The Stories of Richard Bausch (40 page)

“Hey,” he said. “Come on.” He took hold of her elbow, was leading her back into the room, and she had an eerie, frightful moment of sensing that he considered himself to be in a kind of mastery over her. She resisted, pulled away from him. “Don’t touch me.”

“Hey,” he said not unkindly. “I said I was sorry.”

“You said those horrible things—”

He sat down on the bed and locked his hands between his knees. “Let’s start over, okay? This is supposed to be a honeymoon night.”

She stood there.

“We were having so much fun. Weren’t we? Weren’t we having fun?”

It was impossible to return his gaze. Impossible to look into those blue boy’s eyes.

“I got drunk, okay? I went too far.”

“I don’t feel good,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Want me to go for you?”

“No.” She was crying, holding it in, moving toward the bathroom door. The light in that little tiled space looked like refuge. He stood and moved in front of her, reaching to hold the door open. “Oh, hey,” he said. “I’ve got one.”

She halted, sniffled, felt the closeness of the room.

“Do you have to go really bad?”

“I just want to be alone for a while,” she said.

“You don’t have to go?”

“Howard, for God’s sake.”

“Well, no—but look. I’ve got one more. You’ve got to see it. It’s funny. Stay here.”

“I don’t want to play anymore,” she told him.

“Yeah, but wait’ll you see this one.”

“Oh, stop it,” she said, crying. “Please.”

“You’ll see,” he told her, turning his bright, happy expression away, moving into the bathroom ahead of her and hunching down, working himself up somehow.

“Oh, please,” she said, crying, watching him with his back turned there in the bright light of the bathroom.

“Wait, now,” he said. “Let me think a minute. I’ll have one in a minute.”
He wavered slightly and brought his hands up to his face. “It’ll be funny,” he said. “Don’t look. I’m thinking.”

“Just let’s go to sleep,” she told him.

“Let me concentrate,” he said. “Jesus. I promise you’ll like it and laugh.”

She waited, feeling a deeper and deeper sense of revulsion. It was the champagne, of course; she’d had so much of it and they were both drunk, and people said and did things when they’d had too much. She was trying to keep this clear in her mind, feeling the sickness start in her and watching him in his bent, agitated posture. He turned slightly and regarded her. “Don’t stare,” he said. “I can’t concentrate if you stare.”

“What are you doing?” she asked him. But she had barely spoken; the words had issued forth from her like a breath.

“I had it a minute ago,” he said, hunching his shoulders, shifting slightly, running his hands through his hair. Watching this, she had an unpleasant thought, which arrived almost idly in the boozy haze and irritation of the moment, but which quickly blossomed into a fright more profound than she could have dreamed—and which some part of her struggled with a deep shudder to blot out—that he looked like one of those scarily adept comedians on television, the ones who faced themselves away from the camera and gyrated a moment, then whirled around and were changed, had become the semblance of someone else, spoke in an accent or with a different voice, or had donned a mask or assumed a contorted facial expression, looking like anyone at all but themselves.

1950

Don’t let my age
or my clothes fool you. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve read all the books and tried all the counsels of the flesh, too. I’ve been up and I’ve been down and I’ve lived to see the story of my own coming of age in the Old West find its way into the general mind, if you will. In late middle age, for a while, I entertained on the vaudeville stage, telling that story. It’s easy to look past an old man now, I know. But in those days I was pretty good. The Old West was my subject. I had that one story I liked to tell, about Shane coming into our troubled mountain valley. You know the story. Well, I was the one, the witness. The little boy. I had come from there, from that big sky, those tremendous spaces, and I had seen it all. And yet the reason I could tell the story well enough to work in vaudeville with it was that I no longer quite believed it.

What I have to tell now is about that curious fact.

I’ve never revealed any of this before. Back then, I couldn’t have,
because it might’ve threatened my livelihood; and later I didn’t because—well, just because. But the fact is, he came back to the valley twelve, thirteen years later. Joe Starrett was dead of the cholera, and though Mother and I were still living on the place, there really wasn’t much to recommend it anymore. You couldn’t get corn or much of anything green to grow. That part of the world was indeed cattle country and for all the bravery of the homesteaders, people had begun to see this at last.

We’d buried Joe Starrett out behind the barn, and Mother didn’t want to leave him there, wouldn’t move to town. Town, by the way, hadn’t really changed, either: the center of it was still Grafton’s one all-purpose building—though, because it was the site of the big gunfight, it had somewhat of the aspect of a museum about it now, Grafton having left the bullet hole in the wall and marked out the stains of blood on the dusty floor. But it was still the center of activity, still served as the saloon and general store, and lately, on Sundays, it had even become a place of worship.

I should explain this last, since it figures pretty prominently in what happened that autumn I turned twenty-one: One day late in the previous winter a short, squat old bird who called himself the Right Reverend Bagley rode into the valley on the back of a donkey and within a week’s time was a regular sight on Sunday, preaching from the upstairs gallery of the saloon. What happened was, he walked into Grafton’s, ordered a whiskey and drank it down, then turned and looked at the place: five or six cowhands, the cattle baron’s old henchmen, and a whore that Grafton had brought back with him from the East that summer. (Nobody was really
with
anybody; it was early evening. The sun hadn’t dropped below the mountains yet.) Anyway, Bagley turned at the bar and looked everybody over, and then he announced in a friendly but firm tone that he considered himself a man of the gospel, and it was his opinion that this town was in high need of some serious saviorizing. I wasn’t there, but I understand that Grafton, from behind the bar, asked him what he meant, and that Bagley began to explain in terms that fairly mesmerized everyone in the place. (It is true that the whore went back East around this time, but nobody had the courage—or the meanness—to ask Grafton whether or not there was a connection.)

