Читать книгу The Drop Edge of Yonder - Rudolph Wurlitzer - Страница 8

The winter that Zebulon set his traps along the Gila River had been colder and longer than any he had experienced, leaving him with two frostbitten toes, an arrow wound in his shoulder from a Crow war party, and, to top it all off, the unexpected arrival of two frozen figures stumbling more dead than alive into his cabin in the middle of a spring blizzard.

Rather than waking him, the cold blast of wind from the open door became part of a recurrent dream: a long endless fall through an empty sky toward a storm-tossed sea… Come closer, the towering waves howled…

He opened his eyes, not sure for a moment if the man and woman staring back at him weren’t hungry ghosts. Frost clung to their eyebrows and nostrils, and their swollen faces were raw and crimson from the tree-cracking cold. The man wore a hard-brimmed top hat tied under his bearded chin with a long red scarf, along with a buffalo robe coated with slivers of ice. The woman appeared to be a Shoshoni half-breed. She was wrapped inside a huge army overcoat distinguished by sergeant stripes at the shoulders and, at the chest, two bullet holes, one over the other.

The man sank to his knees, swearing and choking from the smoke pouring out of the cabin’s leaky fireplace and the over-powering stench of a nearby slop bucket. He spoke in a rasping whisper, as if his larynx had been smashed.

“I figured we be dead meat until the breed told me you was camped on the Gila. She knows things that ain’t available to other mortals.”

The man was Lobo Bill, an old trapper and horse thief, known for his wide range of windy tales and maniacal rages, that Zebulon had run into and away from in various saloons and hideouts from Tularosa to Cheyenne. When he removed his top hat, he exposed a face sliced on one side from cheek to jawbone, as if neatly quartered by a butcher’s knife.

Lobo Bill nodded toward the breed, who was standing with her back to the wall, staring at Zebulon with huge empty eyes. “She ain’t one for words, but when she does open her flap, she packs a punch you don’t want to know about. Even so, I owe her. She saved my bacon when a wolverine took after me. Axed it into quarters and sliced me up as well. I won her in Alamosa from a horse trader. A straight flush to his full house. A hand for the ages. She’s half Shoshoni, half Irish. ‘Not Here Not There’ is what I call her, and I’m favored to have her, things bein’ what they is these days, or ain’t, depending on which way the wind blows, and even if it don’t.”

Lobo Bill and Not Here Not There took off their clothes. After their bodies thawed out, they collapsed on a pile of bearskins near the fireplace.

Zebulon spent the rest of the night stoking the fire and drinking from one of his last bottles of Taos White Lightning, pondering memories of Lobo Bill and all the other mountain lunatics he had known, and what he and they used to be, or not, and what he was meant to do, or be, depending on his view from the valley or mountaintop. It wasn’t so much that the old mountain ways were played out, although that day was surely coming. There was something else that Lobo Bill and his breed had brought in with them, a mysterious presence or shadow that he was unable to define. Or maybe it was just the sight of two strange and lost figures snoring on his bed.

It was dawn when the wind died, along with most of his premonitions, enough anyway, to let him pass out next to his guests.