Читать книгу The Lonesome Quarter - Richard Wormser - Страница 9

LON FINISHED the last of his fried shrimp and pushed back from the table. “It runs good,” he said earnestly. “Even in the end of September, when the wind’s from the desert, she’s never gone dry. Mike’s after me to maybe put a dam on her, and run two, three feeder lines from other springs in, and irrigate maybe an acre of natural pasture. The SCS man told him that’d feed five, six cows, or two, three horses, but Tommy—he’s the District Ranger up there—says it won’t, that it’d take care of half that many. I dunno—” He broke off. Vera Mae was grinning at him.

He said, “I guess this is kinda dull. I’m sort of out of practice, taking a girl to dinner.”

“I’m taking you out, but we’ll argue that later. You used to be a ladies’ man?”

Lon felt himself grinning foolishly. But he recovered. “I wouldn’t say that. But when I was traveling around, I was more used to gals. Lord! I reckon those rodeo ladies have all settled down and are making homes now! That was ten years ago . . . It’s why I’m so careful to try and do what Mike wants, if I can barely scrape up the money. I wouldn’ta left the homestead if my father hadn’t been so set in his ways . . . He ran just about enough beef to feed us, and made his money cuttin’ off the timber . . . Now it’s all gone, and it’s taken a hell of a lot of water and topsoil with it.”

“So you’re giving Mike a voice in how you run the ranch, even if he’s only ten.”

He nodded. The waitress came and took away their plates, and they ordered coffee. Vera Mae looked at him over the rim of her cup. “You’re a good father.”

“Well, they’re good kids . . . I guess you’re kind of curious about what kind of a man it is that’ll go to a rodeo, and his wife only buried two months.”

She looked down at her plate. Her hair was beautifully brushed, and the part went right down the middle, straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler. Doing up June’s hair every morning had been an awful chore at first, and he’d been half-scared to send her to school when Easter vacation ended. Hadn’t sent her, in fact, but the teacher thought that was on account of her mother. But finally he had decided he was being silly, and when she came home that night, she hadn’t mentioned it, so the teacher or the other kids hadn’t said anything.

He’d like to tell Vera Mae about it. She wouldn’t either laugh or get all wet up around the eyes, like almost any other woman he’d ever known. And she’d understand how he couldn’t even let Dot, down at the ranger station, know about his trouble over a little thing like hair.

She said, “Penny.”

“I was thinking I like the way you do your hair.”

“Why, cowboy!”

When he looked up, she was as red in the face as he’d gotten when Duke gave him the note. It gave him kind of a good feeling to be able to do that to her, but it was cruel to keep it up. He said, “You and Duke and Turk pretty close?”

She said, “Thanks . . . Well, Duke and me. Turk’s a nice fellow to talk to, but all of a sudden he goes off and you don’t see him for a year. Yes, last winter, I stayed in with Duke and his wife. They have a place in the San Fernando.”

He said, “Oh,” very carefully, because she was kind of uncomfortable, the way she could read what he was thinking.

Even so she read him this time. “No,” she said. “I’m divorced . . . I’ll tell you about it sometime—and—and unspoke for.”

The waitress was coming over with the check. He said, “All right.”

All in a rush the rest of it came out. “And I don’t pick up suckers like that fat Dutcher unless things are awful rough.”

The waitress gave him the check, but Vera Mae got it faster than anything he’d ever seen. “I asked you to dinner. And I meant it.”

He shrugged. God knows, if he knew anything, Lonnie was a boy knew when not to argue with women. “It’s better than borrowing from your friends. Duke or Turk.”

Her eyes came clear open. “You see that?” she said. He had to bend forward to hear her. “Well—if you see that—I can tell you the rest. Kenny—my husband—went to prison. He cut a man.”

“You got no call to be telling all this.”

“I know that . . . I was going to divorce him anyway. So I went ahead with it. He was no good, Lon. And they caught him at it, he got two to ten years for mayhem. I heard he’s in Arabia now, skinning cat . . . And I’ll tell you the rest. I married him because he was the best bronc rider I’d ever seen.”

“I couldn’t stay on a rodeo bucker ten seconds,” Lon said bravely, and got his reward; she started laughing again. She said, “Thanks, sister,” to the waitress for the change, and left a tip and stood up. “Walk me out to the fairgrounds to look at my horse.”

