Moving On (28 page)

They descended the pass, went through Raton, and spent the day riding across the long rolling plain that extends from the foot of the Rockies almost to the Brazos River. Patsy finished Gibbon as they were going through Dalhart, Texas. She had been saving part of Volume III for just such a plain. Jim was very impressed. He had always meant to read long books himself, but except for
Middlemarch
he had never read any. He had been forced to read
Middlemarch
but had liked it well enough that he convinced himself he would have read it even without being forced.

“Well, that’s that,” Patsy said, yawning and looking out at Dalhart with quiet amazement. It amazed her to come upon towns in unlikely places. “Could we make a rest-room stop, please?”

“We just made one in Clayton.”

“I know.” She looked at the Gibbon affectionately and pitched it in the box of books. The box of books had long since overflowed onto the rear floorboards. “I think I’m getting a bladder infection.”

“Obsession, I’d say.”

“Anyway, I feel like peeing.”

There was an old paintless grocery store across the street from the filling station where they stopped. It had a Nehi Orange sign on one wall and Jim went over and took a picture of it.

“Vanishing Americana,” he said, returning to the car. “Have you?”

“Hum?” She settled against her pillow for a nap. Dust was blowing across the street, and the cars in the filling station were all dusty.

“Have you got a bladder infection?”

“Possibly. Drive on, please. I don’t like to be stopped in dusty places.”

“Remember that time you peed in the supermarket?”

“That was excusable. My doctor said all newlyweds do that.”

“Newlyweds? We weren’t even married.”

“We were newly sinful. Can’t you think of anything to talk about except my little urinary lapses?”

“What are you going to read now that you’ve finished Gibbon?”

“Magazines,” she said.

“Read another long book.”

“It would be strange, being Boots and Pete,” she said apropos of nothing.

In Childress they had a flat. While it was being fixed Patsy walked around the town. There was an ancient railroad hotel where, as she imagined it, old-timey salesmen with garters on their sleeves sat and drank whiskey at night. It was long after dark when they got to the ranch. They had called Roger from Childress, and when he heard the car cross the cattle guard he came out with a flashlight. He was standing by the back gate when they stopped. Patsy was asleep. Jim shook her awake and she collected her pillow and purse and got out. She almost bumped into Roger, dropped her pillow trying to hug him, picked it up, and wove toward the house without a word.

“Ain’t she woke up, all this time?” Roger asked. He shined his flashlight over the Ford, as if dubious that the vehicle they had left in could really have brought them back. The crickets were singing and the windmill creaked in the darkness above their heads. Jim could faintly see the white shapes of chickens roosting on the fence of the chicken yard.

A hailstorm had been prophesied, so Roger said, and at his suggestion Jim took the Ford and parked it in the hallway of the barn. The night was breezy. Roger was waiting for him in the kitchen, as brown, as thin, and as quiet as when they left.

Jim drank some milk and chatted with him for a few minutes. When he got upstairs he found that Patsy had flopped down on top of the bedclothes fully dressed. His calves were stiff and sore, but otherwise he felt almost fresh. Assuming that Patsy was sound asleep, he began to remove her clothes. He went about it deftly, but she was not really asleep. When he unzipped her shorts and yanked them down her legs she sat up.

“Are you a rapist?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“I was going to ask you to turn me on my back if you were,” she said, giggling a little. She felt lightheaded and strangely giggly. “I won’t be had irregularly,” she added. Jim scratched her leg with his fingernail getting the shorts off, and she kicked at him angrily.

“Sit up and take your blouse off,” he said. “Where are the toothbrushes, since you’re awake?”

“Don’t ask ordinary questions,” she said. “I prefer the fantasy that you’re a rapist. You’re such a timid one.”

She sat up and took one arm out of her blouse, then leaned on the arm and smiled at Jim sleepily. Gusts of wind were rattling the windowpanes.

“What about the toothbrushes?”

“I may have been masturbating with them,” she said, giggling. “It’s very hard to remember.” With a great effort she sat up, flung off her blouse and reached back to unhook her bra. Then she flopped on her stomach and went unwakably to sleep. Jim gargled a little salt water in lieu of brushing his teeth. He opened the window. The air smelled of rain. During the night the wind blew strands of Patsy’s hair against his cheek.”

