Larry McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

by Dead Man's Walk

"But you wasn't going anyway, you were aiming to stay and marry that girl," Call reminded him.

  "No--I aim to go," Gus said. "If I could collect a little of that silver we could live rich, if I do marry her." In fact he was torn. He had a powerful desire to marry Clara; but at the same time, the thought of watching his companions ride off on their great adventure made him moody and sad.

  "You reckon Colonel Cobb would leave me, because of this ankle?" he asked.

  "Why no, there's plenty of wagons you could ride in--a sprain's usually better in a week," Bigfoot said. "I guess they could put you in that buggy with old Phil Lloyd, unless they mean to transport him in a cart." "Ride with a general?" Gus asked. "I wouldn't know what to say to a general." "You won't have to say a word to Phil Lloyd, he'll be too drunk to talk," Bigfoot assured him.

  The next morning, the sprained ankle was so swollen Gus couldn't put even a fraction of his weight on it. The matter chagrined him deeply --he had hoped to be at the general store at opening time, in order to help Miss Forsythe with her unpacking. Yet even standing up was painful-- needles of pain shot through his ankle.

  "I expect they have liniment in that store," Call told him. "I guess I could walk up there and buy you some liniment." "Oh, you would!" Gus said, agitated at the thought that Call would get to see Clara before he did. "I suppose you'll want to help her unpack dry goods, too." "What?" Call said, puzzled by Gus's annoyance. "Why would I want to help her unpack? I don't work in that store." "Bear grease is best for sprains," Long Bill informed him.

  "Well, do we have any?" Gus asked, eager to head off Call's trip to the general store.

  "Why no--I don't keep any," Long Bill said. "Maybe we can scrape a little up, next time we kill a bear." "I seen a bear once, eating a horse," Gus remembered. "I didn't kill him, though." Call grew tired of the aimless conversation and walked on up to the store. The girl was there, quick as ever. She wasn't unpacking dry goods, though.

  She was stacking pennies on a counter, whistling while she did it.

  "Be quiet, don't interrupt me," she said, throwing Call a merry glance. "I'll have to do this all over if I lose my count." Call waited patiently until she had finished tallying up the pennies--she wrote the total on a little slip of paper.

  "So it's you and not Mr. McCrae," she said when she was finished. "I rather expected Mr.

  McCrae. I guess he ain't as smitten as I thought." "Oh, he's mighty smitten," Call assured her. "He meant to be here early, but he fell and hurt his ankle." "Just like a man--is it broke?" Clara asked. "I expect he done it dancing with a se@norita. He looks to me like he's the kind of Texas Ranger who visits the se@noritas." "No, he fell off a bluff," Call said.

  "I was with him at the time. He's got a bad sprain and thought some liniment might help." "It might if I rubbed it on myself," Clara said.

  Call was plain embarrassed. He had never heard of a woman rubbing liniment on a man's foot. It seemed improper to him, although he recognized that standards might be different in Austin.

  "If I could buy some and take it to him, I expect he could just rub it on himself," Call said.

  "I see you know nothing of medicine, sir," Clara said, thinking she had never met such a pompous young fool as Mr. Woodrow Call.

  "Well, can I buy some?" Call asked.

  He found it tiring to do so much talking, particularly since the girl's manner was so brash and her attitude so confusing.

  "Yes, here--we have the best liniment of any establishment in town," Clara said. "My father uses this one--I believe it's made from roots." She handed Call a big jar of liniment, charging him twenty cents. Call was dismayed at the price--he hadn't supposed liniment would cost more than a dime.

  "Tell Mr. McCrae I consider it very careless of him, to go falling off a bluff without my permission," Clara said, as she was wrapping the jar of liniment in brown paper. "He might have been useful to me today, if he hadn't been so careless." "He had no notion that he was so close to the edge, Miss," Call said, thinking that he ought to try and defend his friend.

  "No excuses, tell him I'm very put out," Clara demanded. "Once I smite a man, I expect more cautious behaviour." When Call reported the conversation to Gus, Gus blamed it all on him.

