He was violently sick in the alley beside the hotel. He dragged himself inside, ignored the clerk’s righteously arch glance, and lurched back through the corridor to his room. He had emptied himself but he still felt sick. When he opened the door, the tenpenny nail bounced off his shoulder and rattled when it hit the floor. He went inside, kicked the door shut, and sprawled facedown at an angle across the bed. He wanted to pass out, but unconsciousness eluded him crazily. The world spun. He could hear the nighttime revelry from the streets, bands playing, hoarse shoutings, some fool shooting off a gun somewhere. He lay that way in a suspension of time, with no idea how long he had been there-long enough to get cramped and feel pressure on his ribs lrom lying on them. When the dull, stunned feeling left, it unmasked sharp blades of anguish which stabbed him from all directions. He put his face in his hands.
He was lurching with sobs when someone shook his ankle. He turned his head sluggishly, ludicrously; he couldn’t turn it far enough; he had to roll over on his back; and when he did, he almost fell off the bed. He braced one arm against the floor and from that awkward drunken position saw Caroline, her curved, husky body silhouetted against the faint lamplight in the corridor beyond the open door.
The only way to get up was to get down. He rolled his legs and body off the bed, got his feet on the floor, and levered himself clumsily upright; sitting on the edge of the bed he scraped both hands down his face, wiping his eyes.
She was moving around the room. A match exploded, the lamp came alight; she walked back to the door to push it shut. When he looked up she was standing in front of him, looking down at his face.
She said, “Go ahead. I already did my crying.”
“All done.”
“You feel tougher now, Jerr?”
His mind was mired, his tongue thick; he had to think out what he said, and form the words with care. He said very slowly, “I think maybe I don’t ever want to be that tough.”
“God help you if you were.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “You’re drunk, but besides that-how are you, Jerr?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying-you feel terrible.”
“Why the hell should you care?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and began again: clearly it was not what she had meant to say. “The funeral’s in the morning, in a few hours.”
“I’ll make it.”
“I know you will.”
“He was my brother,” he mumbled, slurring thick. “Half brother anyway. God damn it I let him down, I killed him, but God damn it God damn it I loved him!”
There was a stretch of silence at the end of which, with amazing abruptness, she slapped his face.
His head rocked back; he blinked and squinted at her. “What the hell was that for?”
“Shut up about killing him. You didn’t kiU him.”
“If I’d thrown him out of town the way I should have, he’d be alive.”
“No. He’d just have come back.”
“I thought you were the one who put him up to it.”
“If you want to blame me,” she said, “go ahead. I’ve been doing that myself. If anybody killed him it was me, not you. I wanted-”
He said with savage hastiness, “What did you want?”
She stood up, She had her back to him. “I wanted to make him into a man like you,” she said in a small voice.
He cackled.
It made her wheel. She lifted her hand as if to slap him again. He neither flinched nor guarded himself; he only stared at her brandished hand with a morose, vacuous scowl.
Slowly her hand dropped to her side. She shook her head. “Don’t you see, you couldn’t have stopped him. You couldn’t have kept it from happening. Maybe not the way it happened, but it would have happened sometime and someplace because I was too selfish and too stupid and too damned mixed up to know you can’t change anybody. I wanted to make him into something he wasn’t and I got him killed. And now,” she said with acid bitterness, “now I know. I’ had to learn from this that you can’t ever change anybody, you just have to accept them for what they are. Jesus, Jerr, Rafe was a goddamned good wrangler, he loved horses.”
She wasn’t crying but she refused to look at him; she turned her back again and he saw her small, tough hands bunched into fists, womanly fists, the thumbs inside the curled fingers.
She said, “Are you listening all right? Can you pay attention?”
“I guess so.”
“I have to say something and I don’t want to, and if I don’t say it to you now I probably won’t ever have the guts to again.”
He shook his head at her back. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but I think you’d better save it. Neither one of us is thinking too straight.”
Her fists tightened; he couldn’t see her face. He had to lean forward to hear her: “I’ve got to, Jerr, I’ve got to-I want you to listen to what I say and don’t interrupt. I put my hooks in Rafe because I wanted him to be you. I took him because I couldn’t get you, do you understand? He wasn’t you, he never would have been-let me finish! — but he was the closest thing there was to you. I tried to change him into you because you were the one I really wanted, and I knew as soon as we were married that I couldn’t do it but I wouldn’t give up, I couldn’t then, and you see what it did to him. It’s not your fault, what happened. It’s mine. Mine and Reese Cooley’s.”
He didn’t believe her. She wasn’t telling the truth; she meant the lie to show, she meant him to see through the falsehood, she just wanted to give him an out so he’d quit blaming himself. It had to be hke that; her story was too absurd. He said sourly, “Sure-sure. You say I was the one you wanted. You couldn’t get me. You flatter a man, Caroline. I never knew you even knew I existed until you and Rafe decided to get married.”
“I was always there but you never paid any attention to me. You weren’t interested in me-hell, why should you be? I was a young girl. My father’s not much older than you. You were out of my reach, Jerr, and I had to grab what I could get, and the closest thing to you was Rafe, and oh Jesus God I wish I could apologize to him.” She sank down on her knees with one arm across the iron foot of the bedstead.
He was developing a thudding headache that made it hard to think clearly. He had the taste of bile in his throat. He got up, swayed dizzily for a moment, said, “Be back,” and went down the corridor to the front desk. He asked the clerk for Seidlitz powders, got them and a filthy tumbler, and went back to the room to mix the compound. Caroline was sitting on the corner chair chewing her knuckle. He drank the bitter mixture and stood with his eyes closed until it went down into his belly and he felt it churning at work; he poured water into the commode basin and scrubbed his face.
When he toweled the water out of his eyes and looked at her, she was sitting up straight and there was fire in her eyes. She said, “All right, confession hour’s over, Jerr. We both made mistakes and Rafe suffered for them but we won’t be doing him or ourselves any good going on like this.”
“What do you suggest?” he said angrily. “A celebration?”
“No. But neither one of us is built to spend the rest of our lives wearing sackcloth and ashes over this.”
“You put him out of your mind just like that?” he said, incredulous. “He’s not even buried yet!”
“Women are tough,” she said. “My mother died when I was three. My father has outlived three wives. No, I haven’t put Rafe out of my mind. I probably never will. But we’ve got to-”