The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “However, if I had a mind to rent pigs I’d be mighty upset,” Wilbarger said. “A man that likes to rent pigs won’t be stopped.”

  “He’d be stopped if he was to show up here,” Newt said, after a bit. Nobody else spoke up and he felt that Wilbarger’s remark demanded an answer.

  “Well, is this a cow outfit or have you boys run off from a circus?” Wilbarger asked.

  “Oh, we cow a little,” Pea said. “How much cowing are you likely to need.”

  “I need forty horses, which it says on that sign you sell,” Wilbarger said. “A dern bunch of Mexicans run off dern near all of our remuda two nights back. I’ve got a herd of cattle gathered up the other side of the Nueces, and I don’t plan to walk ’em to Kansas on foot. A feller told me you men could supply horses. Is that true?”

  “Yep,” Pea Eye said. “What’s more, we can even chase Mexicans.”

  “I’ve got no time to discuss Mexicans,” Wilbarger said. “If you gentlemen could just trot out about forty well-broke horses we’ll pay you and be on our way.”

  Newt felt a little embarrassed. He was well aware that forty horses was out of the question, but he had hated to come right out and say so. Also, as the youngest member of the outfit, it was not his responsibility to be the spokesman.

  “You best talk to the Captain about it,” he suggested. “The Captain handles all the deals.”

  “Oh,” Wilbarger said, wiping the sweat off his brow with his forearm. “If I’d noticed a captain I’d have picked him to talk to in the first place, instead of you circus hands. Does he happen to live around here?”

  Pea pointed at the house, fifty yards away, in the chaparral.

  “I expect he’s home,” he said.

  “You men oughta publish a newspaper,” Wilbarger said. “You’re plumb full of information.”

  His pockmarked companion found the remark wonderfully funny. To everyone’s surprise, he let out a cackle of a laugh, like the sound a hen might make if the hen were mad about something.

  “Which way’s the whorehouse?” he asked, when he finished his cackle.

  “Chick, you’re a sight,” Wilbarger said, and turned his horse and trotted off toward the house.

  “Which way’s the whorehouse?” Chick asked again.

  He was looking at Dish, but Dish had no intention of revealing Lorena’s whereabouts to an ugly little cowboy on a swaybacked horse.

  “It’s over in Sabinas,” Dish said matter-of-factly.

  “Which?” Chick asked, caught a little off guard.

  “Sabinas,” Dish repeated. “Just wade the river and ride southeast for about a day. You’ll likely strike it.”

  Newt thought it extremely clever of Dish to come out with such a remark, but Chick clearly didn’t appreciate the cleverness. He was frowning, which tensed his small face up and made his deep pockmarks look like holes that went clear through his cheeks.

  “I didn’t ask for no map of Mexico,” he said. “I’ve been told there’s a yellow-haired girl right in this town.”

  Dish slowly got to his feet. “Well, just my sister,” he said.

  Of course it was a rank lie, but it got the job done. Chick was not convinced by the information, but Wilbarger had ridden off and left him, and he was conscious of being outnumbered and disliked. To imply that a cowboy’s sister was a sporting woman might lead to prolonged fisticuffs, if not worse—and Dish Boggett looked to be a healthy specimen.

  “In that case some fool has tolt me wrong,” Chick said, turning his horse toward the house.

  Pea Eye, who liked to take life one simple step at a time, had not appreciated the subtleties of the situation.

  “Where’d you get a sister, Dish?” he asked. Pea’s mode of living was modeled on the Captain’s. He barely went in the Dry Bean twice a year, preferring to wet his whistle on the front porch, where he would be assured of a short walk to bed if it got too wet. When he saw a woman it made him uncomfortable; the danger of deviating from proper behavior was too great. Generally when he spotted a female in his vicinity he took the modest way and kept his eyes on the ground. Nonetheless, he had chanced to look up one morning as they were trailing a herd of Mexican cattle through Lonesome Dove. He had seen a yellow-haired girl looking out an open window at them. Her shoulders were bare, which startled him so that he dropped a rein. He had not forgotten the girl, and he occasionally stole a glance at the window if he happened to be riding by. It was a surprise to think she might have been Dish’s sister.