  "I suppose you informed her that I was drunk-- you aim to marry her yourself, I expect," Gus said, in a temper.

  Call was astonished by his friend's irrationality.

  "I don't even know the woman's name," he told his friend.

  "Pshaw, it don't take long to learn a name," Gus said. "You mean to marry her, don't you?" "You must have broke your brain, when you took that fall," Call said. "I don't intend to marry nobody. I'm off to Santa Fe." "Well, I am too--I wish I'd never let you go up to that store," Gus said. He was tormented by the thought that Clara Forsythe might have taken a liking to Call. She might have decided she preferred his friend, a thought so tormenting that he got up and tried to hobble to the store. But he could put no weight on the wounded ankle at all--it meant hopping on one leg, and he soon realized that he couldn't hop that far. Even if he had, what would Clara think of a man who came hopping in on one leg?

  He was forced to lie in camp all day, sulking, while the other Rangers went about their business.

  Long Bill Coleman grew careless with the jug of whiskey he had procured the night before.

  While he was trying to repair a cracked stirrup, Gus crawled over to Bill's little stack of bedding, uncorked the jug, and drank a good portion of it. Then he crawled back to his own spot, drunk.

  Brognoli, the quartermaster, showed up about that time, looking for men to load the ammunition wagons. Call and Rip Green were recruited.

  Gus was fearful Brognoli would remove him from the troop once he found out about the ankle, but Brognoli scarcely gave him a glance.

  "You'll be running buffalo in a few days, Mr. McCrae," Brognoli said. "I'll warn you though: be careful of your parts, once we're traveling. Colonel Cobb won't tolerate stragglers. If you can't make the pull, he'll leave you, and you'll have to come back as best you can." Gus managed to sneak several more pulls on Long Bill's jug, and was deeply drunk when he woke from a light snooze to see a girl coming toward the camp. To his horror, he realized it was Clara Forsythe. It was a calamity--not only was he drunk and too crippled to attend himself, he was also filthy from having accidentally rolled into a mud puddle during the night.

  He looked about to see if there was a wagon he could hide under, but there was no wagon. Johnny Carthage was snoring, his head on his saddle, and no one else was in camp at all.

  "There you are--I had hoped you would show up early and help me unpack those heavy dry goods," Clara said. "I see you're unreliable --I might have suspected it." She was smiling as she chided him, but Gus was so sensitive to the fact that he was drunk and filthy that he hardly knew what to do.

  "Let's see your foot," Clara said, kneeling down beside him.

  Gus was startled. Although Call had informed him that Clara intended to rub liniment on his foot herself, Gus had given the report no credit.

  It was some lie Call had thought up, to make him feel worse than he felt. No fine girl of the class of Miss Forsythe would be likely to want to rub liniment on his filthy ankle.

  "What?" he asked--he was so drunk that he could hardly stammer. He wished now that he had not been such a fool as to drain Long Bill's jug --but then, how could he possibly have expected a visit from Miss Forsythe? Only whores prowled around in the rough Ranger camps, and Clara was clearly not a whore.

  "I said, let's see your foot," Clara said. "Did the fall deafen you, too?" "No, I can hear," Gus said. "What would you want with my foot?" he asked.

  "I need to know if I think you're going to recover, Mr. McCrae," Clara said, with a challenging smile. "If you do recover, I might have plans for you, but if you're a goner, then I won't waste my time." "What kind of plans?" Gus asked.

  "Well, there's a lot of unpacking that needs to get done around the store," Clara said. "You could be my assistant, if yo
u behave." Gus surrendered the wounded foot, which was bare, and none too clean. Clara touched it gently, cupping Gus's heel in one hand.

  "The thing is, I'm a Ranger," Gus reminded her. "I signed up for the expedition to Santa Fe. If I try to back out now, the Colonel might call it desertion and have me hung." "Fiddle," Clara said, feeling the swollen ankle. She lowered his foot to the ground, noticed the jar of liniment sitting on a rock nearby, and removed the top.

  "Well, they can hang you for desertion, if they take a notion to," Gus said.

