.” His voice sank to a cunning whisper: “What do you suppose they’d say if I went back to the bank? Went back to the bank as manager. Ran the whole shooting match? What do you suppose they’d say about that?”

“I thought the bank let you out,” Rivers said brutally.

Sondern went on as though he had not heard. His voice suddenly rose to a shout. “Well, they don’t need to worry about that. They could come to me on their bended knees!” He got up from his chair again and walked unsteadily to the kitchen window and looked out across the street. “They haven’t even got their sign painted,” he said contemptuously. “Hey, who’s that?”

Rivers came to the window and looked across the sunlit morning snow. “That’s Mr. Ellis. Remember, I told you Dobbs retired. Mr. Ellis has got the bank now.”

“Mister Ellis,” Sondern mocked. “Mister Ellis. Look at him.”

Abruptly he lurched back to the table and scooped up the strewn cards. He rushed to the door and flung it open and raced bareheaded for the other side of the street. “Hey!” he yelled, “hey you!”

Lonnie Rivers stood at the door bawling after him in alarm. “Come on back here. You come back.” Sondern slipped and fell heavily in the packed snow in the middle of the road. But he got up again and raced the rest of the way to his quarry, now standing poised uncertainly at the bottom of the cement steps leading up to the entrance to the bank.

He thrust the cards in the hypnotized stranger’s face. “Take a card, you smart bastard,” he yelled. “Take any card!”