The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  For Maggie, it had never been easy, opening her door to a man. Once the door was open she was caught; if a bad man or a cruel man was standing there, then she was in for a bad time. Sometimes, of course, the customer outside her door would just be some unhappy man whose wife had passed away. Those men, who were just looking for a little pleasure or comfort, were not a problem. The men she feared were the men who wanted to punish women—that was the chief peril of her profession; Maggie had endured many sweaty, desperate times, dealing with such men.

  She always opened the door, though; not opening it could cause consequences just as grave. The man outside might grow angry enough to break down the door, in which case the landlord might throw her out. At the very least, she would have to pay for the door. Besides that, the customer might go to the sheriff and complain; he might claim that she had stolen money—that or some other accusation. The word of any man, however dishonest, was worth more with a sheriff than the word of a whore. Or the aggrieved customer might complain to his friends and stir them up; several times gangs of men had caught her, egged on by some dissatisfied customer. Those times had been bad. Much as it might frighten her to open her door, Maggie never let herself forget that she was a whore and had to live by certain rules, one being that you opened the door to the customer before the customer got mad enough to break it down.

  Still, it was her room—she felt she could at least take her time buttoning her dress. It was important to her that her dress be buttoned modestly before she let a man into her room. She knew it might seem contradictory, since the man outside was coming in to pay her to unbutton the same dress; but Maggie still buttoned up. She felt that if she ever started opening the door with her dress unbuttoned she would lose all hope for herself. There was time enough to do what she had to do when the man had paid his money.

  She opened the door cautiously and received a grim shock: the person who had just lurched down the hall was the young ranger Jake Spoon, who had only been in the troop a few weeks. He was so drunk that he had dropped to his knees and was holding his stomach—but when he saw Maggie he mastered his gut and put out a hand, so she could help him up.

  “Why, Mr. Spoon,” Maggie said. “Are you sickly?”

  Instead of answering Jake Spoon crawled past her, into her room. Once inside he got to his feet and walked unsteadily across the room to her bed—then he sat down on the bed and began to pull off his boots and unbutton his shirt. Jake Spoon looked up at her mutely—he seemed to be puzzled by the fact that she was still standing in the doorway.

  “I got money,” he said. “I ain’t a cheat.”

  Then he pulled his shirt off, dropped it on the floor, and stood up, holding on to a bedpost to steady himself. Without even looking at her again he opened his pants.

  Maggie felt her heart sink. Jake was a Texas Ranger, although just come to the troop. In the years that Maggie had been seeing Woodrow Call it had become known to the rangers that she and Woodrow had an attachment. It was not yet the sort of attachment that Maggie yearned for; if it had been she would not have been renting a cheap room, and opening her door to drunken strangers.

  But it was an attachment; she wanted it and Woodrow wanted it, though he might have been slow to admit it. Sensing the attachment, the other rangers who knew Woodrow well had gradually begun to leave Maggie alone. They soon realized that it was distasteful to her, to be selling herself to Woodrow’s friends. Though Call never said anything directly, the rangers could tell that he didn’t like it if one of them went with Maggie. Augustus McCrae, an indiscriminate whorer, would never think of approaching Maggie, although he had long admired her looks and her deportment. Indeed, Gus had often urged Woodrow to marry Maggie, and end her chancy life as a whore, a life that so often led to sickness or death at an early age.

  Woodrow had so far declined to marry her, but lately he had been more helpful, and more generous with money. Now he sometimes gave her money to buy things for her room, small conveniences that she couldn’t afford. It was her deepest hope and fondest dream that Woodrow would someday forbid her to whore; maybe what they had wouldn’t go as far as marriage, but at least it might remove her from the rough traffic that had been her life.

  Woodrow’s argument, the few times they had approached the subject, was that he was often gone for months on hazardous patrols, any one of which could result in his death. He felt Maggie ought to take care of herself and continue to earn what she could in case he was cut down in battle. Of course, Maggie knew that rangering was dangerous and that Woodrow might be killed, in which case her dream of a life with him would never be realized.

