Andromeda Gun (21 page)

“No, Ian, her pa got knocked off his horse by a cottonwood limb. Rode under it without ever seeing it. He was paying no attention to where he was going because he was deep in a book he was reading—John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. I reckon Jim Stewart’s the only man in the world to get killed by
Paradise Lost
.”

The anecdote solved a minor mystery for Ian, who had assumed John Milton to be a local gunfighter. But any distinction the widow might have been given by her husband’s unique manner of dying served little to alleviate her passing sorrow. She looked downright mournful.

In a comment improvised to console her, he remarked, “I reckon paradise is what your husband lost, having to leave a family with you and Gabe in it.”

“Anyhow, no man could hold her pa against the girl.” Liza brightened with an idea. “At least, she’s got some of her mother’s spunk. She took right over, running the restaurant in summer and teaching school in winter. Despite that nice little figure of hers, she’s got a head on them pretty little shoulders.”

Naturally the mother was extolling the daughter, Ian realized, but there were eddies and countercurrents in Liza’s talk, and Ian seized mildly on a backwash.

“Yes’m, but she don’t talk like you and me.”

“She could learn to talk proper with a good man to teach her.”

“Maybe Gabe would be better off with a man of property,” Ian ventured, finally accepting the subject of the mother’s conversation. “Of course, I got a little property myself. I picked up the fifty acres south of your property from Billy Peyton, the place where the creek comes out from under Clayton’s Bridge. But you can’t raise much beef on fifty acres.”

Ian’s thoughts, G-7 noticed, were making lazy circles in his mind, and the effect was pleasant. Ian’s momentary concern for Gabriella’s welfare drifted into a vivid and living image of the creek flowing under the bridge; G-7 could hear the splash and gurgle of running water, feel the cool flow.

“Of course, a man don’t have to raise cattle. Cattle has to be fed. Corn’s a good feed crop, but corn’s got other uses. Why feed good corn to cows? I been thinking about that creek water, Liza. It’s melted snow, soft and pure.”

“Yes, like the lights in Gabriella’s eyes,” Liza said, almost dutifully, before her interest perked up considerably and she asked, “How’d you pry that renegade Mormon loose from the fifty acres?”

“Me and him worked out an agreement,” Ian explained. “You think that land will grow corn, Liza?”

“It’ll grow anything you tell it to grow, and it’s right near Gabe’s new school. She might get some of her boys to go down into your cornfield and do a little shucking. Gabe’s got a way with her boy pupils because she’s so pretty.”

Ian wanted to get her off the subject of her daughter.

“You know, Liza, I been thinking a lot lately, more than I usually do, and sometimes about other people. I don’t want to spend my time as a lawman. Of course, I’d be willing to protect the public when people really need me, for, say, running somebody out of town or hanging somebody—little one-shot temporary law jobs. But I’d liefer make people happy by not hurting anybody. Now, I ain’t saying I want to take up preaching, because that’s too dangerous. People kill each other over religion… No, I been thinking about them poor old Indians the government’s herding together down there on the reservation.”

Liza had been following Ian’s divagations with womanly sympathy up until his last remark. Here, she broke in rather harshly. “That’s for their own good, boy. If they run loose, they’d be stealing chickens and tromping through young married folks’ cornfields.”

“Now, don’t r’ar back, Liza. I ain’t for going down there and letting them out. But the government’s just roping them folks into that corral to forget them, and Indians is people. They like to have fun, just like white folks, and sometimes they even buy things.”

Listening intently, her head cocked in speculation, Liza suddenly asked, “Sure, boy, but where does Gabe figure in all this? You going down to set up a trading post and put her behind the counter?”

“No’m. Sheriff Faust got me thinking along other lines. He wanted the fifty acres to grow hops to make beer for his old age, but I ain’t much of a beer drinker. If the land grows corn and the creek water’s good, the ravine behind your barns would be a fine place to put a still and cook up a few batches of moonshine to sell to the Indians. The government don’t allow nobody to sell whiskey to the Indians, so I’d have the whole market to myself.”

“Red men like whiskey same as white men, maybe better, and the government ain’t got no right to keep them poor people from having fun. By selling whiskey, I could do a lot of good for that poor, downtrodden race, and get paid for my kindness.”