  “Pea, when was you born?” Dish asked, grinning at Newt.

  The question threw Pea into confusion. He had been thinking about the girl he had seen in the window; to be asked when he was born meant stopping one line of thought and trying to shift to another, more difficult line.

  “Why you’d best ask the Captain that, Dish,” he said mildly. “I can’t never remember.”

  “Well, since we got the afternoon off I believe I’ll take a stroll,” Dish said. He ambled off toward town.

  The prospect of getting to go with the men that night kept crowding into Newt’s mind.

  “Where do you go when you go down south?” he asked Pea, who was still ruminating on the subject of his own birth.

  “Oh, we just lope around till we strike some stock,” Pea said. “The Captain knows where to look.”

  “I hope I get to go,” Newt said.

  Deets clapped him on the shoulder with a big black hand.

  “You in a hurry to get shot at, my lord,” he said. Then he walked over and stood looking down into the unfinished well.

  Deets was a man of few words but many looks. Newt had often had the feeling that Deets was the only one in the outfit who really understood his wishes and needs. Bolivar was kind from time to time, and Mr. Gus was usually kind, though his kindness was of a rather absentminded nature. He had many concerns to talk and argue about, and it was mostly when he got tired of thinking about everything else that he had the time to think about Newt.

  The Captain was seldom really harsh with him unless he made a pure mess of some job, but the Captain never passed him a kind word, either. The Captain did not go around handing out kind words—but if he was in the mood to do so Newt knew he would be the last to get one. No compliment ever came to him from the Captain, no matter how well he worked. It was a little discouraging: the harder he tried to please the Captain, the less the Captain seemed to be pleased. When Newt managed to do some job right, the Captain seemed to feel that he had been put under an obligation, which puzzled Newt and made him wonder what was the point of working well if it was only going to irritate the Captain. And yet all the Captain seemed to care about was working well.

  Deets noticed his discouragement and did what he could to help pick his spirits up. Sometimes he helped out with jobs that were too much for Newt, and whenever a chance for complimenting a piece of work came, Deets paid the compliment himself. It was a help, though it couldn’t always make up for the feeling Newt had that the Captain held something against him. Newt had no idea what it could be, but it seemed there was something. Deets was the only one beside himself who seemed to be aware of it, but Newt could never work up the nerve to question Deets about it directly—he knew Deets wouldn’t want to talk about such things. Deets didn’t talk much anyway. He tended to express himself more with his eyes and his hands.

  • • •

  While Newt was thinking of night and Mexico, Dish Boggett strolled happily toward the Dry Bean saloon, thinking of Lorena. All day, laboring at the windlass or in the well, he had thought of her. The night had not gone as well as he had hoped it would—Lorena had not given him anything that could be construed as encouragement—but it occurred to Dish that maybe she just needed more time to get used to the notion that he loved her. If he could stay around a week or two she might get used to it, and even come to like it.

  Behind the general store, an old Mexican saddlemaker was cutting a steerhide into strips from which to make a rope. It occurred to Dish that h
e might be more presentable if he walked down to the river and washed off some of the sweat that had dried on him during the day, but walking to the river meant losing time and he decided to let that notion slide. What he did do was stop just back of the Dry Bean to tuck his shirttail in more neatly and dust off his pants.

  It was while he was attending to his shirttail that he suddenly got a shock. He had stopped about twenty feet behind the building, which was just two stories of frame lumber. It was a still, hot afternoon, no breeze blowing. A strong fart could have been heard far up the street, but it was no fart that caught Dish’s ear. When he first heard the steady crackling, creaking sound he thought nothing of it, but a second or two later something dawned on him that almost made him feel sick. In spite of himself he stepped closer to the building, to confirm his fear.

  From the corner just over his head, where Lorena had her room, came a crackling and a creaking sound such as two people can make in a bad bed with a cornshuck mattress over a weak spring. Lorena had such a bed; only last night it had made the same noise beneath them, loud enough that Dish wondered briefly, before pleasure overtook him, if anybody besides themselves was hearing it.

