by Leif Enger
Iron Tail said, “You are lucky to have your wife here. I have a headache tonight. I wish my wife was alive.”
No one replied, so the old chief continued.
“She used to help me when I got a headache. She would rub my neck with her strong hands. Sometimes I couldn’t bear the light, and then she would cover my eyes with cool mud. That was a good way to go to sleep. When I woke up, the headache was gone.”
“My wife never took away my headaches—she generally brought ’em on,” said a man sitting on the floor next to the door. He said it in the tone of someone going for the laugh, and he got one or two, but the truth is we weren’t much in the mood for wife wringing. The monkey commotion had unsettled the men whose wives were upstairs; it made those of us without our wives miss them. We were a dozen weary men in a damp room with one smoky candle for light and no prospect of rest.
Iron Tail said, “When the headache was bad she would rub grease into my neck. That was a good wife.”
Then Glendon said, “My wife used to go sailing with me, down in Mexico. We had a little boat. She was a fine sailor. There wasn’t anything on that boat she couldn’t do as well as me.”
“I remember you two on that boat,” said José Barrera, without rancor.
“My wife got so she couldn’t see me anymore,” said an old man propped in a corner. “She could see everyone else. Just not me.”
“Say, now,” someone remonstrated.
The old man said, “It’s the truth. I walked into the house one day saying Darling it’s me, and she couldn’t hear nor see me. If I touched her she’d see me again, but pretty soon, out I’d fade.”
It froze me, hearing that old man. I said, “What caused it, sir?”
But he didn’t answer. He took a breath as though considering my question; then Iron Tail, who was standing nearest the candle and had been gazing into its flame, remarked, “I don’t know what kind of grease that was. It was strong grease.”
“Maybe ’twas bear grease,” offered Bodes, the mechanic, in a voice so nasal it seemed to arrive through a pinhole.
“Not bear grease,” said Iron Tail. He was a little impatient, as though he knew all about bear grease and didn’t think much of it.
“Was it skunk grease?” asked Bodes. “What did it look like?”
“I don’t know,” Iron Tail admitted. “I had that mud over my eyes.”
There was a silence during which I hoped the man in the corner would speak up. I wanted to know whether his wife had started to see him again, as time passed, or whether he had become invisible to other people as well. His children, for example—could they see him? This was my question: If you eventually become like a ghost to all who know you, how do you bear the loneliness?
The candle guttered along. It didn’t throw much light. Except for Iron Tail, who stood right next to it, I couldn’t tell one man from the next. A few were able to sleep sitting up, but the rest of us just murmured or dozed. I shut my eyes and fell into nostalgia. I remembered a couplet I’d written to Susannah. A painting she made for me of a lovely small house beside a river, a house she said we would one day occupy together. She was seventeen when she made that painting; she had a clean mature eye, even at that age. I wished I could see the painting again. Had we lost it somehow? Sitting in the dank boardinghouse, my head against my knees, I wondered where it had gone.
“Saints above, Jip—tell me it ain’t you!” said a woman’s voice.
At those oddly recognizable words I lifted my eyes. While I dozed, someone had lit another candle; it was the old man from the corner, the invisible husband. He wore a brimmed hat that obscured his face. He’d fetched a candle and stuck it to the floor with wax and was playing a hand of solitaire. The woman who’d spoken was tall, trousered, and fringed—she’d been there all along, I suppose, and once again I’d assumed she was a man.
“Don’t you know me, Jip?” said Darlys DeFoe, squatting beside the old cardplayer.
“Nope,” came the cool reply.
“Oh, you must. You must remember,” and prizing the candle off the floor she held it near her face. “Look closer—see if you know me now.”
Annoyed at losing his light the old man raised his head. I was wholly unprepared to see Charles Siringo’s face under that hatbrim, yet there it was—his pitted and dashing face. It was a fearsome sight to me.
“Very well, I don’t know you,” he said. “Give me back the candle.”