“I’d be all for it, Ian,” Liza said, with qualified enthusiasm, “but you know Gabe would never approve of moonshining. That’s against the law, and selling the stuff to Indians is against another law.”

“Laws are for people who don’t know better,” Ian said, thinking: She kept prodding the conversation back to the same old corral. It was about time for him to grab the halter.

He poured them both another round of drinks, which finished the bottle, and spoke carefully and deliberately.

“Liza, I figure Gabe will be marrying Three-finger Peyton now he’s converted, and she’ll be too busy raising children at two dollars a head to worry much about what’s going on down behind the hen house.”

Liza’s face grew suddenly thoughtful, then soft, and her great, dark eyes misted over. Bemusedly she sipped her cup, then nodded slowly in agreement.

“You’re right, Ian. If she married Billy Peyton, she’d be the richest woman in the valley down there on all that rich land. When she wasn’t teaching school, she’d be riding out over that fancy spread of hers all the time, and she’d forget her old ma, despite all I’ve done for her.”

Ian had presented the widow with a breakdown in the dowry negotiations, but Liza seemed hardly concerned with the import of his remarks about Peyton. Instead, she seemed intent on some private and secret hurt of her own as she continued in a plaintive yet indignant tone.

“Yes, sir. Sometimes I think she’s a little ashamed of my chickens… But I tell you one thing, her and that backsliding Mormon would make a good pair. He don’t know nothing, and she ain’t got the skills of an older woman to teach him with.

“There’s lots of tricks a woman can teach her daughter, things they don’t put in books, but how can a woman do it when her daughter’s too educated and snooty even to talk about it with her?… You know that snit was always trying to get me to take off my shoes before I came into the house from the chicken yard?”

Liza’s face was contorted as she struggled to hold back the tears, and her tears would disturb him. He drained his cup to bolster his courage and said bluntly, “Liza, if you’re willing to put in your thirty acres with my fifty, that’d give us ninety good acres, with hen house fertilizer, to grow enough corn for the whole reservation, and we wouldn’t have to build a house. Yours is good enough, and it’d be handy to our still. Then I’d give you the gray horse in the bargain.”

At his remark, her beginning tears seemed to evaporate.

“Are you and me talking business, boy?”

“In a way, I reckon, I ain’t got a thing against Gabriella. A man couldn’t ask for a better stepdaughter. But I always thought you had a pretty level head, yourself, Liza, on one of the nicest pair of shoulders I ever did see, and down below you’ve got the biggest…”

“Keep talking, boy!”

“… heart I ever found in a woman. And you’ve got a strong stomach, too. Talking business with you is more fun than courting a lot of other women, and if you’re willing to give me Gabriella as a stepdaughter, I’d be mighty pleased.

“You see, Liza, I ain’t no young whelp no more. I’m twenty-eight going on forty, and I reckon you’re about thirty-five going on thirty. Now, I’ve seen some bargains in my day, but, I tell you, Liza, you’re worth twice as much as that big gray outside, and you’ll have to admit it’s some horse.”

“Ian McCloud, are you proposing to me?”

“Well, ma’am, if you want the horse…”

“If you’re proposing to me, boy, what kind of answer do you expect from a woman who’s been widowed a year and before that was married to a man who read books? Do you expect me to flutter my eyes and say, ‘Maybe?’ ”

“I’ll throw in The Sergeant’s pinto, too. It’d make a good plowhorse for our cornfield.”

“Slow down, boy. No need for you to try to sweep me off my feet or drag me off with horses… There’s only one thing I want you to do for me, Ian. I’ll tell you when I want it done, but first I’ll tell you why I want it done.

“When I heard about you taking dead aim and shooting Billy Peyton’s finger off, I said to myself, there’s a kind man, just the one to comfort a widow. Then, when you came to my house looking like a lost ball in high weeds when Gabe started talking books, I said to myself, here’s a man who won’t keep a woman waiting while he finishes a story he’s reading. Then, when you ate all that chicken, I knew you were a man who appreciates the finer things of life. But what cinched me was when you rode the pinwheeler, Midnight. I knowed, then, you were just the buster for this bronc.

“Ian, it pleases me no end that you recognize a real woman when you see one. No spindle-legged, schoolteaching flibbertigibbet is good enough for Ian McCloud.”

“Liza, it pleases me to hear you say all them kind things, but what do you want me to do for you?”

