The City of Lovely Brothers (36 page)

Caliban did not see the apartment until the day they moved in. A small crowd from their building and others on the 45block gathered to stare at their new neighbors.

Nick whispered, "I wish I could carry you over the threshold like I did when I moved into our house on the range, but everybody's watching us."

"You can do it. I'll make my limp look worse than it is and have you carry me up the stairs, too."

After he had looked over the apartment, Caliban

said, "It's going to feel funny, Nick, going about our daily business with strangers living on top of us, below us, next door to us, and across the hall."

"Especially when you consider what we do for alot o' that daily business. But we done it on the train."

"Do you know what I'm going to miss most living here?"

"Lying out buck naked in the sunshine."

"That too. But I'm going to miss having a dog more."

* * * *

Nick found a line job at a factory that made farm machinery, and Caliban found work at the public library.

All he had to do was sit behind a desk and tell people where to find the books they wanted and stamp the date on the card when they checked them out. He had a stool under 45the desk to rest his leg on and only had to get up to help someone with a reference book or carry a drawer from the card catalogue to his desk to go through it and check that the cards were in alphabetical order. It did not pay well, but it paid, and it gave him something to do.

They adjusted quickly to city life once they had their own apartment and the daily routine of their jobs.

Nick's ten hours a day and weekends off seemed like nothing after the fourteen plus hours a ranch hand has to put in, and Caliban only worked six. The convenience of indoor plumbing, stores within walking distance, and public transportation more than made up for the quiet and open spaces of their house on the ranch. They did not need a car. Shopping in one of the large department stores and seeing all the new-fangled gadgets was always fun even if they did not buy anything. They could go to a baseball game or take in a movie or buy tickets for a play at the Capitol Theater on their days off, or go for a swim at the municipal pool, whose locker room reminded them of the bunkhouse showers back home. They also liked to sit by the river and watch the boats.

Whether it was from walking on the hard pavement or climbing the stairs every day or not being able to interrupt his work at the library to lie down for an hour, Caliban's hip continued to grow stiffer and more painful 45until his right leg could no longer support him. To walk at all he needed crutches, although for a while he still used his cane inside the apartment. Two years after they moved to Davenport, he had to quit his job. He could sit at the desk, but riding the trolley to work had become too hard for him.

He thought he might earn some money as a private tutor, but it turned out the families who could afford them would not send their children to him for lessons. They expected him to come to them. So he stayed home alone all day.

For twenty-two years they had lived together eight miles from their nearest neighbors. No one ever came there except members of Caliban's family unless Calhoun stopped by with a couple of his cowherds for supper when he was grazing their land. They could go naked indoors and out and fondle each other unobserved. In Davenport, they lived in a building with more than a dozen other families, some with five or six children who played hide-and-seek in the hallways, and most of the people who lived there with them they did not know by name. Yet, in a way, they had more privacy now than ever before, because here they were ignored, while in Caladelphia everyone knew them and talked about them, although until their last weeks there nobody had said anything but good of them. Most people who move from a small town to a big city are at first disoriented by the anonymity; they feel their loneliness 45most in the middle of a crowd. For Caliban and Nick, those crowds were like the empty miles that had surrounded their house in a far corner of Caladelphia Ranch.

Amanda never completely recovered from her

depression. Most of the time, she lived alone. Logan worked for Calhoun and came home late at night. In autumn he would leave for a month on the cattle drive, and after that he'd find a job in Billings and not come back with the others, or return with them, and leave to visit Brandon outside of Dickinson for a week. When he got back, he would find a job for four or five months in Miles City or Billings until the end of winter. In summer, Calhoun used to give him two weeks off, once in June and again at the end of July, to spend time with his mother, but Logan went into town most evenings when he did, and he went there Sundays after church, too. Amanda never complained.

Every so often he would say something to his mother to excuse himself and apologize for his neglect. She said it didn't matter; she could not expect him to live like the hermit she had become. "I know how much you like company," she would say, "and I don't much feel like being around people no more. I need to be alone with my thoughts."

