“Everybody thought it was a joke,” he says. “You asking and asking and her steady saying no. Even Miz O’Malley thought you were only funning.”
They have been friends, these two, since their boyhood in Presidio County, whose westernmost corner lies 150 miles downriver of the saloon where they now stand. Youngblood has owned the YB Ranch in Presidio since shortly after his father suffered a severe stroke fifteen years ago. Unable to walk or get on a horse or speak a coherent word, reduced to communicating by means of a small slateboard he wore around his neck, the old man endured his crippled state for four months before writing DAMN THIS! on his slate and shooting himself through the head. Youngblood couldn’t blame him, but the loss was the last one left to him in the family. His elder brother Teddy had been killed at age eighteen in an alley fight in Alpine, and his little brother James, whose birth their mother had not survived, was twelve when he drowned in the Rio Grande.
Hartung’s daddy had died two years prior to Youngblood’s. The man was badly given to drink and one night on his way home from the saloon he stood up to piss from the moving wagon and lost his balance and fell out and broke his neck. He left the family so deeply in debt they’d had to sell their ranch, which neighbored the Youngblood place. Frank’s mother and sister moved to Amarillo to live with relatives, but Frank chose to go work on his uncle’s ranch near Las Cruces, New Mexico, some forty miles north of El Paso. The uncle was a childless widower and happy to take him in. When he died not long after, he left the place to Frank.
For more than ten years now Hartung and Youngblood have been getting together in El Paso once a month or so for a Saturday-night romp. Their usual procedure on these rendezvous is to take rooms at the Sheldon Hotel, dine at a fine restaurant, do a bit of drinking in various of the livelier saloons, and then cap the evening with a visit to Mrs. O’Malley’s. They have on occasion arrived at her door in battered disarray, having obliged hardcases spoiling for a barroom fight, and she has in every such instance refused them admission until they first went to the pump shed at the rear of the house to wash the blood off their faces and tidy themselves somewhat. They can still get a laugh from each other with the recollection of the time she said they were too disorderly to be allowed to come in, and Hartung said, “Too disorderly? Hellfire, this is a disorderly house, aint it?”
One Saturday night just three days into the year of 1914 they met the darkly blond Ava, the “new girl” as Mrs. O’Malley called her, though by then she had been with the house nearly two months. Youngblood went upstairs with her and was so thoroughly smitten that he gladly paid the steeply higher price of staying with her all night. For the next two weeks he had frequent thoughts of her as he worked at the ranch, as he tried to read after supper, as he lay in bed and waited for sleep. The following Saturday he was back in El Paso and again bought her for the night—and he had returned every weekend thereafter.
His enjoyment of her went beyond the carnal, was of a sort that had been absent from his life since age twenty when Connie Duderstadt of Alpine threw him over for a boy of more prosperous family. In the years since, he has gained much experience with whores and believes himself no fool about them. This Ava’s interest in his life—in his descriptions of the YB Ranch and the ruggedly beautiful country surrounding it, in the tales of his adventurous youth and of the last wild Indians that roamed the region in those days and the Mexican bandits that still did—seemed to him fully genuine. It soon became clear that she knew something of horses and rivers and weather, that she took as much pleasure in the natural world as he did. When he asked if Ava was her true name, she said it was, and on his promise to keep it to himself told him her full name was Ava Jane Harrison. She shared in the smile he showed on receiving such intimate information.
He had of course early on asked the ineluctable question of how she’d come to be in this business, but her mute stare in response had carried such chill he did not ask again. Although she steadfastly refused to reveal anything of her own history, he formed an impression that she’d grown up a solitary child. Her accent carried the softer resonances of the South, though he could place it no more precisely than that. For all her guardedness, she did let slip a small hint of her past on the night she asked if he’d ever read Edgar Allan Poe. He had—and he was delighted to know that she too was a reader. They talked and talked about Poe’s poetry and such of his stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her favorite tale was “The Imp of the Perverse,” which he had not read. She was fond as well of Stephen Crane, especially his poetry, though she liked The Red Badge of Courage for its glorious renditions of battle and tormenting self-doubt. Had she also read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he wanted to know. She said she had, but she would not be drawn into a discussion of it—and he reasoned that its subject lay too close to home. She then asked who had taught him to enjoy books and he said his mother. “Me too,” she said. And left it at that.
It was in the course of these postcoital conversations that he grew aware of just how lonely he had been for many years now, and that he did not want to continue that way.
By the time he and Hartung got together for their next monthly lark in El Paso, Youngblood had begun coming into town on Fridays so he could spend both nights of the weekend with Ava. Over supper he told Hartung of his interim trips into El Paso. His friend chuckled and said it sounded like he’d caught himself an expensive case of poontang fever and ought to try and get over it before he went broke.
Youngblood told him he had already twice asked her to marry him and had both times been turned down. Hartung looked stunned for a moment—and then broke out laughing and slapped him on the shoulder, taking it for a grand joke. On their arrival at Mrs. O’Malley’s that evening, Hartung jovially asked the madam if she knew of his friend’s quest to marry one of her girls. Mrs. O’Malley had known a number of working girls who’d married men they’d met professionally, but the idea of a confirmed bachelor and funlover such as Youngblood wanting to marry a girl like the Spook—and even more, the idea of the Spook turning him down—well, it had to be their little jape on everybody, and she joined in Hartung’s laughter. The other girls suspected that the Spook had enlisted Youngblood’s help to make sly fun of their own hopes for marriage some day, and they indignantly ignored the matter altogether.
For his part, Youngblood didn’t care whether anyone except Ava believed his sincerity. He continued to catch the train from Marfa every Friday to be with her. On the past two Saturdays he had taken her to an early supper at a nice restaurant and then they had gone for a walk along the riverside before returning to the house at sundown, at which time she was officially back on the job. He then paid Mrs. O’Malley and they ascended the stairs to Ava’s room.
He every weekend asked for her hand and she every time turned him down. The first time she’d refused him he’d been too stunned to even ask why not, but after the second rebuff he did. She’d given him an exasperated look and said, “What difference does it make?”—an answer so baffling he didn’t know how to pursue his argument. He had settled for asking if it were possible she might change her mind one day.
“They say you ought never say never,” she said.
He chose to interpret her smile as encouragement. He secretly believed her refusal was more a matter of inexplicable willfulness than solid conviction, but he was not without strong will of his own.
“In that case,” he said, “I guess I’ll go on asking.”