High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “The whole command?”

  “To the man. U.S. Cavalry and Samurai alike.”

  “My God!”

  “Terrible. But I think it’s the last rise for the red man, and not to sound ghoulish, friend, but I believe this will further cement Japanese and American relationships. A good thing, considering a number of miners in Cherrywood, both white and yellow have found gold. In a case like that, it’s good to have a common enemy.”

  “I didn’t know that either.”

  “Soon the whole continent will know, and there will be a scrambling to Cherrywood the likes you’ve never seen.”

  Hickok rubbed his eyes. Blast the things. His sight was good in the dark or in shadowed areas, but direct sunlight stabbed them like needles.

  At the moment Hickok uncovered his eyes and glanced toward the shadowed comfort of the aisle, a slightly overweight woman came down it tugging on the ear of a little boy in short pants. “John Luther Jones,” she said, “I’ve told you time and again to leave the Engineer alone. Not to ask so many questions.” She pulled the boy on.

  Cody looked at Hickok, said softly: “I’ve never seen a little boy that loves trains as much as that one. He’s always trying to go up front and his mother is on him all the time. She must have whipped his little butt three times yesterday. Actually, I don’t think the Engineer minds the boy.”

  Hickok started to smile, but his attention was drawn to an attractive woman who was following not far behind mother and son. In Dime Novels she would have been classified “a vision.” Health lived on her heart-shaped face as surely as ill-content lived on that of his wife. Her hair was wheat-ripe yellow and her eyes were as green as the leaves of a spring-fresh tree. She was sleek in blue and white calico with a thick, black Japanese cloth belt gathered about her slim waist. All the joy of the world was in her motion, and Hickok did not want to look at her and compare her to his wife, but he did not want to lose sight of her either, and it was with near embarrassment that he turned his head and watched her pass until the joyful swing of her hips waved him goodbye, passing out of sight into the next car of the train.

  When Hickok settled back in his seat, feeling somewhat warm under the collar, he noted that Cody was smiling at him.

  “Kind of catches the eye, does she not?” Cody said. “My wife, Louisa, noticed me noticing the young thing yesterday, and she has since developed the irritating habit of waving her new Japanese fan in front of my face ‘accidentally’ when she passes.”

  “You’ve seen her a lot?”

  “Believe she has a sleeping car above the next parlor car. I think about that sleeping car a bunch. Every man on this train that’s seen her, probably thinks about that sleeping car a bunch.”

  “Probably so.”

  “You single?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, something of a pain sometimes, is it not? Well, friend, must get back to the wife, least she think I’m chasing the sweet, young thing. And if the Old Woman were not on this trip, I just might be.”

  Cody got up, and with a handshake and a politician wave, strode up the aisle and was gone.

  Hickok turned to look out the window again, squinting somewhat to comfort his eyes. He actually saw little. His vision was turned inward. He thought about the girl. He had been more than a bit infatuated with her looks. For the first time in his life, infidelity truly crossed his mind.

  Not since he had married Mary Jane and become a clerk, had he actually thought of trespassing on their marriage agreement. But as of late the mere sight of her was like a wound with salt in it.

  After rolling and smoking another cigarette, Hickok rose and walked back toward his sleeping car, imagining that it was not his pinch-faced wife he was returning to, but the blonde girl and her sexual heaven. He imagined that she was a young girl on her first solo outing. Going out West to meet the man of her dreams. Probably had a father who worked as a military officer at the fort outside of Cherrywood, and now that Japanese and American relations had solidified considerably, she had been called to join him. Perhaps the woman with the child was her mother and the boy her brother.

  He carried on this pretty fantasy until he reached the sleeping car and found his cabin. When he went inside, he found that Mary Jane was still sleeping.

