Don’t bother. She looked at him and turned away. I’m not going.
What do you mean you’re not going?
You didn’t even bring me a box of chocolates, did you.
Chocolates?
It’s Valentine’s Day, you son of a bitch. You didn’t even know that. I’m nothing to you. I’m just a place to stay and somebody to fuck in bed when you feel like it. That’s all I mean to you.
Oh hell. You’re all upset. I’ll buy you chocolates tomorrow. I’ll buy you five boxes of chocolates if that’s what you want.
He bent and kissed her again and put his arm around her and poked his hand down into the loose front of her blouse. She slapped at his hand.
Don’t, she said.
Why what’s wrong here?
What do you think is wrong.
Hell, I’m ready to go. Soon as I take a shower.
I’m not going anywhere with you. I told you. You can just get the hell out of here too.
Honey, now this ain’t like you, he said. This don’t sound like my girl.
She took up her glass and took a long drink. He watched her.
You got to quit that drinking. That’s what it is. You’re already drunk and we ain’t even got out of the house yet.
He took her glass away and walked across the kitchen and poured the gin into the sink. Laverne came up out of her chair. She stumbled toward him and slapped him hard in the face.
Don’t ever tell me what I can do in my own goddamn house. Her eyes were wild. She brought her hand up and slapped him again.
You crazy bitch, he said.
He hit her smartly in the face with his open hand, and she spun half around and sat down all at once on the floor.
I’m going to go shower, he said. And you can calm your ass down. Then we’ll get out of here for the night.
When he went back to the bathroom, she stood and grabbed a long metal cooking spoon she’d been stirring their chili with, and lurched after him. He was sitting on the toilet, pulling off his boots, and she began hitting him over the head and about the shoulders with the heavy spoon, spattering chili on his face and shirt and jacket.
Goddamn it, Hoyt shouted. You stupid bitch. Quit it.
He rose up and took hold of her shoulders, spinning her around in the little bathroom, neither of them saying anything at all but both panting furiously, and he grabbed her hand and bent it back until she let go of the spoon. The spoon clattered on the floor. Then he released her, but immediately she scratched desperately at his face, and he shoved her away and she fell backward into the shower curtain, grabbing wildly at anything, and tore the curtain loose from the rod and crashed into the bathtub.
Look what you done, he said. Are you satisfied now?
Help me out of here, she whimpered. Her eyes were wet with tears. She was half wrapped up in the curtain.
You going to quit?
Help me out of here.
Tell me you’re going to quit.
I quit. All right? I quit. You son of a bitch.
You better behave.
He pushed the curtain aside and pulled her by the hand and stepped back, waiting, but she only looked at him. Her makeup had run and her eyes were awash with mascara. Without a word she hurried out of the bathroom and ran through the apartment to the bedroom closet where she grabbed an armful of his shirts, hangers and all, and then rushed back into the front room. He was standing in the kitchen doorway and, when he saw what she was doing, came forward to stop her, but she’d already thrown the door open and flung his shirts through the door out across the stair landing into the night, his flannel work shirts and his good western shirts alike, all drifting and sailing to the ground as in some dream or fantasy.
There, she cried. I did it. Now get out. Get out, you filthy bastard. I’m done with you.
Then Hoyt hit her in the face with his fist.
She fell back against the door and he wrenched it open and went leaping down the stairs to collect his shirts, ducking and bobbing across the yard as he picked them up.
Laverne pulled herself up and shoved the door closed, locked it, and stood looking out the narrow window, panting. She wiped at her nose with her shirt cuff, leaving a smear across her cheek. Her soft woman’s face looked like a Halloween fright mask now. The mass of her maroon hair was all undone.
Hoyt came pounding back up the stairs with his shirts under his arm and tried to turn the knob. Bitch, he said. You better let me in.
Never.
You goddamn bitch. You better open this fucker.
I’ll call the police first.
He hammered on the door, then stepped back and rammed it with his shoulder, glaring back at her through the little window.
You’re going to be sorry for this, he said.
I already am. I’m sorry I ever met you.
He spat at her face in the window and it dribbled slowly down the glass. He stood and watched it for a moment, then walked back down the stairs. He looked around but the houses along the street were all quiet and dark. He walked toward downtown as far as Albany Street, and hid the shirts under a bush across from the courthouse, then went on to the tavern at Third and Main. He was still wearing his work clothes, his flannel shirt, the denim jacket spattered with chili, and his manure-stained jeans. He entered and went directly to the bar.
BY MIDNIGHT HE WAS WEAVING DRUNKENLY ON THE STOOL next to an old local man named Billy Coates who had long dirty white hair and lived alone in a tarpaper house north of the railroad tracks. Hoyt had been telling him his tragic story for an hour and Coates finally said: They’s the davenport if you want it. If you don’t got nowheres else to go.
I don’t have no place else, Hoyt muttered.
I got a dog but you can just push him off. He won’t bother you any.
When the tavern closed, they walked to Albany Street to collect Hoyt’s shirts. The shirts were frozen stiff and Hoyt gathered them up and carried them like boards under his arm, then followed Billy Coates across the tracks to his house, and immediately fell to sleep on the davenport in the front room. The old mongrel dog whined for a while but finally curled up on the floor next to an old coal oil heater, and they each — man and man and dog — slept soundly until Sunday noon.
32
WHEN THE CALVES CAME IN FEBRUARY, RAYMOND ROSE two and three times in the freezing night to check on the cattle he had noticed were showing springy and had begun to bag down, having moved the cattle into the corrals and loafing shed next to the barn in the days before. Once he was there he would check that the nose and the front feet were exposed and started out as normal, or he would catch the laboring cow and pull the calf with the calf-chain, ratcheting the calf out, and sew the cow up afterward and doctor her with antibiotics. So, for weeks of these indistinguishable days and nights, he was exhausted, he was worn out almost beyond thinking. He still had the ordinary daily chores and the hay-feeding to do as always, which by themselves would have been almost too much for one man to do and keep up with, but he was doing all of it alone now, since his brother had been killed in the previous fall. He went on regardless. He went on in a kind of daze. He found himself falling asleep at the kitchen table, noon and night and sometimes, though he’d just risen, in the mornings too when he sat down to his meager solitary hurried meal. Then he would wake an hour or two later, with his neck stiff and his hands numb and his tongue as dry as paper from having breathed through his open mouth for too long with his head lolled back against the chair back, and with the food before him already long gone cold on his plate and the black coffee on the table no longer even tepid in his cup. Then he would sit up and rouse himself and look around, study the light or the lack of it in the kitchen window, and push himself up from the old pinewood table and get into his canvas coveralls and overshoes again and pull on his wool cap and step outside into the winter cold once more. And then walk across the drive to the corrals and calving shed to begin it all again. This routine, day and night, lasted for something over a month.