Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  Pure bluster, but I liked the notion of my brother taken in by the countryside. “I hear he’s being hid by the cattlemen.”

  “That’s bullshit,” the major said. “It’s the reds. Round about May, my scouts put him up the canyon from us. They was all there and we had the jump. Closest we ever come. The boys was bouncing with it. We all thought it was ours. As we slipped into position up comes a whistle like an elk bugling, ’cept its spring and I ain’t never heard a bugle outside autumn. It was his squaws, had to be. It was their warning. We busted on ’em then and come up the canyon red hot and there’s their fires still burning and even some half-eaten chow in the dirt. But where’s them? We had that canyon tied down. No way out.”

  The major didn’t go on. “What happened then?” I asked.

  He spat.

  Drum asked, “What happened, Billy?”

  He pulled from his bottle. He muttered the next part. “They circled back on us. Burnt the supplies.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. My old brother, the trickster.

  The major shoved me and I fell into the darkness. It was Drum who stopped the little man from kicking on me. “I don’t rightly care if he’s good with a pistol or not. Who this tenderfoot think he is?”

  I climbed from the dirt and found my bottle.

  “I quit the Governor once,” Tuss said out of the blue, like all the while we was talking about quitting. “Course he was the colonel then. Wasn’t two years later I was back at his door. You miss the work. You might hate it sometimes, but watch, you walk away and you’ll come crawling back.”

  “What’d you do when you quit?” Greenie asked.

  “Rented a fertile spread from Boss. Found myself a Methodist gal and got to thinking we’d start us a little family. She could cook, no doubt. Give me two boys in two years.”

  “Where’s your family now?” I pulled from my bottle.

  Tuss shrugged. “When you’s here you want to be somewheres else. But if you’s somewheres else you want to be here. Try settling down, just try it. Boring as watching snow melt. I saw it through to the youngest was born and then that was all for me.”

  The major spat. “Some men is farmers, some ain’t. No use pretending to be something you ain’t.”

  “So what is we then?” Greenie asked. “If we ain’t farmers?”

  “Braves,” the major answered. “Every color got ’em. We’s the lucky ones. You imagine sprouting beans for living?”

  * * *

  —

  We stayed drinking that night. Tuss put us to poker so he could take our monies, and he did too. Tuss was all the time making my winnings his. When we couldn’t see the cards straight no more we took to singing at the moon. The boys pulled out their trunks and pissed on the dirt.

  I was so sauced by then that I pulled down my britches just like the men done and pretended to hold my thing and let loose. I will admit it got messy before it went straight. But I saw that a girl could make it go if she held herself just right and believed long enough.

  We pulled up our britches and belched and Tuss’s tobacco pouch made the rounds. It done fell from his pocket when we stood from the card table and Drum had snagged it before Tuss noticed. Now Tuss was the last to receive it. “Thanks, fellers. Mighty kind to share your pouch. Wait a fool . . . That’s my damn ’baccy pouch!”

  Greenie fell down laughing. Drum leaned on me for support. We both tumbled over.

  Tuss was the one who saw the saturation of my pants and pointed. The lantern light was brought to bear and all the boys balanced themselves for a proper gander at my wet pants.

  The major belted, “Somebody better teach this snapper to shoot!”

  This was what got them howling so loud Charles was sent to shut us up.

  * * *

  —

  I was laying on my bed too dizzy with drink to sleep when Greenie come in and kicked off his boots. But instead of his bed he fell into mine, right on top of me though he caught his own weight.

  A bead of his sweat hit me between the eyes. Our noses was touching. All at once the liquor was gone from me and I felt clean sober. There wasn’t no missing his hardness.

  How many moments was we locked together? For all of them I took in his breaths and he took in mine. All I had to do was welcome him. He was waiting on me to welcome him. But I just lay there unmoving.

  I had come to love Greenie in that manner of young, lonesome men who see in the eyes of another no judgment. But no man ever moved me toward lust, even this one whose mood I knew by nothing more than the force of his spat.

  Soon enough he pushed off me and moved onto his own bed. He rolled to the wall and was silent.

  Greenie’s voice come in flat and low. “You gonna tell?” His back was still to me.

  “About what?”

  “Promise you won’t say.”

  “I swear to you.”

  “I ain’t a fish,” he said.

  “Don’t matter to me if you is.”

  “I just really thought you was part of this.” His voice was shaking. “Don’t be queer about it or nothing, I beg you. Let’s just go on as we was. I’m just drunk is all, can’t hardly see straight. Just fell on the wrong bed is all. Thought I saw Miss Aberdeen.”

  I laid there seeing everything between me and Greenie with new eyes. The only man I knew better was my brother. To tell it straight, Greenie was my first friend in this life.

  The longer I thought it over, the more I dwelled on that terrible story Greenie had told of his friend Bern who died in the snow with his parts cut free. Greenie was the other man with Bern that night, I was sure of it now. My blood quickened at the thought. How could Bern have been killed like that and not Greenie?