  She lay tossed out on the bunk with her arm thrown across her eyes. Her sour, puckering lips had not lost their bitterness. They projected upwards like the mouth of an active volcano about to spew. She had taken off her clothes and laid them neatly over the back of a chair, and her somewhat angular body was visible because the sheet she had pulled over herself had fallen half off and lay draped only over her right leg and the edge of the bunk. Hickok noted that the glass decanter of whiskey on the little table was less than half full. As of this morning only a drink or two had been missing. She had taken more than enough to fall comfortably back to sleep again, another habit of near recent vintage.

  He let his eyes roam over her, looking for something that would stir old feelings—not sexual but loving. Her dark hair curled around her neck. Her shoulders, sharp as Army sabres, were her next most obvious feature. The light through the windows made the little freckles on her alabaster skin look like some sort of pox.

  The waist and hips that used to excite him still looked wasp-thin, but the sensuality and lividness of her flesh had disappeared. She was just thin from not eating enough. Whiskey was now often her breakfast, lunch and supper.

  A tinge of sadness crept into Hickok as he looked at this angry, alcoholic lady with a life and a husband that had not lived up to her romantic and wealthy dreams. In the last two years she had lost her hope and her heart, and the bottle had become her lifeblood. Her faith in him had died, along with the little-girl look in her once-bright eyes.

  Well, he had had his dreams too. Some of them a bit wild perhaps, but they had dreamed him through the dullness of a Kansas clerkery that had paid the dues of the flesh but not of the mind.

  Pouring himself a shot from the decanter, he sat on the wall bench and looked at his wife some more. When he got tired of that, he put his hand on the bench, but found a book instead of wood. He picked it up and looked at it. It was titled: Down the Whiskey River Blue, by Edward Zane Carroll Judson.

  Hickok placed his drink beside him and thumbed through the book. It did not do much for him. As were all of Judson’s novels, it was a sensitive and overly poetic portrayal of life in our times.

  It was in a word, boring. Or perhaps he did not like it because his wife liked it so much. Or because she made certain that he knew the Dime Novels he read by Sam Clemens and the verse by Walt Whitman were trash and doggerel. She was the sensitive one, she said. She stuck to Judson and poets like John Wallace Crawford and Cincinnatus Hiner.

  Well, she could have them.

  Hickok put the book down and glanced at his wife. This trip had not worked out. They had designed it to remold what had been lost, but no effort had been expended on her part that he could see. He tried to feel guilty, conclude that he too had not pushed the matter, but that simply was not true. She had turned him into bad company with her sourness. When they had started out he had mined for their old love like a frantic prospector looking for color in a vein he knew was long mined out.

  Finishing his drink, and placing the book behind his head for a pillow, Hickok threw his feet up on the long bench and stretched out, long-fingered hands meshed over his eyes. He found the weight of his discontent was more able than Morpheus to bring sleep.

  · · ·

  When he awoke, it was because his wife was running a finger along the edge of his cheek, tracing his jawbone with it. He looked up into her smiling face, and for a moment he thought he had dreamed all the bad times and that things were fine and as they should be; imagined that time had not put a weight on their marriage and that it was shortly after their wedding when they were very much on fire with each other. But the rumble of the train assured him that this was not the case, and that time had indeed passed. The momen
t of their marriage was far behind.

  Mary Jane smiled at him, and for a moment the smile held all of her lost hopes and dreams. He smiled back at her. At that moment he wished deeply that they had had children. But it had never worked. One of them had a flaw and no children came from their couplings.

  She bent to kiss him and it was a warm kiss that tingled him all over. In that moment he wanted nothing but their marriage and for it to be good. He even forgot the young girl he had seen while talking to Cody.

  They did not make love, though he hoped they would. But she kissed him deeply several times and said that after bath and dinner they would go to bed. It would be like old times. When they often performed the ceremony of pleasure.

  · · ·

  After the Cherokee porter had filled their tub with water, and after she had bathed and he had bathed in the dregs of her bath and they had toweled themselves dry, they laughed while they dressed. He kissed her and she kissed him back, their bodies pushed together in familiar ritual, but the ritual was not consummated. Mary Jane would have nothing of that. “After dinner,” she said. “Like old times.”

