The Clearing (38 page)

The trapper faced around and stared, his eyes crossed as though one of them had been beaten out of line by a sledge.

“What you gonna do with that knife?” Minos asked.

“Skin me a hide.”

“No you ain’t.”

“How you gonna stop me?”

Minos pulled his father’s Colt lightning and fired a round into the trapper’s shin, right over his mud-caked boots. The man yelped and threw his arms aloft as if he were slipping down on ice, the skinning knife flying up and sticking in the underside of the porch roof.

The doctor got up and walked through the puff of gun-smoke into the black side of the saloon, where he put a hand under a saw filer’s overalls strap and dragged him out into the sun, instructing him to fetch two five-gallon cans of kerosene from the commissary.

Galleri stepped out on the porch, his hands making questions in the air. “What’s going on?”

“Clear every worthless jarhead out of that bugger hole,” the doctor told him.

“What? What you going to do?” His lardy face bounced back and forth between the two men.

“Your floors are unsanitary,” the doctor announced. “We’re going to clean them so people can say you run a healthy place.”

Minos searched the writhing trapper’s pockets and stepped down off the porch. “Coal oil. Ten gallons ought to clean things up some.”

Galleri looked into the men’s faces. “This a joke, right?” Then, after a moment he hurried inside. From the back of the saloon came the sound of breaking glass, and the doctor and Minos dragged the bleeding Indian off the porch and dumped him out in the lane next to a pile of mule droppings.

When the kerosene arrived they went inside the white section and found that Galleri had broken out the jackpot windows in the slot machines and was scooping quarters and nickels into a sombrero. The saw filer set down a can in the middle of the floor, and Minos shot a hole into it near the bottom; next, they walked over to the black side and did the same, the slug bounding through the other side of the can and shattering a mirror behind the bar.

A tipsy, barefoot whore wandered out from the back, holding a pint can of pomade, come to see what the racket was about. When she smelled the kerosene, her feet froze to the floor, and she looked at the spreading silvery pool. “What you crazy white folks doin’?”

The doctor smiled at her. “Do you have a ready-made, my darlin?”

The woman drew a soggy cigarette from her bodice and held it out as though expecting someone to light it. “You wants to fire me up?” she asked, wavering.

Minos stepped around the running fuel and dug a kitchen match from a box on the bar. “Come here, girl.” He led her around to the front door and struck the match, the doctor following and putting his hand on the knob.

The woman leaned over and inhaled noisily, then let the smoke slide from her mouth and drift up her nostrils. “You gennelmens want something?”

When Minos took a step backwards and dropped the match to the floor, a yellow lip of flame grew patiently across the boards as though following a giant wick. The woman stepped onto the porch without making a sound, an expert at leaving trouble, and the men stayed in and closed the door behind her, then walked quickly along the wall to the springloaded back door. They strolled out casually, moving toward the canal, where they sat down on a bulkhead. For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening inside the building, but then the fire began to drum and snap, gray smoke snaking out around the closed windows. Something detonated with a thud, and after this noise every crack and seam in the saloon began to spray smoke. The mill’s fire whistle started to whoop, sliding up and down the scale, and the two of them walked around to stand with the gathering crowd, feigning surprise. A stretcher crew showed up for the wounded trapper, while the whore, trying to be inconspicuous, sauntered around to her cabin in back.

Minos pointed at her. “Looks like she’s going to pack, yeah.”

“She’ll be all right,” the doctor said. “Nobody’ll bill her for a burnt-up saloon.”

A team of workers rolled down a hose cart from the boiler room and began to hook up to the one hydrant in the mill yard. Minos walked over and grabbed a man by the arm. “Take your time,” he said.

The man looked over at the building, which was now a huge blossom of seething, slate-colored smoke. “You gone Baptist on us, Mr. Minos?”

