The Hour of Lead (23 page)

“I'm glad to know it,” Matt said. “I could use the help.”

Jarms shook his head. “There's no future in it.”

“Work, you mean?”

Jarms nodded. “Roland worked all his life. So have you. What've you got I ain't.”

The question stumped Matt. He'd never figured it in a gathering way.

“I got a job,” Matt said.

Jarms laughed. “That's a good answer. They're damned hard to come by, I hear.”

“Well, what've you got?” Matt asked him.

Jarms smiled. “And that's a good question and I'll consider it deeply, but in the meantime, let's go see if that girl's any fatter.”

They traveled the rutted road in silence aside from a static-filled country station until Jarms parked and switched the radio
off. Jarms rested awhile, but Matt remained alert. One lantern lit the house below and they could watch it travel from room to room. Jarms put a blanket over his lap. Autumn was approaching and the night turned nippy. Their breath fogged the glass. Matt rolled down his window and watched it disappear. He let the cold air come over him. He enjoyed the way it cleared the sky and made his skin feel fresh-scrubbed. Watching the girl did the same thing to him. She stood in her room. All he could see was her shadow on one wall, and it took the binoculars for that. He couldn't help but feel some anxiety when he saw the new swoop of her belly and milk-heavy breasts.

“You think she knows we're here?” Matt asked.

Jarms shrugged. “It doesn't matter to me what she knows.”

“Not at all?” Matt asked.

“Nope. What's in her belly is all that counts.”

“I guess so.”

“You gone and fallen in love?” Jarms asked him.

“No,” Matt said. “I just don't know how to leave her out of it.”

“It's easy,” Jarms told him. “We'll give her money.”

“That don't seem like enough.”

Jarms said, “You know how rare cash is?”

“She might change her mind.”

“Nope.”

“Maybe the baby'll want her.”

“What do you want to worry about all this for?” Jarms asked him.

“Seems like it bears considering.”

Jarms pointed to the darkened window where the girl's room was. “She's cattle,” he said. “Or a ewe, or a brood mare. Nothing more. Nothing that bears considering. Not one goddamned thing.”

“Not even the baby?”

“More livestock.”

Matt was quiet. He looked at a place where the dark line of the horizon met the night. Night had scared him once. Looking now, he realized it wasn't the sky that made him afraid, it was the dark over the country underneath it.

“Remembering your girl?” Jarms asked.

“She never answered my letter.”

“You wrote her?”

“A month or so back.”

“Jesus, with this baby coming?”

Matt said nothing.

“You don't see what one's got to do with the other do you?” Jarms's laugh idled and died. “Good for you,” he said.

Matt just stared at the darkened house. It seemed to him as sacred as a church, and for the first time since he could remember he felt like praying. He thought for a moment he might ask for Wendy's answer and reconsidered, figuring his best hope was in continued silence.

“She don't need you,” Jarms said. “No more than that girl in that house does.”

“I don't guess so.”

“You know why men make armies?” Jarms asked.

Matt shrugged.

“They got to be together. They make armies and taverns and card games. Women, they stay at home. They don't need nothing but themselves. Don't let yourself think they do. It's men that do the needing in this world.”

Matt had been alone fourteen years, but he wasn't inclined to argue. What Jarms said seemed true enough. He'd never quit needing the whole time.

“A baby still seems worth a little concern,” Matt said.

“Roland'll concern himself for all of us.”

“You sure?”

“He's been doing it for me all my life,” Jarms said. “He's doing it for you, too. He's good at it.”

Jarms lit a cigarette and started the car. He pinched the butt between his finger and thumb and took a deep pull and released a stream of smoke. Matt watched his hand shake, then still. Jarms stared into the cigarette ember. The car motor rumbled and Matt wished he'd turn it off so they could sit longer, but Jarms backed up and turned them toward home.

•

T
HE THREE OF THEM CELEBRATED
the end of cutting with a spitted lamb, dining from it three nights, squandering the days in the porch's shade, napping. Autumn, traditionally, was slow for farmers, leading to a winter of dormant country and keeping livestock from starvation and the other perils of snow and cold. The air cleared and Matt could see Steptoe Butte, which rose from the grain swells of Palouse like a random bicuspid in a golden and verdant gum. The county, Whitman, was named for missionaries local Indian tribes assassinated outside of Walla Walla—in what became another county entirely. Steptoe was an army colonel who managed to lose enough battles to the Palouse Indians, a tribe so poor they never merited a reservation and existed now only as Yakimas and Spokanes, that he was eventually martyred. The county had planted a dozen radio towers there and constructed a switchbacked road to a tiny park at the summit. The most remarkable aspect of the landmark was the lack of stone and trees. Scrub brush and dirt blanketed the peak to the apex, not unlike the country beneath it, which Lake Missoula, through a series of ice age floods, deposited the richest loam this side of the Mississippi. If a thresher could manage the thirty-degree grade, wheat and barley and canola would line the slopes until August cutting.

Farther east and south, Kamiak Butte sat the horizon, less prominent as it was an extension of the St. Joe Range, which was itself an arm of the Rockies. Kamiak, the chief rebel harassing Steptoe and George Wright, was summoned to the Latah country near what was then Spokane Falls to a peace conference where he was summarily hanged without a trial. Perhaps the butte was justice or at least an admission of something, not guilt, of course, but regret. The slopes of Kamiak were forested with white pine and broken with meadows so fragrant with wildflowers that one almost was sickened by the sweetness, as if the chief's body still rotted somewhere beneath.