  “Like old times,” he said.

  Arm in arm they went to the dining car, dressed to the hilt and smiling. They paid their dollar and were conducted to their table where they were offered a drink to begin the meal. As if to suggest hope for later, he denied one, but Mary Jane did not follow his lead. She had one, then another.

  When she was on her third drink and dinner was in the process of being served, the blonde girl with the sunshine smile came in and sat not three tables down from them. She sat with the matronly woman and the little boy who loved trains. He found he could not take his eyes off the young lovely.

  “Are you thinking about something?” Mary Jane asked.

  “No, not really. Mind was wandering,” he said. He smiled at her and saw that her eyes were a trifle shiny with drunkenness.

  They ate in near silence and Mary Jane drank two more whiskies.

  · · ·

  When they went back to the cabin, she was leaning on him and his heart had fallen. He knew the signs.

  They went into their cabin and he hoped she was not as far along in drunkenness as he thought. She kissed him and made movements against his body with hers. He felt desire.

  She went to the bed and undressed, and he undressed by the bench seat and placed his clothes there. He turned down the lamp and climbed into bed with her.

  She had fallen asleep. Her breath came out in alcoholic snores. There would be no love-making tonight.

  He lay there for a while and thought of nothing. Then he got up, dressed, went into the cars to look for some diversion, a poker game perhaps.

  · · ·

  No poker game to be found and no face offered any friendly summons to him. He found a place to sit in the parlor car where the overhead lamp was turned down and there was no one sitting nearby. He got out the makings, rolled himself a smoke, and was putting a lucifer to it when Cody fell into the seat across from him. Cody had his pipe like before. “You’d think I’d have found some lucifers of my own by now, wouldn’t you?”

  Hickok thought just that, but he offered his still burning light to Cody. Cody bent forward and puffed flame into his packed pipe. When it was lit he sat back and said, “I thought you had turned in early. I saw you leave the dining car.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “You were not looking in my direction. I was nearby.”

  Hickok understood what Cody was implying, but he did not acknowledge. He smoked his cigarette furiously.

  “She is quite lovely,” Cody said.

  “I guess I made a fool out of myself looking at her. She is half my age.”

  “I meant your wife, but yes, the girl is a beauty. And she has a way with her eyes, don’t you think?”

  Hickok grunted agreement. He felt like a school boy who had been caught looking up the teacher’s dress.

  “I was looking too,” Cody said cheerfully. “You see, I don’t care for my wife much. You?”

  “I want to, but she is not making it easy. We’re like two trains on different tracks. We pass close enough to wave, but never close enough to touch.”

  “My God, friend, but you are a poet.”

  “I didn’t mean to be.”

  “Well, mean to. I could use a bit of color and poetry in my life.”

  “An ambassador is more colorful than a clerk.”

  “An ambassador is little more than a clerk who travels. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I just don’t feel tailored to it.”

  “Then we are both cut from the wrong cloth, Cody.”

  Hickok finished his cigarette and looked out into the night. The shapes of the cherry trees flew by, looked like multi-armed men waving gentle goodbyes.

  “It seems I have done nothing with my life,” Hickok said after while, and he did not look at Cody when he said it. He continued to watch the night and the trees. “Today when you told me about Custer and Yoshii, I did not feel sadness. Surprise, but not sadness. Now I know why. I envy them. Not their death, but their glory. A hundred years from now, probably more, they will be remembered. I will be forgotten a month after my passing-if it takes that long.”

  Cody reached over and opened a window. The wind felt cool and comfortable. He tapped his pipe on the outside of the train. Sparks flew from it and blew down the length of the cars like fireflies in a blizzard. Cody left the window open, returned his pipe to his pocket.