  Now he was hearing it, standing with his shirttail half tucked in, while someone else was making it with Lorena. Memories of her body mingled with the sound, causing such a painful feeling in Dish’s breast that for a second he couldn’t move. He felt almost paralyzed, doomed to stand in the heat beneath the very room he had been hoping to enter himself. She was part of the sound—he knew just what chords she contributed to the awful music. Anger began to fill him, and for a moment its object was Xavier Wanz, who could at least have seen that Lorena had a cotton-tick mattress instead of those scratchy cornshucks, which weren’t even comfortable to sleep on.

  In a second, though, Dish’s anger passed Xavier by, and surged in the direction of the man in the room above him, who was also above Lorena, using her body to produce the crackling and the creaking. He had no doubt it was the pockmarked weasel on the swaybacked gray, who had probably pretended to ride up to the house and then cut back down the dry bed of the creek straight to the saloon. It would be a move he would soon regret.

  Dish belted his pants and strode grimly around the saloon to the north side. It was necessary to go all the way around the building to get out of hearing of the bed sounds. He fully meant to kill the little weasel when he came out of the saloon. Dish was no gunfighter, but some things could not be borne. He took out his pistol and checked his loads, surprised at how fast life could suck you along; that morning he had awoke with no plans except to be a cowboy, and now he was about to become a man-killer, which would put his whole future in doubt. The man might have powerful friends, who would hunt him down. Still, feeling what he felt, he could see no other course to follow.

  He holstered his pistol and stepped around the corner, expecting to stand by the swaybacked gray until the cowboy came out, so the challenge could be given.

  But stepping around the corner brought another shock. There was no swaybacked gray tied to the hitch rail in front of the saloon. In fact, there were no horses at all in front of the saloon. Over at the Pumphreys’ store a couple of big strapping boys were loading rolls of barbed wire into a wagon. Otherwise the street was empty.

  It put Dish in a deep quandary. He had been more than ready to commit murder, but now he had no victim to commit it on. For a moment he tried to convince himself he hadn’t heard what he had heard. Perhaps Lorena was just bouncing on the cornshucks for the sake of bouncing. But that theory wouldn’t hold. Even a lighthearted girl wouldn’t want to bounce on a cornshuck mattress on a hot afternoon, and anyway Lorena wasn’t a lighthearted girl. Some man had prompted the bouncing: the question was, Who?

  Dish looked inside, only to discover that the Dry Bean was as empty as a church house on Saturday night. There was no sign of Xavier or Lippy, and, worse, the creaking hadn’t stopped. He could still hear it from the front door. It was too much for Dish. He hurried off the porch and up the street, but it soon hit him that he had no place to go, not unless he wanted to collect his horse and strike out for the Matagorda, leaving Captain Call to think what he would.

  Dish wasn’t quite ready to do that—at least not until he found out who his rival was. Instead, he walked up one side of the street and down the other, feeling silly for doing it. He went all the way to the river, but there was nothing to see there except a strip of brown water and a big coyote. The coyote stood in the shallow, eating a frog.

  Dish sat by the river an hour, and when he got back to the Dry Bean everything was back to normal. Xavier Wanz was standing at the door with a wet rag in his hand, and Lippy was sitting on the bar shaving a big corn off his thumb with a straight razor. They didn’t count for much, in Dish’s view.

  What counted was that Lorena, looking prettily flushed, was sitting at a table with Jake Spoon, the coffee-eyed stranger with the pearl-handled pistol. Jake had his hat pushed back on his head and was addressing her, with his eyes at least, as if he had known her for years. There was a single glass of whiskey sitting on the table. From the doorway Dish saw Lorena take a sip out of the glass and then casually hand it to Jake, who took more than a sip.

  The sight embarrassed Dish profoundly—it went to the pit of his stomach, like the sound of the creaking bed when he first heard it. He had never seen his ma and pa drink from the same glass, and they had been married people. And yet, the day before, he had been practically unable to get Lorie to look at him at all, and him a top hand, not just some drifter.

