Cardinal Numbers: Stories (3 page)

The stove had gone out and night frost come up on the windows, but they paid no mind. Costain was rattling coins in his hand. Midnight was pawing at an empty syrup bottle. His face was all puffed up and had confusion in it.

Buzz said: “Should of seed it. First slug puts him in rotation like a top. Then High Wide gives him the cup of grass on the next one and near takes his head off clean.”

Midnight said: “Shut up and deal.”

Wiley had his eyes open like a trance, but he was snoring. The loghouse smelled of blankets. The wick of the lamp was turned low. Costain brought the bandanna soaked in ether up to his face.

Buzz said: “Fuck cards.”

Oil dripped off the edge of Midnight’s whetstone. Bits of steel shaved from the blade were too small to see. Midnight was nodding to the rhythm of scrapes. Hair fell over his eyes.

He said: “How ’bout I cut you a new asshole?”

Buzz shot out of his chair and flapped his hand over an empty holster. A fist came down hard on the table and it was Costain’s.

He said: “Quit now. Stow it before I have to lay both of you out.”

The rivals stared at each other a long minute and the heat came into their eyes.

Costain said: “Midnight. Get some air. Go find Juanito.”

It was so fresh outside. Midnight stood under the moon clear as water and threw up his arms. Trees and fenceposts made long shadows and his breath made steam. The stars seemed to flare. A chicken ran out from under the porch. Midnight caught her up and opened her throat on the blade. He sucked blood from his finger stumps.

In the morning Juanito was missing with two horses. Each man went alone to his cache and found it untouched. Then they looked for a trail sign. They walked in mist to their knees and a silence that was tense. Costain had been expecting something but not exactly this. He knew there was a supply of time being used up and nothing he could do about that.

To himself Wiley said: “We got to take steps.”

He was thinking how it would be sad to leave this place, where Juanito was sure to bring law on purpose or by accident. He liked being near water. He liked being right under the sky. Anywhere else would bring on his claustrophobia.

The search was called off at noon. Midnight stayed behind in the woods to drink cocaine syrup and curse the others. In the loghouse, Costain got out his maps.

Buzz said: “What the hell are you so calm about?”

Costain did not look up.

Buzz said: “Let’s just torch the place and ride.”

Wiley was stroking his pelt bundles. He said: “We made this. We worked it up and around and …”

Costain told them both to shut up. His eyes narrowed. He said: “Three will take a week’s provisions and head out for the Beaverhead. The other one will find Juanito and quiet him.”

Wiley said: “Can we go to the hot springs on the way?”

The deck of cards came out and Wiley volunteered to sit for Midnight.

Costain cut himself a red four. He said: “Low card wins. I’ll go.”

They agreed to meet at the needle rocks on the first day of May and swore a pact of blood to die free. Buzz had tears in his eyes. Midnight had to be clubbed to stop his raving and then tied to his pinto. They took off just at dusk and followed a feeder creek up across the ridge. Further on they found a cave dug out of the red rock that would conceal their fire. They made camp and Buzz and Wiley lit into one another over who should’ve put coffee on the packhorse and hadn’t.

Buzz said: “But for that greaser punk, we wouldn’t be asquat down in mud with fried biscuit for dinner.”

Midnight said: “You gone soft?”

They laid themselves down, but nobody slept. There was bat stink in the cave and a cold seep that had them all rucked up in their blankets.

COSTAIN
knew how to be careful. He wore a false mustache and ordered rye whiskey with a Spanish accent. The pianola was playing “Strawberry Blonde.” The mine drudgers had already shed their pay, so all the tables were empty except the one where Perreault could be seen. He had a cigar in his mouth and his finger up the girl child on his lap. Costain would have got him outside and hijacked his pockets but for the business at hand.

He said to the barman: “Seen my cousin tonight? He berry thin witha long hair.”

The answer came: “Yah, I seen ten guys like that and I didn’t ask nobody’s name.”

This barman was a safecracker lammed from Cleveland first and then Denver. Talking the hour with Costain, he could boil it down and see they were comrades.

He said: “Want help with this Mex pigeon a yers, then I could be the man.”

Costain hadn’t dropped his guard for nothing. He could recognize an asset when it came up, and this one had a kind of city smarts that would fit.

Costain said: “Meet me on the back street with a bottle.”

THE
drizzle lasted all morning. Wiley’s horse came up lame and had to be walked. They pulled up where aspens were in bud and scrounged for dry wood, but the fire was more steam than smoke. Midnight’s feet were swole up, so he couldn’t get his boots off.

