Hard Twisted (16 page)

Don't!

The gun fired and Lottie screamed, the echoes of girl and gunshot overlapping in their lithic refuge. The horse reared and
galloped down-canyon, showering Palmer in sand where he stood with the pistol raised to skyward and the gunsmoke curling in the half-light above him.

Lottie began to sob. Palmer grabbed her by the shirtfront and yanked her forward and spun her roughly to the ground, the shirt cloth tearing in his fist. He kicked her once, twice, where she lay curled.

Damn you! Damn you to hell! Look what you made me go and do!

The morning was late in coming, and when Lottie finally woke, it was to Palmer bent over a cookfire with sunbeams angling from over the rimrock bathing him in a gauzy radiance. Nearby, both horses stood as bookends with their muzzles in the spring pool, the buckskin lifting its dripping head and nickering as Lottie stirred.

Her ribs ached and her head was light as she stood upright and moved but two steps from her bedroll before kneeling to retch, and to retch again.

Palmer was beside her as she spat and wiped her mouth. He lifted her gently by an elbow.

Easy now. Coffee's just about ready, and I got biscuits in the chute.

She could not straighten. He cupped her shoulder and walked her weak-kneed to the fire, where the saddles lay angled in the sand like jetsam left by a tide long receded.

Here we go. You need a blanket? How about that coffee?

He moved nimbly, fetching her blanket and her cup and pouring her coffee. Solicitous in his every aspect. He poked at the embers and unstacked the plates and reached for the iron skillet.

Whooee! Here. Hold this.

He passed her a plate and wrapped a glove onto the panhandle and parsed out the blackened biscuits. She nibbled and swallowed, and he hung as on tenterhooks on her verdict.

How's that? Good?

She nodded. He filled his own cup and sat and watched her as she ate in small bites, avoiding his eyes. Behind her, the bay horse moved across the sandy wash, sniffing at her empty bedroll.

I seen some cow track on the way in, he told her.

She looked at him without speaking.

Got me to thinkin, maybe I could catch on with a outfit right hereabouts. We could set us some roots, maybe find us a piece of ground. From what I seen of the cowboyin in these parts, I'd be top hand in no time. Then your pa, he could come to us instead of us chasin him all over creation.

What about the horse?

Palmer looked to the dun horse mirrored in the spring pool.

Tell you what, you let me worry about her. He set down his plate, reaching across to stroke her dirty cheek. I'm sure sorry about last night.

She looked away, and he rose on to his knees to face her.

Listen, Lucile. I been in some hard places in my life, and I seen some things no man ought to of seen. I know that don't excuse what I done, but a dog that's been kicked too much, well, he's liable to bite and scratch when he ought to be a'lickin and a'waggin his tail. And that's me right there in a nutshell.

He took hold of her hands.

I been thinkin about this all night, and I figured that you, you're like the little girl what finds that dog and takes him in and gives him a good home. Only it takes a while for that dog to
understand that things is different this time, and that he don't have to snap and bite all the time to protect himself. That the little girl is lookin out for him, and that she won't do nothin to hurt him. And that's what I got to learn, I know that, and you've got to have a little patience with me is all. I guess that's the long way around to what I'm tryin to say.

Tears were in his eyes by the end, and she at the sight of them reached out to wipe his face, and in so doing became the very girl of his story.

They rode into Blanding side by side on the main street like thin and ragged heralds of some coming apocalypse, Palmer dirty and unshaven and Lottie hunched forward over her pommel and a town cur yapping and bristling in their wake.

They rode past the schoolhouse and the stake house, and they reined in before the lone café, where Palmer dismounted and tied the bay horse to a lamp standard. He reached up and eased the wincing girl from her saddle.

Wait here, he told her, passing her the knotted catchrope.

She watched through the plate glass as Palmer spoke with the counterman. The portly Dane listened with growing interest as Palmer spoke at length and then stepped aside to gesture streetward. At last the man untied his apron and circled the counter.

They stood at the window side by side, the big man nodding at the smaller man's narration. Then he said something and turned, and Palmer flashed Lottie a thumbs-up and moved to the door.