Except when it snowed, Logan usually rode his

horse to town. Nine out of ten evenings he would see 45Calvin Jr. there. They would acknowledge each other, but they rarely hung around together. Logan did not like his cousin. He called him shiftless. On a slow night, the two might talk a little or go off somewhere in Calvin Jr.'s car if the town was really dead. As Amanda said, Logan liked company.

Logan was not the only one who called Calvin Jr.

shiftless. Darcie also called him that. He neglected the ranch he was theoretically in charge of, seldom doing more than taking a cursory glance at the books at the end of the month, and left running it to his father, who passed most of what needed doing on to Darcie. When she complained that was their son's job, Calvin said the boy was still learning.

She would answer, "He ain't gonna learn by not doing nothing," and then go do it herself. Whenever he felt like it, Calvin Jr. took a handful of cash from the till and spent it on a fancy shirt or new pair of boots, or he would go for another haircut, or even a barbershop shave on days he did not feel up to shaving himself. About the only work he did was to wash and polish the car he had talked his father into buying him.

He had almost nothing in common with his cousin

Logan. Logan was straightforward, unaffected, and outgoing. He enjoyed having a couple of drinks, talking with his cronies, listening to songs on the jukebox, shooting 46pool. On a warm night, he might go outside for a game of horseshoes. Calvin Jr. fancied himself a bit of a dandy. He wasn't so much sociable as he sucked up to people. He wore flashy outfits, flirted with the ladies, and often asked one or two of them to dance. He drank heavily, liked to gamble at poker, and was good at neither. By the time the other men in the saloon were ready to go upstairs with a whore, Calvin Jr. was usually out of money and too drunk to perform if he had any left. He was lucky not to crash the car on the way home, though he did drive into the ditch and spend the night there a few times. Once Logan spotted his car in a ditch, found his cousin passed out over the steering wheel, and lifted him onto his horse and brought him back to the ranch slung over his saddle like a sack of potatoes.

As bad as Calvin Jr.'s ability was to hold his liquor, his knack for winning at cards was worse. If two or three men were playing poker and Calvin Jr. came and sat down with them, whoever saw him would rush to the table to grab one of the empty chairs. He lost most of the time and paid scant attention to how much he was losing. When he ran out of cash, he would write an IOU for what he owed and borrow from the other players to stay in the game. He could always find someone to lend him money because Caladelphia was the wealthiest ranch in the county, and most people thought he owned it outright.

* * * *

One Saturday Calvin Jr. went into town and was

gone three whole days. His father said he was probably shacked up with a girl; Darcie said he must have drunk himself into a stupor. He came home looking paler and more subdued than they had ever seen him. "I told you he was drunk," Darcie said. "That must be some headache you got, Junior."

"I… I lost money… at cards," he stammered. "Lost big. Real big."

Calvin's lower lip was trembling. "How much d'ya owe?" he asked quietly.

"About eight hundred, I think."

Calvin turned pale, and his jaw dropped. He did not say a word. He stared at his son wide-eyed, breathing heavily. Darcie did not appear angry. She remained calm, as if the news neither surprised nor vexed her, but she spoke her mind.

"It's your fault, Calvin, for always giving in to him,"

she said evenly, her tone of voice matter-of-fact. "Never disciplined 'im, never raised a hand to 'im. Lord knows what's keeping you from doing it now. You let 'im think he owned the world. The boy's a millstone 'round our necks. Ain't never given us nothing but trouble."

But Calvin's face had turned purple, and his eyes were bulging. Darcie thought he was having another stroke and ran to fetch his pills. When he had quieted down and was breathing easily, she said, "C'mon, sweetheart, let me put you to bed. We can deal with this in the morning."

Calvin supported himself on her arm as she led him toward their bedroom. When they got to the door, he turned to Calvin Jr. and said, "Whattaya mean, you
think
? Don't you know?"

"It was eight hundred."

"Then eight hundred's what you owe."

"But I got other losses from before I ain't paid back yet. Can't remember how much, exactly."

Darcie paid her son no attention. "You see what your coddling done?" she asked Calvin, more disgusted than angry. "I'd 'a taken a stick to 'im if you'd 'a let me.

Thrashed 'im every time he misbehaved and kept on doing it till he shaped up, no matter how old he got to be. Sixteen, eighteen… I'd do it now if I thought it'd do us any good.

