Saratoga Trunk (11 page)

“But why! Why do you wear it? It is fantastic, a gun on the hip, like the Wild West.”

“The West is wild, and don’t you forget it. Anyway, I wouldn’t feel I was dressed respectable without it, I’m so used to it. I’d as soon go out without my shirt or my hat.”

“Tell me,
chéri,
have you killed men?” He was silent. She persisted. “Tell me. Have you?”

“Oh, two, three, maybe. It was them or me.”

“They,” she said automatically and absurdly.

“Aim to make a genüeman out of me, don’t you, honey?”

“I don’t want to change you. You are perfect. But perfect!”

“Ye-e-es, you do. You’re like all the rest of’em. They all try to make their men over.”

“Their men! You are not my man. You belong to that little lady who you say is the finest littie lady in the world—she who made you the amazing white satin tie embroidered with the blue forget-me-nots. Oh, that tie!” She laughed her slow, indolent laugh.

“What’s the matter with it! You’re jealous, that’s all.”

“It is terrible. But terrible! Tell me about her—the finest little lady in the world who made you that work of art. Blue eyes, you said, and golden hair, and so little she only comes up to here. How nize! How nize!” When she mocked him she became increasingly French, but rather in the music-hall manner, very maddening. “Tell me, when are you going to marry, you two?”

She could not be sure whether the finest little woman in the world really existed back there in his Texas past or whether he had devised her as protection. Grown cautious, he would say, “I don’t aim to marry anybody. Me, I’m a lone ranger out for big game.”

She in turn had no intention of allowing this man to shape her life. She, too, had her armor against infatuation. “I shall marry. I shall marry a husband very, very rich and very respectable.”

“Yes, and I’ll be best man at the wedding.”

“Why not? But no, you would be too handsome. All the guests would wonder why I had not married you. Very, very rich and very respectable men are so rarely handsome. But then one can’t have everything.”

“Say, what kind of a woman are you, anyway!” he would shout, baffled. Back home in Texas the codes were simpler. There were two kinds of women; good women, bad women. But here was a paradoxical woman, gay, gende, fiery, prim; brazenly unconventional, absurdly correct; tender, hard, generous, ruthless. Sometimes she seemed an innocent girl; sometimes an accomplished courtesan.

Even after their first week together they were watching one another warily, distrustful of the world and of each other, stepping carefully to avoid a possible trap.

The very morning after their reunion in the church of St. Louis she had sat brushing her hair that hung a curtain of black against the sheer white dotted swiss of her
gabrielle
with its ruffled lace edging of Valenciennes. She wielded the silver-backed brush and sniffed the air delicately and half closed her eyes. “A house isn’t really a house,” she murmured, “unless it has about it the scent of a good cigar after breakfast.”

He stared at her, he strode over to her seated there before the rosewood
duchesse.
With one great hand he grasped her shoulder so that she winced. “Where did you learn that?”

“Mama used to say that, poor darling. Or maybe it was Aunt Belle.”

“Did, heh? Look here, all that stuff you were telling me last night in the garden—it’s the truth, isn’t it? I don’t mean that first stuff about being a countess, and all that. Sometimes you talk like a school girl—and sometimes I think you’ve been—”

She looked up at him from the low bench before the dressing table. He put his hand on her long throat, tipping her head still farther back so that his eyes plumbed hers.

“Ask Kaka. Ask Cupide.”

“Those two! They’d lie for you no matter what.”

“Well,” she said gentiy, with his hand still on her throat so that he could feel the muscles moving under his palm as she spoke. “Well, if you think that I am lying and Kaka is lying and Cupide is lying why don’t you finish your business here in New Orleans and go back to the finest little lady in Texas?” His great fist doubled against her jaw, he pushed her delicate head back gendy, ruefully, in tender imitation of a blow.

He was a bewildered, love-smitten Texan who had met a woman the like of whom he never had seen or dreamed of.