“Go on back to the mill for that big wrench hanging by my chair. You got to get that hose on tight.” He looked at the other men. “All of you go get yourselves a wrench.” They did as he asked, moving toward the mill in no particular hurry. Meanwhile, the saloon hissed and boiled, sap running like water out of the knotholes, the tin roof crinkling and banging as if someone were inside throwing billiard balls against it. All at once the fire burned through a side wall, the air got in, and every board bled red and yellow flame. The onlookers scrambled back to escape the flash of heat and the ragtime notes of bottles breaking, the building lighting up like a paper bag and disappearing in a roaring bloom. The hose crew reappeared with their wrenches and proceeded to wet down the roof of the commissary, the two whore cabins out back, and three smoking-hot privies. The porch posts burned away upright, the window sashes fell out and flamed in the yard, and the saloon pulsed hotter, a giant tulip of crackling orange light, until its roof collapsed in a tornado of sparks. Everyone not on shift was in the yard, watching respectfully as if the blaze were a play they’d paid good money to see.

Full dark showed only a bank of red coals, and the next morning revealed a rectangle of ash littered with giant rusty flakes of tin and the partially melted hulks of eight slot machines canted in the cinders like one-armed torsos. A bucker glancing at the debris on the way to his shift remarked that it looked like the day after Hell burned out.

That afternoon several thirsty men stood around the ashes like dogs whose bowls had been taken away, and Galleri, smudged and sick, appeared at the mill office, straw hat in hand. Jules asked what he could do for him.

“I didn’t have no insurance,” he said, turning his hat in front of him.

Jules threw down his pencil. “Hell, you the only man around here with a bank account.”

“Okay, I was ready to move on, but you got to admit, the building was worth somethin’. You got to admit that.”

“Aw, go on and move to Shirmer, or Tiger Island. Build yourself a barber shop or a little grocery store.”

“Hey, you know what happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can’t get no free lumber?”

The assistant manager looked up at him for a long moment. “All right. I can let you have some number two stuff, siding and some joists.”

Galleri rocked from one foot to the other. “What about tin?”

Jules squinted meanly. “Hell, no. Your place was a boil on this mill’s ass, and you’re lucky to get a four-penny nail out of me.”

Galleri put on his hat. With his hand on the doorknob, he said, “One time, Buzetti offered me a thousand dollars to kill Mr. Byron.”

The assistant manager’s face snapped up. “Why didn’t you take it?”

“You know, livin’ out here with the owls, I thought about it a while. Not real serious, you know? But still, a thought like that wouldn’t never popped into my head if I lived in a town.” He rattled the knob. “A thousand dollars is a lot of money.” Galleri laughed. “That’s how you get to thinkin’ when you work in the woods sellin’ booze to the animals.”

Jules began filling the little voids of an invoice. “I guess.”

“Is it workin’ out in the woods makes you crazy?” Galleri asked. “What you think?”

Jules did not look up. “I think you’re glad you didn’t take that money.”

The mill manager rose to wakefulness the way a Louisiana coffin pushes up out of the mud after a week-long rain. Lillian was there holding his hand, one of her eyes blacked shut, a narrow bruise across the bridge of her nose and fourteen bristling stitches marking her cheek. He tried to speak, but his mouth felt plugged with wax. “No,” she said. “Don’t try anymore.” She told him this as if he’d tried for many days already and had failed, and this frightened him. He saw behind her a figure the size of Byron, and beyond, against the wall, a man holding a book who was perhaps a minister. The room came apart and drifted away, and Randolph prayed for forgiveness for whatever he’d done wrong in his life, and then suddenly, when he felt his brother’s touch and voice, the walls came back together, light again registering in his brain and his eyes seeing as if through broken water. He thought of things he had yet to do, hundreds and hundreds of things, but realized, in his trough of weakness, that he had better think of the two or three most important. He willed his lips into a shape and aimed his one working eye at his wife, who lowered her face to his.