But as I was saying, the town wasn’t much, and it wasn’t going to
be
much. By now everybody had pretty well accepted this. We were going on with our lives, the children were growing up and leaving, and even some of
the older ones, the original homesteaders who had stood and risked themselves for all of it alongside Joe Starrett, who had withstood the pressure of the cattlemen, had found reasons to move on. It’s simple enough to say why: the winters were long and harsh; the ground, as I said, was stingy; there were better things beyond the valley (we had heard, for instance, that in San Francisco people were riding electric cars to the tops of buildings; Grafton claimed to have seen one in an exhibit in New York).

I was restless. It was just Mother and me in the cabin, and we weren’t getting along too well. She’d gone a little crazy with Joe Starrett’s death; she wasn’t even fifty yet, but she looked at least fifteen years older than that. In the evenings she wanted me with her, and I wanted to be at Grafton’s. Most of the men in the valley were spending their evenings there. We did a lot of heavy drinking back in those days. A lot of people stayed drunk most of the time during the week. Nobody felt very good in the mornings. And on Sundays we’d go aching and sick back to Grafton’s, the place of our sinful pastimes, to hear old Bagley preach. Mother, too. The smell of that place on a Sunday—the mixture of perfume and sweat and whiskey, and the deep effluvium of the spittoons, was enough to make your breathing stop at the bottom of your throat.

Life was getting harder all the time, and we were not particularly deserving of anything different, and we knew it.

Sometimes the only thing to talk about was the gunfight, though I’m willing to admit that I had contributed to this; I was, after all, the sole witness, and I did discover over the years that I liked to talk about it. It was history, I thought. A story—my story. I could see everything that I remembered with all the clarity of daytime sight, and I
believed
it. The principal actors, through my telling, were fixed forever in the town’s lore—if you could call it lore. Three of them were still buried on the hill outside town, including Wilson, the gunfighter who was so fast on the draw and who was shot in the blazing battle at Grafton’s by the quiet stranger who had ridden into our valley and changed it forever.

He came back
that autumn, all those years later, and, as before, I was the first to see him coming, sitting atop that old paint of his, though of course it wasn’t the same horse. Couldn’t have been. Yet it was old. As a matter of harsh fact, it was, I would soon find out, a slightly swaybacked mare with a
mild case of lung congestion. I was mending a fence out past the creek, standing there in the warm sun, muttering to myself, thinking about going to town for some whiskey, and I saw him far off, just a slow-moving speck at the foot of the mountains. Exactly like the first time. Except that I was older, and maybe half as curious. I had pretty much taken the attitude of the valley: I was reluctant to face anything new—suspicious of change, afraid of the unpredictable. I looked off at him as he approached and thought of the other time, that first time. I couldn’t see who it was, of course, and had no idea it would actually turn out to be him, and for a little aching moment I wanted it to
be
him—but as he was when I was seven; myself as I was then. The whole time back, and Joe Starrett chopping wood within my hearing, a steady man, good and strong, standing astride his own life, ready for anything. I stood there remembering this, some part of me yearning for it, and soon he was close enough to see. I could just make him out. Or rather, I could just make out the pearl-handled six-shooter. Stepping away from the fence, I waited for him, aching, and then quite suddenly I wanted to signal him to turn around, find another valley. I wasn’t even curious. I knew, before I could distinguish the changed shape of his body and the thickened features of his face, that he would be far different from my memory of him, and I recalled that he’d left us with the chance for some progress, the hope of concerning ourselves with the arts of peace. I thought of my meager town, the years of idleness in Grafton’s store. I wasn’t straight or tall, particularly. I was just a dirt farmer with no promise of much and no gentleness or good wishes anymore, plagued with a weakness for whiskey.

Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him.

The shock of it took my breath away. His buckskins were frayed and torn, besmirched with little maplike continents of salt stains and sweat. He was huge around the middle—his gunbelt had been stretched to a small homemade hole he’d made in it so he could still wear it—and the flesh under his chin was swollen and heavy. His whole face seemed to have dropped and gathered around his jaws, and when he lifted his hat I saw the bald crown of his head through his blowing hair. Oh, he’d gone very badly to seed. “You wouldn’t be—” he began.

“It’s me all right,” I said.

He shifted a little in the saddle. “Well.”

“You look like you’ve come a long way,” I said.

He didn’t answer. For a moment, we simply stared at each other. Then he climbed laboriously down from the nag and stood there holding the reins.

“Where does the time go,” he said, after what seemed a hopeless minute.

Now I didn’t answer. I looked at his boots. The toes were worn away: it was all frayed, soiled cloth there. I felt for him. My heart went out to him. And yet as I looked at him I knew that more than anything, more than my oldest childhood dream and ambition, I didn’t want him there.

“Is your father—” he hesitated, looked beyond me.

“Buried over yonder,” I said.

“And Marian?” He was holding his hat in his hands.

“Look,” I said. “What did you come back for, anyway?”

He put the hat back on. “Marian’s dead, too?”

“I don’t think she’ll be glad to see you,” I said. “She’s settled into a kind of life.”

He looked toward the mountains, and a little breeze crossed toward us from the creek. It rippled the water there and made shadows on it, then reached us, moved the hair over his ears. “I’m not here altogether out of love,” he said.

I thought I’d heard a trace of irony in his voice. “Love?” I said. “Really?”

“I mean love of the valley,” he told me.

I didn’t say anything. He took a white handkerchief out of his shirt—it was surprisingly clean—and wiped the back of his neck with it, then folded it and put it back.