  She never spoke of her life as a whore, when she was with Woodrow; in her own mind her real life was their life. The rest of it she tried to pretend was happening to someone else. But the pretense was only a lie she told herself to help her get through the days. In fact it was her who opened her door to the men, who took their money, who inspected them to see that they were not diseased, who accepted them into her body. She had been a desperate girl, with both parents dead, when she was led into whoring in San Antonio; now she was no longer a girl, but the desperation was still with her. She felt it even then, as Jake Spoon stood there in her room, drunk almost to the point of nausea, with his pants open, pointing himself at her and waiting sullenly.

  Woodrow didn’t know about her desperation—Maggie had never told him how much she hated what she did. He might have sensed it at times, but he didn’t know how hard it was, on a morning when all she wanted to do was sit quietly and sew, to have to deal with a man so drunk that he had to crawl into her room. Worse than that, he was a ranger, the same as Woodrow; he ought to have known to seek another whore.

  “Why are you standing over there? I’m ready,” Jake said. His pants had slipped down to his ankles; he had to bend to pull them up, so he could dig into his pocket and come out with the coins.

  “But you’re sickly, Mr. Spoon—you can barely stand up,” Maggie said, trying to think of some stratagem that would cause him to get dressed again and go away.

  “Don’t need to stand up and I ain’t sick,” Jake said, though, to his dismay, the act of speaking almost caused his stomach to come up. He swayed for a moment but fought the nausea down. It was the whore’s fault, he decided—she hadn’t come over to help him with his clothes, as a whore should.

  He fumbled again for the coins and finally got them out of his pocket.

  Looking at the whore, who had closed the door behind her but still stood across the room, staring at him, Jake felt his anger rising. Her name was Maggie, he knew; the boys all said she was sweet on Woodrow Call, but Woodrow Call was far up the plains and the warning meant little to Jake. All whores were sweet on somebody.

  “Come here—I got the money!” he demanded. In his mind, which swirled from drink, was the recent memory of the wild games he had played with Inez Scull—acts so raw that even whores might not do them. He didn’t like it that the whore he had chosen was so standoffish. What of it if she was sweet on Woodrow Call?

  Maggie saw there was no way out of it, without risking the sheriff, or a worse calamity. In another minute the young ranger would start yelling, or else do her violence. She didn’t want the yelling or the violence, which might lead to her having to move from the room she had tried to make into a pleasant place for Woodrow to visit when he was home.

  She didn’t want to get thrown out, so she went across the room and accepted Jake Spoon’s money. She didn’t look Jake in the eye; she tried to make herself small. Maybe, if she was lucky, the boy would just do it and go.

  Maggie wasn’t lucky, though. The minute she took Jake’s money he drew back his hand and slapped her hard in the face.

  Jake slapped the whore because he was angry with her for being so standoffish and lingering so long, but he also gave her the slap because that was how Madame Scull had started things with him. The minute he walked up stairs she would come out of the bedroom and slap his face. The next thing he knew they would be on
the floor, tussling fiercely. Then they would do the raw things.

  He wanted, again, what he had had with Inez Scull. He didn’t understand why she had cut his hair and thrown him out. Her coldness upset him so that he stole a bottle of whiskey from a shed behind the saloon and drank the whole bottle down. The whiskey burned at first, and then numbed him a little, but it didn’t cool the fever he felt at the memory of his hot tusslings with Inez Scull. Only a woman could cool that fever, and the handiest woman happened to be Woodrow Call’s whore.

  She had very white skin, the whore—when he slapped her, her cheek became immediately red. But the slap didn’t set things off, as it had when Madame Scull slapped him. Maggie, Call’s whore, didn’t utter a sound. She didn’t slap him back, or grab him, or do anything wild or raw. She just put the money away, took off her dress, and lay back on the bed, waiting. She wouldn’t even so much as look at him, although, in an effort to make her a little more lively, he pulled her hair. But neither the slap nor the hair pulling worked at all. Except for flexing herself a little when he crawled on top of her, the whore didn’t move a muscle, or speak or cry out or yell or bite or even sigh. She didn’t scream and kick and jerk, as Madame Scull did every time they were together.