They ate chicken-fried steaks with mashed potatoes and flour gravy, and they drank cold root beers from the bottle through
white paper straws. They sat by the window with an angled view of the horses, Palmer rising from his seat cushion whenever a stroller paused too long to regard them.

They had the café to themselves, the counterman washing dishes somewhere in back. When he finally returned, wiping his hands on his dirty apronfront, Palmer stood and followed him outside.

Lottie watched as they circled the buckskin, Palmer pointing and extolling as the counterman inspected the saddle and lifted the horse's pasterns each in turn, cupping her hooves and bending to examine her shoeing. He looked inside her mouth. He stood by while Palmer led her into the street and trotted her up and back. Then he spat on his hand, and Palmer did likewise, and the two men shook.

Palmer resumed his seat while the big man moved to stand behind the counter.

What? Lottie whispered as Palmer touched a finger to his lips.

The man when he returned placed one shoe on the empty chair seat and payed out the bills on the tabletop.

Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. He produced a pencil and drew a crude map on the back of his checkpad and placed it atop the banknotes.

You tell Mary Jane I'm the one that sent you.

Palmer lifted the stack and squared it and folded it into his shirt pocket.

Much obliged, cousin.

I assume you've got some kind of paper on that horse?

Palmer looked at Lottie. Well, he said, we did, of course. Only thing is, it got burnt up in that fire I was tellin you about.

The man nodded gravely. He turned to Lottie, resting a thick, pink hand on her shoulder.

I'm terribly sorry for your loss, miss. My mother passed on this year as well.

The rental when they found it was more shed than guesthouse, the floorplanks cupped and gapped and the open stud walls nested with skeins of feathery dust. The window glazing rattling in its sashes as the door swung closed behind them.

Lord knows, it isn't much, the woman said, snatching at a strand of floating cobweb. We don't rent it in the winter, of course. But there's a flush toilet and a tub through here, and a closet.

There was a bedstead as well, bare springs under thin cotton ticking, plus a sink and a small eating table. The woman drew a line in the dust with her finger.

I wasn't expecting to show it so soon. I'll send one of the girls down to sweep it out this afternoon. She glanced at Lottie and smiled. And bring some clean linens, of course.

Palmer turned to the window, which looked onto the back lawn and the main house beyond.

The woman spoke to his back. Are you by any chance kin to Lawrence Palmer? He's our county sheriff, you know.

Palmer turned. The woman was broad and potato-faced, with large hands and clear, unblinking eyes. Her age was sixty, or eighty. She wore a white cotton apron over her housedress, and her steel-gray hair was upswept and tightly bound.

Could be, ma'am. My granddaddy and my uncle, they was both Texas Rangers. He winked at Lottie. We Palmers got a long history with the law.

Why then, you'll have to meet my Will. The woman beamed, turning toward the door. He was county sheriff as well.

Palmer soon lapsed into a familiar pattern of gambling and drinking and sleeping past noon, of midnight suppers and afternoon breakfasts, and so was a stranger to Lottie's routine of rising with the sun and retching into the rusted toilet before heading outside to her chores.

The scrawny bay, which Palmer called Shithead or Shitface, but which Lottie had named Henry, became her chief confidant and confessor. He greeted her each morning, nickering at her approach, and he listened patiently to her ramblings as she busied herself currying and brushing his new summer coat and combing his mane and tail and picking the red-earth packing from his feet. Then, before filling his water and gathering his morning hay, she always stood before him, and Henry always stepped close to her and pressed his great oblong face into her shirtfront. Standing perfectly still. Breathing softly, as though smelling somehow her unborn child and remembering in the smell of it some other, former life.

As June bled into the withering heat of July, the slow dissipation of Jimmy Palmer was increasingly noted and remarked upon, both in the household of their tenancy and in the Blanding community in genreal. Incidents large and small grew both in frequency and amplitude, culminating in the Pioneer Day raid on a floating pitch game for which the locals fingered Palmer, who vowed to recoup his resulting court fine by any means necessary.

