Lonesome Dove (17 page)

“I hadn’t been planning on going to Montana,” Augustus said. “That’s your plan. I may come if I feel like it. Or you may change your mind. I know you never have changed your mind about anything yet, but there’s a first time for everything.”

“You’d argue with a stump,” Call said. “Just watch them horses. We may never get that lucky again.”

Call saw there was no point in losing any more time. If Augustus was not of a mind to be serious, nothing could move him.

“Jake did come back, didn’t he?” Augustus asked.

“His horse is here,” Call said. “I guess he probably come with it. Do you think he’ll work, once we start?”

“No, and I won’t, either,” Augustus said. “You better hire these Irish boys while you got the chance.”

“It’s work we’re looking for,” Allen said. “What we don’t know we’ll gladly learn.”

Call refrained from comment. Men who didn’t know how to get on and off a horse would not be much use around a cow outfit.

“Where you goin’ hiring?” Augustus asked.

“I might go to the Raineys’,” Call said. “As many boys as they got they ought to be able to spare a few.”

“I sparked Maude Rainey once upon a time,” Augustus said, tilting back his chair. “If we hadn’t had the Comanches to worry with, I expect I’d have married her. Her name was Grove before she married. She lays them boys like hens lay eggs, don’t she?”

Call left, to keep from having to talk all day. Deets was catching a short nap on the back porch, but he sat up when Call came out. Dish Boggett and the boy were roping low bushes, Dish teaching the boy a thing or two about the craft of roping. That was good, since nobody around the Hat Creek outfit could rope well enough to teach him anything. Call himself could rope in an emergency, and so could Pea, but neither of them were ropers of the first class.

“Practice up, boys,” he said. “As soon as we gather some cattle there’s gonna be a pile of roping to do.”

Then he caught his second-best horse, a sorrel gelding they called Sunup, and headed northeast toward the brush country.

13

LORENA HAD STOPPED expecting ever to be surprised, least of all by a man, and then Jake Spoon walked in the door and surprised her. The surprise started the minute before he even spoke to her. Partly it was that he seemed to know her the minute he saw her.

She had been sitting at a table expecting Dish Boggett to come back with another two dollars he had borrowed somewhere. It was an expectation that brought her no pleasure. It was clear Dish expected something altogether different from what the two dollars would buy him. That was why, in general, she preferred older men to young ones. The older ones were more likely to be content with what they paid for; the young ones almost always got in love with her, and expected it to make a difference. It got so she never said a word to the young men, thinking that the less she said the less they would expect. Of course they went right on expecting, but at least it saved her having to talk. She could tell Dish Boggett was going to pester her as long as he could afford to, and when she heard boot heels and the jingle of spurs on the porch she assumed it was him, coming back for a second round.

Instead, Jake had walked in. Lippy gave a whoop, and Xavier was excited enough that he came out from behind the bar and shook Jake’s hand. Jake was polite and glad to see them, and took the trouble to ask their health and make a few jokes, but even before he had drunk the free drink Xavier offered him he had begun to make a difference in the way she felt. He had big muddy brown eyes and a neat mustache that turned down at the corners, but of course she had seen big eyes and mustaches before. What made the difference was that Jake was so at home and relaxed even after he saw her sitting there. Most men got nervous when they saw her, aware that their wives wouldn’t like them being in the same room with her, or else made nervous by the thought of what they wanted from her, which they couldn’t get without some awkward formalities of a sort that few of them could handle smoothly.

But Jake was the opposite of nervous. Before he even spoke to her he smiled at her several times in the most relaxed way—not in the bragging way Tinkersley had when he smiled. Tinkersley’s smile had said plainly enough that he felt she ought to be grateful for the chance to do whatever he wanted her to do. Of course she was grateful to him for taking her away from Mosby and the smoke pots, but once she had been away for a while she came to hate Tinkersley’s smile.

Lorena felt puzzled for a moment. She didn’t ignore the men who walked through the door of the Dry Bean. It didn’t do to ignore men. The majority of them were harmless, with nothing worse than a low capacity to irritate—they were worse than chiggers but not as bad as bedbugs, in her view. Still, there was no doubt that there were some mean ones who plain had it in for women, and it was best to try and spot those and take precautions. But as far as trusting the general run of men, there was no need, since she had no intention of ever expecting anything from one of them again. She didn’t object to sitting in on a card game once in a while—she even enjoyed it, since making money at cards was considerably easier and more fun than doing it the other way—but a good game of cards once in a while was about as far as her expectations went.

