Against the Day (90 page)

   
“Just
that when I first heard, I hated her so much—”

“She had at least the spirit to look
me in the eye and say she was marryin that little horseapple. I had my chance
right there but was too shook to take it I guess, and she was out the door, and
now it’s long over and done with.”

“I’m having some more of this pie,”
Frank said. “You?”

“Sure thing. You boys were hard work,
but that’s only hard work. A daughter pretends to be so easy, a little lady,
smilin, dancin, all the time she’s waitin on that perfect moment that’ll hurt
the most. And mercy, did it.” With a light in her eye now warning Frank it was
all she had to say about it, at least to him.

·
    
·
    
·

Frank took the
narrowgauge
out of
Cripple, and it was some time before he noticed he was riding south. Something
like a cloak of despair was settling down over his soul, useful, like a duster
out on the trail. He still didn’t understand how much harder and less inclined
to mercy it was making him. He looked around the train car, as if the Rev, out
circuitriding, might be about to show up with some useful thoughts. But either
Moss Gatlin wasn’t there or he was choosing to stay invisible.

“I had this dream about running away
with the carnival,” Mayva had told Frank in the lamplight one evening, both
just keeping easy company. “Since the summer I was twelve and went to one down
in Olathe. They’d set up all their pitches beside the river, and I got to
talking somehow to this one fellow who ran that horserace game they called the
Hippodrome, he must have sure had a case or something, kept asking me why
didn’t I come and work there, said he’d already been to the owner about me, and
we could travel together all over the country, maybe the world, he understood
my natural gifts and so forth
. . . .
”

“All the time we were growing up,”
Frank said, “you wanted to run away and join the carnival?”

“Yes, and there I was with all o’
you, right
in
the carnival, and didn’t even know it.” And he hoped he’d
always be able to recall the way she laughed then.

own they journeyed, out of the mountains, seldom looking
back, down through the prairiesmoke of eastern Colorado, onto a lowland that
seemed to be awaiting reoccupation by ancient forces of mischief. . . in each
face Deuce’s criminal palps could sense an imminence almost painful,
unremitting, agents of a secret infiltration proceeding before the event.

For a while it seemed the only towns
they ever came to rest in were ones that had picked up a bad reputation among
those obliged to visit regularly— vendors of farm machinery, saloon
musicians, pharmacy drummers with giant sample valises full of nerve tonics and
mange pills that would pass for hair restorers. “Oh,
that
place.” Down
the line and all across the land, you could find these towns it was better to
keep clear of, unless you had grown long habituated to a despair that would
someday be all defined by just its name, spoken among lowbudget travelers in a
certain way. There would be no laundries, bathing facilities, or cheap eats
anywhere near the station. Well say, welcome to our li’l town, stranger, stayin
long? In the trainstation toilets, you could always find inscribed the last
word in these matters—

Roses is red

Shit is brown

Nothing but assholes

Live in this town.

Each meandering river presented a
distinction between the two sides, prosperity or want, upright or immoral, safe
as Heaven or doomed as Sodom,

sheathed in certainty or exposed in all helplessness to the
sky and a tragic destiny.

When Deuce had left this part of the
world, just a youth, geography had favored the vectorless. From any patch of
these plains, there was more than enough compass for vanishing, roads of flight
could just aim off along any heading, into terrain far from mapped even yet,
Wild West or decadent East, north to the gold fields, down into Old Mexico, all
angles between.

Former bank officers whose sleeping
heads were pillowed on satchels of U.S. currency, fifteenyearold gold
prospectors who inside were already old and crazy, with growing into it just a
bothersome detail, girls “in trouble” and boys who’d got them there, wives in
love with clergymen, clergymen in love with clergymen, horse thieves and
stackers of decks—and every last sinful absquatulator among them
somebody’s child, not so much gone as consciously committing absence, and
folded that quick into family legend. “Then that one day they all just showed
up again out of the blue, no more’n an hour on the road, he said, he’d met her
in a drugstore, just over in Rockford, and before that weekend they were
married—” “No, no, that was Crystal’s cousin Oneida, string of little
ones like elephant babies at the circus—” “No, now I’m sure that one was
Myrna—”

The farther into it they moved, the
deeper Deuce felt he was descending again into all he had ever wanted to rise
above, to those unfairly walked out on as well as those he prayed he’d never
see again. It was the light kept reminding him, yellow darkening to red to
bitter blackness of the whirlwind brought among the sunlit, wildflowered
meadows, thunder that began like the rumbling of sashweights locked with old
deathsecrets of some ancient house back behind the sky’s neatly carpentered
casementing and soon rocking like artillery.

“And back down in slow dumb old
‘Egypt,
’ ”
his sister Hope would
tell Lake over a potatosalad recipe unvaried for generations, popovers and
sweet corn and a chicken roasted straight from the yard, “we went on with our
days, children of a captivity some escaped as Deuce did, while others of us
never will. For there have to be our kind, too.”