“Love you,” he whispered. She kissed his cheek and put a finger on his bloodless lips, but he spoke around it. “By,” he said, like a call.

His wife backed away and Byron stepped closer, his eyes wide on some grief-killing drug the doctor had given him. “Rando,” he whispered. “The man who did it, Mrs. Scott hung up his guns for him. I’m thinking of giving her my badge.”

The mill manager struggled for a breath. “No.”

“What is it?”

“Walter,” he said slowly.

“He’s safe, brother. And he’ll be safe.”

It cost him a great effort to form the words, “I lied.”

Byron’s brows went up, and his eyes were dark moons. “What? What lie?”

“May told me.” He felt the room warping apart, so he gathered his breath and said, “He’s yours.”

Byron turned and looked behind him, and Lillian put the heel of her hand on her forehead. She took the minister’s arm and led him through the door into the hall, then came back alone. She looked at her husband, who had closed his eyes and gone under, then at Byron. “I consider myself a loyal wife, but I’m not stupid. It occurred to me that it could have been one of you.” She looked to the window, where a rainy sky darkened toward sunset. “I just tried not to think about it.”

Byron put his hand on Randolph’s shoulder.

“Let him sleep.” She pulled him away from the bed.

He sat down next to the cold radiator. “I’ve got to think straight.” He pointed at the bed with his stump. “Why would he lie to me?”

“Maybe he figured you had enough troubles.” She looked down at her stomach. “Or he wanted the baby for himself,” she said bitterly.

“This is some news.”

Lillian looked at him a long time. “What kind of news, Byron?”

He raised his face to her, smiling a regular smile. “Tall headlines,” he told her quietly. “Like they used at the end of the war.”

The mill manager groaned and stirred under the sheets. The rubber tube snaking down into a bloody bottle on the floor quivered with his pounding pulse, and the two of them continued to wait for him to die.

A week after his brother entered the hospital, Byron returned to Nimbus and found his wife waiting for him on the porch with Walter in her lap. He walked up carrying his grip and stood still in the yard.

Ella looked down at him and hugged the boy. “It’s a fine thing to hear about over the telephone.”

He stepped up onto the porch. “I told you what happened, how and why. I can’t do any better, but if you want me to say or do something else to make it right, I’ll do it.”

Walter squirmed out of Ella’s lap and grabbed Byron’s hand. “Come see,” the boy said, tugging him to the far edge of the porch. “Take me to the train.”

Byron looked over to where Rafe was setting the packing nuts on the locomotive’s cylinders. “Sure. We’ll go in just a minute.”

“This might take more than just a minute to fix,” Ella said. She was biting a thumb, looking away.

“I’m sorry. It was that one time, and I told you how she came on to me.”

Out of the side of her mouth, she said, “Kind of like an ambush, was it?”

He took this hurt and squeezed Walter’s hand. “I guess so.” He moved closer to her and looked at her freckled skin, her sandy hair curled above her shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”

He could tell that she was trying not to cry, and she didn’t answer him. He was afraid of what she might say, the longer she would not say it. She was studying the child.

“Ella?”

“It sure would be hard to let you off the hook if we were in one of our hometowns.” She looked around the mill yard, then raised an arm. “But here, well, where the hell are we, anyway?” She stood up, putting a hand on Walter’s head. “I guess someday we might have one that’s mine too. They say one like this can cause another to come on.”

Byron looked over to the flat blanket of ash that was the saloon. “I wonder why he never told me the truth.”

“You don’t have to ask that, do you?”

He stepped off the porch and let Walter pull him toward the tracks. “I guess not.”

Randolph Aldridge did not die. For two months a fluid pressed around his heart like a spongy fist. The bullet had passed through the center of his chest, and all the tissue around its path had been shocked black. No one expected him to recover, and after thirty days a young Spanish doctor began to experiment, holding back his injections of fluids, and slowly, like a boat bailed by a thimble, Randolph began to come up.