Immediately Jake Spoon began to change the way her thinking worked. Before he even brought his bottle to the table to sit with her, she began to want him to. If he had taken the bottle and gone to sit by himself, she would have felt disappointed, but of course he didn’t. He sat down, asked her if she’d like some refreshments and looked her right in the face for a while in a friendly, easygoing way.

“My goodness,” he said, “I never expected to find nobody like you here. We didn’t see much beauty when I lived in these parts. Now if this was San Francisco, I wouldn’t be so surprised. I reckon that’s where you really belong.”

It seemed a miracle to Lorie that a man had walked in who could figure that out so quick. In the last year she had begun to doubt her own ability to get to San Francisco and even to doubt that it was as cool and nice as she had been imagining it to be, and yet she didn’t want to give up the notion, because she had no other notion to put in its place. It might be silly to even think about it, but it was the best she had.

Then Jake came along and right away mentioned exactly the right place. Before the afternoon was over she had laid aside her caution and her silence and told Jake more about herself than she had ever told anyone. Lippy and Xavier listened from a distance in astonished silence. Jake said very little, though he patted her hand from time to time and poured her a drink when her glass was empty. Once in a while he would say, “My goodness,” or “That damned dog, I ought to go find him and shoot him,” but mostly he just looked friendly and confident, sitting there with his hat tipped back.

When she got through with her story, he explained that he had killed a dentist in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and was a wanted man, but that he had hopes of eluding the law, and if he did, he would certainly try to see that she got to San Francisco, where she belonged. The way he said it made a big impression on Lorie. A sad tone came into his voice from time to time, as if it pained him to have to remember that mortality could prevent him from doing her such a favor. He sounded like he expected to die, and probably soon. It wasn’t a whine, either—just a low note off his tongue and a look in his eye; it didn’t interrupt for a minute his ability to enjoy the immediate pleasures of life.

It gave Lorie the shivers when Jake talked like that, and made her feel that she wanted to play a part in keeping him alive. She was used to men thinking they needed her desperately just because they wanted to get their carrots in her, or wanted her to be their girl for a few days or weeks. But Jake wasn’t asking for anything like that. He just let her see that he felt rather impermanent and might not be able to carry out all that he wished. Lorena wanted to help him. She was surprised, but the feeling was too strong to deny. She didn’t understand it, but she felt it. She knew she had a force inside her, but her practice had been to save it entirely for herself. Men were always hoping she would bestow some of it on them, but she never had. Then, with little hesitation, she began to offer it to Jake. He was a case. He didn’t ask for help, but he knew how to welcome it.

She was the one who suggested they go upstairs, mainly because she was tired of Lippy and Xavier listening to everything they said. On the way up she noticed that Jake was favoring one foot. It turned out one of his ankles had been broken years before, when a horse fell on him—the ankle was apt to swell if he had to ride hard for long stretches, as he had just done. She helped him ease his boot off and got him some hot water and Epsom salts. After he had soaked his foot for a while he looked amused, as if he had just thought of something pleasant.

“You know, if there was a tub around here, I’d just have a bath and trim my mustache,” he said.

There was a washtub sitting on the back porch. Lorena carried it up when she needed a bath, and the six or eight buckets of water it took to fill it. Xavier used it more often than she did. He could tolerate dirt on his customers, but not on himself. Lippy gave no thought to baths so far as anyone knew.

Lorena offered to go get the washtub, since Jake had one boot off, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He took the other boot off and limped down by himself and got the tub. Then he bribed Lippy to heat up some water. It took a while, since the water had to be heated on the cookstove.

“Why, Jake, you could buy a bath from the Mexican barber for ten cents,” Lippy pointed out.

“That may be true, but I prefer the company in this establishment,” Jake said.

Lorena thought maybe he would want her to leave the room while he bathed, since so far he had treated her modestly, but he had nothing like that in mind. He latched her door, so Lippy couldn’t pop in and catch a glimpse of something it wasn’t his business to see.

“Lippy will eye the girls,” Jake said—no news to Lorena.

“I wisht it was a bigger tub,” he said. “We could have us a wash together.”

Lorena had never heard of such a thing. It surprised her how coolly Jake stripped off for his wash. Like all men who weren’t pure gamblers, he was burned brown on his face and neck and hands, and was fish-white on the rest of his body. Most of her customers were brown down to their collar, and white below. The great majority of them were reluctant to show anything of their bodies, though it was bodies they had come to satisfy. Some wouldn’t even unbuckle their belts. Lorena often made them wait while she undressed—if she didn’t, whatever she was wearing got mussed up. Also, she liked undressing in front of men because it scared them. A few would get so scared they had to back out of the whole business—though they always scrupulously paid her and apologized and made excuses. They came in thinking they wanted to persuade her out of her clothes, but when she matter-of-factly took them off, it often turned the tables.

