King of Spades (15 page)

“Ransom.”

“Or a new pick and shovel. Along with a pan and a gold-dust bag.”

She paused. “You really mean that last, don't you?”

“As soon as this mess clears up, I'm off for the Black Hills to find me a gold mine.”

“Why?”

“I'm in a hurry to get somewhere. Be rich and independent. Do something big.”

“Many a poor duffer has already come back from the Hills flat broke.”

“Not me.”

Katherine couldn't help but smile. “Well….” She placed the long box beside him. “Open it.”

With some reluctance he sat up and opened the box. He drew out a complete set of new clothes. “Holy bulls.”

“Like it?”

“I don't know what to say.”

“It's for you.”

“But why for me?”

“Like it?”

“You shouldn't've done it. It's too good for me.”

“Handsome is what Ransom wears.”

“Where'd you get this fancy city suit way out here? A rich man's black like this?”

“A new clothier in town.”

“But why for me?”

“Your wedding suit.” Quickly she added, “In case anybody asks.”

He had to admit he liked the black suit.

“Put it on,” she urged.

“Now?”

“Now.”

“I'd better not.”

“Listen. Take it.”

“No.”

“Take it. Listen. Consider it pay for stepping in like you did when Horses went loco.”

“Well…”

“Please.”

“All right. It's about time I had a fancy suit like this. But remember, I'm going to pay you for it, now that Sam's left me his span of mules.”

“Don't be silly.”

He brushed the suit with a loving hand. “But I do thank you for picking it out for me.”

“Will you put it on for me? Just once?”

“Sure.”

“Good.” A lickerous gleam entered her eye. “I'll be back in a jiffy.”

By the time she returned he had made the complete change: black suit, white silk shirt, high choker collar, gold cuff links, new black socks, drawers, new black patent- leather shoes.

She was taken aback by the transformation. “You really are a handsome man.”

“Cut it out.”

“When I finally turn you loose on the streets of Cheyenne, you're going to be rough competition for the rest of the men.”

“I said, cut it out.”

She abruptly turned pensive. “Tell me something.”

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever lost someone you most wanted to keep?”

“Well … Sam, of course.”

“Oh, yes. Sam.”

“And you?”

“I wouldn't even dare to begin to tell you.”

“It was that bad?”

“It was.”

Ransom placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I'm sorry to hear it. Maybe someday you'll find another to take his place.”

“Never. There was only one like him.”

“Is that the one who had to do with …?”

“My lost eye? Yes.”

He gave her shoulder a warm squeeze. “What was he like? Maybe I can help you find him.”

“He's dead. At least so I think. Dead.” Her whole face wrinkled over with an old anguish.

He was moved.

She turned woodenly from him.

“Katherine.”

A tear appeared along the bottom edge of her black eye patch.

“Godsakes, Katherine.”

Abruptly she left the room. Her footsteps slowly faded away down the hall.

“Poor woman. She takes it pretty hard.”

 

He undressed and hung his new clothes in the corner closet. He stroked each piece, the coat, vest, trousers, silk shirt, neatly into place. “I'll make sure to pay for them when I sell Sam's mules.”

Naked, he stretched to his full height, up on his toes, chest out. “Ahh!” His biceps came up like risen dough and his thighs rippled like taut lariats.

He caught sight of himself in Katherine's full-length mirror. He saw where his johnny-nods hung dreaming in its thicket of curly black hair. It resembled almost exactly his nose in the middle of his beard.

On an impulse he decided to go to bed naked, as he'd sometimes done on warm nights out on the prairie.

He blew out the night lamp. And, crawling into his suggans on the floor, was sound asleep in a minute.

 

After a while, body warming in sleep, an arm, then a leg, tossed the thick horse blanket aside. He lay exposed.