Jim slept most of the next day and Patsy lay in bed with him, idling, reading through copies of a magazine called
The Cattleman
. Aside from the
Reader’s Digest
it was the only magazine in the house. She washed her hair and filed her nails and discovered that she did have a mild bladder infection. It was a very hot day—the wind had the breath of August. It blew in their window from the south and the sheets of their bed grew as hot as if they had come from a dryer at a laundrymat. Jim lay in sweat. Patsy hunted up a little electric fan and set it near the bed. It didn’t cool, but it made a kind of crosscurrent. Roger Wagonner was nowhere to be seen. When she tired of reading about ways in which brush could be combated and cattle made to gain more pounds per day she began
Love among the Cannibals
, which she had bought the evening before in a drugstore in Childress.

Later, well past the middle of the afternoon, Roger rattled up to the house in his old pickup, a brindle cow in the back end. He came into the house for a drink of water and Patsy went down to greet him, wearing a shift. His gray shirt was soaked with sweat.

He bent and kissed her on the cheek, his smell with him. Skin that was outdoors a lot seemed to smell different than skin that wasn’t.

“Kind of orange, ain’t it?” he said, meaning the shift. “I got a cow with a high fever. I thought you and Jim might want to ride in with me to take her to the vet.”

“Jim might. He just got up. I’ve ridden all I want to for a while.”

Jim did. He came down wearing Levi’s and a blue shirt and made a peanut butter sandwich to take with him. Patsy noticed that the peanut butter was exactly at the same level she had left it weeks before.

She walked outside with them and leaned on the back fence looking at the cow. It was an old thin cow, with a black spot around one eye and two darkened twisted horns that looked like they might have grown into spirals if they had not been blunted. From time to time she bawled loudly and made awkward attempts to turn around in the narrow pickup. A string of slobber hung from her chin and her eyes rolled wildly, as if they saw another place. The bed of the pickup was already slick with green droppings.

“Poor thing,” Patsy said. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Not sure,” Roger said. As he spoke the cow began to sway. Her front legs buckled and she sank forward onto her knees. Roger jumped to the cab, grabbed a long walking stick, and began to jab it roughly between the sides of the pickup, into the cow’s ribs.

“Here,” he said. “You can’t lie down. Get up there! Get on back on your feet!”

And he continued to jab at the cow with the walking stick, poking her just behind the legs and poking her hard. Patsy was horrified. He had always seemed so gentle. The cow grunted every time the stick poked her, and then she began to bawl. It was an awful sound. Finally, desperate to escape the stick, she got her back feet under her and rose and whirled toward the cab of the pickup, hanging one horn on a sideboard as she turned. The horn came loose and the cow slipped in her own drippings but managed to stay on her feet, her flanks quivering.

“Poor
thing,”
Patsy said, quivering herself. “Why do that to her?”

Roger removed his hat and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “A little rough,” he said, noticing that Patsy was distressed, “but if I’d let her stay down she would have died. As long as she’s up she’s got a chance.”

“But why can’t she die, if she’s dying?”

“Well, she’s got a calf to raise, and she might be savable. If she wants to die bad enough, she’ll die.” He got a rope and after much soothing talk, much hanging over the sideboards, he managed to get the rope around the cow’s horns. He tied her head as high as he could, so that her eyes were looking over the cab at the sky.

“Let’s go,” he said to Jim. “The sooner we get there the better.”

When they left, Patsy wandered through the house for a while. Most of the upstairs light bulbs were burnt out and she could find none to replace them with, but she decided that the faded floral wallpaper looked better in dimness. About sundown she made herself a jelly sandwich with some plum preserves that seemed homemade—perhaps a present from some neighbor’s wife—and had a glass of thin, slightly weedy milk. The milk seemed almost bluish. She went out and sat in an old glider on the front porch and swung herself gently and ate the sandwich as she watched the lovely late summer dusk descend. With the sun so low, the south breeze was more pleasant, though still warm as breath. Very soon after sundown a few clear stars appeared. The phone rang, a sound very different in the stillness than the sound of a city phone. Jim told her they would be late, perhaps another hour or so. She went back out and sat on the steps, and Bob, the old dog, lumpy and deferential, came and lay at her feet. He stared at her, his tongue hanging out from the heat. Occasionally he licked her hand.