“We were sweethearts at Hole in the Wall, Jippie,” Darlys said. She was pleading and earnest; for the first time I felt honest compassion for her. “It can’t be that long ago; say you remember.”
“Why, I’ll give you this much,” said Charles Siringo. “I have been to the Hole on many occasions, and I did have a few sweethearts there.” Then his face turned wily and he said, “None were as rugged as you, however. I have better-looking brothers! I’ll take that candle now, goodbye.”
Had he contemplated a year I doubt he could’ve chosen more cutting words to say to Darlys DeFoe. I found myself hoping she’d douse that candle in one of his eyeballs, but she only handed it to him carefully. Maybe she was dazed by his cruelty. He didn’t even watch her depart but dripped a mound of fresh wax on the floor, fixed the candle on it, and returned to his game.
And that is how Siringo reentered our lives. For the rest of that night I watched him at his solitaire, and I wondered when and how he had come to the ranch, when nearly everyone else was leaving it. Did Glendon know Siringo was in the room? When the deck of cards was finally put away and the old savage was at rest, I got up and crept about—it was a congested little crypt, that lobby—but I couldn’t find my friend, and at last I went to the door and stood listening to the hard rain and the water flowing past at rising speed and sound.
In the charcoal dawn Glendon appeared with his bundle and we stepped out under the awning. I said, “Charles Siringo is here.”
“Ain’t he a bloodhound? I think he is better than he was. And now I have got to leave. Alone, this time.”
The rain came off the awning in endless strings.
He said, “You see how it is, Monte.”
I nodded. We were both fatigued—by the flood, by Siringo in that very house, by many days lost and the vanishing of Hood and the bumping of barrels and drowned beasts against the flagging porch.
“I enjoyed our travels,” he said. “At first chance, it’s back to Susannah for you.”
To this I agreed without condition. Through the long night I had pondered Siringo’s strange and familiar testimony—how his wife had ceased to see him. The conviction had taken hold that I must go home immediately. Perhaps there was still time to keep my own hazy outline from becoming permanent.
“I feel sure we’ll meet sometime again,” Glendon said.
It put a knot in my throat, that sentence. The knot returns as I mention it.
He said, “Beware of Charlie. He’ll want to use you. Stay out of his grasp. He has a strong grasp—it used to be strong, anyway. I’ve got no reason to think it’s weak now.”
“Glendon. Did Siringo know Darlys DeFoe?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Were they sweethearts at Hole in the Wall?”
“Yes, they were.”
I said, “Is there anything I can do for Darlys?”
It was so dark I couldn’t see him smiling—I heard him, though. He said, “No, I’ve taken care of that. Thank you, Monte.”
We shook hands and he stepped off the porch. “Why, what about that,” he observed, “it’s near to my waist,” and hoisting the pack to his shoulder he melted into the rain.
11
As Glendon tested the surging water, Ern Swilling, on the cot upstairs, was about to test the infinite. His windpipe had sustained an awful kink; kept from collapse by a length of rubber tube akin to yard hose, the tube snaked free in the wee hours and Ern moved on without lifting a hand. The actor’s meek death put us all on edge—we shouldn’t have been surprised, yet we were. Two or
three of the ladies came down to a cold breakfast still insisting poor Ern would rise in triumph; this is the prospect they were discussing when the doctor, name of Clary, entered in his tailed coat to explain with chagrin about the slipped hose.
“The fault is my own,” Clary said quietly. “I fell asleep and was not watching. He died for my failure.” These remarks have little to do with the larger story, but I report them as a mark of that doctor’s humility. The truth is he’d been awake nearly sixty hours before dropping off in a ladderback chair at Ern’s side. “Regret is ever the physician’s companion,” he told me later, sallow with weariness and burden.
Regret, regret: I felt it too. Regret for Ern Swilling, certainly, and his family; regret for the kind doctor and the upstairs girls in their theatrical despair; but chiefly I felt it for Hood Roberts, whose name was suddenly being whipped about with a fury reserved for the vilest reprobates. The malevolent thug! Murderer of the next screen Romeo! Of course Hood had only set out to defend his friend Ignacio. How would you like a punch in the nose? Any nine-year-old boy worth a dime says it every week.
