Lonesome Dove (26 page)

“I would have taken her to San Francisco,” Xavier said. “I would have given her money, bought her clothes.”

“In my opinion the woman made a poor bargain,” Augustus said. “I seen her not an hour ago, trying to cook over a dern smoky fire. But then we don’t look at life like women do, Wanz. They don’t always appreciate convenience.”

Xavier shrugged. Gus often talked about women, but he had never listened and didn’t intend to start. It wouldn’t bring Lorena back, or make him feel less hopeless. It had seemed a miracle, the day she walked in the door, with nothing but her beauty. From the first he had planned to marry her someday. It didn’t matter that she was a whore. She had intelligence, and he felt sure her intelligence would one day guide her to him. She would see, in time, how much kinder he was than other men; she would recognize that he treated her better, loved her more.

Yet it hadn’t worked. She went with him willingly enough when he requested it, but no more willingly than she went with other men. Then Jake had come and taken her, just taken her, as easily as picking a hat off a rack. Often Xavier had passed the boring hours by dreaming of how happy Lorie would be when he made his proposal, offering to free her from whoring and every form of drudgery. But when he offered, she had merely shaken her head, and now his dreams were ruined.

He remembered that when he declared his love her eyes hadn’t changed at all—it was as if he had suggested she sweep out the bar. She had only tolerated him to avoid a scene with Jake, and had seemed scarcely aware that he had given her nearly two hundred dollars, four times as much as Gus. It was enough to buy her passage to San Francisco. But she had merely taken it and shut the door. It was cruel, love.

“Well, it’s too bad you ain’t a cowboy,” Augustus said. “You look like you could use a change of air. Where’s Lippy?”

Xavier shrugged. The last thing that would interest him was the whereabouts of Lippy.

Augustus drank a glass but said no more. He knew he could not talk Xavier out of his depression.

“If Jake gets killed, tell her I will come,” Xavier said—there was always that prospect. After all, he had only met Therese because her first husband had fallen off a roof and broken his neck. A man like Jake, a traveler and a gambler, might meet a violent end at any time.

“I doubt it’ll happen,” Augustus said, not wishing to encourage faint hopes.

When he went out he found Lippy sitting in the wagon with his bowler on his head.

“How’d you get in my wagon?” Augustus asked.

“Jumped off the roof and this is where I landed,” Lippy said. He liked to joke.

“Jump back on the roof then,” Augustus said. “I’m going to Montana.”

“I’m hiring on,” Lippy said. “The pianer playin’s over around here. Wanz won’t feed me and I can’t cook. I’ll starve to death.”

“It might beat drowning in the Republican River,” Augustus said. Lippy had a little bag packed and sitting between his feet. It was clear he was packed and ready.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Well, we got two Irishmen, I guess we can always use a man with a hole in his stomach,” Augustus said. Lippy had been a fair horseman once. Maybe Call would let him look after the remuda.

As they rode out of town the widow Cole was hanging out her washing. Hot as the sun was, it seemed to Augustus it would be dry before she got it on the line. She kept a few goats, one of which was nibbling on the rope handle of her laundry basket. She was an imposing woman, and he felt a pang of regret that he and she had not got on better, but the truth was they fell straight into argument even if they only happened to meet in the street. Probably her husband, Joe Cole, had bored her for twenty years, leaving her with a taste for argument. He himself enjoyed argument, but not with a woman who had been bored all her life. It could lead to a strenuous existence.

As they passed out of town, Lippy suddenly turned sentimental. Under the blazing sun the town looked white—the only things active in it were the widow and her goats. There were only about ten buildings, hardly enough to make a town, but Lippy got sentimental anyway. He remembered when there had been another saloon, one that kept five Mexican whores. He had gone there often and had great fun in the days before he got the wound in his belly. He had never forgotten the merry whores—they were always sitting on his lap. One of them, a girl named Maria, would sleep with him merely because she liked the way he played the piano. Those had been the years.

At the thought of them his eyes teared up, making his last look at Lonesome Dove a watery one. The dusty street wavered in his vision as if under a heavy rain.

Augustus happened to notice that Lippy was crying, tears running down both sides of his nose into the floppy pocket of his lip. Lippy normally cried when he got drunk, so the sight was nothing new, except that he didn’t seem drunk. “If you’re sick you can’t go,” he said sternly. “We don’t want no sickly hands.”

“I ain’t sick, Gus,” Lippy said, a little embarrassed by his tears. Soon he felt a little better. Lonesome Dove was hidden—he could barely see the top of the little church house across the chaparral flats.

