In An Arid Land (14 page)

"Spite or revenge or whatever you want to call it that doesn't matter. I won't do it, wrong or right."

"Well, and just what would we do then?"

"I'll think of something."

"I'm not sure we have even enough money to buy him a decent suit or a casket, much less a plot in the cemetery. He left nothing, you know, but thirty-two dollars in his wallet and some change there in the bureau. What will we do with him?"

"I'll think of something," he said again and the tone of his voice made it clear that this was the end of it for now. Again the unyielding silence, only the sound of the dog snuffling after Carla's house shoe, trying gently to remove it from her foot with his mouth, and Carla's murmur, "No, no."

V

Warren was not in the house when Carla woke the next day. It was almost seven and this was to be expected but she could tell he hadn't come back to bed that night. Out in the barn she found him, sitting on a wheelbarrow in front of Old Velvet's stall.

"Ain't he a beaut," Warren said of the colt. "Just like his mama." His breath was thick and frosty and smelled of liquor.

It was all understandable. Carla smiled and took his hand.

"Dr. Sweeney was really pleased with the way it went. Everything was fine, he said. A prize-winner, he called him."

Carla watched as Warren stepped into the large stall and maneuvered between the mare and the colt and then she watched as he stood there brushing Velvet and talking to her softly. She was a stocky carrot-colored sorrel they had admired for many years before saving the money to buy her. Back then they would stop on the road in front of the Jones place and pet her over the fence, and Mr. Jones would wave and call, "She's yours whenever you want her. I'm saving her for you." It had been two years more before they raised the money to breed her with Pay Dirt, the big quarter horse stud that all the men in the county knew about.

"It's a pleasure to watch you with her like that," Carla said. "She's so easy with you, and you with her."

"We got a way with each other, that's for sure," he said and she saw that his eyes were shining when he turned into the light.

"Well now," she said. "How about some breakfast?"

"That's a good idea," he said without looking at her.

She would wait until he had a hot meal in his stomach before bringing up the matter of his father again. They would have to decide something and she thought she knew him well enough to know that he had been speaking through grief and exhaustion the night before, that he would feel differently now, in the daylight, and such a tender day, soft blue above sharp white. As she crunched across the patchy snow in the yard she glanced off through the trees beyond the leafless orchard at what Warren called the family plot. The short chain-link fence glistened with icicles and a peak of powdery snow lay on his mother's gravestone.

It was Mr. Hudson's truck coming through the gate. She waved to him from the porch when he stopped and got out on the drive, and he waved back warmly before walking off toward the barn. He was a short round man with a shaggy moustache who lived on a beautiful ranch about five miles away. He liked Warren and respected his opinions and his work and he had always treated her husband as something of a son, for he too had begun life poor and had made his mark in business with labor and loyalty. They talked on the telephone at least once each day, often before sunrise, and he often came by just to get away from his huge household.

Mr. Hudson leaned against the fence. Then she saw that Warren had brought Old Velvet out of her stall and was tying her to a fence rail. Soon he came out with the colt who stood shakily next to his mother, nuzzling her underside, and then Warren crawled through the fence to stand beside Mr. Hudson. Come to admire and console, she said to herself and then went inside.

The sausage was still sizzling when Carla called the men in for breakfast. Their boots thundered on the back porch as they stomped away the snow and the sound of it was reassuring to her.

Mr. Hudson smiled at her and shook her hand politely, saying, "Carla, how the hay are you?" in his high friendly voice, as he did every time they met. He offered no condolence.

"Have a seat, Mr. Hudson," she said and started putting the platters of food on the table. The room was warm and fragrant.

"Carla, I wish you'd talk him out of it," said Mr. Hudson in a glad, teasing way. It was obvious he didn't know.

She glanced at Warren, who was sullen-seeming and wouldn't look up at her. She said, smiling as if at a joke,

"What's that, Mr. Hudson?" and took her own seat between the men.

"The horses!" he said but he was really speaking to Warren. "It seems a real shame selling them. Now, I'd be a damn fool not to buy them, even at three-thousand, and I've wanted Old Velvet for years, but it does seem a damn shame. I know there's no changing his mind once it's made up and I'm sure y'all have your own reasons, but still"

"Business is business, Mr. Hudson, as you always say."

This was Warren speaking and the sound of his voice saddened her, the things being said astonished her. There was an emptiness in her heart, a silence, as Mr. Hudson went on talking gladly about the horses and filling his plate with food. She understood now, though she would never truly understand it, and she looked at her husband to question him: his eyes, so much like his mother's just then, dark and wounded, hooded with bitter secrets, refused again to meet her gaze. She wouldn't have thought him capable of this, of going so far to get his revenge. She dared not say anything, for he would never forgive such disloyalty, and besides everybody would know soon enough. It was wrong.

Carla stared at him trying to attract his eyes. Only once did they glance at her a quick shift and a shift away, without contact and she realized even then, with fear, that this was how they would be with each other for a long, long time.

There are twenty-three, now twenty-four thimbles on the arm of my lawn chair. I adjust the position of one in the middle the one with the image of Mount Rushmore etched into it so they line up perfectly. The thimbles were all that Mother left me when she died. I don't know why she thought I'd want them. An only child I was, though, and I guess she wanted me to have something of hers. Now I pull them out of the old sewing cabinet whenever I'm home, take a look, feel the cool of metal and porcelain on my fingers.