Hoarse moans were still echoing round the boardinghouse when a commotion of sorts broke out. “Yonder comes a boat,” called an imp in a window, but he was too quick and got it half wrong: there was a boat, but it wasn’t coming. It was going.
“It’s got two men,” he added, missing again; it contained only one man, Glendon Hale, plus a pair of spotted pigs who were staying very still in the tiny craft. It was a rummy little coracle—a dishlike vessel of ancient design, prone to spin when paddled. Despite this Glendon seemed to handle it with ease, and it occurred to me that for the sake of ballast Glendon had overcome his dread of pigs. To my knowledge, pigs are no happier about a flood than monkeys; yet these seemed at peace, seated somewhat grandly upright and behaving themselves with their snouts in the air.
It was a charming sight, but looking round I saw Charles Siringo push through the little clutch of onlookers and lean out the window. Siringo wasn’t charmed! It’s fair to say he was aggravated—he shot me a dark look by which I understood his eye had been on me for some time, then pulled on his coat and waded down off the porch. Charging around in hip-deep water is no easy deed but Siringo leaned into it holding his gunbelt aloft and traversed the flooded street several times, looking for a vessel in which to give chase. In the end he settled for a tall horse, one of Jos Miller’s gold-medal drafters. Mr. Miller favored black shires imported from the English midlands—his favorite, a gelding called Mammoth, was at rest high and dry on the Millers’ covered portico. Climbing the steps, water streaming from his pockets, Siringo seized a handful of mane and tried to leap aboard Mammoth but slid off. A shire is two feet taller than your common nag and Siringo led the temperate beast down the steps and mounted from the porch rail. The water rose only to the horse’s belly and Siringo rode it easily up the street while buckling his gunbelt in place. Few if any guessed his intention, for he smiled and seemed to enjoy the spectacle he made astride Mammoth—tipping his hat, for example, when the ladies waved to him.
What a strange, sluggish pursuit it made! Mammoth refused to giddyup but only picnicked along at a walk; even so, he gained on the bobbing coracle. I saw Glendon bend with effort, so that the craft half spun and the pigs dipped and scrabbled; then Siringo, seeing he was noticed, lifted his revolver and fired. I don’t know how long a shot it was: too long apparently. Siringo holstered the revolver again and put Mammoth forward.
Well, the gunshot alerted all that a drama was under way. Soon everyone was leaning out the boardinghouse windows, the ladies agape, the men clamped, the children shoved to the rear. I was told later that two of the upstairs ladies had opera glasses that they employed without shame. Siringo urged the shire ahead with what seemed to me outrageous patience. He was beginning to disappear in the rain. I don’t know how far off he was when he again lifted his arm and pointed in the direction of Glendon. A thousand yards? Twelve hundred? By now Mammoth seemed nearly atop the coracle. I want to say all shouting ceased as we waited for the report, but perhaps there was no shouting to begin with. Perhaps everyone was as numb as I was. Siringo sighted along his arm. When watching an execution, does anyone shout?
Then there was a report, at which I can reliably tell you several women began to cry; only it was wrong, the sound of that shot. It was close. As if fired from above us the report echoed off the water and decayed above the floodplain; then, “Lookit him, he’s killed,” cried the imp, because Charles Siringo had drained down in the saddle and slumped forward against the neck of the shire. Relieved of direction, the horse made a half circle and began its slow return while Glendon, in the coracle, continued on.
