“I am going to try to reduce her sentence, string out the road show through appellate court, work on her eligibility for pardon and just all-round obfuscate justice like the good mouthpiece I am. You know, for a country boy.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see. What you see is acquittal for her and a fresh start for the two of you. Y’know, quiet evenings around your paint-by-numbers kit out there to the ranch.”
“You’re getting a little loose-lipped now. This thing is bad enough without the grandstanding. I mean, spare me. And make that your last one—” Lucien pointed at his drink. “Tank towns know few more unpleasant eyesores than native-son lawyers with land-grant educations tottering out of some roadhouse where they know the owner.… I got to go.”
He started to leave. The lawyer called after him, “One’ll get you ten you lose the hundred thou.”
When Lucien looked back, the lawyer had a light sweat from thinking up his last line. It was like a jog around the block for a guy who runs a lot. He looked fairly pleased with himself, but Lucien appreciated him: freewheeling hick-town wise guys were getting scarce.
Lucien tried to think directly about Emily shooting her husband, a brutal Type A personality who took it out on all and sundry. Emily would look the facts in the eye. Lucien felt he had never been able to do that. He could see her weighing the old husband in the scales of justice the way a park superintendent reviews the record of a garbage-raiding bear who is scaring the campers: we’ve got one here who’s got to go.
Lucien got up early and made breakfast. It was a wood stove with a water jacket, and kind of amusing to run. It had a lot of hot spots on top, so cooking eggs required moving the skillet around until you found a reasonable temperature that didn’t burn them up. Today they were going hunting.
Lucien stole some glances attempting to see storm clouds on her brow as she ate. There weren’t too many storm clouds. She still had the serenity of the class beauty transported through years of tribulation like a vase that has survived a revolution. It seemed a handsome contrast to his infuriating jauntiness, the air of boyish resilience that had probably cost him Emily in the first place. An eighteen-year-old boy with the air of a tired salesman thirty years his senior will get all the girls every time.
When they started out of the kitchen, Austinberry appeared and asked, “Where’s everybody going?”
“Hunting,” said Emily.
Austinberry stared at them for a long time, a gaze that was meant to be burning, and said, “Oh goody.”
They stopped the truck at an old homestead. Lucien let Sadie out to tear around the buildings while they looked through the broken windows; all the glass was on the floor. There were worn-out irrigator boots and a Scotch cap hanging on a nail. The place had been empty a long time. There was a tin of bag balm on the sill that was heavy enough to be full, but the lid was rusted shut. The gray outbuildings surrounded a common space, and the sense of their being huddled against terrific and frightening outside forces was enough to make Lucien glad he had never faced the frontier. That was no spot for a guy who trips over his own feet.
The first field had been in years past a great one for birds. It was level and uniform, and the scent of fowl had lingered in its invisible air currents. A dog like Sadie would make a strong race and lock on point in the first two minutes. A wheel-line sprinkler lay across it like a monster.
“Emily,” he said as they went along down the furrows, “how is it you’re so calm?”
“I’m not calm. I’m fatalistic.”
Lucien took this in. “You know I had a drink with your attorney.”
“Oh, I wish that you hadn’t done that.”
“Well, I did, and I wish he were more optimistic.”
“There’s nothing for him to be optimistic about. He knows I’d do it again.”
They hit a good stubble field. There was still frost on it, and it looked like some huge glassy thing had tipped over and shattered. As Lucien looked across it to the Crazies, he wanted to shield his eyes. It was a beautifully farmed field that used all the flat ground; but it was wonderful to see the sage-covered remains of buttes and old wild prairie that wouldn’t submit to plowing. Lucien released Sadie and she cracked off on her first cast, ignoring the showering meadowlarks that broke into song exactly as his bird book described it: “Boys, three cheers!” To Sadie these were mere decoration, furniture. The undertow of game was stronger.
For a moment Lucien didn’t care whether Emily shot her husband, pissed up a rope or went blind. He had the sublime freedom of the hunt.
Presently they rode down among the thin, pale, jerky trunks of an aspen grove following a small stream toward its source. It must have been a spring because the stream’s stable mossy banks were obviously undisturbed by runoff. When they reached the spring, it was just a swamp, a small and beautiful swamp, though, from which snipe bolted in that down-angled hurtling flight that makes them seem so bold. The wet ground supported an even, refined stand of cattails, some brown and velvety, some wound with streamers of windy cotton.
“These moments, these long looks,” she said.
“How am I going to find any grouse without long looks?”
They had to go across some of the boggy ground. Sadie danced over the surface while they hunted dry spots and moldering logs. Once clear of the cattails and sedges, they could make out the shining granitic roof of the Crazies.
One of the miracles of the land was the isolation of water: as soon as they came out of the boggy ground they were once more on the juniper and sage uplands, where the circulation of prairie air bore the feeling of distance and dryness and great shapes, quite different from the intimacy of spring bogs; it hardly seemed the two could exist side by side.
They followed a steep wash and, just below the line of wild roses at the crest, Sadie went on point. Lucien hoped the birds would hold, because it was almost a vertical climb. He started up, carrying the little L. C. Smith in one hand and looking for things to grab hold of as he went. He had to stop and blow like an old pack horse about halfway up; but she held the point, a brilliant mark on that ocher ridge.
Lucien arranged to come up on flat ground behind her and could see then that she was pointed staunch into ideal berry-filled cover. He was already anticipating the roaring flush. He glanced down to see Emily below him, watching with a slightly opened mouth. Lucien concentrated himself to shoot well, walked past Sadie to make the flush; but when the grouse went up he just watched them go, brown and mottled against the open sky.
6
Lucien slept, and during the night he dreamed or overheard — he’d never know — incessant activity, activity which must have gone on long into the night: the dragging of objects over the wood floors, the random opening and closing of doors, the shunting about of vehicles in the dark, the long cry of a horse left in the wrong corral, then silence. When Lucien woke up, he found Emily awaiting him with breakfast on a tray. He was not warmed by this treatment and just leaned up on one elbow waiting for her to speak.
“It’s all yours,” she said, “but I’ll always be able to come back, now, won’t I?”
Lucien didn’t speak. He guessed his accepting the knowledge she was leaving made him an accomplice. “I’d like a picture of you,” Lucien said. “Portrait-style, with a good frame.”
He watched the light and clouds make changes in his window; he saw the revolving shadows in the peaks of the Crazies, and night arriving not simultaneously but in different places and at different times. He began to wonder what screwballs lived here in other days who had hidden whiskey bottles under the porch or made the dog graves by the creek. Then having rested most of the day, he lay awake through the night and looked out the window at the cold moonlight on neglected meadows. He was just wondering how you’d care for a piece of ground like that. All that grass; all that timothy and brome and foxtail and oat and fescue and rye and orchard grass and bluegrass and panic grass and river grass and six-weeks grass and brook grass! All those rocks! All that running water!