We ain't never gonna have no joy o' him." Then she helped her husband upstairs to the bedroom and tucked him in.

She asked Calvin the next morning what he was

going to do. "The only thing I can do," he said. "I gotta cover his debt, or we won't be able to hold our heads up in 46front o' no one."

"Where we gonna get the money?"

"I'll sell off the half o' Caleb's quarter I got from Amanda, maybe to Calhoun. Don't do me no good anyways with that two-mile strip 'twixt it and what Caliban sold me."

"Calhoun won't buy it. Wouldn't be of much use to him neither, and he don't care if we can't hold up our heads."

"Then I'll find another buyer. It shouldn't be hard."

* * * *

The eight hundred dollars wasn't half of it. Calvin had to sell both Amanda's portion and Caliban's old quarter to a well-to-do Miles City lawyer who fancied setting himself up as a rancher on the side. He cut a dashing figure with his burly frame in a tweed suit and cowboy's string tie, his Justin Cody hat and the click of his cowboy boots on the pavement, and his ruddy complexion and strawberry blond handlebar mustache and jowly sideburns complemented his shoulder-length, dark-carrot color hair.

Mr. Troilus Pardoner —Willis to his wife, poker buddies, and colleagues in the legal profession— had earned himself a reputation for knowing the law outside and in as well as 46for his uncanny ability to twist it to his advantage. He practiced just about every kind of law farmers or cattlemen might need from probate to property rights, personal injury and liability, business and bankruptcy, and certain criminal charges, including murder. His defense of men accused of fraud or embezzlement was legendary. But he swore he would never represent a horse thief, and none ever came to request his services. Being a lawyer, Troilus Pardoner drove a hard bargain, and Calvin returned to Caladelphia a hundred dollars short of being able to pay off the debt.

"I'll go to Calhoun and offer to buy Julia's strip offa him," he told Darcie.

"How's buying land gonna give you more money?"

she objected.

"I'll give 'im alot for it, then turn round and sell it to Pard'ner for more. Calhoun don't know I sold what I got from Caliban and Amanda. I got the money to do it, too, right here in my pocket. What I got from Pard'ner."

"Calhoun ain't stupid. He'll know you got something up your sleeve, and he won't budge. You take my word for it."

"Only way to find out is to go see 'im."

"Go, if you like. I'll stay home, much as I'd like to see Julia again, sooner'n be there when you and Calhoun start screaming at each other." "I'll pay you back, Pa," Calvin Jr. said. "Every cent.

I promise I will."

Darcie snorted. "That'll be the day!"

"Why d'ya say that, Darcie?" Calvin said reprovingly. "Maybe the boy's learned his lesson."

"He wouldn't 'a lost that last eight hundred if he'd 'a learned his lesson."

"Ain't you being too hard on the boy?"

"Hard on him? What'd I do except let 'im know what a low-down, lazy, self-important varmint he is? If it'd been up to me, I'd 'a let the men he owes it to shake 'im down for it, and let 'im take his licks."

"And what'd they do after they knocked 'im up?

Gone to the law, and he'd 'a had to sell off some of the ranch— our ranch. Better for me to pay by selling off what was Caliban's and Amanda's."

Calvin went to talk to Calhoun that evening, when he knew he would find him at home. He rode there on horseback instead of taking his car. He had not been on a horse in years, but he thought that he had a better chance of succeeding if he came looking like a cowboy.

Calhoun scowled when he saw him. "What you

come here for? Who invited you?"

"I come to buy that strip o' yours that cuts through my land." "I wouldn't sell it to you back then, and I ain't selling it to you now, so you can just go home and forget about it. What you want it for anyway?"

"I wanna go back to doing some real ranching. Give Calvin Jr. the experience he needs."

"You can send Calvin Jr. to work for me if you want 'im to get experience. He don't know where to start.

But you wouldn't do that, would ya? It'd gnaw at you, seeing your boy working for me. Send 'im somewhere else, then. Mine ain't the only ranch around here. And what made you wanna start ranching all of a sudden? It wasn't Calvin Jr., that's for sure."