  "I know that, shut up," Clara said, scooping a bit of liniment into her hand. She began to massage it into the swollen ankle, a dab at a time.

  "My pa thinks this expedition is all foolery," Clara went on. "He says you'll all starve, once you get out on the plains. He says you'll be back in a month. I guess I can wait a month." "I hope so," Gus said. "I wouldn't want no one else to get the job." Clara looked at him, but said nothing. She continued to dab liniment on his ankle and gently rub it in.

  "That liniment stinks," Gus informed her. "It smells like sheep-dip." "I thought I told you to shut up," Clara reminded him. "If you weren't crippled we could have a picnic, couldn't we?" Gus decided to ignore the comment--he was crippled, and wasn't quite sure what a picnic was, anyway. He thought it was something that had to do with churchgoing, but he wasn't a churchgoer and didn't want to embarrass himself by revealing his ignorance.

  "What if we're out two months?" he asked. "You wouldn't give that job to nobody else, would you?" Clara considered for a moment--she was smiling, but not at him, exactly. She seemed to be smiling mostly to herself.

  "Well, there are other applicants," she admitted.

  "Yes, that damn Woodrow Call, I imagine," Gus said. "I never told him to go up there and buy this liniment. He just did it himself." "Oh no, not Corporal Call," Clara said at once. "I don't think I fancy Corporal Call as an unpacker. He's a little too solemn for my taste. I expect he would be too slow to make a fool of himself." "That's right, he ain't foolish," Gus said.

  He thought it was rather a peculiar standard Clara was suggesting, but he was not about to argue with her.

  "I like men who are apt to make fools of themselves immediately," Clara said. "Like yourself, Mr.

  McCrae. Why, you don't hesitate a second when it comes to making a fool of yourself." Gus decided not to comment. He had never encountered anyone as puzzling as the young woman kneeling in front of him, with his foot almost on her lap. She didn't seem to give a fig for the fact that his foot was dirty, and he himself none too clean.

  "Are you drunk, sir?" she asked bluntly.

  "I think I smell whiskey on your breath." "Well, Long Bill had a little whiskey," Gus admitted. "I took it for medicine." Clara didn't dignify that lie with a look, or a retort.

  "What were you thinking of when you walked off that cliff, Mr. McCrae?" Clara asked. "Do you remember?" In fact, Gus didn't remember. The main thing he remembered about the whole previous day was standing near Clara in the general store, watching her unpack dry goods. He remembered her graceful wrists, and how dust motes stirred in a shaft of sunlight from the big front window.

  He remembered thinking that Clara was the most beautiful woman he had ever encountered, and that he wanted to be with her--beyond being with her, he could conceive of no plans; he had no memory of falling off the cliff at all, and no notion of what he and Woodrow Call might have been discussing. He remembered a gunshot and Call and Johnny finding him at the base of the bluff. But what had gone on before, or been said up on the path, he couldn't recall.

  "I guess I was worrying about Indians," he said, since Clara was still looking at him in a manner that suggested she wanted an answer.

  "Shucks, I thought you might have been thinking of me," Clara said. "I had the notion I'd smitten you, but I guess I was wrong. I haven't smitten Corporal Call, that's for sure." "He ain't a corporal, he's just a Ranger," Gus said, annoyed that she was still talking about Call. He didn't trust the man, not where Clara was concerned, at least.

  "Why, that's better, perhaps I have smitten you." She closed the jar of liniment, eased his foot to the ground, and stood up.

  "It does smell a little like sheep-dip--that's accurate," she said. "What do you gentlemen use to wash with around this camp?" "Nothing, nobody washes," Gus admitted.

  "Sometimes we wash in a creek, if we're traveling, but otherwise we just stay dirty." Clara picked up a shirt someone had thrown down, and carefully wiped her fingers on it.

  "I hope the owner won't mind a little sheep-dip on his shirt," she said.

  "That's Call's extra shirt, he won't mind," Gus assured her.

  "Oh, Corporal Call--where is he, by the way?" Clara asked.

  "He ain't a corporal, I told you that," Gus said. He found her use of the term very irritating; that she felt the need to refer to Call at all was more than a little annoying.