“It’s funny, leaving a place, ain’t it?” he said. “You never do know when you’ll get back.”

24

ALTHOUGH HE KNEW they wouldn’t leave until the heat of the day was over, Newt felt so excited that he didn’t miss sleep and could hardly eat. The Captain had made it final: they were leaving that day. He had told all the hands that they ought to see to their equipment; once they got on the trail, opportunities for repair work might be scarce.

In fact, the advice only mattered to the better-equipped hands: Dish, Jasper, Soupy Jones and Needle Nelson. The Spettle brothers, for example, had no equipment at all, unless you called one pistol with a broken hammer equipment. Newt had scarcely more; his saddle was an old one and he had no slicker and only one blanket for a bedroll. The Irishmen had nothing except what they had been loaned.

Pea seemed to think the only important equipment was his bowie knife, which he spent the whole day sharpening. Deets merely got a needle and some pieces of rawhide and sewed a few rawhide patches on his old quilted pants.

When they saw Mr. Augustus ride up with Lippy, some of the hands thought it might be a joke, but the Captain at once put him in charge of the horses, an action that moved Dish Boggett to scorn.

“Half the remuda will run off once they see him flop that lip,” he said.

Augustus was inspecting the feet of his main horse, a large buckskin he called old Malaria, not a graceful mount but a reliable one.

“It might surprise you, Dish,” he said, “but Lippy was once a considerable hand. I wouldn’t talk if I were you. You may end up with a hole in your own stomach and have to play whorehouse piano for a living.”

“If I do I’ll starve,” Dish said. “I never had the opportunity of piano lessons.”

Once it was clear he was not going to be constantly affronted by the sight of Jake and Lorena, Dish’s mood improved a little. Since they were traveling along the same route, an opportunity might yet arise to demonstrate that he was a better man than Jake Spoon. She might need to be saved from a flood or a grizzly bear—grizzly bears were often the subject of discussion around the campfire at night. No one had ever seen one, but all agreed they were almost impossible to kill. Jasper Fant had taken to worrying about them constantly, if only as a change from worrying about drowning.

Jasper’s obsession with drowning had begun to oppress them all. He had talked so much about it that Newt had come to feel it would be almost a miracle if someone didn’t drown at every river.

“Well, if we see one of them bears, Pea can stick him with that knife he keeps sharpening,” Bert Borum said. “It ought to be sharp enough to kill a dern elephant by now.”

Pea took the criticism lightly. “It never hurts to be ready,” he said, quoting an old saying of the Captain’s.

Call himself spent the day on the mare, weeding out the weaker stock, both cattle and horses. He worked with Deets. About noon, they were resting under a big mesquite tree. Deets was watching a little Texas bull mount a cow not far away. The little bull hadn’t come from Mexico. He had wandered in one morning, unbranded, and had immediately whipped three larger bulls that attempted to challenge him. He was not exactly rainbow-colored, but his hide was mottled to an unusual extent—part brown, part red, part white, and with a touch here and there of yellow and black. He looked a sight, but he was all bull. Much of the night he could be heard baying; the Irishmen had come to hate him, since his baying drowned out their singing.

In fact, none of the cowboys liked him—he would occasionally charge a horse, if his temper was up, and was even worse about men on foot. Once, Needle Nelson had dismounted meaning to idle away a minute or two relieving himself, and the little bull had charged him so abruptly that Needle had had to hop back on his horse while still pissing. All the hands had a fine laugh at his expense. Needle had been so angered that he wanted to rope and cut the bull, but Call intervened. Call thought the bull well made though certainly a peculiar mix of colors, and wanted to keep him.

“Let him be,” he said. “We’ll need some bulls in Montana.”

Augustus had been highly amused. “Good God, Call,” he said. “You mean you want to fill this paradise we’re going to with animals that look like that?”

“He ain’t bad-looking if you don’t count his color,” Call said.

“Be damned to his color and his disposition too,” Needle said. He knew he would be a long time living down having to mount his horse with his dingus flopping.

“Well, I reckon it’s time to go,” Call said to Deets. “We’ll never get there if we don’t start.”

Deets was not so sure they would get there anyway, but he kept his doubts to himself. The Captain usually managed to do what he meant to do.

“I want you to be the scout,” the Captain said. “We got plenty of men to keep the stock moving. I want you to find us water and a good bed ground every night.”

Deets nodded modestly, but inside he felt proud. Being made scout was more of an honor than having your name on a sign. It was proof that the Captain thought highly of his abilities.

When they got back to the wagon Augustus was oiling his guns. Lippy fanned himself with his bowler, and most of the other hands were just sitting around wishing it was cooler.