  As soon as the young ranger finished—it took considerably longer than she had hoped—Maggie got off the bed and went behind a little screen, to clean herself. She meant to stay behind the screen, hiding, until Jake Spoon left. She knew she would have a bad bruise on her cheek, from the slap. She didn’t want to see the young man again, if she could help it.

  Again, though, Maggie was not lucky. While she was cleaning herself she heard Jake retching and went out to find him on his hands and knees again. At least he was vomiting in a basin; he had not ruined the new carpet she had saved up to buy.

  Jake Spoon heaved and heaved. Maggie saw how young he was and took a little pity. When he finished being sick she cleaned him up a little and helped him out the door.

  16.

  “NOW BOYS, LOOK THERE!” Inish Scull said, pointing westward at a small red butte. “See that? Pretend it’s your Alps.”

  “Our what, Captain?” Long Bill inquired. It was breakfast time—Deets had just fried up some tasty bacon, and the breeze, though chilly, could be tolerated, particularly while he was sitting at the campfire holding a tin mug of scalding coffee that in texture was almost as thick as mud. All the rangers were hunched over their cups, letting the steam from the scalding coffee warm their cold faces. The exception was Woodrow Call, already saddled up and ready to ride—though even he had no notion of where they were headed, or why. They had traveled due south for a few days, but then the Captain suddenly bent to the west, toward a long empty space where, so far as any of the rangers knew, there was nothing to see or do.

  The low, flat-topped hill was red in the morning sunlight.

  “The Alps, Mr. Coleman!” the Captain repeated. “If you find yourself in Switzerland or France you have to cross them before you can get to Italy and eat the tasty noodle. That was Hannibal’s challenge. He had all those elephants, but the Alpine passes were deep in snow. What was he to do?”

  Captain Scull was drinking brandy, his morning drink and his evening drink, too, when he could have it. One well-padded brace of saddlebags contained nothing but brandy. A tipple or swallow or two in the morning cleared his head wonderfully, when he was campaigning, and also rarely failed to put him in a pedagogical mood. History, military history in particular, was his passion. Harvard wanted him to teach it, but he saw no reason to be teaching military history when he could go out in the field and make it, so he packed up the ardent Dolly Johnson, his Birmingham bride, and went to Texas to fight in the Mexican War, where he promptly captured three substantial towns and a number of sad villages. The air of the raw frontier so invigorated him that he gave little thought to going back to Boston, to the library and the ivied hall. Because of his long string of victories in Mexico he was soon offered the command of the disheveled but staunch band of irregulars known as the Texas Rangers.

  Inish Scull was convinced, from what he knew of politics, that a great civil conflict was looming in America, but that conflict was yet some years away. When it came, Inish Scull meant to have a generalship—and what better way to capture the attention of the War Department than to whip the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Apache, the Pawnee, or any other tribe that attempted to resist the advance of Anglo-Saxon settlement?

  Scull might not have broken the wild tribes yet, but he had harried them vigorously for almost ten years, while, little by little, settlement crept up the rivers and into the fertile valleys. Farms and ranches were established, burned out by the red men, and built again. Small poor townships were formed; wagon roads rutted the prairie; and the government slowly placed its line of forts along the northern and western line of settlement. All the while, Scull and his rangers ranged and ranged, hanging cattle thieves in the south and challenging the fighting Indians to the north.

  Still, now and then, with a prickle of brandy in his nostrils, and a cold wind worthy of New England cooling his neck, Scull found that the professor was likely to revive in him, a little. At moments he missed the learned talk of Cambridge; at times he grew depressed when he considered the gap in knowledge between himself and the poor dull fellows he commanded—they were brave beyond reason, but, alas, untutored. Young Call, it was true, was eager to learn, and Augustus McCrae sometimes mimicked a few lines of Latin picked up in some Tennessee school. But, the truth was, the men were ignorant, which is why, from time to time, with no immediate enemy to confront, he had started giving little impromptu lectures on the great battles of history. It was true that the little butte to the west did not look much like an Alp, but it was the only hill in sight, and would have to serve.

