“Yes.”
“Why, how nice for you,” she said. “To have a life’s theme. An old flame. An old flame that never dies is like those overbuilt goddamn English shoes rich ladies used to wear. The illusion of everlasting life. That’s what came with them. You buy a pair of those beauties when you get out of Miss Whozit’s, and forty years later they haul you to the boneyard in the same brown shoes with the shiny eyelets. That’s about how much the old-flame number is doing for me.”
“May I have a blow job?”
“Pure poetry, Lucien.… I met a couple at Alabama Jack’s restaurant in Florida who said they ran into you in South America. They said you had a wonderful wife, a beautiful girl, but you were inattentive to her and looked like you wanted to join the space program.”
“I joined the USIA. Wasn’t that enough for them?”
“Apparently not. They were absolutely sober.”
Lucien scratched at the dial of his watch with a fingernail. “Look,” he said, “is it all that terrible that I’ve gone on having these feelings? Not everyone has such a happy view of his own past.”
“Was I the first girl you ever slept with?” she asked with terrific glee.
“Pretty darn close.”
“ ‘Pretty darn close’!” She was put out. “How far did I miss by?”
“There was a real sweet Assiniboin girl at Plentywood when I was on the baseball team.”
“It seems you have an array of genuinely happy memories,” Emily said with unconcealed indignation.
Lucien raised a cautioning finger. “Remember, now, you were sleeping with the doctor. My dear.”
“That guy,” said Emily. “Don’t worry about that bastard. I shot him dead.”
4
The saw-whet owl, an occasional predator of the river lowlands, burned through Lucien’s view and got something past the granary. There was a small cry, and it wasn’t the owl’s. Lucien walked and puffed on a bait-shack-style corncob pipe, a Missouri meerschaum he’d bought on a stateside trip with his aunt. He had been away from the area for years, some years in which English was his second language. He was an iron man of information, but just maybe what passed for strength of character was nothing more than a low resting pulse rate.
Using the corncob pipe as a prop, Lucien imagined himself old and alone on the ranch. In front of the frame house a piebald domestic duck cruised by itself on the green pond. Inside, an old man (the Lucien of the future) felt himself cooling, felt the heat of the light bulb on his hands as he turned the pages of his book.
Lucien started to get nervous.
That night the hired man had him down for ice cream and checkers. Though he scarcely knew him, Lucien played as though his life depended on it. Lucien knew W.T. took his frenzy for the creaking of a harsh and unremitting soul, but he played on.
Twice Lucien got up and stared at the lights of the main house. The third time W. T. Austinberry said, “Jump, and king me.”
Lucien sat down and pressed three fingers on a checker he wasn’t sure he’d play. He was suddenly afraid of something. Maybe he was just tired.
“Let’s finish this game.”
“Not till she’s over,” said W.T.
Lucien floundered onto his elbows. “Can’t play any more.” He was drunk.
“You gettin’ you a little up to the big house?”
“Don’t start that.”
W.T. threw his head back. “Lord!” he bayed. “It’s a little bitty world.”
They fought bitterly but briefly, bloodying each other’s faces on the floor, then refilled their drinks and resumed the checker game. The checkers were all over the board.
“You with the FBI?” asked W.T.
“ ‘No, the USIA.”
“Hunh. Thought she said the FBI. Thought you was a Federale.”
“King, king, king!” Lucien splattered the checkers good. “I win, you lose … talk that way about my girl, you—”
“When’s the last time you had a date with Emily?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Go on, tell me.”
“Years and years ago.”
“Son, she’s changed since that time.” W.T. laughed deep in his throat.
“How?”
“She’s a better shot,” said W.T. with a wide cowboy smile. Then he grew alcohol-pensive. “This time I’m thinking about, I was trying to prove up on a lease I had over at Kid Royal. And we was getting ready to load out at Deadrock. I had the heeler up front with me, the radio on, when I threw a recap right on the scale. I was with Boyd, and he cusses and dumps a set of dead batteries from his hot shot, throws it in the jockeybox and said he’s got a come-along to get our outfit to dry ground with. This was supposed to be the last of a big run of yearlings. And it turns out we got a five-hole spare for a six-hole rim. I knew right then and there my luck was shot. I knew them yearlings would bring next to nothing. God, it was bad. Also at this time I had a girl name of Shawna who wore a mood ring which was always nearly black. She cooked at the brandings and made eyes at the ropers. She was dumb. She read love comics and used her Chapstick as if it was a cigarette, and she was about as dumb as a stick. She lived at Parade Rest Trailer Park, which is no more than a breeding pen, and she was stick-ass dumb. But right about then, I met ole Emily. She come into the sale yard and bought that set of cattle. She gave me my break, and I ain’t looked back since. She liked me.”
“I can’t tell you what this story does to me.”
“I’d follow her to the gates of hell.”
“That’s her most famous effect, all right.”
Lucien refilled the drinks while W.T. talked. “You gotta make them women happy. Plow ’em, take ’em on a trip, put a little smile on their lips. They like to spend, spend, spend. So what I say is, let ’em.” The thermostat on the baseboard heater turned on and forced W. T. Austinberry to get up and go a good part of the way across the room.
He lay out on the floor, barely moving. Then it got quiet. “Hundred-proof whiskey is a cowboy’s color TV,” said W. T. Austinberry from his own world on the bunkhouse floor, and passed out. Lucien looked at him: he could no longer be reached.
Lucien had an awkward time getting back to his room. He thanked W. T. Austinberry for the lovely evening, then did the hurricane walk across the yard from tree to tree until he achieved the main house. He did his best going up the stairs, whereupon Sadie began barking at him in sharp yelps. He smothered her against the floor long enough for her to recognize him, then dragged her into bed.
“Lucien, what’s going on there?”
Lucien froze, clutching his dog. He heard Emily start up the stairs. Then she appeared, eclipsing the dangling bulb that threw a circle of electrical light around her. She glittered in vengeful beauty.
“What’ve you been doing?”
“I’m afraid we got damn well good and drunk,” said Lucien.
“You and W.T.…”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
“God, I don’t know,” said Lucien. “We were playing checkers.”
“Let’s take a walk.”
“Let’s take a walk!”
“Yeah,” she said. “By the moonlight.”
“All right,” Lucien said and got out of bed fully dressed. Sadie shot repeatedly in the direction of the door, indicating her readiness for some hunting.
“Why don’t you leave the dog …”
Lucien thought about it, then hitched Sadie to the leg of one of the ruined chairs and got a coat. Emily had a pair of jeans pulled on under a nightshirt. She tied the tails of the nightshirt and, downstairs, pulled a loose sweater over that. They headed into the night like laundry.