“I said,” stuffing a fistful of tobacco over the white ash in the bottom of the pipe, “there’s just one man who died out here. Only the one death that come to anything. For ten, even twelve years, in all that time there ain’t been a single robber shot in the head, no rancher fatally struck by snakes. It hasn’t been long enough for any man to grow old enough to die…”
The jail, with its door standing open and another locked, kept all men who spit or talked within its walls comfortable on gray lead painted floor or dry cane, confidential, close, by its very smell and heat of confinement, preserved them amidst the circles of the desert. No sound passed between the padlock and smoky boulder. The scratching of infected toes, the whispering from swollen, hair covered throats, died near the foundations of the jail. Away, no voice called for help, the desert might have sunk from sight, beyond detection and points of the compass.
Only the soft voice croaking full of stories and the listener, at that hour, feeling just old enough to wait. The Sheriff looked up and down the page, turned, flipped another one and paused. “Aquarius is poor,” he said and thought, “That will hold him, ain’t a chemical sounds that good to the ear.” He added, “Sagittarius is poor, also.”
The purveyor of menthol, iodine, and peppermint stepped to the window as the drone continued. There were no dark house fronts, no flashing signs. Only the dented black plains stretched from the window to the horizon without a flicker of movement except for a shadow that now and then crossed the buzzing screen. For a long while Cap Leech stood pressed against the wall, listening. He looked toward the cow country for some speck of a herd against the night sky or a lone rider nodding over the pommel. The mosquitoes ticked against the screen in his face.
The Sheriff scowled into the magic page. “Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.” He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.
It is a lawless country.
in the beginning, before the sights were even taken for Mistletoe, Government City, before the women and children arrived, when stray cows could stop wherever they pleased below the high ground to water, and the water in its turn could slug downstream to flood, when the nearest city, not including Clare which was only a post on the plain, was over the line into the next state — at that time, as winter came on and workers migrated to the project anyway, upon the whole head of the bluff there was founded a colony of a thousand tents that smoked like an Indian village through the hard snow. Ten or twenty men to a tent, they penny-anted by lantern light and only came out into the falling snow to watch when a load of shovels arrived or the crated yellow tractor was slid from the rear of a truck and left in a shallow dune to await spring. For days the men tramped out in small groups to lean over, and touch, and inspect the box of spare parts that someone had struck open with an iron bar. The temperature went down.
There were no streets and hardly a pathway, no community hall or cookhouse; fires were built before each tent and the tin cans, thrown behind one, landed in the dooryard of the next and slid beneath the snow. A ton of steel cable was finally shipped in and remained a solid mountain for the winter. In hours when the snowfall ceased and the eye could travel far over the white flat lands, the new workers would creep from the tents and standing on the bluff in the wind, look down upon the widening overflow, the ice blocked river. New sheepskin coated friends were made in these lulls on the ridge.
Men landed in camp all through the months of sleet and snow. Tents trickled down the slope, clustered in pockets and mushroomed in four or five protected holes in the land. Fat Chance, Reshuffle, Dynamite, they were unrecorded towns still remembered by a few in Gov City.
The storms tossed heavier than ever on Christmas, the river was out of sight and only the explosions of the ice told them it was there below. Tent flaps were staked down, the cans burning a skim of gasoline covered them all with soot. Hardly a worker dared face the gales that out of the northern moose country turned and vaulted in the hail swept bowl; nor would they walk far on the cornerless white range. But one old driller, stumbling a few yards from his place in the circle, carrying a shovel and wad of excelsior, discovered, in a dry notch of stone and sand, a short green frozen twig of pine. He nailed it to the ridgepole. And grinning down at the men, shaking his beard that was still black, he threw the shovel into its public corner and pointed upward.
“That there’s Mistletoe!” he cried.
When it finally thawed and the river rose, when the mud sloshed over the top of their boots and shoepacks, the women came. From that time on the wash was hung to dry out of doors. In the sun — when it was warm and a fresh breeze rose from the receding banks — in mid-morning, whole lines of workmen hunched forward on crates or squatted in the sand and earth that was still damp, with dirty towels on their shoulders, not turning to talk, staring off where birds were flying or hills emerging from the prairie, getting haircuts from their wives.
As the tide was stopped and in the dry season the river, at its weakest, was pinched off, the old bed became a flat of seepage and puddles of dead water. When the men turned the tideland into a shipyard, built barges and could swarm from one bank to the other, poles and lines were raised and Gov City finally telegraphed to Clare.
“There isn’t any town out here.”
“Sure there is,” said Camper to his wife, “not so small either, if I can find it.” He braced the fluid steering wheel against his stomach, squinted at the enormous thorny balls of sage that rolled in slow motion before the headlights.
“You’re dreaming again. No one’s dumb enough to put a town out here. Take us back to the highway.”
Sharp lifeless blades of prairie grass scratched at the undersides of the automobile, crackled to the slow turning of the tires. The armored vehicle with its veils of glass, shrouded in blunt searching beams of light and swinging, dipping its useless aerial in the hot air, prowled forward toward the unknown dried out river, now and then dropping its front bumper into a mound of sand. Camper pressed, released the accelerator with his sandaled foot, watched for signs of a track not wholly lost, saw only the yellow powder, the needles of a still and tangled earth. He felt that the inflated rubber of his car wheels must be crushing colonies of red ants, crazed lizards, bugs caught before they had time to hum and fly. He sat on the edge of the padded leather seat.
“What’s the matter with you? Turn around!”
“Only a minute now, Lou, you’ll see. A real town, I know it.”
“You can’t kid me. You just want a chance to use that tent. I’ll sleep in the car.”
He could not find it. Once he stopped the automobile — all its wide tapering body listed — and climbed out, leaving the door open, its sharp edge jammed in the sand. He looked back to the sound of the heavy engine on weeded soil, to the small light burning over the blue blouse, the green silk slacks of the woman. Then, bent double, he stepped in front of the headlights and peered closely at a few square feet of ground, looking for some trace of a house, a piece of wood once shaped by saw, a brick that had burned under the fire of a kiln; as if he expected to find the town or its remnants in a hole at his feet. The cowboy had spoken of it, he himself remembered it and yet, picking up a handful of grit and dust, perhaps she was right.