  All Greenie had to do was tell Drum it was me who’d made the move. I was the fish. The first one to tell would be the one trusted.

  Looking back, I’m sure he considered hanging me to dry. Greenie feared one thing worse than death and that was being cast out of the crew. And so he must’ve weighed his belief in me, in my loyalty to him.

  No other way but he come to decide he could safekeep his trust in me, in Jesse Straight.

  * * *

  —

  Even all these years on, I lift Greenie from those events and keep him near. I see anew his sidelong smile, that familiar glance over his shoulder before slipping me a daytime bottle. Despite what come to pass between us, I worry for him still.

  What would Greenie have done had I come clean to him that night? I like to think he would have considered picking me, over them.

  This life is cut with trails unrode. There was a time I resented that fact, the cruelty of being stuck to only one. But age like I got teaches you to be grateful for those trails untook. The old mind can wander their lengths and see what the eyes was never allowed, what the eyes would have missed. I’ve had time to wander those trails that interest me.

  I only hope Greenie was so lucky.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the next night in fine detail. Ain’t no forgetting it. I was down with Drum and Tuss eating in the kitchen. They was arguing about the proper design of horseshoes. Never mind neither of them shod a horse in all their lives. Greenie was in his room, and that’s where my eyes was, on the shut door.

  Then Charles appeared beside the table. “Master desires your presence.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Tuss, his mouth full of food. “The kid done and did it this time!”

  Drummond didn’t say a word. He didn’t blink. His stare sent goose pimples down my arms.

  I was delivered to the Governor’s office, which was lit now with lanterns on account of the darkness. The room was empty. I stood in the middle. “Do I wait?”

  Charles was in the doorway. “Stand with your hands at your sides.”

  “Am I in some manner of trouble?”
>
  He was an unwavering man, that Charles. All summer I’d been in his proximity and never once had I seen any side of him he didn’t want me to see. “Sir,” Charles said down the hallway. “Straight waits as you requested.”

  The Governor entered and behind him come a man dressed in a black duster. This man wore a leather patch over his right eye and his head was clean shaven. He wore no hat. His ears had long ago been cut down their middles. The top half of one curled forward.

  The Governor poured brandies and offered me a glass. I took it. Still the new man stared on me. He was taller even than the Governor.

  “Please, let us sit,” the Governor said.

  “Is there anything else, sir?” Charles asked.

  “No, that is all. Thank you, Charles.”

  Charles bowed and shut the door without a sound.

  I took a seat after the Governor. The new man sat last. I sipped my drink. I was the only one.

  “Straight, I’d like you to meet my agent, Mr. Thorvald. Mr. Thorvald is just returned from Harney’s home county. He carries a few questions for you. I have communicated to him that you knew Harney as a boy.”

  The bald man placed his drink upon the table. Now his eye turned from me to a pocket inside his duster.

  I remembered to breathe.

  The Governor was studying me. He hadn’t studied me since the evening of our first dinner.

  The bald man had a notebook in his hand and a pencil. He touched the lead to his tongue and tapped it to his book. He spoke with a heavy accent I did not recognize other than to know it was of the Old World. “Harney, he make few friends. And yet here is you.”

  “We ain’t friends.”

  “No? What be you then?”

  “I knew him. That’s all. What’s this about?”

  “So, you have been to his family land?”

  “Yes.”

  “Describe it for me, please.”

  “Like what it look like?”

  “That is correct.”

  I looked to the Governor. He nodded.

  “Well, there’s a lake northwest of the house. A barn with two stables off to the south. Sod roof. A small place. Like they all was in the time of its building. It has been some years since I was near it but that’s my memory.”

  “And inside?”

  “Like inside the house? I don’t remember. A fireplace. Two beds. It’s a house, what do you mean?”

  “Who lived in the house?”

  “There was Harney and his pa.”

  “Is that all?” His eye expected something. I understood he knew of the sister.

  “There was a girl too.”

  “How old?”

  “It’s been some time. But I’d reckon she would be round about seventeen.”

  The Governor said, “Describe her.”

  “She was not much to look at, I remember that. I didn’t never spend time at their place. Harney come over to our spread.”

  “Where was your spread? Precisely,” Agent Thorvald asked.

  “Across the valley. Beyond the Mormons. That sister was ugly as sin, I remember that. Flat chested and raggy hair and strong where God don’t want girls strong.”

  “There is a big house on the edge of town, white and wide. Is that the one?”

  “No, not the Thurston place. It is a touch farther. The earthen one along the river. Our acres went up the draw there.” I had described the place the Landcaster widow lived.

  “How far was that from Harney?”

  “Ten miles, on abouts.”

  “So Harney would leave his residence and all the work there and ride to your residence, as you say, and work for your father? Why would he do this?”

  “My pa had money to pay for a time. Not many did in that county. Not many do.”

  “He would ride past the Mormon? The Mormon has much. The Mormon hired eight hands this summer.”