Gus was an exception, of course. He liked her naked and he liked her clothed. Seeing one body would remind him of other bodies, and he would sit on the bed and scratch himself and talk about various aspects of women that only he would have had anything to say about: the varieties of bosoms, for example.

Jake Spoon wasn’t as talkative as Gus, but he was just as immodest. He sat happily in the tub until the water got cold. He even asked if she’d like to give him a haircut. She didn’t mind trying, but quickly saw that she was making a mess of it and stopped with only a small portion of his curly black hair removed.

Once he toweled himself off he turned and led her to the bed. He stopped before he got there and looked as though he was going to offer her money. Lorena had wondered if he would, and when he stopped, she turned quickly so he could undo the long row of buttons down the back of her dress. She felt impatient—not for the act, but for Jake to go ahead and assume responsibility for her. She had never supposed that she would want such a thing from a man, but she was not bothered by the fact that she had changed her mind in the space of an hour, or that she was a little drunk when she changed it. She felt confident that Jake Spoon would get her out of Lonesome Dove, and she didn’t intend to allow money to pass between them—or anything else that might cause him to leave without her.

Jake immediately stepped over and helped her undo the buttons. It was plain she wasn’t the first woman he had undressed, because he even knew how to unhook the dress at the neck, something most of her customers would never have thought of.

“You’ve had this one awhile, I reckon,” he said, looking rather critically at the dress once he got it off her.

That, too, surprised her, for no man had ever commented, favorably or unfavorably, upon her clothes—not even Tinkersley, who had given her the money to buy the very dress Jake was holding, just a cheap cotton dress which was fraying at the collar. Lorena felt a touch of shame that a man would notice the fraying. She had often meant to make a new dress or two—that being the only way to get one, in Lonesome Dove—but she was awkward with a needle and was still getting by on the dresses she had bought in San Antonio.

In the months there she had had several offers to go to San Antonio with men who would probably have bought her dresses, but she had always declined. San Antonio was in the wrong direction, she hadn’t liked any of the men, and anyway didn’t really need new dresses, since she was attracting more business than she wanted just wearing the old ones.

Jake’s comment had been mildly made, but it threw Lorena slightly off. She realized he was a finicky man—she could not get away with being lazy about herself, any longer. A man who noticed a frayed collar with a near-naked woman standing right in front of him was a new kind of man to Lorena—one who would soon notice other things, some perhaps more serious than a collar. She felt disheartened; some glow had seeped from the moment. Probably he had already been to San Francisco and seen finer women than her. Perhaps when it came time to leave he wouldn’t want to bother with someone so ill-dressed. Perhaps the surprise that had walked into her life would simply walk back out of it.

But her sinking confidence was only momentary. Jake put the dress aside, watched her draw her shift off over her head, and sat beside her when she lay down. He was perfectly at ease.

“Well, Lorie, you take the prize,” he said. “I had not a hope of being this lucky when I headed back here. Why, you’re as fine as flowers.”

When he began to stroke her she noticed that his hands were like a woman’s, his fingers small and his fingernails clean. Tinkersley had had clean fingernails, but Jake wasn’t arrogant like Tinkersley, and he gave the impression of having nothing but time. Most men crawled on top of her at once, but Jake just sat on the bed, smiling at her. When he smiled, her confidence returned. With most men, there was a moment when they moved their eyes away. But Jake kept looking at her, right in the eye. He looked at her so long that she began to feel shy. She felt more naked than she had ever felt, and when he bent to kiss her, she flinched. She did not like kissing, but Jake merely grinned when she flinched, as if her shyness was funny. His breath was as clean as his hands. Many a sour breath had ruffled her hair and affronted her nostrils, but Jake’s was neither rank nor sour. It had a clean cedary flavor to it.

When it was over, Jake took a nap, and instead of getting up and dressing, Lorie lay with him, thinking. She thought of San Francisco, and just thinking about it made her think that she could do anything. She didn’t even feel like moving to wipe the sheets. Let them be. She would be going soon, and Xavier could burn them for all she cared.

When Jake woke he looked at her and grinned, and his hand, warm now, went right back to work.

“If I ain’t careful I’m apt to sprout up again,” he said.

Lorena wanted to ask him why his breath smelled like cedar but she didn’t know if she ought, since he had just come to town. But then she asked him, a little shocked at hearing her own voice make the question.

“Why, I passed a cedar grove and cut myself some toothpicks,” Jake said. “There’s nothing that sweetens the breath like a cedar toothpick, unless it’s mint, and mint don’t grow in these parts.”