He dreamed he was swimming. He was paddling for all he was worth to get to shore. On the shore stood Sam Slaymaker. Sam was calling to him with warm encouraging words. Behind Ransom stretched a vast body of water. How he'd come to be in the water in the first place he couldn't figure out. When his knee hit gravel, Sam had a hand up for him. Sam led him to a crackling fire. Sam fed him venison and coffee. By the time his clothes were dry, Ransom found he'd outgrown them and Sam had to cut him a new suit out of deerskin. In making them Sam hadn't allowed enough room for his crotch. So Sam had to recut his buckskin pants.

Then Ransom woke up.

He lay musing and breathing for a while.

Poor Sam shot and killed.

Sam had loved him with a true-blue heart. Sam had loved him up when he'd felt down. Sam had scolded him when he'd felt antsy.

Goddam that Horses.

But Sam had been mostly wrong about Miss Katherine though. All that talk of hers about bundling, and keeping the white sheet between them, meant only one thing: she wanted a man, bad.

Fantasies of what he'd do with Miss Katherine someday drifted through his mind. He would stroke her shadowed gold hair. He would cup her breasts. He would hug her to him, warm and close and hard.

Again he dreamed he was swimming. This time it was under water.

He nosed into some dark water where the seaweeds
stood thick. He swam with powerful stroking arms. The seaweeds kept trailing across his face.

He swam harder. Yet for all his stroking he just couldn't seem to make headway. It was as if his body had sent down some kind of root.

He looked down. Yes. His body had sent down a root. It was his phallus. It'd grown to be as big as an elephant's trunk, and where it'd been sucking at the bottom it had rooted in.

He was tied down. While he was swimming, his root had somehow anchored deep in the mud. Also, every little while, some goldfish, four of them along with a papa goldfish the size of a thumb, played around the root.

All of a sudden his root swelled up. And it began to burn deliciously. Deliciously. It was so delicious he had the feeling his phallus was going to back up on itself and turn around and swallow him complete. The end of it would be that he would disappear into the mud bottom.

“Wake up, wake up!” a doctor cried. “It's going to get you. Hurry. Before it's too late.”

He bumbled out loud. “I am hurrying.”

“Darling,” a woman's voice said. “Darling, I know it's dreadful of me to be so forward. But the thought of your sweet boy innocence, oh dear God, it drives me wild to think that someone else should have it first.”

“I'm hurrying, Doc.”

“Also, the Army has let me know that they know you're only bunking in my bedroom and not sleeping with me as man and wife. So they're coming to get you tomorrow morning.”

“Mum?”

“You're awake, aren't you?”

“Mam?”

“Darling, the sound of your voice drives me mad. I hear red when you talk. Lonely and red.”

It had to be a dream.

“It's been so long, so long since I've done it. And I always loved it so. Even with that other. And even with shy little Dennis.”

A dream.

“And I know I'm breaking my own rule. Because I once swore on my own soul that I'd never do it again until I'd found him. But, oh God, it's been so long.”

It had to be a dream. In dream it would be all right. In dream one couldn't help it.

“But seeing you I now know I'll never find him. You're even better, darling.”

He fought to stay as asleep as possible. “Mussent wake up.” He struggled to stay down. “Or it ain't a dream.”

“All those years denying it. Keeping myself pure for the day when I might find him again.”

He found himself floating. And he let himself go on floating.

“We'll start over. A sweet little nest somewhere in the West. Make a new start.”

A face nuzzled his beard. Full soft lips found his lips. Hair trailed across his nose. The fishes played.

“Darling, you are awake, aren't you?”

“Mum?”

“My husband. My dear daddy husband.”

“Mam?”

A woman smiled in his ear. “Dear old Aunt Agnes might not approve.” The fishes played. “But we don't care, do we?” “Who?”

“I can't help it, sweet, but I never did think tubers were unsightly.”

He suffered his lips to be parted and the tip of a tongue touched the tip of his tongue.

“Come, wake up, darling. Nnnh? Under that black patch I'm really a honeypot, you know. The stamp of a passional nature is set deep in me.”