But outside he hesitated, and she said, “I told the chambermaid we wouldn’t be back till about eleven; to sit with the kids till then. Let’s walk, it isn’t far out to the fairgrounds.”

“My pickup is at the hotel.”

“No, let’s walk.” She took his arm, and they turned right. The street was crowded, with the usual rodeo night crowd of any Western town; the shopkeepers and the clerks in the department stores and banks and utility companies, the foremen in the millwork plant had all put on plaid shirts and saddle pants or levis; some of the men and women wore high-heeled boots, but most of the tight breeches ended disappointingly in low heels and laces.

Mixed up with the crowd were millworkers in their Sunday best and others in overalls and denim jackets, going up for the night shift. There were farmers and ranchers from around the countryside, there were a couple of dozen professional rodeo riders following the circuit, and there were some pickpockets and short-con workers—who also followed the circuit.

There was a merry-go-round set up at a wide corner, and kids whooped and yelled and dodged around underfoot, their faces smeared with chili and hot-dog mustard.

Lonnie nodded at one brat who had nearly collided with the solid rear end of a state policeman. “That kid’s only about seven. Ought to be in bed.”

Vera Mae laughed. “Stop being a professional father. You’re a young man out with a girl.”

“Well—” They had passed the lighted streets, were in the dark belt between town and the fairgrounds. The sidewalks ended, and he had to feel for the paving rather than watch it. He put his arm around Vera Mae’s shoulders.

“That’s better,” she said. “I’d think I was losing my grip if you didn’t try and cop a feel now and then.”

“Don’t talk so rough,” Lonnie said. “You can’t scare me. I heard all the words once, even if I don’t know what they mean.”

There was a light in each of the barns at the fairground, and a couple of patient watchmen walking the rounds, sniffing for fire. The smell of cows and horses came out of the first buildings they passed, and also a small whiff of, pig. “Whoosh,” Vera Mae said. “Why do pigs smell so much like pigs? You seen the twin palominos?”

“June went right to them,” Lonnie said. “Just like Mike found the soil conservation exhibit.” But they turned in at the fairground building anyway.

In a front stall a cream-colored mare stood drowsing, but she shook off her tiredness when she saw she had visitors, and threw her head back proudly, her silver mane rippling. And she had something to be proud of: twin colts, as rare as human twins, and both of them a paler gold than hers, but with a dark skin promising they’d be the true palomino when they grew older, a color by definition the “shade of a newly minted gold piece.”

A blue ribbon fastened to the front of the stall said, “Special Award, Palomino Mare with Twin Colts,” but neither of them laughed at her as the two youngsters waded through the deep straw and began to nurse, pushing each other back and forth until each got a nipple.

“Golly,” Vera Mae said, “I love horses. Everything about them, the way they look and the way they eat, and the way they smell . . . I’ve sure been around them a lot, and I never get tired of them.”

“Did I tell you,” Lonnie asked, “that I started to turn the ranch over into a horse ranch? Everybody says there’s no money in it, but I wanted to try anyway.”

“What happened?” Vera Mae asked. She smiled at the mare, and took his arm and guided him out into the night. They started toward the dark grandstand and the rodeo stock barns behind it.

“My stallion got away,” Lonnie said. “Old Mulemouth.”

“Got away? What’d he do, cut himself up on barb wire?”

“No,” Lonnie said. “He just got away. He’s running loose on the desert.” He could feel her staring at him, somehow, though it was too dark to see her expression. He guessed maybe he ought to explain. “He was wild,” he said. “There’s a lot of wild horses around our country. Mostly just little broomtails, but sometimes a good mare gets away and runs with them, sometimes some rich man comes up and starts raising horses and gets tired of it and moves away and—”

“I’ve never seen wild horses,” she said. “I mean really wild, not this rodeo stock, but wild and not belonging to anybody.”

They were past the grandstand and skirting along the corrals that held the roping steers and calves, the Brahma bulls. Ahead stretched the long stable where the riding stock slept; then off in the night, dust still rose from a corral where the broncs were put up.

“They aren’t worth rounding up,” he said again. “When I was a kid, they used to have big drives, round ’em up, break the best of ’em, shoot the rest; the broomtails were taking the country over. Now it’s not so bad, there aren’t so many. But there was this one—”

He stopped, because she’d stopped walking and was leaning into a box stall. A head came out to greet her. She stroked the horse’s nose, and said, “Go on.”

