“Stealing and fighting. Then fighting and stealing. He stole two cows once, and they caught him there. Then he stole two trucks and beat a guy up for fun. He went down for that.”
“I don’t need to beat anybody up,” I said.
“There’s Mr. Conscience talking now,” Claude said. “Have another drink, Mr. Conscience.” He had another drink of the gin, then I took another one, then he threw the bottle in the back, where the seat of his Buick had been torn out and the floor boarded in with plywood. Two fishing rods were rattling back in the dust.
“Who is this woman,” I asked, feeling the gin tightening my scalp.
“He brought her over in the caboose last night from Havre. He dead-headed her in. She’s Canadian. I didn’t actually catch her name.” Claude laughed, and we both laughed about it, and then we were down among the first poor houses of Sunburst.
Sunburst had one paved street, which was the Canada highway, and the rest dirt streets. There was the elevator, a cafe, an implement company, a sawdust burner, one bar and the motel. It was the show-up for the Shelby crews that worked the GN going south. A switch engine hauled in a caboose and three cars two times a day, switched out the elevator spur, and took the crews back and forth to the main line. A green bull-pen shack was across the tracks, and my father’s brown truck sat parked beside it with other crew trucks.
The motel was a little cottage camp across the highway — six white cottages and a skinny gravel lot. The closest cabin had a sign on top that said rooms for tourists, and there was only one car, with an Alberta plate, parked at the cabin nearest the street.
Claude drove in the lot and gunned his engine. I saw a woman look out through the blinds of the office cabin. I wondered if she would know me if she saw me. Claude and I did not go to school in this town, but at the Consolidated in Sweetgrass.
Claude honked the horn and his father stepped out of one of the cabins. “Here comes the great lady’s man,” he said. “The big Indian.” Claude grinned. We were both a little drunk now. He revved the engine again and kicked out gravel.
Sherman Philips was a large dark man with a big belly. He walked bent forward and took very small steps. He had on a long-sleeved white shirt, and his black hair was slicked back and tied in a long ponytail. He wore glasses and a pair of bedroom slippers with no socks. I didn’t see how any woman would like how he looked. He drank a lot, is what my father said, and sometimes had been seen carrying a loaded gun.
“Clear conscience is no conscience,” Claude said to his father out the car window. He was still smiling.
Sherman leaned on the car door and looked in at me. His big face had pockmarks, and a scar below his left ear. I had never been this close to him. He had narrow eyes and he was clean shaven. A pack of cigarettes was in his pocket, and I could smell his aftershave.
“You two’re drunk as monkeys,” he said in a mean way.
“No, we’re not drunk at all,” Claude said.
I could hear Claude’s father breathe in his chest. The lines in his face behind his glasses were deep lines. He looked back over his shoulder at the cabin. Behind the screen in the shadows, there was a blond woman in a green dress watching us, but who didn’t want us to see her.
“I’ve got to get home right now,” Claude’s father said. “You understand? Hazel thinks I’m in Havre.”
“Maybe you are,” Claude said. “Maybe we’re all in Havre. What’s her name.” He was looking at the cabin door where the blond woman was.
“Lucy,” Sherman said, and breathed in deeply. “She’s a nice girl.”
“She likes you, though, I guess,” Claude said. “Maybe she’ll like us.”
Sherman stood up and looked down the row of cabins to the office, where a phone booth was outside. The woman was gone from the office window, and I thought that she probably knew Claude’s father because he had been here before, and that probably she knew all the railroad men — including my father.
“I’m going to bring her out here,” Sherman said.
“You going to give her to us as a present?” Claude said.
And Sherman suddenly reached his big hand through the window and caught Claude’s hair in the back and twisted it. Claude’s hair was as short as mine, for boxing, but Sherman had enough of it to hurt. He had a big silver and turquoise ring on his index finger that pushed into Claude’s scalp.
“You’re not funny. You’re clucks. You’re stupid clucks.” Sherman forced Claude’s head almost out the window. He seemed dangerous to me, then — just suddenly. He was an Indian, and I wanted to get out of the car.
Sherman opened the door, pulled Claude out by his hair and away from the car, and put his big face down into Claude’s face and said something I didn’t hear. I looked the other way, at my father’s Dodge truck parked over beside the bull-pen. I didn’t think he would be back until late tonight. He stayed in Shelby in the bars sometimes, and went home with women. I wondered where my mother was right at that moment. California? Hawaii? I wondered if she was having a good time.
“Okay now, wise ass?” I heard Sherman say. “How’s that, now?” He still had Claude’s hair, but had raised his voice as if he wanted me to hear, too. Claude was much smaller than his father, and he had not said anything. “I’ll just break your goddamn arm, now,” Sherman said and grabbed Claude up closer, then pushed him away. Sherman glared over at me in the car, then turned and walked back toward the cabin he’d come out of.
Claude got back in the car and turned off the engine. “So fuck him,” he said. His face was red, and he put both his hands in his lap. He didn’t try to touch the back of his head, he just stared out at the Polar Bar, beside the motel. A little red Polar bear sign was shining dimly in the sunlight. A man came out the side door wearing a cowboy hat. He looked at us sitting in the car, then walked around the side of the building and disappeared. No one else was in town that I could see. I didn’t say anything for a few moments.
Finally I said, “What’re we doing?” The car engine was ticking.
Claude stared ahead still. “We’re taking her off somewhere and bringing her back tonight. He doesn’t want her out in the street where people’ll see her. He’s an asshole.”
Behind the cabin screen I could see Claude’s father in his white shirt. He was kissing the woman in the green dress, his big arms wrapped around her. One leg was hooked behind her so he could get all of her against him and hold her. I could hardly see the woman at all.
“I think we should kill her,” Claude said, “just to piss him off.”
“What will happen to her?”
“I don’t know. What’s going to happen to you? Maybe you two’ll get married. Or maybe you’ll kill each other. Who cares?”
The screen opened and Sherman came out again. He looked bigger. He walked in his short steps across the lot, the sun gleaming off his glasses. He had dollar bills in his hand.
“This is shut-up money,” he said when he looked in the window again. He stuffed the bills down in Claude’s shirt pocket. “So shut up.” He looked across at me. “Go the hell home, George. Your old man’s cooking dinner. He needs you home.”
I didn’t smile at him, but I did not talk back either.
“I’ll take him home,” Claude said.
“He’ll spew this.”
“No, he won’t,” Claude said.
“I don’t spew anything,” I said.
Claude’s father glared at me. “Don’t talk toward me now, George. Just don’t begin that.”
I looked at him, and I wanted him to know what I was thinking: that I was sorry Claude had to be his son. I wanted the woman inside the cabin to come with us, though, and I wanted Sherman to leave. I knew Claude would not take me home.