Lonesome Dove (6 page)

Lippy began to feel unhappy about the fact that Xavier had thrown his hat out the door. Augustus’s mention of the pigs put the whole matter in a more ominous light. After all, the pigs might come along and eat the hat, which was one of the solidest comforts in his meager existence. He would have liked to go and retrieve the hat before the pigs came along, but he knew that it wasn’t really wise to provoke Xavier unduly when he was in a bad mood anyway. He couldn’t see out the back door because the bar was in the way—for all he knew the hat might already be gone.

“I wisht I could get back to St. Louis,” he said. “I hear it’s a right busy town.” He had been reared there, and when his heart was heavy he returned to it in his thoughts.

“Why, hell, go,” Augustus said. “Life’s a short affair. Why spend it here?”

“Well, you are,” Dish said, in a surly tone, hoping Gus would take the hint and set out immediately.

“Dish, you sound like you’ve got a sour stomach,” Augustus said. “What you need is a good satisfying game of cards.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Dish said, casting a bold and solicitous glance at Lorena.

Looking at her, though, was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed as they were. You could go to them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting.

Xavier stood at the door, staring into the dark. The rag he used to wipe the tables was dripping onto his pants leg, but he didn’t notice.

“It’s too bad nobody in town ain’t dead,” Augustus remarked. “This group has the makings of a first-rate funeral party. What about you, Wanz? Let’s play cards.”

Xavier acquiesced. It was better than nothing. Besides, he was a devilish good cardplayer, one of the few around who was a consistent match for Augustus. Lorena was competent—Tinkersley had taught her a little. When the Dry Bean was full of cowboys she was not allowed to sit in, but on nights when the clientele consisted of Augustus, she often played.

When she played, she changed, particularly if she won a little—Augustus frequently did his best to help her win a little, just to see the process take place. The child in her was briefly reborn—she didn’t chatter, but she did occasionally laugh out loud, and her cloudy eyes cleared and became animated. Once in a while, when she won a really good pot, she would give Augustus a little punch with her fist. It pleased him when that happened—it was good to see the girl enjoying herself. It put him in mind of family games, the kind he had once played with his lively sisters in Tennessee. The memory of those games usually put him to drinking more than he liked to—and all because Lorie ceased being a sulky whore for a little while and reminded him of happy girls he had once known.

They played until the rustler’s moon had crossed to the other side of town. Lorena brightened so much that Dish Boggett fell worse in love with her than ever; she filled him with such an ache that he didn’t mind that Xavier won half of his next month’s wages. The ache was very much with him when he finally decided there was no hope and stepped out into the moonlight to unhitch his horse.

Augustus had come with him, while Lippy sneaked out the back door to retrieve his hat. The light in Lorena’s room came on while they were standing there, and Dish looked up at it, catching just her shadow as she passed in front of the lamp.

“Well, Dish, so you’re leaving us,” Augustus said. “Which outfit’s lucky enough to have you this trip?”

The quick glimpse of Lorena put Dish in such perplexity of spirit that he could hardly focus on the question.

“Reckon I’m going with the UU’s,” he said, his eyes still on the window.

The cause of Dish’s melancholy was not lost on Augustus.

“Why that’s Shanghai Pierce’s bunch,” he said.

“Yup,” Dish said, starting to lift his foot to his stirrup.

“Now hold on a minute, Dish,” Augustus said. He fished in his pocket and came out with two dollars, which he handed to the surprised cowboy.

“If you’re riding north with old Shang we may never meet again this side of the bourn,” Augustus said, deliberately adopting the elegiac tone. “At the very least you’ll get your hearing ruint. That voice of his could deafen a rock.”

Dish had to smile. Gus seemed unaware that one of the more persistent topics of dispute on the Texas range was whether his voice was louder than Shanghai Pierce’s. It was commonly agreed that the two men had no close rivals when it came to being deafening.

“Why’d you give me this money?” Dish asked. He had never been able to figure Gus out.

“You asked me for it, didn’t you?” Augustus said. “If I’d given it to you before the game started I might as well have handed it to Wanz, and he don’t need no two dollars of mine.”

There was a pause while Dish tried to puzzle out the real motive, if there was one.

“I’d not want it thought I’d refuse a simple loan to a friend,” Augustus said. “Specially not one who’s going off with Shanghai Pierce.”