“Well, we called him Mulemouth. And most of the boys around there said there wasn’t any such a thing, and some said he’d been seen, but it was always by somebody you couldn’t count on. So—” He stopped again. “This is all mixed up. What do ya call your horse?”

“Brownie,” she said. “He’s seal brown, six years old, fifteen-three. And I want you to look at his near front leg, but later. First tell me.”

He said, “I want to. I just want to get it straight in my mind first . . . We had these two kids, Mike and June, and they were wonderful. I wanted another, and Joan was favorable . . . But it ain’t much of a ranch. People hear you’re a rancher, and they think you’re rich, but it’s the last homestead anybody’s hung on to, up there . . . Some of ’em went back to the government, and some big companies have bought up, for land and cattle or timber . . . You can’t hardly make out on a sagebrush quarter.”

“It sure is mixed up, Lonnie . . . Take your time.”

His hand ran down the horse’s nose, and found her fingers. She hung on tight, and that made it easier, the pressure on his fingers like the kids’, only different.

“So I took off, we have three horses, and I packed one and rode one and left Joan the other to work the ranch. I was gone three weeks. Couldn’t get nobody to help me, nobody believed, you see and— Anyway, I built a brush fence across a box canyon. Staked my mare in there, and rode out on the gelding, we call him Bob . . . Tracked him and tracked him—”

“This is in the desert?”

He said, “Yeah. There are high buttes there. The stallions get on ’em, and look out. I run off two studs, and they wasn’t him. I rode two pairs of shoes right off Bob, and I tacked the third one on, and told myself when they were gone, I’d have to quit.”

“How about food?” she asked.

“Joan and me jerked some beef. I still had some left. And Bob and me, we were both raised in that country, we can stand an awful lot of alkali . . . Lots of that water on the desert won’t kill you, it just tastes bad . . . I picked up the track of this herd, and damn, the stud had big feet, and deep prints, like he was heavy . . . Coulda been some old truck horse somebody turned out, but I didn’t think so . . . I stayed behind him drifting. By that time, I reckon I’d been on Bob so long, if they had smelled me, they’da thought I was a horse. But I’d shoot off a gun once in a while, to keep them moving. A fella told me once, if you keep them moving, they’ll head for the rim of the desert, where a moving horse can eat and walk. You see, he had a bunch of mares about due to drop their colts, and that held him down. Even so, sometimes old mares’d drop out past me, they couldn’t keep up. None of ’em was worth nothing, just broomtails. I wanted to see a colt, see if it was any better than its mama.”

“You never got to see Mulemouth, then?” Still holding his hand, she ducked under Brownie’s head, and came up facing him, close. Natural as if they’d practiced for a springtime, she relaxed against his shoulder, most of her weight on the stall door.

“Bob and me kept them moving so that Mulemouth would have to stay in front, picking the way, finding feed and water. There was pretty good graze back where I’d left my mare, and anyway, a wild stud’ll almost always stop and try and add a good mare . . . All of a sudden, he heard her whinnying, and the last six miles it was me and Bob right after him, and the mares scattering to hell and gone. When I pulled my trap, they all come up against it from outside, whinnying to papa. But he was in there with our Betsy, seventeen hands tall and prettiest horse I ever did see, golden buck with black mane and tail and four black legs. And in good shape, even then. A horse that could stand all that and still look good—”

“Money couldn’t buy him,” Vera Mae said.

“Naw. And you could always sell his colts. He was plenty mad, but not bronco-mad, not mad enough to kill himself, like some little ole wild studs’ve done . . . I went and got everybody I knew, and we got enough ropes on him to make him say uncle, and trucked him up the mountain and into a breaking corral I’d built, ten feet high and solid logs.”

He stopped. Her cheek moved up against his for a second, and then away. She said, “I never heard anything like that. I never knew a cowboy didn’t have something like that, a lost gold mine, or a wild horse that was really worth money, or a place in the desert where there is all the water you want two feet down or—you know.”

He said, “Sure. When I was traveling around, we’d talk about them. Mine was where holdup men in the old days had buried a lot of silver . . . I’m still going to find it.” He laughed. “It’s up the head of Bear Creek Canyon, sure as hell. Wore out the knees of three pairs of levis when I was a kid, climbin’ around there.”