The country was quiet in the early evening, so very quiet that Patsy found it scared her a little. It was like the too-quiet part of a Western movie, the part just before an ambush. As she watched the darkening range she managed to frighten herself with the absurd fantasy that she was a pioneer woman, her menfolks gone for some reason. She was absolutely alone in the vast still country, about to be leapt at by Indians bent on rape and pillage. She rubbed Bob’s head and tried to dismiss the fantasy but could not help thinking how scary it must have been for real pioneer women. She turned up the collar of her thin blouse. Who could be sure there wasn’t someone unfriendly around. Sonny Shanks, perhaps. It would be just like him to turn up at such a time. He might be lurking in the smokehouse, a little shack she had peeked in once. It was full of spider-webs and empty boxes—nothing had been smoked there for a very long time. At her feet, Bob had fallen asleep, obviously no very trustworthy watchdog.

Thinking of Shanks reminded her of Boots and Pete. She ought to have bought Boots a decent robe to go with the yellow gown. If she was going to hold hands with her husband she owed her at least that much. But the store had not had any good robes. Pete’s hand had been callused on the palm and had a rough scab on one finger. It seemed to her a pity he did not know how to talk, for if they could have talked, their vaguely sympathetic feeling for each other might have grown or shrunk or somehow taken shape. As it was, it had remained formless. It had been a kind of scent, and it seemed very unlikely she would ever smell that scent again. Her mind drifted and the breeze cooled as the upper sky darkened. Noises began: the whinnying of horses some distance away, a few crickets, the creak of the windmill.

She was relieved, when an hour had passed, to see car lights moving her way over the dirt road that ran to the house. It was the men, and her mood turned at once. It was so good to have men coming home. She hurried around the house, the dry short summer grass pricking at her bare feet. The windmill had been turning and water was sloshing out of the storage tank and dripping off the edges of the watershed with a cooling sound.

Patsy asked about the cow. “Lost cause,” Roger said. “We took her to the hide-and-rendering plant. Let’s eat something before we all starve.”

He got out some thin steaks and fried them as hard as he had fried the eggs. He fried some potatoes too while Patsy made iced tea. Jim and Roger ate the steaks and Patsy drank some iced tea and nibbled at a French fry. Roger looked at her with concern.

“Stop that,” she said. “I had a sandwich already. I’m supposed to be slim. Besides, this heat makes me sluggish as a reptile.”

“I killed a reptile today that wasn’t so sluggish,” he said. “Nine rattles.”

After the meal they went out and sat on the porch until almost ten enjoying the evening. Roger told them stories of his dead wife, Rosemary. He and Jim sat in rope-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall of the house, and Patsy sat on the lower step.

Chuckling, he told them about the Bible argument that had been their nightly staple for thirty-five years.

“We never could get together on salvation,” he said, “nor sin either. Six nights out of seven we’d get into it over one or the other. Thirty-five years that went on. After the first year or two I doubt we really listened to one another, but we got hot about it, listening or not. One night I got so mad I took off around the house and walked into a clothesline pole. Knocked myself flat. Mary thought it served me right.” He paused a minute to light a cigarette.

“The first time I ever really gave Mary’s side of the argument much thought was a night or two after her funeral. I was sitting out here all primed to argue and there wasn’t nobody to argue with. Since then I’ve been kinda making up her part. In a way it’s even better than having her here. I always win the argument and there ain’t no way she can get revenge on me at the breakfast table.

“I got to admit the quality of the biscuits has declined, though,” he added quietly.

He went on and told other stories, anecdotes about wounds and arguments, dances, frights, misunderstandings and exploding pressure cookers—selecting for them a kind of anthology of scenes from his decades of married life. After a while it seemed to Patsy that he was delivering an elegy, probably the only one he ever spoke. His voice was calm and quite firm, as if its tone had long ago been purified by whatever disappointment, loneliness, or grief he had felt in that place, on that high-roofed old porch, alone with the night breeze and the dark pastures round.