  “No, you see, Hannibal and his elephants were on the wrong side of the hills—or at least he wanted his enemies to think so,” Scull said, pacing back and forth, his brandy glass in his hand. He hated to drink brandy out of anything but glass. On every patrol he carefully wrapped and packed six brandy glasses, but, despite his caution, he would usually be reduced to taking his brandy out of a tin cup before the scout was finished.

  “What was he doing with elephants if he was out there in the snows?” Augustus asked. He hated it when the Captain got in one of his lecturing moods—though, since as far as he could tell they were just wandering aimlessly now, it probably didn’t much matter whether they were riding or getting a history lesson. Now there the Captain was, drunk on brandy, pointing at some dull little hill and prattling on about Hannibal and elephants and snow and Alps and Romans. Gus could not remember ever having heard of Hannibal, and he did not expect to enjoy any lecture he might receive, mainly because one of his socks had wrinkled up inside his boot somehow and left him a painful blister on the bottom of his foot. He wanted to be back in Austin. If he limped into the Forsythe store looking pitiful enough Clara might tend to his blister and permit him a kiss besides. Instead, all he had in the way of comfort was a mug of coffee and a piece of sandy bacon, and even that comfort was ending. Deets had just confided in him that they only had bacon for one more day.

  “Why, Hannibal was African,” Scull said. “He was a man of Carthage, and not the only great commander to use war elephants, either. Alexander the Great used them in India and Hannibal took his on over the Alps, snow or no snow, and fell on the Romans when they least expected it. Brilliant fighting, I call it.”

  Call tried to imagine the scene the Captain was describing—the great beasts winding up and up, into the snowy passes—but he had never seen an elephant, just a few pictures of them in books. Though he knew most of the rangers found it boresome when the Captain started in lecturing, he himself enjoyed hearing about the battles Captain Scull described. His reading ability was slowly improving, enough so that he hoped, in time, to read about some of the battles himself.

  Just as the Captain was warming to his subject, Famous Shoes suddenly appeared, almost at the Capta
in’s elbow. As usual, all the boys gave a start; none of them had seen the tracker approach. Even Captain Scull found Famous Shoes’ suddenly appearances a little unnerving.

  “I was in the camp of Buffalo Hump, he has a new wife,” Famous Shoes said. “His son took me prisoner for a while—he was the one who killed Mr. Watson. They call him ‘Blue Duck.’ His mother was a Mexican woman who froze to death trying to get away from Buffalo Hump.”

  Inish Scull smiled.

  “You’d make a fine professor, sir,” he said. “You’ve managed to tell us more about this scamp Blue Duck than I’ve been able to get across about Hannibal and his elephants. What else should I know? Has Kicking Wolf crossed the Alps with those stallions yet?”

  His witticism was lost on Famous Shoes, who did not particularly appreciate interruptions while trying to deliver his reports.

  “Slow Tree came into camp with many warriors and many women,” Famous Shoes went on. “Slow Tree wanted to kill me but Buffalo Hump will not let anybody kill me.”

  “Whoa, that’s news—why not?” Scull asked.

  “I helped his grandmother die,” Famous Shoes said. “I do not have to worry about Buffalo Hump.”

  “Is that all?” Scull asked.

  “You do not have to worry about Buffalo Hump either,” Famous Shoes said. “He is still with Slow Tree. But Kicking Wolf is following you now.”

  “Kicking Wolf—why, the rascal!” Scull exclaimed. “A few days ago I was following him. Why would the man we were chasing want to follow us?”

  “He probably wants to steal more horses,” Call said. “Stealing horses is what he’s good at.”

  “It could be that, or he might mean to cut our throats,” Inish Scull commented. He looked at the scout, but Famous Shoes seemed to have no opinion as to Kicking Wolf’s plans.

  “I didn’t see him,” he said. “I only saw his tracks. He has Three Birds with him.”