She said, “Yes. But you went out and got the stallion that was worth the fortune.”

He thought. “You might say I had to. But you’d be smarter if you said I was lucky.”

“How much jerky did you have left when you finally corralled Mulemouth?”

He laughed again. “Oh, it had been gone since a couple of days after I cut his trail.”

The girl moved away from him, and he could see her face dimly in what light the single watch bulb at the other end of the stable gave. “You got more guts than anybody I ever knew.”

In the night wind, his shoulder was cold where she’d moved away. “Maybe so,” he said. “But they’re a damn poor substitute for brains.”

Her laughter startled Brownie, and the horse threw his head up, shoving the girl forward. Lon pulled her back to his shoulder . . . Three years ago Joan hadn’t wanted to go to a party Tommy and Dot gave down at the ranger station for two girl cousins of Dot’s who were seeing the West. He had driven one of the girls down the road for more beer and kissed her on the way back, but outside of that it had been a long time, with anybody except Joan. “This is the first time since—it happened—I’ve been happy,” he said.

Again she was gone. “Take a look at Brownie’s leg for me,” she said. “He banged it in the trailer.”

Lonnie opened the stall door and slipped in. She shut the door after him, and he was in the dark stall, the air warm and heavily loaded with horse and manure and oat hay. He patted Brownie’s nose, slid a hand up and over the gelding’s neck to hold him; Brownie wasn’t wearing a bridle. The other hand slid down one front leg and then the other. “Cool and smooth,” he said. “And he’s got a good deep bed.”

He slipped outside again and fished in his pockets for cigarettes while Vera Mae latched the door. As soon as he struck the match, a figure moved down the line. Vera Mae called, “It’s all right, Slim,” and the watchman didn’t come near them. She said, “You’re an awful damn fool, Lonnie. Mentioning your wife to me—just then.”

He said, “I had it to do. You’d maybe forgotten I have two kids.”

“And a lot of memories,” she added.

“I don’t know about that.” Lonnie sucked on his cigarette, and then threw it down. “Maybe I’m not smart enough for that. I’m sure’n hell bullheaded, though . . . ”

Vera Mae’s voice had lost its life. “What happened to her?”

He sensed that it wasn’t a question, that she didn’t really want to know. But he said, “I worked Mulemouth a couple of hours a day, got him so I could saddle him, ride him around the breaking corral a little. Said I was going to take him out next morning . . . Joan slipped out early, and did it for me . . . A couple of weeks later, I was riding, and I found her saddle, with the cinch broke, up in the pine woods . . . ”

“Threw her?”

“She got dragged a hundred yards before her foot came out of the stirrup. I was down in the meadow, where we night pasture the rest of the horses . . . ”

“Good God,” Vera Mae said. Her hand found his arm and slid down to his hand.

“Yeah,” Lonnie said. “Yeah . . . well, for a while, I did what riding I had to while the kids were in school. But school’s out soon. I had to see if horses scared ’em. Mike saw it, saw the end of it, and threw Junie down on the bed so she couldn’t look out the window.”

“Oh, good God,” Vera Mae said again. “You poor kid . . . What would you have done if they’d cried at the rodeo?”

“Tommy Burns—he’s district ranger up at Salal Flats-would give me a letter some place. I could work in a sawmill, I reckon. Or on one of the dairy farms down in the flat country. I can milk and plough and all . . . ”

The other hand found him, and she was in his arms again. “I thought you were a rube when I first saw you.” The words were a little muffled by his coat.

“I traveled rodeo for a year. I been around . . . Vera Mae, the kids are crazy about you, they never took to anyone so good, and—well—I’d been saving money in case I did have to move. Got enough to put in a bathroom now; there’s a place off the back hall where I can knock a door through, and then I’ll build a wooden floor, and Sears have got the complete outfits, toilet, water heater, tub and washstand—Unless you’d rather have a shower?”

She was shaking, and he thought she was crying. But when she raised her face, it was dry under his kiss and twisted up with laughing. She said, “Cowboy, is this a proposal or a plumbing catalog?”

“I told you I was dumb.

Her horse snorted and went to the other end of the stall at her voice. “Don’t ever say that again. You hear me? Not ever again.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll make out fine, Vera Mae.”