“Oh, Mr. Pierce don’t go with us,” Dish said. “He goes over to New Orleans and takes the train.”

Augustus said nothing, and Dish soon concluded that he was to get the loan, even if the aggravation of Mr. Pierce’s company wasn’t involved.

“Well, much obliged then,” Dish said. “I’ll see you in the fall if not sooner.”

“There’s no need for you to ride off tonight,” Augustus said. “You can throw your blanket down on our porch, if you like.”

“I might do that,” Dish said. Feeling rather awkward, he rehitched his horse and went to the door of the Dry Bean, wanting to get upstairs before Lorie turned off her light.

“I believe I left something,” he said lamely, at the door of the saloon.

“Well, I won’t wait, Dish,” Augustus said. “But we’ll expect you for breakfast if you care to stay.”

As he strolled away he heard the boy’s footsteps hitting the stairs at the back of the saloon. Dish was a good boy, not much less green than Newt, though a more experienced hand. Best to help such boys have their moment of fun, before life’s torments snatched them.

From a distance, standing in the pale street, he saw two shadows against the yellow box of light from Lorie’s room. She wasn’t that set against Dish, it seemed to him, and she had been pepped up from the card playing. Maybe even Lorie would be surprised and find a liking for the boy. Occasionally he had known sporting women to marry and do well at it—if Lorie were so inclined Dish Boggett would not be a bad man to settle on.

The light had gone off at the Pumphreys’ and the armadillo was no longer there to roll its shadow at him. The pigs were stretched out on the porch, lying practically snout to snout. Augustus was about to kick them off to make room for the guest he more or less expected, but they looked so peaceful he relented and went around to the back door. If Dish Boggett, with his prairie dog of a mustache, considered himself too refined to throw his bedroll beside two fine pigs, then he could rout them out himself.

5

WHATEVER SUBJECT Augustus had on his mind when he went to bed was generally still sitting there when he woke up. He was such a short sleeper that the subject had no time to slip out of mind. Five hours was as much as he ever slept at a stretch, and four hours was more nearly his average.

“A man that sleeps all night wastes too much of life,” he often said. “As I see it the days was made for looking and the nights for sport.”

Since sport was what he had been brooding about when he got home, it was still in his thoughts when he arose, which he did about 4 A.M., to see to the breakfast—in his view too important a meal to entrust to a Mexican bandit. The heart of his breakfast was a plenitude of sourdough biscuits, which he cooked in a Dutch oven out in the backyard. His pot dough had been perking along happily for over ten years, and the first thing he did upon rising was check it out. The rest of the breakfast was secondary, just a matter of whacking off a few slabs of bacon and frying a panful of pullet eggs. Bolivar could generally be trusted to deal with the coffee.

Augustus cooked his biscuits outside for three reasons. One was because the house was sure to heat up well enough anyway during the day, so there was no point in building any more of a fire than was necessary for bacon and eggs. Two was because biscuits cooked in a Dutch oven tasted better than stove-cooked biscuits, and three was because he liked to be outside to catch the first light. A man that depended on an indoor cookstove would miss the sunrise, and if he missed sunrise in Lonesome Dove, he would have to wait out a long stretch of heat and dust before he got to see anything so pretty.

Augustus molded his biscuits and went out and got a fire going in the Dutch oven while it was still good dark—just enough of a fire to freshen up his bed of mesquite coals. When he judged the oven was ready he brought the biscuits and his Bible out in the backyard. He set the biscuits in the oven, and sat down on a big black kettle that they used on the rare occasions when they rendered lard. The kettle was big enough to hold a small mule, if anybody had wanted to boil one, but for the last few years it had remained upside down, making an ideal seat.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.

It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. Then the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dust dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air.

It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

While he was enjoying a verse or two of Amos the pigs walked around the corner of the house, and Call, at almost the same moment, stepped out the back door, pulling on his shirt. The pigs walked over and stood directly in front of Augustus. The dew had wet their blue coats.

“They know I’ve got a soft heart,” he said to Call. “They’re hoping I’ll feed them this Bible.

“I hope you pigs didn’t wake up Dish,” he added, for he had checked and seen that Dish was there, sleeping comfortably with his head on his saddle and his hat over his eyes, only his big mustache showing.

To Call’s regret he had never been able to come awake easily. His joints felt like they were filled with glue, and it was in irritation to see Augustus sitting on the black kettle looking as fresh as if he’d slept all night, when in fact he had probably played poker till one or two o’clock. Getting up early and feeling awake was the one skill he had never truly perfected—he got up, of course, but it never felt natural.