For a week—two—three—they spent lazy hours talking, listening. The girl always until now had taken third place. Her mother had come first, then Aunt Belle; Kakaracou had waited on them, cooked New Orleans dishes for them, sewed for them. Cupide had run about for them tirelessly; he had been coachman, footman, butler, boots, page. Clio had worn second-best, had fetched and carried for the two women, had played bezique with Belle Piquery, bathed her mother’s forehead with eau-de-cologne when she was suffering from headache, pressed her fresh young cheek against Rita’s tear-furrowed one when she was sad, fed the two with her youth and high spirits. Now she found it wonderful to be the center of interest. Now she and Clint Maroon, suspicious of the world and resentful of it, could pour out to each other their hopes, their schemes, their longings, their emotions. It was almost as fascinating to listen as to speak. Not quite, but almost. He had told her his story disjointedly, in bits and pieces, for he was not an articulate man, and he had been taught to think that emotion was weakness.

“I haven’t got any money, honey. I mean, money. I make my living gambling. I wouldn’t fool you. I raise horses some—or did, back home in Texas. Sometimes I race ‘em. That’s how come I left. I shot the man we caught trying to lame my three-year-old, Alamo. He’s almost pure Spanish, that chestnut. He steps so he hardly touches the ground; it’s like the way you see a dancer that never seems to have a foot on the floor he’s so light. It was a plain case; no jury in the Southwest could convict me, but I reckoned I’d better leave for now, anyway. And besides, I was ready to go. I always told Pa I’d come up North and get the land and money back they’d stole off him. Why, say, they came in and they took his land away from him as slick as if he’d been a hick playing a shell game at a country circus. Everybody in Texas knew Dacey Maroon, the town we lived in was named after him, Daceyville. Grampaw Maroon fought the siege of the Alamo; I was brought up on the story; it was sacred history like the stories in the Bible, only more real. He had fought over the very land he owned. Pa used to say that Daceyville and San Antonio were watered with the blood of their defenders. In Texas schools they teach the young ones about Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and battles of the Civil War like it was history, but mighty few up North know the story of the Alamo and San Jacinto. They’re as much a part of American history as the Revolution or Gettysburg, and more. Pa had come in and settled his land and married Ma and brought her to Texas from Virginia. Brought up gentle as she was you’d think she never could have stood what she had to. She was little—”

“Like the one who embroidered the forget-me-not tie?”

“Why—maybe.”

“Men often marry their mothers,” Clio observed, dreamily. Then, hastily, she added, “I heard Aunt Belle say that, too.”

But his was too literal a mind for Belle Piquery’s unconsciously sound psychology.

“There’ll never be anybody like her. Everything around the house just so, and yet she’d never chase the menfolks out of the house to smoke, the way some women would. I reckon that was the way she was brought up in Virginia. She could gende the orneriest horse in Texas, and her two little hands weren’t any bigger than magnolia petals. Time she was married they drove into Texas from Virginia, through hell and high water. Pa worked that land there in Texas, staked it and claimed it and laid out the town of Daceyville, but Grampaw, he came in with Austin when Texas belonged to Mexico. That was real pioneering. They cleared, and they built cabins and planted grain. Funny thing about Texas. Do you know about Texas, honey?”

“No. I have read that it is big. Enormous. And wild.”

“It’s big, all right. Bigger than France, bigger than Germany, bigger than most of Europe rolled into one. Lots has been written about Texas, but it’s unknown territory. Maybe it’s because it’s so all-fired big. Grampaw Dacey Maroon, and Sam Houston and Martin and Jones and Pettus—the Old Three Hundred—and Bowie and Travis and Davy Crockett, why, they were my heroes the way other youngsters think of Washington or Napoleon or Daniel Boone. Bowie, sick and dying of pneumonia there in the Alamo, and hacking away at the Mexicans from his cot because he was too weak to stand up or even sit up, and twenty dead Mexicans heaped up on the floor around him when finally they got him—that’s what I mean when I say Texas. And then along through the West came a fellow named Huntington that used to be a watch peddler, and Mark Hopkins, and a storekeeper named Leland Stanford and a peddler named Charley Crocker. Smart as all get-out. Well, say, they pulled deals in Washington that no cattle or horse thief would have stooped to. They began to survey in Daceyville and they sent a low-down sneaking polecat to Pa and said, ‘You’ll give us your land and right of way through here and so many thousand dollars that you’ll raise among the folks here in Daceyville and we’ll run our railroad line through here and make a real town of it. If you don’t we’ll go ten miles the other side and you might as well be living in a graveyard.’