“Sure,” said her husband Levi, as
they were having a smoke out back, “but Deuce what’n the hell ever took you out
that way?”

   
“Looked
west, saw those mountains . . .”

   
“Not
from no Decatur you didn’t.”

“Most times it was clouds,
thunderclouds, so forth
. . . .
But
sometimes when it was clear.”

   
“Dipping
into Mother Kindred’s laudanum again, eh—”

   
“Leave
her out of this if you wouldn’t mind.”

“No offense, just th’t people with
stories like that tend to end up in California, they’re not careful.”

   
“That
could happen.”

   
“Let
us know.”

And thanks and so forth, but they’d
sleep in town. It would be impossible for him to sleep in that house, ever
again
. . . .

For a day or two
after they got married, Deuce had
kept repeating to himself, I’m not alone anymore. It became a formula,
something to touch to make sure, too hard for him otherwise to believe that she
was here, inside the angle of his elbow, far down the line as anybody cared to
look legal as you please. Course, there was that old Sloat, and he had to
admit, well, maybe he hadn’t been all that alone, really
. . . .
And then the activities among the three of them that
followed, and after months more of domestic apprenticeship, the formula he
found himself muttering, not always silently, had become, shit and when was I
ever
not
alone?

But along with that, as time passed,
he had also found himself engaged in pursuit of her forgiveness, as if it were
a prize being held carefully as maidenhood—hungering after it the way
some drover too long out in the brush might after the unspoiled object of his
desire. Deuce, feeling this need, till recently unsuspected, slowly beginning
to eat its way into his brain, would find occasion to blunder in small, stupid
ways, breaking the Mexican flowerpot, forgetting to fix the roof before the
next storm rode in, staying out at night pissing away the rent, just so there’d
never be a shortage of things he could beg her forgiveness for.

What he didn’t quite see was how
little it mattered to her by now. If the marriage was coming more and more to
resemble a kitchentable poker game, why, she valued her forgiveness at not much
more than some mediumsize chip. She had allowed the immediacy of Webb’s
death—Webb’s life—to pass like smoke into the steadily darkening
air between them. From a thousand small tells he had remained too unschooled in
deceit to know how to keep from letting slip, Lake in fact already knew, or
suspected too much by now not to know. But it would have to be Deuce who turned
all the cards face up. And the day, before they knew it, had accelerated upon
them, avalanche style.

In her own way of knowing and not
knowing, she would say something like, “Your father still kickin, Deuce?”

   
“Someplace
back here. Last I knew.” Waited for her to go on with it, but

only got the careful face. “And my Ma, she died in that hard
freeze in doubleought. Couldn’t dig her a grave till spring.”

   
“You
miss her?”

   
“Guess
so. Course.”

   
“She
ever cry on your account?”

   
“Cry,
not when I was around.”

“
Anybody
ever cry for you,
Deuce?” Waited for him to shrug, then, “Well I hope you’re not countin on much
from me, I’m done ’th all my crying. Must’ve been that my Pa took the last of
it, what d’you think? for my tears have all run and the drought has set in.
Whatever happens to you, guess I won’t be crying. That be all right with you?”

   
He
was giving her this peculiar look.

   
“What,”
she said.

“Surprises me is all. Tears and so
forth, thought you and him didn’t get along.”

   
“Did
I tell you that?”

   
“Well
no, not in so many words.”

   
“So
you got no idea how I felt and come to that still feel about him.”

He understood by then that he’d do
better to cut his losses and just dummy up, but he couldn’t, something stronger
than simple selfinterest was pushing him, and he didn’t know what it was but it
frightened him because he couldn’t control it. “You remember what it was like
up there. Wasn’t just the mountain trails where you ’s only a step from the
edge. Those Association boys, it ain’t like once they hire you on that you have
the choice. Wa’n’ nothin special about me, just I was there. They would’ve
hired anybody.” There. That was way too much.

   
But
how ready did she feel to say, “You could’ve stood up.”

   
“What’s
that?”

   
“Could’ve
been a man instead of crawling like a snake.”

Then he might’ve taken in a short
breath but no more. “Yeahp, that’s what your Daddy tried, and look what they
did to him.”

   
“Excuse
me, ‘they,’ what ‘they’ was that again, Deuce?”

   
“What
are you tryin to say, Lake?”

   
“What
are you trying not to?”

Being afraid of
ghosts
, Deuce had been
waiting for Webb to find him. In dreams no different from his cursed youth, he
left her in the night, went calling into the unmeasured shadows deep inside
haunted barns, daring what was there to come out into the open country, which
itself had grown

malevolent. He waited up into the clockless nights for
mountains miles high that only came out at night, waiting to drive an ownerless
wagon straight uphill into autumnal graveyard terrain and be found by the man
he had killed. Mosquitoes big as farm animals, with eyes as reincarnate and
expressive as a dog’s, and bodies warm and squeezable as a rabbit’s, bumped
slowly against him
. . . .