12
I would love to tell you that Darlys DeFoe turned herself in. That she came down off the roof of Marland Oil across the street, where she had climbed unnoticed when all eyes were on Siringo and the big horse, and that she presented herself to the law and told her tale of misplaced affection. That would be romance! That would be opera! But the fact is she disappeared even more handily than Glendon himself had done. José Barrera said he saw “a tall man wading toward Texas” while the rest of us were transfixed watching Mammoth’s slow return, but who knows? Though a search turned up one fifty-caliber shell casing and a soaked sheepskin on the roof where she had rested her rifle, nothing suggested where Deep Breath Darla might be planning to go next or by what means. So far as I can tell, no one who was then at the Hundred and One ever saw her again.
Which, I suppose, is fairly romantic too.
Meantime Charles Siringo lay against the shire’s neck like wet bedding. There was some debate among the boardinghouse audience whether he was alive or dead on that horse, but I hadn’t any doubt of his living. Laugh all you like at the old perception of the fated existence; Siringo wore it like his own skin. You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own.
13
A new day appeared and I wrote Susannah. It wasn’t a proper letter, but it was the longest thing I’d managed to put down since leaving home. I wrote about the treacherous brown flood, about the day of departing wagonloads with their sallow passengers. I wrote how it was to see the yellow sun again, but words were poor compared to the relief I felt, which was acute as bee stings.
In fact the old sun appeared the morning after Glendon’s providential escape. The great cloud dissipated as though released from duty and the light came over a horizon that was no longer a ranch but a calm and littered sea. I suspected more days would pass before I was able to leave. José Barrera tried to drive a hayrack out behind two of the big shires; the rig made it fifty yards before the horses lost all footing and the harness had to be cut loose.
I was sitting on the ledge of an open window, groggy with sun, when Dr. Clary stepped into the lobby.
“Excuse me, are any of you gentlemen Monte Becket?”
No one but Glendon and Hood had used my real name in weeks. It was a strange and welcome sound that brought me to my feet.
“What do you need?”
He said, “Mr. Siringo is repeating your name.”
Charles Siringo was in the ad hoc infirmary upstairs. He had been shot in the ribcage though the bullet’s route was still a mystery. Clary had ascertained one smashed rib and believed the lungs were whole but beyond that was unwilling to guess. Siringo had arrived unconscious aboard Mammoth and was carried upstairs in a state of escalating fever, but soon awoke and began to shout nonsensical language. Clary took his hand and was met with violence; he restrained him and was met with rage. At last for Siringo’s own safety he dosed him with ether, only to have the old vulture wake hours later, still angry though with less noise.
“He’s saying Monte Becket,” Clary told me. “You might help him settle. What else he’s saying doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“What else is he saying?”
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Clary didn’t answer so I followed him up the steps to the infirmary. It was no place you would choose to be sick but the doctor had made the best of it. He had waded to the small hospital maintained by the ranch and manhandled supplies to high ground: surgical implements, corked brown bottles, setting plaster and bandages by the roll. Amid this smart clutter lay Siringo in the bed vacated by Ern Swilling. Frankly, Siringo looked soon to follow Ern wherever. He was talking in a husky baritone like a man still in the tavern at sunup. He didn’t look at me but breathed out a dragon of illogical syllables.
“Wait a little,” said Clary. Siringo bored on in his husky voice. Abruptly a few words spilled out. Names mostly. I remember he said Jip Fingers. He rolled to and fro in his ravings. He said Monte Becket, and I answered him yes.
“Who are you?”
“Becket.”
He laughed at this and focused on me with his fevered eyes.
“Not Jack Waits then.”
“No.”
“Friend of Glen Dobie,” he said.
“That’s right.” There seemed little use for caution now, with Glendon gone, and Siringo in this condition.
He struggled to get a line on me and I moved round to the foot of the bed where he could look me straight on.
“Did you shoot me, lad?”
“No.”
“You were with him, with Dobie.”
“I didn’t shoot you.”
He rolled half over with an agonized shout—it made me jump, but he calmed and lay still.
The doctor said, “You were shot, Mr. Siringo, by a gunman who is still at large and whose identity no one knows for certain.”
This was a mild equivocation, since everyone at the ranch knew there was only one person who could’ve made the shot.