  “You know,” Cody said, “I wanted to go out West during the Japanese Wars: the time the Japanese were trying to push down into Colorado on account of the gold we’d found there, and on account of we’d taken the place away from them back when it was part of New Japan. I was young then and I should have gone. I wanted to be a soldier. I might have been a great scout, or a buffalo hunter had my life gone different then.”

  “Do you sometimes wonder that your dreams are your real life, Cody? That if you hope for them enough they become solid? Maybe our dreams are our trains not taken.”

  “Come again.”

  “Our possible futures. The things we might have done had we just edged our lives another way.”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it actually, but I like the sound of it.”

  “Will you laugh if I tell you my dream?”

  “How could I? I’ve just told you mine.”

  “I dream that I’m a gunman-and with these light-sensitive eyes that’s a joke. But that’s what I am. One of those long-haired shootists like in the Dime Novels, or that real life fellow Wild Jack McCall. I even dream of lying face down on a card table, my pistol career ended by some skulking knave who didn’t have the guts to face me and so shot me from behind. It’s a good dream, even with the death, because I am remembered, like those soldiers who died at the Little Big Horn. It’s such a strong dream I like to believe that it is actually happening somewhere, and that I am that man that I would rather be.”

  “I think I understand you, friend. I even envy Morse and these damn trains; him and his telegraph and ‘pulsating energy.’ Those discoveries will make him live forever. Every time a message is flashed across the country or a train bullets along on the crackling power of its fire line, it’s like thousands of people crying his name.”

  “Sometimes—a lot of the time—I just wish that for once I could live a dream.”

  They sat in silence. The night and the shadowed limbs of the cherry trees fled by, occasionally mixed with the staggered light of the moon and the stars.

  Finally Cody said, “To bed. Cherrywood is an early stop.” He opened his pocket watch and looked at it. “Less than four hours. The wife will awake and call out the Cavalry if I’m not there.”

  As Cody stood, Hickok said, “I have something for you.” He handed Cody a handful of lucifers.

  Cody smiled. “Next time we meet, friend, perhaps I will have my own.” As he stepped into the aisle he said, “I’ve enjoyed our little talk.”

  “So
have I,” Hickok said. “I don’t feel any happier, but I feel less lonesome.”

  “Maybe that’s the best we can do.”

  Hickok went back to his cabin but did not try to be overly quiet. There was no need. Mary Jane, when drunk, slept like an anvil.

  He slipped out of his clothes and crawled into bed. Lay there feeling the warmth of his wife’s shoulder and hip; smelling the alcoholic aroma of her breath. He could remember a time when they could not crawl into bed together without touching and expressing their love. Now he did not want to touch her and he did not want to be touched by her. He could not remember the last time she had bothered to tell him she loved him, and he could not remember the last time he had said it and it was not partly a lie.

  Earlier, before dinner, the old good times had been recalled and for a few moments he adored her. Now he lay beside her feeling anger. Anger because she would not try. Or could not try. Anger because he was always the one to try, the one to apologize, even when he felt he was not wrong. Trains on a different track going opposite directions, passing fast in the night, going nowhere really. That was them.

  Closing his eyes, he fell asleep instantly and dreamed of the blonde lovely in blue and white calico with a thick black Japanese belt. He dreamed of her without the calico, lying here beside him whiteskinned and soft and passionate and all the things his wife was not.

  And when the dream ended, so did his sleep. He got up and dressed and went out to the parlor car. It was empty and dark. He sat and smoked a cigarette. When that was through he opened a window, felt and smelled the wind. It was a fine night. A lover’s night.

  Then he sensed the train was slowing. Cherrywood already?

  No, it was still too early for that. What gave here?

  In the car down from the one in which he sat, a lamp was suddenly lit, and there appeared beside it the chiseled face of the Cherokee porter. Behind him, bags against their legs, were three people: the matronly lady, the boy who loved trains and the beautiful blonde woman.

  The train continued to slow. Stopped.

  By God, he thought, they are getting off.