Again the tip of a tongue found him. Then the last of what
he'd hoped was a dream was gone, and he found himself being hugged by a wonderful woman. Naked. Now. A rush of red from a new spring swept through him.

Suddenly he threw his arms around her, and hugged her hard in turn, and kissed her compulsively.

With his fingertips he touched all of her. He felt the tender skin of her and the supple flesh of her, and under them the surprisingly hard female hipbones of her.

One of his hands found her softest hair. With a ripped cry he turned her over on her back and moved up on his knees and entered and possessed her. He was mad to have a woman at last.

“At last, at last, to be doing it doing it. After so many years.”

“Nnn.”

“My husband.”

“Kathering.”

“My King.”

“Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.”

She heard red in the sound of his voice.

He smelled puccoons in the loose strands of her hair.

4

Later in the night he carried her to the four-poster bed and crept in beside her.

She murmured sleepily. He murmured sleepily. And before they were comfortably settled between the sheets, he was upon her again.

“Come.”

“Husband.”

He'd swum his river finally. And once across he couldn't get enough of it.

As he dozed off he promised himself to look into why it
was that something about her scent always set off a trigger in him.

It wasn't just that she smelled of puccoons. It was more than that. It was as if he knew already beforehand that he'd smell the puccoons on her. Somehow he'd been there before, in some other kind of life if that was possible, before he'd been born into this life, with the edges of the being-there-before resembling the vaporings of a horizon on a hot summer day.

Vaguely he was aware of footsteps going away from their door.

He fell asleep.

After that the Army left them alone.

 

An unlabeled bottle of perfume always stood on her dressing table.

One day he saw her touch a drop of it to her ears.

He went over and stood behind her. There it was. That special Katherine scent. The one that always set him off.

He picked up the bottle. It was half-full of something that looked like light beer. “What's this?”

“A perfume I make.”

“What from?”

“Puccoons.”

“So that's why I always smell them on you.” He uncapped the bottle and took a good whiff. “Mmm. Let me give you a word of advice.”

“Yes?”

“See to it that you never run out of this and then you'll never lose me.”

She laughed. “Maybe it's more the perfume you love than me.”

“Just don't you ever run out of it. That's all I've got to say.”

“You like it that much?”

“It's the key to you.”

She told him how she made the perfume, from the squeezings of puccoon blossoms and the dregs of boiled puccoon roots.

The next day he took a stroll out on the prairie. Look as he might, he couldn't find any puccoons.

He remembered then that on that first ride into Cheyenne with Sam he had seen some growing off to one side of the trail.

He saddled his tan mustang Prince and went to look for them.

He found them. The stalk and the leaves were still green, but the topmost flowers were edged with a withered brown. Only a few of the lower trumpet blossoms, much smaller, still had the true golden-orange color.

He picked them all. He also dug out several roots.

He carried them home to Katherine.

She was touched. She bit her lips to keep tears from starting.

“They are the right kind, ain't they?”

“Yes.”

“I just didn't want you ever to run out of it.”

I won't.

 

She was gone uptown much of the day. She came home just before supper, tired, shadows under her eyes, face gaunt.

“Where you been, my lady?”

“Let's have a bite first. Then I'll tell you.”

She had on new black button shoes. She reached down to rub them over the toes. After a moment she took them off.

“Your new shoes are too tight for you, eh? I bet you'd like to soak your feet in warm water awhile, wouldn't you? And have me rub them down?”

She drew in a sucking breath. “Why, Ransom, how nice of you to notice.”

“I'll wash them for you if you want me to.”

“No-o. But it's nice of you to think of it.”

After supper, sitting on his lap in their bedroom, she told him. “We're moving tomorrow.”

He stirred under her like an uneasy horse. “What?”

“What would you say if I told you I've given The Stinging Lizard away?”

“You gave it away? To who?”

She blew her nose with a scented kerchief. “Well, to Hermie.”