And so their landlady's offers to commend the Texas cowboy to her husband, who was off tending cattle on his summer range,
waned and abated, and then ceased altogether. As did the social invitations once extended, and the pleasantries once passed, and eventually, even the rudimentary courtesies of that small and close-knit Mormon township.

On a Saturday evening in late July a knock sounded, and the door to the guesthouse swung wide, and Lottie looked up from her sewing to find their landlady in the doorway with her hair down and her housedress gathered tightly at her throat. Her eyes moving from the dirty-clothes pile to the dirty horse tack to the dirty dishes piled in the dirty sink, settling at last on the dirty girl, who sat thin and alone amid the manly squalor in a forlorn parody of adulthood.

Johnny Rae, she said, when Jimmy comes home,
if
Jimmy comes home, you tell him that Mr. Larsen was by to see him.

Ma'am?

Mr. Larsen. From the café. She turned again to the door. Something about a horse.

They saddled Henry in the moonlight and were gone before dawn, Palmer loose in the saddle, railing at the state of a world in which a man couldn't even get some proper shut-eye before running from the law.

The sun when it rose was hot and angry, and Lottie rode with her head on Palmer's shoulder in a bid to share his hat shade. They rode through scrub plains flecked with cattle and twisted cedars, and then, farther south, into the verdant geometry of irrigated farmland.

Maybe we could try our hand at farmin, Lottie suggested, rousing Palmer from his torpor.

I ain't cut out to be no sodbuster.

How come?

A tractor chugged and belched in the distant field, and Palmer leaned and spat in reply. You mean hitch old Shitface to a plow? I reckon that'd teach him how good he's had it.

The horse whinnied and quickened.

You ever worked a farm before?

We growed some cotton at Uncle Mack's.

Palmer grunted. My daddy growed oats. I never seen the point to it myself. He'd work like a nigger to raise feed for the horses, just so's they could pull the plow to plant the goddamn feed. Now where's the sense in that?

If we growed truck, we'd never go hungry.

The horse clopped and Palmer's hat rocked in languid sway with the movement. A hot breeze rose up from the west, carrying with it the loamy smell of the newly riven earth.

A goddamn sodbuster. Palmer shook his head sadly. My daddy would shit a anvil.

They camped outside Bluff in the shade of the Navajo Twins, whose paired ocher spires blotted the white glare of sunrise. A communal well was nearby, and Lottie brewed coffee while Palmer stood shirtless by the cookfire, scraping the last of the soap lather from his throat. He rinsed the straight razor in his coffee mug and closed his eyes and splashed the soapy lees onto his face, blowing and shaking his head.

Did I miss anywheres?

Wait. There is somethin peculiar, she said. Didn't you used to have two ears?

He smiled the smile of an artist pleased with his canvas, proud of his creation.

You sure you'll be all right?

I ain't afraid.

That's my girl. He fastened his shirt. Anybody asks, you tell 'em your husband's a two-fisted desperado with a quick draw and a quicker temper, you got that?

She looked away.

What's the matter?

It ain't nothin. Get on with yourself.

The land he'd found lay south and west of what town remained of the old Bluff City in those years of exodus and drought. There was a pioneer cabin, and a field choked over with knapweed and cheatgrass and spindly cholla. The scar of an irrigation ditch adjoined the land from the west, and they walked it together, to a wooden sluice gate on a larger ditch where willows grew and where water ran in a thin, silent ribbon through the green and whispering grass.

Can we just take it?

Palmer, squinting, looked up-ditch and down.

Shit, he said. Course we can. That's what it's here for, ain't it?

The cabin walls were cottonwood timbers daubed with the red clay mud of the region. Palmer repaired the door hinges and patched the broken window glass with siding salvaged from the outhouse. There was no barn or shelter for the horse, so he strung a picket line between the cabin and the largest of the cottonwoods, and in two days' time the horse had grazed a clear path through the field.

On the third day, they plowed. Or performed a parody of
plowing, with a device of Palmer's assembly that combined a rusted shovel blade, the wheels of an old ore cart, and the angled roof joist of the outhouse.

Bluebirds rose and darted as the horse strained against its rope traces with Palmer, shirtless and already sweating, standing his weight on the spade pedal.