Buzz thumbed Costain’s hand-drafted map and said: “Settler’s cabin marked right two mile off. I say we go down and get proper fed. See what else might look good while we’re in the neighborhood.”

Wiley said: “You go on. My gut burns fit to kill.”

That knife went clean through wet leather. Midnight had it figured to the minute. He was going to walk the mountain on bloody feet till he found the Virgin Mary and got clean.

Chicago said he knew about a Mex hideout in Bilby and why didn’t they go over there. The sun was going thump inside Costain’s hangover and all he could do was grunt. They rode four miles down the wagon-road ruts, but it was slow going in the mud and Chicago was impatient for a shortcut. Costain stopped to light a cigarillo.

Chicago blew rain off his lips and whispered: “Thing of it is you told me all I need to know last night.”

And then he brought up the Derringer and shot Costain through the eye. He stripped the body and hobbled the horse. He cut out for the Flathead camp with Costain’s ears tied to his belt and bouncing.

(here ends recovered manuscript)

A
MERICAN ARCHITECTURE IS WHAT
you can see from the road.

That’s what I tell my class, and they put it down in their notebooks. The stout girl in the front row (I think her name is Bonnie) looks pointedly at her watch. She is dutiful, like all my students, but not interested in much. I think: This isn’t what I had in mind, either. I dismiss them ten minutes early and sit in the quiet room watching it snow.

My apartment is chilly, the furnace clacking down below. I place my new space heater by the tub and soak a long time. The nightgown I put on has been washed so often the piping has come loose from around the collar. I take out some cold lentils, dress them with olive oil and what can be squeezed from a hard old lemon half, listen to a Dave Clark Five album, the oldest in my collection. On the back cover, under a leafy bower of red ballpoint ink, are my initials, S.E.A. Later, I get in bed to read, but my head tows me under. I fall asleep with all the lights on, the book cradled in my arm like a doll.

BARBARA
intercepts me outside the library. She is giving a dinner party for “interesting women,” and wants me to attend. An NPR reporter will be there, a peace activist visiting from Israel, two illustrators, an oncologist, and Sue Willens from the Drama Department. Barbara glitters with enthusiasm, or it could just be snow settling on her lashes. I don’t think much of an obligation to be interesting, but say I’ll call her by the weekend.

Someone has to do the freshman lit. surveys, and it’s Barbara. Possibly having been raised on a farm with eight brothers is useful in this respect. She speaks constantly of her family, of her writing hardly ever, which is how I can tell she’s serious about it.

Though it’s completely out of sequence, I spend today’s class on Louis Sullivan. We look at details of the Carson Pirie Scott store, foliage intricately incised above the doorways. I show slides of Sullivan’s small-town Minnesota banks, slides Corey and I took one summer. Mistakenly among them is one he must have snapped without my knowing. In workshirt and white slacks, I kneel by a picnic table and stare at my hand. My expression is one of dismay, as if something were painfully embedded there. The sun is low behind me. I am unsettled by the picture, unable to recall ever having seen it before.

I take the long way home, two legs of a triangle. Ice lumps turn in the slow porridge of the river. Long mill buildings, low storage lockers, seem solid and husklike at once. In a livelier, more solvent city, I realize, all this would be reclaimed, the brick blasted clean and a design center or galleria installed. Much prettier this way, dead.

MY
office is small to begin with, and on top of that, I double up. Alice has been teaching here for nearly thirty years, and she is very particular. I would say fussy, but her unrelenting dignity precludes it. Clear pushpins only are allowed on the cork board we share and I must stand in the hall to smoke. But Alice has given me the desk by the window because, she says, “You’re pale as shortening.”

Guiltily, I am clearing away a month’s unopened mail. Outside, while turning everything to mush, the sun resembles something membranous and insubstantial. I scrabble through drawers for a cigarette, decide to chew a rubber band instead. There is a card from Holly, my brightest student of two years ago; on its front, a woodcut of mountains, and under that, “La poesía es como el pan, para todos.”

Inside there is this:

This will need to be in a hurry because I have a tutorial in forty minutes. This town, like you said, is full of noise, but I’m getting along. I have a room near campus in a house with turret gables and I’m seeing a man who makes sailboats, which is okay though he’s not very physical. We might go down to Baja this summer. Nothing much to say, except when I do something I want it to be the way you would.

I really love you,

Holly

Bright but backward, much too old to have a crush on her teacher. Or possibly I’m misled by embarrassment, lured into evasion. Might this be a defect of the “interesting woman”? I drop the card in my bag, knowing I won’t write back.