  "Nonetheless I intend to call him Corporal Call, and it's not one bit of your business what I call him," Clara said pertly. "I'm free to choose names for my admirers, I suppose." Gus was so annoyed that he didn't know what to say. He sulked for a bit, thinking that if Call were there, he'd give him a punching, sore ankle or no sore ankle.

  "Well, good-bye, Mr. McCrae," Clara said. "I hope your ankle improves.

  If you're still in camp tomorrow, I'll come back and give it another treatment. I don't want a crippled assistant, not with all the unpacking there is to do." To his surprise, she reached down and gave him a handshake--her fingers smelled of the liniment she had just rubbed on him.

  "We're supposed to pull out tomorrow--I hope we don't, though," Gus said.

  "You know where the store is," Clara said. "I certainly expect a visit, before you depart." She started to leave, and then turned and looked at him again.

  "Give my respects to Corporal Call," she said. "It's a pity he's not more of a fool." "If he's a corporal, I ought to be a corporal too," Gus said, bitterly annoyed by the girl's manner.

  "Corporal McCrae--no, that don't sound right," Clara said. "Corporal Call--somehow that has a solid ring." Then, with a wave, she walked off.

  When Call came back to camp in the evening, sweaty from having loaded ammunition all day, he found Gus drunk and boiling. He was so mad his face turned red, and a big vein popped out on his nose.

  "She calls you a corporal, you rascal!" Gus said in a furious voice. "I told you to stay clear of that store--if you don't, when I get well, I'll give you a whipping you'll never forget." Call was taken completely by surprise, and Long Bill, Rip Green, and a new recruit named Jimmy Tweed, a tall boy from Arkansas, were all startled by Gus's belligerence. Jimmy Tweed had not yet met Gus, and was shocked to find him so quarrelsome.

  Call didn't know what reply to make, and so said nothing. He had known that sometimes people took fevers and went out of their heads; he supposed that was what was the matter with Gus. He walked closer, to see if his friend was delirious, and was rewarded for his concern with a hard kick in the shin. Gus, though in a prone position, had still managed to get off the kick.

  "Why, he's unruly, ain't he?" Jimmy Tweed said. "I expect if he wasn't crippled we'd have to chain him down." "I don't know you, stay out of it!" Gus warned. "I'd do worse than kick him, if I could." "I expect it's fever," Call said, at a loss to explain Gus's behaviour any other way.

  Before the dispute could proceed any further, Bigfoot came loping up on a big grey horse he had just procured.

  "Buffalo Hump struck a farm off toward Bastrop," he said. "An old man got away and spread the news. We're getting up a troop, to go after the Indians. You're all invited, except Gus and Johnny. Hurry up. We need to ride while the trail's fresh." "Why ain't I invited?" Johnny Carthage asked. He had just limped into camp.

  "Because you got to do the packing," Bigfoot said.

  "The expedition's leaving early. I doubt we'll be back. You got to get all this gear together and pack Gus into a cart or a wagon or something.

  We'll meet you on the t
rail--if we survive." "This is a passel of stuff for one fellow to pack," Johnny observed bleakly. "Gus won't be no help, either--he's poorly." "Not poorly enough--he just kicked my leg half off," Call said. The more he thought about the incident, the more aggrieved he felt. All he had done all day was load ammunition--why did he have to be kicked because of some joke a girl made?

  Shadrach came trotting up, his long rifle across his saddle. He didn't say anything, but it was clear that he was impatient.

  "Let's go, boys--Buffalo Hump will be halfway to the Brazos by now," Bigfoot said.

  Call had been assigned a new mount that day.

  As yet he had barely touched him, but in a minute he was in the saddle. The little horse, a bay, jumped straight up, nearly throwing him; after that one jump, he didn't buck again. Call only had time to grab his rifle and ammunition pouch. Shadrach had already left. Long Bill, Rip Green, and Jimmy Tweed were scrambling to get mounted. Bigfoot was the only calm man in camp. He reached down without dismounting and grabbed a piece of bacon someone had brought in, stuffing it quickly into his saddlebag.