Pop moves in his chair. He's been quiet for half an hour, but now he says, "She loved those things," and I nod. We look at each other. I shrug, uncertain what he wants with his drooping, sad eyes, if he wants me to say something. But he says, "She really loved those things," and our eyes turn away, go searching for something that we cannot find in the other one's face.

Beyond the yard and the chain-link fence, way out on that damn treeless Wyoming horizon, a pump jack is working against the sunset. Its big horse head bobs up slowly and then dips again. I scan the line where the yellow field touches the pale sky, but there is nothing: no bushes, no cacti, very little grass. Why he settled here I'll never know. The place is so high and open and lonely that it makes me feel like an ant when I visit. This is country that takes your heart out and throws it away as soon as you cross the border. Maybe that's why he came here. Maybe he needed his heart to be thrown away when Mom died. He's healthy. He says the doctors give him ten, maybe twenty years to live. Imagine being heartbroken for twenty years.

I glance at him, and he must sense my interest. He says, "It's sure been good having you, Jimbo."

"Yeah, Pop, it's been good. Thanks for putting me up."

"Any time," he says. "Any time."

His expression goes intense again and I can see that he is concentrating, watching the changing light in the sky. Weather permitting, he sits out here every evening. Sometimes, when I sit with him, I feel like an intruder, an unwanted presence, an irritating charge in the atmosphere that interferes with his thoughts. He told me once that the evening clouds above Wyoming help him evoke the image of Mom, of Katty as he called her, better than any clouds anywhere. And he's been around. Tonight the colors run together, gray and purple, a wash of amber angling through it, holding everything together like a seam.

I've been here a week, sleeping in my old bed, eating his hotcakes in the morning, drinking his "for-guests-only" bourbon at night. He, assumes I'm leaving in a day or two. In the past I've stayed only a few days at a time, twice at Christmas, once at Easter, always with Jackie, my wife. But this time it's different. I don't know when I'm leaving. No job to go to, and no Jackie now. He doesn't know about that. I told him she had to work and couldn't make the trip. At night I pull the phone into the bedroom and fake long-distance calls to her. I do it for him. I know he listens, and he would wonder if I did nothing.

Pop says, as if he knows what I'm thinking about, "Too bad Jackie's not with you. We could take a day and run over to Mount Rushmore, show her the faces." My elbow flinches, bumps the thimbles and one of them falls to the ground, bounces, lights on a tuft of his neatly trimmed grass.

In the morning we go to town. It's a short ride; he lives in a subdivision of fifteen or twenty houses owned by people in the oil and gas business, the few guys still trying it around here, and a community of retirees like himself. He has friends; they get together after church and for Spades on Friday nights and for coffee at the Old Mill Cafe on Custer Street.

He directs his pickup into a parking place at the curb in front of the cafe. "Why don't you go on in," he says. "I've got an errand to run. Won't be long." I watch him as he walks away along the high-curbed sidewalk. His bald spot and wispy gray hair shine above his shoulders; his strides are short, purposeful, but erratic, as if he has to think about each step.

I sit at a booth in the corner. It's an old place, like the town, with glass-enclosed pie stands on the counter and the stuffed heads of game animals on the walls. But the waitress is pretty and she smiles for me, a genuine smile. She puts down water, a paper napkin and Army surplus silverware. I look up. She is smiling again in a direct, familiar way, and it's then that I realize I know her. "Hello, Jimbo," she says, but I can't recall her name until she helps: "Charlene. Remember?"

"Char-lene," I say, tapping my forehead. High school; we'd known each other in Houston. "What are you doing here ?"

"That's what I was going to ask you."

She sits across from me and we talk for a while as old acquaintances do when they meet by chance at odd places in the world, and under odd circumstances, and I learn that she is in Newton, Wyoming, for much the same reason I am. An aunt and uncle are here, she needed a place and they took her in, found her this job. She says, "It's just temporary, until I figure things out."

"Sure, I know. Me, too."

"I heard it's been years now I heard you'd married."

I nod, but say nothing, indicate nothing of the trouble.

"Any kids?"

I shake my head no, and she says, "Me either. I'm divorced. You probably didn't even know I was married."

"It figures. I mean, we were all raised to get married."

"I'm over it, though," she says as if she didn't hear me.

I say, "Here's Pop," and she stands up in a hurry, brushes down her apron. I introduce them, explain briefly, and she says that she needs to get back to work. "I'll give you a minute."

Right off he says, "Still got the old attraction, eh Jimbo. The easy ones always come running." He has teased me about this ever since the first time he discovered I'd been with a girl and Mother insisted that he instruct me in the ways of nature. But he's never been one to talk frankly about "intimate relations" and even at his age he blushes over the topic. Teasing me is how he compensates, though it ended mostly when I married Jackie and moved to Oklahoma. Now he says, "Remember that gal" but I cut him off. "Don't, huh. Charlene's not like that."

"You're right," he says quickly, charitably, his face going red. "And it's unfair to Jackie, you know. Even among the guys."

Charlene is back, ready to take our order.