I catch a chill at Thriftway just from shuffling through the frozen entrees. Indecision is always dangerous. So I stick firmly to inedibles: a set of jumper cables, wood glue, mouthwash, aluminum-foil loaf pans, a plastic helicopter,
Self
magazine. In the checkout line, watching a short, placid man watching me, I realize the rubber band is still in my mouth.

IT’S
Friday and I go to see Corey. The temperature has sharply dropped, turning yesterday’s slush into mean ice troughs, making the drive difficult. But I never miss a Friday. I sway and spin up into the hills, past long black driveways and houses built, in a simpler period, to be above the soot.

Corey’s father comes out across the porch and puts his arms around me. He’s all overbearing bone at first, then something gives inside and it seems the only thing holding him up is his chin hooked over my shoulder.

“Everything smooth?” I ask.

“Tolerable.”

He takes my gloves, tugs at my coat, but I won’t let him have it.

“I don’t warm up till April.”

He smooths his mustache, which is yellowing like ivory. “Go on ahead. He’s heard the door.” His eyes ascend so slowly, as if counting each carpeted stair.

Corey’s room overlooks the back garden, but the spot he prefers for his chair is away from the window, under a wedge of white ceiling where the roof slants around a dormer. He pretends to be surprised.

“Na aun. Aun!”

I lift the bill of his Pirates cap, tickle his lashes with mine.

“Loom spox,” he whispers slyly.

The damage came not from the accident but from surgery afterward, a futile try to reattach his right arm, severed by the guardrail. An anesthetist’s blunder, loss of oxygen to the brain, permanence. Corey’s father might have sued, but the blunt mechanics of the process made him turn away.

“I’ve made a lot of money, some of it in not very pleasant ways,” he said. “But, goddamn, I won’t squeeze my boy like he is for profit.”

Corey can walk just fine, even dance, but he’d rather sit, his one arm gone above the elbow, the other one withered, useless mostly, nerves crushed when his Kawasaki came back down out of the air.

“Potos,” he says, nodding at the chocolate apple as I break it into sections. “Owow potos.”

It’s hard to know how much he remembers or now understands. The doctor says to think of it like a stroke, certain sectors of the brain cut off. But which ones? I think Corey cries at magazines because he can’t take pictures anymore, but I’m not sure. He adores music sometimes, or it can send him into a rage. Sometimes he’ll turn his back to me if I speak, but not today. I feed him chocolate in small bits to make it last and describe a John Garfield movie, the new prison going up at the north end of Rock City Road, about Barbara’s party and why I don’t want to go. Quizzically, he watches my lips. And, as always, when I take him out of his pants, he’s all ready. What I always say: This is something he can’t do for himself. But, of course, it’s at least as much for me, a small stolen serenity, all his veins and capillaries. And so I think of the big house over us, of joists and beams and lath. Corey looks gravely at what he has put in my hand. I make a fist around it, stand at the window. Catbirds swoop to millet in the feeder. There is a jagged trench in the snow where Corey’s father has shoveled, thrown salt, given up.

TODAY
the sun is bright and kids are playing hockey in the street. I spend an hour putting on toenail polish, as if planning to appear somewhere in sandals. Barbara calls, very tense about her party. I turn up the radio, pretending someone else is here, promise to call back later. Then I make a pot of gunpowder tea and, as though back in high school, write down this dream I had.

A white-trashy house where I’m staying in Los Angeles, old TV sets in the yard and an avocado tree no one ever picks from. A big screen porch with everybody sitting on car seats, or the floor, men with ponytails and marijuana-leaf belt buckles. Woman in underwear with runny nose, two others passing a can of mushroom soup, spoon sticking out. Can’t understand how these people have three Hindu servants (father, two small sons in bellboy suits). Disparaging remarks made to and about servants. Laughter. Very nasty. I say to frog-faced man, “You should keep your fucking mouth shut,” start to leave. “Is this civilization?” he asks. I say, very righteous, “No, just decency.” Then walking past motel where there’s been some disturbance, street littered with broken glass: green, milky, clear, ribbed, frosted. Nature of perception. Real possibilities. Walk on to unkempt park, eucalyptus leaves on ground, newspapers in lake. Police everywhere. A child has been murdered, they need a culprit and I’m handy. Hemmed in with questions, knocked down. They’re kicking me. Black jackets, yelling. Then Corey pushes in to the rescue, but they grab his hair and it comes off. His head is all white. Running in the water to escape is when I wake up.