Augustus lay down the Bible and walked over to look at Jail’s wound.

“I oughta slop some more axle grease on it,” he said. “It’s a nasty bite.”

“You tend to your biscuits,” Call said. “What’s Dish Boggett doing here?”

“I didn’t ask the man his business,” Augustus said. “If you die of gangrene you’ll be sorry you didn’t let me dress that wound.”

“It ain’t a wound, it’s just a bite,” Call said. “I was bit worse by bedbugs down in Saltillo that time. I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night.”

“Not me,” Augustus said. “I only read it in the morning and the evening, when I can be reminded of the glory of the Lord. The rest of the day I’m just reminded of what a miserable stink hole we stuck ourselves in. It’s hard to have fun in a place like this, but I do my best.”

He went over and put his hand on top of the Dutch oven. It felt to him like the biscuits were probably ready, so he took them out. They had puffed up nicely and were a healthy brown. He took them quickly into the house and Call followed. Newt was at the table, sitting straight upright, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, but sound asleep.

“We come to this place to make money,” Call said. “Nothing about fun was in the deal.”

“Call, you don’t even like money,” Augustus said. “You’ve spit in the eye of every rich man you’ve ever met. You like money even less than you like fun, if that’s possible.”

Call sighed, and sat down at the table. Bolivar was up and stumbling around the stove, shaking so that he spilled coffee grounds on the floor.

“Wake up, Newt,” Augustus said. “If you don’t you’ll fall over and stick yourself in the eye with your own fork.”

Call gave the boy a little shake and his eyes popped open.

“I was having a dream,” Newt said, sounding very young.

“Your tough luck, then, son,” Augustus said. “Morning around here is more like a nightmare. Now look what’s happened!”

In an effort to get the coffee going, Bolivar had spilled a small pile of coffee grounds into the grease where the eggs and bacon were frying. It seemed a small enough matter to him, but it enraged Augustus, who liked to achieve an orderly breakfast at least once a week.

“I guess it won’t hurt the coffee none to taste like eggs,” he said testily. “Most of the time your eggs taste like coffee.”

“I don’t care,” Bolivar said. “I feel sick.”

Pea Eye came stumbling through about that time, trying to get his pizzle out of his pants before his bladder started to flood. It was a frequent problem. The pants he wore had about fifteen small buttons, and he got up each morning and buttoned every one of them before he realized he was about to piss. Then he would come rushing through the kitchen trying to undo the buttons. The race was always close, but usually Pea would make it to the back steps before the flood commenced. Then he would stand there and splatter the yard for five minutes or so. When he could hear sizzling grease in one ear and the sound of Pea Eye pissing in the other, Augustus knew that the peace of the morning was over once again.

“If a woman ever stumbled onto this outfit at this hour of the day she’d screech and poke out her eyes,” Augustus said.

At that point someone did stumble onto it, but only Dish Boggett, who had always been responsive to the smell of frying bacon.

It was a surprise to Newt, who immediately snapped awake and tried to get his cowlick to lay down. Dish Boggett was one of his heroes, a real cowboy who had been up the trail all the way to Dodge City more than once. It was Newt’s great ambition: to go up the trail with a herd of cattle. The sight of Dish gave him hope, for Dish wasn’t somebody totally out of reach, like the Captain. Newt didn’t imagine that he could ever be what the Captain was, but Dish seemed not that much different from himself. He was known to be a top hand, and Newt welcomed every chance to be around him; he liked to study the way Dish did things.

“Morning, Dish,” he said.

“Why, howdy there,” Dish said, and went to stand beside Pea Eye and attend to the same business.

It perked Newt up that Dish didn’t treat him like a kid. Someday, if he was lucky, maybe he and Dish would be cowboys together. Newt could imagine nothing better.

Augustus had fried the eggs hard as marbles to compensate for the coffee grains, and when they looked done to him he poured the grease into the big three-gallon syrup can they used for a grease bucket.

“It’s poor table manners to piss in hearing of those at the table,” he said, directing his remarks to the gentlemen on the porch. “You two are grown men. What would your mothers think?”

Dish looked a little sheepish, whereas Pea was merely confused by the question. His mother had passed away in Georgia when he was only six. She had not had time to give him much training before she died, and he had no idea what she might think of such an action. However, he was sure she would not have wanted him to go in his pants.

