“Been many on the road?” Slowly Luke fanned his hat. Heads leaned farther back, ears were scratched, possessions laid hold of, bugs flicked to the grass again. And one of them mumbled:
“About three hours back there was one. Four door.”
“Two door.”
“I reckon it was four!”
A magazine, with a zebra-skinned woman on the cover and pages damp — retrieved from a hole in the foundations of a barn — was held up to the light and admired. From beneath one pair of coveralls there thrust two shiny leather boots. A leather jacket could be seen at the collar and from the breast pocket there hung the broad white elastic strap of a pair of goggles. He did not speak but watched the cowboy with the rest.
“That must’ve been the car I met. Parked up the road apiece where the driver’s kid was snakebit.”
They stirred as if to rise and settled again, the spy among them silent, faces turned to the shadow.
“I reckon not. I don’t reckon a car like that’d ever stop out here.”
One pulled a bright new harmonica from his pocket and began to play. The man with the magazine finally turned past the cover, and from across the highway, where the store had competed with the Buckhouse ten years before, there was a sudden rustling in the brush and a pebble dropped into a hidden well.
“Keep a good watch, boys,” said Luke and squaring his hat stepped inside and up to the plywood bar. He was watched as he entered and the wheeze of the mouth organ softly faded.
Those who might have remembered that ears had been chewed off long ago in Buckhouse brawls and that women from over many borders, slipped by lax patrols, had been forced to whirl their skirts hip-high at gun point, had passed to other diggings and other cabarets of dried earth. Only a few, remembering how the fights and women had pushed their way outside and over to the porch of the store, driving the keeper through his rear window, lingered close to the old places, within a range of twenty miles.
The spangled, tinkling lantern shade, with red beads and panes of blue, still slid and turned around the single light globe, filling the quiet, summer evening air with twitching, faded streamers of color. There were twenty-two caliber bullet holes in the ceiling.
“Bowl of chowder and shot of muscatel,” said Luke. He rested his foot lightly on the lead pipe rail and stared, pinching his chin in his hands, at the cans of beer pyramided before the dusty mirror behind the bar.
“Bohn been around tonight?”
Revolving slowly, the tasseled lampshade turned the men first red, then blue, and caused dots of color to walk across the brown photograph of the dam over the mirror. The trestle, with small, erect figures holding tools posed stiffly at arm’s length, wrinkled, even under glass, across the wall. Ma had always claimed to be in the picture.
“Hey, Snake-Killer!”
Luke turned and in the last green booth, blurred and heavy in the colored lights, shirt unbuttoned and pulled aslant from white chest, he saw Camper laugh, flex the fishing pole in fat hands.
“Cowboy!” He stooped heavily to draw a match sharply on the dance floor. “You didn’t expect to see me again, eh? Or the wife either, I expect. Well, she ain’t here!” With both hands he caught the edge of the bench and laughed, turning pink as a new chip of glass slipped into place. Red mosquitoes clung to the shade.
“Howdy,” said Luke, and whispering, “I’ll take my drink and chowder at the table.”
Luke grinned, pushed his hat back over one ear, and the two men shook hands strongly, the cowboy’s arm rock hard at the elbow. Camper, with three empty glasses and fishing gear neatly spread before him, flushed, and suffering the bites of insects, still deftly and without a tremble held a reel to the light and probed, tuned, with the metallic point of a miniature screwdriver.
“I couldn’t keep away from it,” he said, “even if she hasn’t got much water in her. I had to see it.”
“I wouldn’t go on her in the dark if I was you.” Luke watched the eyes; they stared between white ears battened to the skull. “There’ll be more water in it than you think in the morning.”
“Just so there’s a foot to cover that lousy yellow ground, I don’t care. Couldn’t wait for morning. I know that dam like I know my own golf course, every hole and trap in it.” He rubbed at the mosquito bites and for a moment was quiet, looking at the browned newspaper shot of the project above the bar.
“No. By sunup my wife’ll have the kid dressed in his swim trunks for traveling, the radio tuned up, the car loaded and headed towards sandstone and the line. I wouldn’t catch a thing.”
“You aim to try her in the dark?”
“There’s no wind, is there? There’s no danger, is there? They surface at night. I’m a hunter.” Camper twisted the head of a pin in the reel. “You took me for a tourist!” He reached across the table and shook Luke by the shoulder. “A sightseer! Why, hell, I was crawling around that river bed a whole year before they got anything like a staff of men out here. And I watched that boy drop out of sight almost before my eyes. Here, take a drink of this.”
They touched glasses and threw back their heads. The harmonica played again beyond the door.
“Say, listen,” said Camper, “before we get talking about it, and I know he’s your brother, I got something I’d like to ask you.”
Luke nodded, tightening his lips.
“I want to make a trade.”
“Well, now,” Luke lit up afresh and grinned, “I never mind a little bargaining.” He had bargained for Ma’s stove in a vacant barn on the edge of Clare, won against twenty bidders. When he bought his fourth plow pony from the Indians and paid them by note, the Mandan came with it carrying the tack, because of the color of his shirt and ferret jaws.
“I’ll oblige you. As best I’m able.” Hearing a slight sound or sensing that slit eyes had opened, darkly over his shoulder he added, “You keep yourself out of this, Sam. And bring another bottle.” His own eyes were on the man stopping in town just for the night, who might make of! before sunrise, leave quickly when there were others on the street or be two hundred miles away before finding himself the loser. Luke never moved his head.
“Well, I’ll tell you right off.” Camper leaned forward and flatly said, “I’ve got to have those steerhorn boots of yours.” He drank unsteadily and spoke before he finished wiping his mouth, “Got to. They’ve been on my mind ever since you fixed up the kid.”
Luke slumped back against the soft new paint of the booth. “I never do anything without considering it.” He spoke softly. “What would Bohn think if I gave away my boots?”
“But I’m talking about a trade …”
“How could I drive the team?”
“You don’t need them like I do …”
“Besides,” Luke tucked his feet back under the bench, “Mulge give me these boots. For my birthday. We drove clear to Daisy — that was beyond Clare and over the line — to pick them out.”
“But look here!” Quickly Camper reached under the table, fumbled, and pulled up a yellow sandal. “I mean to trade!” He gave it to Luke.
And after a moment: “That’s different.” Luke held it forth to the dim colored lights meant for the skirt-high dance. “It sure is.”
“Go ahead. Try it on.”
The cowboy studied first one sandal then the other, felt the white rope soles and yellow leather thongs that crisscrossed the foot from toe to ankle. Weighing a soft piece of beachwear in either hand he called again over his shoulder, “Don’t you worry about me, Sam.”