A Moment in the Sun (64 page)

It will be the end of her job here, for sure, though it probably won’t be long before some of the blame for this spills her way and she’ll be fired anyhow. “Junior will take your side on it if you get there,” she adds. “I just bet he will.”

Jessie takes too long to answer. Alma remembers sitting with her just two years back, maybe three, playing dolls and talking nonsense, the girl laying her head against her when she laughed, little braids back then—how she worked every morning doing up those little braids for Jessie. Girl could melt your heart. Jessie takes too long to answer, but when she does she tells the truth.

“I’m just a girl,” she says.

It never happens in the books. Ruined girls are mentioned, pitied, but there is never one you get to know as a character, as a friend.

Jessie studies herself in the mirror above her vanity. Maybe they’re all wrong. Her father never took her temperature, never listened to her heart or even put his hand on her forehead the way he did when she was little and had a fever. And if they’re wrong about it there is still time to win them over, to make them see who Royal is. If he knew he would come, Army or no Army, he would come and make everything right.

It was his tongue that surprised her more than the rest. Alma told her about the rest, told her not to expect so much the first few times, but that part was nice, was sweet and thrilling, building up after the first strange invasion of his tongue into her mouth, touching her own, breathing into one another for a moment. Intimate. They were intimate. And that is all they will ever have.

Jessie studies herself, studies the swollen wreck this day has made of her face, feeling like a powerful hand is squeezing her throat shut, like each breath is a hill she has to climb. She turns the corners of her mouth down and wonders what it will be like to never smile again.

MAIL CALL

Tombstone is closer but the boys say there’s more cooking every night in the Gulch so that’s where they are. It is most of a day’s ride and none of them are cavalry.

They ditch the mounts at a stable and come into the Calumet Saloon all together, nine of them, uniforms but no sidearms, and the miners are too drunk to care. Royal’s sitter is sore as hell so he stands at the bar drinking from the stone jug they fill from a barrel, what they say is Old Crow but tastes like creosote and it doesn’t matter.

My dearest Royal—

Mail call was early, with Corporal Puckett handing out the letters.

“Royal Scott got him three,” he shouted out, holding the envelopes under his nose. “Smell good, too.”

Oohing and aahing and catcalling from the boys then, like they would with anybody.

“What you want to do is read the last one first,” said Hardaway. “Get to the grit.”

But Royal started with the first one and wasn’t one line in before he couldn’t swallow.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you.

The thing with a jug is you can’t see how much whiskey is left. He hopes there is enough. The miners are singing one song and the boys from Companies A and H something else, but happy, it is early Saturday night and the holes around Bisbee are puking out copper like there is no tomorrow and the Papagos and the Apaches are quiet and the boys will have half of Sunday to sober up in the saddle and Royal is slugging his way through a gallon jug.

My dearest Royal—

Her handwriting is beautiful, like you’d expect, and at first it was hard to understand that something so wrong could be hiding in such gracefully crafted shapes. If she is as upset as she says she is, he thinks, why can’t you see it in the writing? If the handwriting in the letters was a voice it would be soft, reasonable, calm—

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child.

Something he heard from the Bible once.
With child.
Too Tall is down the bar telling a story about Coop, who is back digging slit trenches at Huachuca cause they caught him smoking hemp on guard duty. Whatever is in the jug feels better when it gets down now, though swallowing is still a chore. His throat started closing right while he was reading, his insides trying to push up out of him, and by the end of the first section he could hardly breathe.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child. But our love cannot be.

Fort Huachuca is nothing but heat and dust. They drill, they march into the mountains with full packs on, they listen to the officers tell them they may be needed in the Philippines or in China, but finally it is only Army makework and not nearly enough of it.

“Stick the niggers where they can’t make too much trouble,” Coop grumbles whenever they are out on maneuvers. “Any further an we be in Mexico.”

“All I know,” says Too Tall, who got the trench foot so bad in Cuba they almost had to amputate, “is it aint rainin.”

It is crowded in the saloon, crowded in all of the dozens of saloons in Brewery Gulch, and the boys will tie one on and then climb uphill to buy women but Royal is looking straight ahead, past the two busy bartenders who run back and forth, looking to the even busier picture behind them of the 7th being slaughtered by Indians on the hills he has ridden over on a bicycle. At the lower right there are men already stripped of their clothes, others having their scalps lifted or being trampled by horses or shot or stabbed or tomahawked, and only a few able to fight back. More Indians on horseback are on their way, galloping from the mountains at the top of the picture. The General himself is just up and over from the middle, dressed in buckskins, hatless, empty pistol held as a club in his left hand and saber raised high in his right. Above the frame it says that the beer company presented the original of the painting to the regiment, though why you’d want a picture of your friends being murdered and mutilated is not explained. On the bottom it identifies
RAIN-IN-THE-FACE
and
HALF BREED
and
GENERAL CUSTER
and some others and at the far right
SQUAW KILLING WOUNDED
. Sure enough above it there is a woman in a red dress grabbing a downed soldier at his collar and raising a club overhead to brain him. No prisoners.

We have no engagement to break off, of course, no, we have nothing but our one night of love to remember—

He has seen
Custer’s Last Fight
in bars before but never studied the details. The old troopers say you kept the last bullet for yourself because if you weren’t finished they would scalp you alive and then do other things. Coop said that in Caney they found a Spanish officer who’d stabbed his woman, a Cuban girl, and then shot himself in the head. But that is just meanness and honor, Dago stuff, and no model for his present situation.

Father will not be moved and I am not of an age to defy him. If it was not for my condition we could wait—

Junior is sitting over with the boys but quiet. And feeling bad, Royal hopes. He drinks more whiskey from the jug. He read all three letters, the second two just more of how bad she feels but she is not the mistress of her own fate, her hands are tied, she suffers with each breath, each word seeming more of a fake than the next, and only the first one has anything for him, scrawled as an afterthought below her name—

I will always love you.