“I had to hurry,” he said.

“Howdy, Captain,” Dish said.

Call nodded. In the morning he had the advantage of Gus, since Gus had to cook. With Gus cooking, he got his choice of the eggs and bacon, and a little food always brought him to life and made him consider all the things that ought to be done during the day. The Hat Creek outfit was just a small operation, with just enough land under lease to graze small lots of cattle and horses until buyers could be found. It amazed Call that such a small operation could keep three grown men and a boy occupied from sunup until dark, day after day, but such was the case. The barn and corrals had been in such poor shape when he and Gus bought the place that it took constant work just to keep them from total collapse. There was nothing important to do in Lonesome Dove, but that didn’t mean there was enough time to keep up with the little things that needed doing. They had been six weeks sinking a new well and were still far from deep enough.

When Call raked the eggs and bacon onto his plate, such a crowd of possible tasks rushed into his mind that he was a minute responding to Dish’s greetings.

“Oh, hello, Dish,” he said, finally. “Have some bacon.”

“Dish is planning to shave his mustache right after breakfast,” Augustus said. “He’s getting tired of livin’ without women.”

In fact, with the aid of Gus’s two dollars, Dish had been able to prevail on Lorena. He had awakened on the porch with a clear head, but when Augustus mentioned women he remembered it all and suddenly felt weak with love. He had been keenly hungry when he sat down at the table, his mouth watering for the eggs and fryback, but the thought of Lorena’s white body, or the portion of it he had got to see when she lifted her nightgown, made him almost dizzy for a moment. He continued to eat, but the food had lost its taste.

The blue shoat came to the door and looked in at the people, to Augustus’s amusement. “Look at that,” he said. “A pig watching a bunch of human pigs.” Though he had been outpositioned at the frying pan, he was in prime shape to secure his share of the biscuits, half a dozen of which he had already sopped in honey and consumed.

“Throw that pig them eggshells,” he said to Bolivar. “He’s starving.”

“I don’t care,” Bolivar said, sucking coffee-colored sugar out of a big spoon. “I feel sick.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Bol,” Augustus said. “If you’re planning on dying today I hope you dig your grave first.”

Bolivar looked at him sorrowfully. So much talk in the morning gave him a headache to go with his shakes. “If I dig a grave it will be yours,” he said simply.

“Going up the trail, Dish?” Newt asked, hoping to turn the conversation to more cheerful matters.

“I hope to,” Dish said.

“It would take a hacksaw to cut these eggs,” Call said. “I’ve seen bricks that was softer.”

“Well, Bol spilled coffee in them,” Augustus said, “I expect it was hard coffee.”

Call finished the rocklike eggs and gave Dish the onceover. He was a lank fellow, loose-built, and a good rider. Five or six more like him and they could make up a herd themselves and drive it north. The idea had been in his mind for a year or more. He had even mentioned it to Augustus, but Augustus merely laughed at him.

“We’re too old, Call,” he said. “We’ve forgot everything we need to know.”

“You may have,” Call said. “I ain’t.”

Seeing Dish put Call in mind of his idea again. He was not eager to spend the rest of his life on well-digging or barn repair. If they made up a fair herd and did well with it, they would make enough to buy some good land north of the brush country.

“Are you signed to go with someone then?” he asked Dish.

“Oh, no, I ain’t signed on,” Dish said. “But I’ve gone before, and I imagine Mr. Pierce will hire me again—or if not him someone else.”

“We might give you work right here,” Call said.

That got Augustus’s attention. “Give him work doing what?” he asked. “Dish here’s a top hand. He don’t cotton to work that requires walking, do you, Dish?”

“I don’t, for a fact,” Dish said, looking at the Captain but seeing Lorena. “I’ve done a mess of it though. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, we’re going down to Mexico tonight,” Call said. “Going to see what we can raise. We might make up a herd ourselves, if you wanted to wait a day or two while we look it over.”

“That mare bite’s drove you crazy,” Augustus said. “Make up a herd and do what with it?”

“Drive it,” Call said.

“Well, we might drive it over to Pickles Gap, I guess,” Augustus said. “That ain’t enough work to keep a hand like Dish occupied for the summer.”

Call got up and carried his dishes to the washtub. Bolivar wearily got off his stool and picked up the water bucket.

“I wish Deets would come back,” he said.