  “All of them Mormon. Them Mormons keep to themselves. They like Chinamen that way.”

  “It’s true,” the Governor said. “And we’re better for it, if you ask me. When did you last see the sister?”

  I took a moment to consider. “Two years back? I don’t rightly remember.”

  “Your age is twenty?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Or is it twenty-one?” the Governor asked.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Twenty-one.”

  “And you lived in a place such as that one and you don’t give attention to a girl who lives only few miles away?”

  The Governor’s eyes did not waver. His drink waited in his hand.

  “Ugly as dust, like I said. Besides I had me a girl,” I shot on the fly. “Her name was Kathleen. Harney done took her plum.”

  “Ah,” the Governor said. He was set at ease by my answer. “Of course. Because paternal loyalty will only drive a man so far. But coital rights, well, they will drive a man to carnage.”

  “Kathleen . . .” Agent Thorvald was writing. He looked up. “Her family name?”

  “Richmond.”

  “Richmond? I do not remember such a name in the county records.”

  I didn’t answer. I thought it queer that a man would think he could remember every name in a county listing. I saw the warning within the statement. Agent Thorvald was trying to bait me. I held my tongue.

  The Governor smelled his liquor. He gave in to the silence first. “I have a great interest in this sister. See, Straight, she has been missing since this spring. We came looking for her only to find her disappeared. The Mormon . . . What was his name?”

  “Saggat,” the agent and I said at once.

  “This Saggat believes she may have joined her brother.”

  “If she could find Harney.”

  The Governor sat back in his chair. He sipped his drink. He looked into the marble eyes of the great stag.

  I considered why they might want the sister. “You can ransom her to Harney. Lure him out.”

  The Governor glanced at Agent Thorvald. “It will come as confirmation and no surprise that Harney’s father was a traitor and coward. Tell him, Thorvald. You’ll love this, Straight. It has kept me cloud bound all afternoon.”

  Agent Thorvald looked up from his notes. “The elder deserted in sixty-three. Harney was name of his major. His true name was Rowhine.”

  My breath slipped.

  “He took the name and papers of the dead major to avoid leaving a trail west. It was a common act of cowardice,” the Governor added.

  “This ain’t true,” I said at once. My hand could no longer hold the liquor still. I took it down and said, “I don’t buy it. It don’t add up.”

  Agent Thorvald studied my face.

  “It is true,” the Governor said. “Rowhine was a coward and he fled his duties and so naturally raised a son with a lack of—”

  “No,” I said, despite an understanding I should remain silent. “People can’t just . . . Harney’s pa was a sharpshooter, no doubt. I watched him shoot.”

  “Rowhine was a sharpshooter, before he turned yellow.”

  My glass clanked on the table. I was dizzy. I was remembering the word burned into the bay of Pa’s fiddle. I had believed it the name of the fiddle’s maker, not its owner. Rowhine.

  “You look sick,” Agent Thorvald said. I saw only suspicion in his eye.

  “Maybe the girl will return home,” I said.

  “She will find only ash.” Agent Thorvald tapped his pencil to his tongue.

  “Ash.”

  “We burned the structures, of course.”

  I laughed because it was all I could do. I slapped my knee and I said, “Burned them to the ground! Ain’t that something.”

  I was the only one laughing.

  “There is another matter,” Agent Thorvald said. He flipped to a f
resh page in his notebook. He extended his enormous arm across the table and placed the notebook in my lap. In his fingers was the pencil. “Write your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Yes.” Agent Thorvald passed his tongue over his bottom lip. “There is no Straight in the county register.”

  The Governor looked to the notebook in my lap. “No games now. I’m asking for your true name.”

  “The senator dubbed me ‘Straight.’ I thought you knew, sir.”

  “So write the name then. As you sign it to documents of county interest. Agent Thorvald has implored us to be fastidious.”

  “Of course.” I took up the pencil. I adjusted my grip. I signed my name “Jesse Landcaster.” It was a poor choice as Mrs. Landcaster never had no offspring, but it was the best I could muster under their gaze.

  * * *

  —

  I took my tobacco pouch outside into the desert night. I leaned against the house and looked at the big, dark mountain that belonged to my employer. I had never called Pa by his real name.

  The Governor had been west for the whole war. He’d built his fortune while boys like my pa went off with their brothers to eat bullets and walk among ghosts and return if they returned at all broke and ill of mind. And now he was claiming my pa was a traitor and a coward for walking west from that fight that wasn’t his.

  Had Ma known Pa’s truth? Or had she died before he come clean?

  Why was that question troubling me so?

  I walked into the chilled desert air. My mind was on the top of that mountain.

  No mountain could ever wear a man’s name. A mountain rose above the plane of names and lifted the winds and with them the ravens and smoke and sent them over the earth. Only a map could wear a man’s name. And what was a map to someone who had walked the flanks of a mountain for all her life and knew its every crag and spring?

  * * *