He will not always love her, not if he can help it. He thinks, in fact, that he has already stopped, but that doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. He wants to paint his face like the Cheyenne and the Sioux in the picture and ride straight over somebody, wants to pound somebody to jelly with a club. Dorsey Love is an old man, almost thirty, and he will be the one lying with Jessie, he will be the one raising up Royal’s baby boy or girl, he will be the one that sits at the Luncefords’ big table and the Doctor will have to smile at him and pass the chicken and pretend he is happy about it. The liquor has no bite now, just a smell, and Hardaway is up on a chair reciting
The Charge of the Nigger Ninth
for everybody in the saloon, though Hardaway is in the 25th and didn’t come up the hill till the second day.

“What you got there?” he called out, passing by as Royal pondered the letters, sitting on the barracks steps. “Some gal that won’t leave you be?”

“Just news from home,” Royal said and looked across at Junior, who was reading his own letter from his mother and knowing by then. “Junior’s sister is getting married.”

“That right?” Mudfish Brown joined in. “Fore you know it he be a uncle. Uncle Junior.”

They were still calling him that on the ride across the scrublands, Junior shooting Royal a sorry look now and then but not saying anything. There is not much he can say that won’t end with Royal hitting him.

I have never understood why Father is so ill-disposed toward you—

Royal understands. Royal has always understood. Junior is the one who doesn’t fit in here, Junior with his little half smile watching the men thumping Hardaway on the back, not a spot on him from a day of riding, Junior the one who grinds through every stupid detail without complaint, who acts like someone even higher than the white brass is watching his every move, judging his deportment, keeping score, while Royal accepts that he is just another sorry-ass nigger no matter how you dress him up.

The second letter didn’t say she would always love him at the end of it, it said how in the light of the terrible circumstances they should probably not correspond any more. And the third one was to apologize for the second one, but it was only a few lines, like she was in a dungeon somewhere and had to write it quick and smuggle it out.

I shall soon reap the consequences of my own weakness. Do not mourn for me, do not even think of me—

She doesn’t say if she means she was weak to come to him at Jubal’s place or weak not to fight more against the Doctor. It doesn’t matter. She is as gone from his life as if she was dead, worse even. Squaw killing wounded. The boys are having too much fun now and he is afraid they will try to pull him into it and the jug is feeling awfully light. He takes it with him, reeling out through the back to the alley behind where you piss and there are two men already sick there, heaving what is probably not really Old Crow and he decides to get the horse and ride somewhere.

But on Commerce Street there are too many men, the town overstuffed with miners come in desperate to spend their pay and get at least as drunk as Royal is. There are three different fistfights in progress and men peeing right out on the curb and a man who has taken his shirt off standing out in the middle and screaming, just screaming. The Gulch rises up steep to the next block, drunken men stumbling down past as he climbs and thrusts the jug into the arms of an already weaving white miner and then passes through an alley between two buildings and just keeps climbing, up the slope and away from the racket of Bisbee and the glowing lights of the copper smelter just below it. It is steep enough that sometimes he has to put his hands down and climb on all fours but finally he is on the ridge, standing unsteadily, looking back down at the lights and the shouting and the raucous music and now and then a gunshot and he can think of nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible story. They had it coming and so did he, it looks like, and he wheels around and walks farther away from the light and the noise.

A different story—forty days and forty nights in the desert, Jesus maybe, or maybe Moses. Mama tried to take them regular to church but for a long time was caring for some white people’s children on Sundays and he and Jubal would go but sit in the back and sneak out sometime before the sermon, so sometimes the stories get mixed up in his head. Forty days and forty nights in the desert and turning away from Temptation and then coming back clean and holy but mostly being away from everybody, away from their ribbing and their eyes able to see the shame of it on your face and them talking about you when they think you can’t hear. Might as well give the damn letters to Hardaway and have him read them out loud. He keeps walking up a dry gulley away from the town, don’t look back, don’t look back, that is another story, and it is getting colder fast now and the wind picking up and he starts to howl back at it. There are coyotes at night, of course, a couple big tribes of them around the Fort that set each other off with their noise that can go on for hours, but you don’t see much of them unless you’re out on maneuvers and cook up a mess of bacon and then they’ll come sniffing, head low and ears back. The stars are gone now, no moon, the sky feeling suddenly low and heavy above him and then there is thunder, rolling at first, and sheet lightning flickering up in the clouds, one section of the sky lighting up for a moment, then another, like the clouds are packs of coyotes calling to each other then
CRACK!
a bolt sizzling down not so far from him and
CRACK!
another behind and then it is hail, hard and scouring and there is nowhere to shelter, the land here even more wasted, even less friendly than Montana and the hailstones sting like hell where they slap against his skin, Royal ducking his head in under his arms, left his hat on the bar in the Calumet, and thinking I looked back, dammit, I forgot the story and I looked back and now I will turn into a pillar of shit. And
CRACK!
it answers, close enough to smell fried air this time, answering him, reminding him how small he is, how it don’t care a thing about his troubles.

Royal sits heavily onto the spiky ground, covering his head and waiting for it to end.

Sergeant Jacks is skirting around Bisbee with Guadalupe and the new mule when a mine foreman riding in the opposite direction tells him there is a soldier sitting in the desert. The mule is the end result of a transaction among Lupe’s hundreds of cousins that started at least two years ago, and he hopes to hell it isn’t stolen. El Chato, who sold it to him at his shack down near Naco a hundred yards from the border, is from the Apache side of her relatives, a son of old Hernán whose sister was one of Geronimo’s wives, and likes to brag about what great stock thieves his people are.