“Have you counted the stock yet?” Call asked Augustus. The man possessed a rare skill when it came to counting animals. He could ride through a herd and count it, something Call had never been able to do.

“No, I ain’t got around to that task,” Augustus said. “Maybe I will if you tell me what difference it makes.”

“It would be useful to know how many we’re starting out with,” Call said, “If we get there with ninety percent we’ll be lucky.”

“Yes, lucky if we get there with ninety percent of ourselves,” Augustus said. “It’s your show, Call. Myself, I’m just along to see the country.”

Dish Boggett had been dozing under the wagon. He sat up so abruptly that he bumped his head on the bottom of the wagon. He had had a terrible dream in which he had fallen off a cliff. The dream had started nice, with him riding along on the point of a herd of cattle. The cattle had become buffalo and the buffalo had started running. Soon they began to pour over a cutbank of some kind. Dish saw it in plenty of time to stop his horse, but his horse wouldn’t stop, and before he knew it he went off the bank, too. The ground was so far below, he could barely see it. He fell and fell, and to make matters worse his horse turned over in the air, so that Dish was upside down and on the bottom. Just as he was about to be mashed, he woke up, lathered in sweat.

“See what I mean?” Augustus said. “Dish has already cracked his noggin and we ain’t even left.”

Call got a plate of food and went off by himself to eat. It was something he had always done—moved apart, so he could be alone and think things out a little. In the old days, when he first developed the habit, the men had not understood. Occasionally one would follow him, wanting to chat. But they soon learned better—nothing made Call sink deeper into silence than for someone to come around and start yapping when he wanted to be by himself.

Virtually all his life he had been in the position of leading groups of men, yet the truth was he had never liked groups. Men he admired for their abilities in action almost always brought themselves down in his estimation if he had to sit around and listen to them talk—or watch them drink or play cards or run off after women. Listening to men talk usually made him feel more alone than if he were a mile away by himself under a tree. He had never really been able to take part in the talk. The endless talk of cards and women made him feel more set apart—and even a little vain. If that was the best they could think of, then they were lucky they had him to lead them. It seemed immodest, but it was a thought that often came to him.

And the more he stayed apart, the more his presence made the men nervous.

“It’s hard for normal men to relax around you, Call,” Augustus told him once. “You ain’t never been relaxed yourself, so you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Pshaw,” Call said. “Pea goes to sleep around me half the time. I guess that’s relaxed.”

“No, that’s worn out,” Augustus said. “If you didn’t work him sixteen hours a day he’d be as nervous as the rest.”

When Call had eaten, he took his plate back to Bolivar, who seemed to have decided to go along. He had made no move to leave, at least. Call wanted him along, and yet somehow didn’t feel quite right about it. It didn’t seem proper that a man with a wife and daughters would go away without even informing them, on a journey from which he might never return. The old
pistolero
didn’t owe the Hat Creek outfit that kind of effort, and Call reluctantly raised the subject with him.

“Bol, we’re leaving today,” he said. “You can have your wages, if you’d rather.”

Bol just looked annoyed, shook his head and didn’t say a word.

“I’m glad you’re with us, Bol,” Augustus said. “You’ll make a fine Canadian.”

“What is Canada?” Charlie Rainey asked. He had never been sure.

“The land of the northern lights,” Augustus said. The heat had caused a dearth of conversation and made him welcome almost any question.

“What’s them?” the boy wondered.

“Why, they light up the sky,” Augustus said. “I don’t know if you can see ’em from Montany.”

“I wonder when we’ll see Jake again?” Pea Eye said. “That Jake sure don’t keep still.”

“He was just here yesterday, we don’t need to marry him,” Dish said, unable to conceal his irritation at the mere mention of the man.

“Well, I’ve oiled my guns,” Augustus said. “We might as well go and put the Cheyenne nation to flight, if the Army hasn’t.”

Call didn’t answer.

“Ain’t you even sorry to leave this place, now that we’ve made it so peaceful?” Augustus asked.

“No,” Call said. “We ought to left right after we come.”

It was true. He had no affection for the border, and a yearning for the plains, dangerous as they were.

“It’s a funny life,” Augustus said. “All these cattle and nine-tenths of the horses is stolen, and yet we was once respected lawmen. If we get to Montana we’ll have to go into politics. You’ll wind up governor if the dern place ever gets to be a state. And you’ll spend all your time passing laws against cattle thieves.”

“I wish there was a law I could pass against you,” Call said.

“I don’t know what Wanz is going to do without us,” Augustus said.