“ ‘I’m damned if I will,’ “ Pa said, and he got his gun and he chased them off the place. They turned Daceyville into Poverty Flat; they built the depot ten miles away and we found we were living in a deserted village, everything closed up; you had to drive ten miles to get a sack of salt. Daceyville was nothing but a wide place in the road. Everybody moved out except us. Pa said we’d stay, and we did. The railroad they built yonder wasn’t even a decent road, but they’d been granted all that land by a rotten Congress that they’d bought up— land on both sides of the tracks for miles and miles, east and west. That’s what they were after, you see. They got all that land along the right of way—hundreds of thousands of acres—and it never cost them a cent of their own money. A handful of men owned the West. They were like kings. Pa said it wasn’t like America, it wasn’t taking a piece of land from the government and setding it and making it fit for civilized folks to live on. It was taking the land by force and by tricks— land that others had worked on and settled. Ma said it was like the days of the feudal lords in Europe, only this was supposed to be free America. It was free for them, all right. All the silver and iron and copper in the land they’d stolen, and the forests that stood on it and the rivers than ran through.”

“But couldn’t your father fight them? Couldn’t he go to Washington and couldn’t he see those Congressmen? If it was his own land!”

“He tried. That’s all he did for years till he was old and broke. I saw my mother and my father die in poverty on the land they’d cleared and built up. Pa couldn’t even take her back to Virginia to be buried with her kin the way she’d always asked to be. Texas was Grampaw Maroon’s lifeblood, and Pa’s—and mine, for a while. Not now. Reckon it’s turned to gall, my blood.”

“It is bad to be bitter, Clint.”

“Cleent,” he grinned, mocking her. “Can’t you talk American! Short, like this—Clint.” He clipped it smartly so that the sound fell on the ear like the clink of a coin. “Clint.”

“Clint,” in brisk imitation.

“That’s it,
muchachita!”

“What? What is that word?”

“Oh, that. I learned that off the Mexicans down home. Spanish, I reckon.
Muchachita.
Means—uh—pretty little girl, kind of. Sweetheart.”

“Very nice—that
muchachita.
But rather long for a dear name. And to be called
muchachita
one must be little.”

He passed his hand slowly over his eyes as though to wipe away an inner vision. “That’s so. It doesn’t suit you, somehow. It just slipped out. It belongs to Texas.”

“But I like you to be Texas. It is right for you. You must never be different. I want to know more about Texas and these men. Tell me more.”

“Nothing more to tell, honey. They’re the men I hate—them and their kind. Ever since I grew up I made up my mind they’d never get me like they’d got Pa. I was going to live off the rich and the suckers—and I have. Let ‘em look out for themselves. I live by gambling and racing once in a while and turning a trick when I can— decent most of the time. Not always. When I can get it honestly, I do it. When I can’t, I get it the best way I can. I’ve lived a rough life. The way I talk, I know better. But I want to talk the way the cowhands talk, and the folks back in Texas. I’ve come a far piece and I aim to go further, but Texas is where I belong. I’m going to make my pile off of them. I hate ‘em all. I’d as soon shoot them as I would a gray mule-deer or a cottonmouth out on the Black Prairie. I might as well tell you I’ve killed men, but never for money. I’ve known a lot of women; I’ve never married one of them and don’t aim to. I could be crazy about you but I ain’t going to be.”

She looked at him as though seeing him clearly for the first time. “In a way,
chéri,
we’re two of a kind. You heard your mother and father talking of the wrong that had been done to them and it cut deeply into you. I heard my mother and Aunt Belle talking the same way when I was very young and they thought I didn’t hear or didn’t understand. I wonder why grown-up people think that children are idiots. I made up my mind early that some day I would pay them back, those people. I’m going to be rich and I’ll make them pay for what they did to Mama and Aunt Belle. Mama never hurt anybody—”

“Well, excuse me, honey, but even back in Texas if shooting a man and killing him ain’t hurting him none, why—”

“She didn’t kill him, I tell you. She—”

“I know, I know. Anyway, she had the gun, no matter which way she was pointing it, and he grabbed it and the bullet went into him and he died. And they got an awful ugly name for that in the courts of law.”

“If they thought she had killed him then why did they send her money all those years in France, to the day of her death?”

“Not aiming to hurt your feelings, honey, but that’s called hush money where I come from.”