  In a flash, as he stood half-through the swinging doors, Dish’s whole conception of woman changed; it was as if lightning had struck, burning his old notions to a crisp in one instant. Nothing was going to be as he had imagined it—maybe nothing ever would again. He started to go back out the door, so he could at least go off and adjust to his new life alone, but he had lingered a moment too long. Both Jake and Lorena looked up from one another and saw him in the door. Lorena didn’t change expression, but Jake at once gave him a friendly look and lifted his hand.

  “Hooray,” he said. “Come on in, son. I hope you’ve the start of a crowd. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a dern gloomy saloon.”

  Lippy, content beneath his bowler, turned and shook his lip in Dish’s direction for a moment. Then he blew the shavings of his corn off the bar.

  “Dish ain’t much of a crowd,” he said.

  Dish stepped in, wishing once again that he had never heard of the town of Lonesome Dove.

  Jake Spoon waved at Xavier. “Davie, bring your poison,” he said. He refused to call Xavier anything but Davie. “Anybody’s that’s had to dig a dern well in this heat deserves a free drink and I’m buying it,” Jake added.

  He motioned at a chair, and Dish took it, feeling red in the face one second and pale the next. He longed to know what Lorena was feeling about it all, and when Jake turned his head a minute, he cast her a glance. Her eyes were unusually bright, but they didn’t see him. They returned continually to Jake, who was paying her no particular mind. She tapped her fingers on the table three or four times, a little absently, as if keeping time with her own thoughts, and she drank two more sips from Jake’s glass. There were tiny beads of sweat above her upper lip, one right at the edge of the faint scar, but she didn’t look bothered by the heat or anything else.

  Dish could hardly pull his eyes away, she was so pretty, and when he did he caught Jake Spoon looking at him. But Jake’s look was entirely friendly—he seemed plain glad for company.

  “If I was to try well-digging, I doubt I’d survive an hour,” he said. “You boys ought to stand up to Call and make him dig his own well.”

  At that point Xavier brought out a bottle and a glass. Jake took the bottle himself and poured liberally. “This is better likker than they got in Arkansas,” he said.

  “Arkansas,” Xavier said contemptuously, as if the word spoke for itself.

  At that point Dish felt himself lose
belief in what was happening. There was no place he would rather not be than at a table with Lorie and another man, yet that appeared to be where he was. Lorie didn’t seem to mind him being there, but on the other hand it was clear she would not have minded if he were a thousand miles away. Xavier stood by his elbow, with the rag dripping onto his pants leg, and Jake Spoon drank whiskey and looked friendly. With Jake’s hat pushed back, Dish could see a little strip of white skin right at his forehead, skin the sun never struck.

  For a time Dish lost all sense of what life was about. He even lost the sense that he was a cowboy, the strongest sense he had to work with. He was just a fellow with a glass in his hand, whose life had suddenly turned to mud. The day before he had been a top hand, but what did that mean anymore?

  Though the day was hot and bright, Dish felt cold and cloudy, so puzzled by the strange business called life that he couldn’t think where to look, much less what to say. He took a drink and then another and then several, and, though life remained cloudy, the inside of the cloud began to be warm. By the middle of the second bottle he had stopped worrying about Lorie and Jake Spoon and was sitting by the piano, singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” while Lippy played.

  9.

  AUGUSTUS WAS on the front porch, biding his time, when Wilbarger rode up. Biding his time seemed to him the friendly thing to do, inasmuch as Jake Spoon had ridden a long way and had likely been scared to seek out womankind during his trip. Jake was one of those men who seemed to stay in rut the year round, a great source of annoyance to Call, who was never visibly in rut. Augustus was subject to it, but, as he often said, he wasn’t going to let it drive him like a mule—a low joke that still went over the heads of most of the people who heard it. He enjoyed a root, as he called it, but if conditions weren’t favorable, could make do with whiskey for lengthy spells. It was clear that with Jake just back, conditions wouldn’t be too favorable that afternoon, so he repaired to his jug with the neighborly intention of giving Jake an hour or two to whittle down his need before he followed along and tried to interest him in a card game.