“Move your desk out of the way because I’m too drunk to walk around it, and it wouldn’t be proper for me to climb over it to get to you.”

“But what’s your answer, Liza?”

“What was the question?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Hell, yes! Somebody’s got to help them poor, downtrodden Indians, and it might as well be you and me.”

Remaining seated, Ian gripped the edge of the desk and flipped it onto its back, sending it sliding across the floor to lodge in front of and to bar the front door. Liza stood and fell into Ian’s exposed lap, hugging and kissing him with an ardor he had seldom encountered north of the border. But Ian’s swivel chair proved an unstable arena for Liza’s gyrations. It tilted backwards and over, spilling its occupants, who landed in a welter of arms and legs. Ian’s squirming to get from under her seemed to set Liza off. She shoved the fallen chair away with her free leg and wrapped the other around Ian, pinning his shoulders to the floor.

Her dark black hair flowed into his eyes; the perfume of her was in his nostrils. She flowed over him and around him, and he was helpless to resist when she whispered, “Ian, honey, your pistol’s bruising me something terrible, so I’m going to take your gun belt off.”

Incredibly deft, her fingers moved as she spoke, and she had barely voiced her intentions when he heard her say with astonishment, “Well, I swan!”

That which G-7’s bumbling host had failed to accomplish in weeks, Liza accomplished in minutes. For the angel, the widow’s promises of pneumatic bliss proved delightfully false, else the whiskey Ian had drunk was scrambling its sense of metaphor; her ovate spheroids, firm yet resilient, were more in the nature of cushioned hydraulic rams, an impression G-7 considered more in harmony with the totality of impressions the female created. Liquid was the word for Liza. To a luminosity, she was exotic yet not totally unfamiliar, suggestive of a whorl of lubricated light. And paradoxical. Immense yet delicate, massive yet buoyant, she focused the liquefaction of her thighs with such exquisite and controlled compaction that even its host—that heretofore aesthetic clod—was drawn into the flowing wonder of her ways. For its part, G-7 could make universal comparisons and it knew that nowhere, not even on Vulvula, existed the being with even a quiver of Liza’s understanding of the mechanics of applied aesthetics.

For instance, the art of Liza Stewart was subtly heightened by an otherwise peculiar practice which G-7 could recognize as a by-product of her life experience: Even the full measure of devotion Liza gave to pleasure was intensified, or spiced, by the piquancy of pain. The woman was an inveterate chicken plucker. Her fingers fluting over Ian plucked notes of passion from chords G-7 was positive her overly fastidious schoolteacher daughter would never have tweaked.

G-7’s analysis was continuing apace when, for the second time in twenty-four hours, it lost its detachment. While half-amused by and half-applauding the esoteric exoticism of the widow, it had a vision of itself lifting off on a pillar of fire, and that vision, sublime and exalting, throbbing with the primal flame, so shivered its tendrils that it was one, not merely with its host but, as it were, its hostess. It could never turn from these revels in derision. It was involved forever with mankind. Throughout its existence it had been launching itself from a seemingly endless array of planets, always leaving, always going. Now it was home. At long last, G-7 had come.

“God of galaxies, be with me now and in the moment of my dissolution. Amen.”

“What’d you say, hon?”

“Nothing, Liza. I reckon I’m half-asleep. I ain’t done nothing all day but kill two men and get engaged the easy way, but I’m plumb tuckered out. Of course, I didn’t get much sleep last night, but that ain’t it. I feel like I’ve fought a war and lost.”

“You stretch out, lover boy, and get yourself some shut-eye. I’ll stand guard. One thing Widow Stewart does—she takes care of her man.”

“You ain’t getting no argument from me on that score. After a short snooze, I’ll see Brother Winchester about making an honest woman out of you, and, after we’re hitched, we’ll ride over to Pocatello for a two-day honeymoon.”

G-7 could no longer look upon the face of its beloved because Ian closed his eyes. No matter—it was concerned now with a concern that never troubled its host, a sense of duty. One final task it must perform as a galactic scout. Disengaging itself from the neurons of the man, it floated upward and outward through the closed door.

G-7, too, had almost succumbed in the struggle on the mountain. True, it felt it had won the battle, but in winning the battle it might have lost the war. Ian had developed a social consciousness of sorts and seemed willing to accept the restraints of matrimony, but the man’s respect for the law still seemed somewhat dubious.