In October, Jarms sold a portion of the grain. Five years before, Garrett and his father had constructed two modern siloes with dial scales and grain pits from which wheat and barley could be augured and elevatored to separated storage vats. Jarms had been happy to store with him as it was a shorter distance than town and Garrett charged the same rent. He permitted Garrett to buy and sell the Jarms wheat because he studied the commodities market and could milk a dime more per bushel than Horace or Roland, who more often than not sold on whims or when they tired of fussing over it.

The enterprise had flourished. Grain nearly filled both silos, and Garrett pulled fourteen-hour days to manage the enterprise and harvest his own crop. As a result, Jarms agreed to meet Garrett at the silo to cut his check. Horace arrived with Roland and Matt. A five-man crew swung spouts toward combination truck containers and aligned them with the ports, then tugged a rope that unloosed several tons of grain. A tremendous rattle followed and a wind yellowed the air. Semi drivers idled, afraid to smoke as the grain dust was volatile as nitro.

Roland shook his head and grinned at the operation. Jarms excused himself and walked across the dirt lot for the check. Matt could see them through the office: Garrett's mouth pinched like he was intent on working something from his teeth, Jarms circling
his hands and later kicking a desk. Jarms slammed the door and marched to the Ford, Garrett trailing.

“What's the mule in the road?” Roland asked through the opened window.

“The bastard won't write the check,” Jarms said.

Roland looked past Jarms to Garrett. “The wheat there?”

Garrett nodded.

“Sales receipts?”

Garrett nodded once more.

“Bank holding the cash?”

“Yes,” Garrett said.

“I fail to see the rub,” Roland said.

“I hold twenty thousand dollars of your son's IOUs.”

“Well, that's not my concern.”

“But it's mine,” Garrett said. “And I'm not releasing your grain until the note's paid. I don't want to see him wasted any longer.”

“Waste or not, the money's due.”

“I won't pay.”

“Will you write it to me, then.”

“You'll pass it on to him.”

“That's my business.”

“And this is mine. I will not make the check.”

“I've got a lawyer who says different.”

“I imagine so. He will argue with mine and they will both get paid, but you will not. Not for a long while, anyway.”

Garrett nodded to Matt. “I will pay him and only him.”

They were silent.

“All right,” Roland said. “Write the check.”

But Jarms was on Garrett. They rolled in the dirt. Each's arms locked the other's head. Jarms champed Garrett's forearm and his blood spackled them both. Garrett's hand tore Jarms's throat. Matt, out of the car, kicked Garrett in the ribs. He heard one break and
kicked him once more, then dragged him by the collar and drove his head into the car fender.

Roland fired the twelve gauge he stowed beneath the seat for an equalizer. Matt loomed over Garrett, who spat and blew blood through his nose.

“Matt,” Roland said. “Get in the car, please.”

He complied. Jarms eyed Garrett on the ground.

“You, too, Horace.”

Garrett remained on all fours. He gasped.

“Seems to me you misplaced your loyalties,” Roland told him. “Or thought some of us did.”

Garrett laughed finally. “Now how come he's the only one I take serious?”

They remained quiet a long while in the car.

“I could kill him,” Matt said.

“So could I,” Jarms replied.

“We'd be rid of him,” Matt said.

Roland sipped his coffee. “No, we wouldn't,” he said.

•

E
VENINGS, THE THREE SAT OUTSIDE
on the porch and took their meal if the weather permitted. After, they played rummy and constructed a list for the day that followed. Roland moved about without a crutch, swinging his ossified leg toward his intended course. He was too weak for labor, but too bored to idle, so he employed his energies toward the kitchen where he constructed, with the assistance of an old cookbook, elaborate and peculiar smelling stews and sauces that, despite Matt and Jarms's misgivings, ended up better than restaurant fare. Jarms did not drink those days, even when Roland and Matt imbibed. Matt recognized color returning to Jarms's face.

Owls hooted and nighthawks punctuated the night along with the cattle's low or coyotes' yips or the creak of the screen door. All would set Roland in the storytelling mood, evening. The tales contained dead ends and false starts as their plots unspooled, and he told them with trepidation, often reduced to retrieving the volume from his library to make certain of details he had once committed to memory.

Matt and Jarms visited the girl nearly every week. Neither of them said much to the other. They'd clean up and pack a snack and watch the house. Some nights all they'd get of her was a glimpse. Others she'd sit on the porch and allow them to contemplate her growing belly. She waddled when she walked. Her parents rarely spoke to her, though they didn't seem angry as much as daunted, like the child was bad weather.

25

F
ALL, THE LIVESTOCK BEGAN TO
disappear. At first, whatever killed the calves had decency enough to drag them away, and Wendy could allow herself the delusion of miscounting. Soon, though, it was taking its meal in the corral and the pasture and once it left a mauled heifer in the barn. She found them with their bellies split and organs spilled, a liver or heart missing, throats savaged and great chunks bitten from their flanks.

The cattle bellowed nights, smelling what was coming. By early winter, it visited nearly once a week, and she was down to a half dozen heifers and a few yearling calves. Evenings, she stationed herself on her porch with a loaded 30.3D. She built great fires outside the yard and torches from rags and grease and tool handles, but the light they shed weighed little against the night's gloom. Mrs. Lawson left for the coast at the behest of a sick cousin. The postman delivered a letter a month later. She opened it with a butter knife.

           
Wendy—

           
I believe I'm safe for people now.