The Hour of Lead (19 page)

“My condolences,” Jarms said. He lifted a set of cards and matched the opener. Matt lit a cigarette, hoping to herd every thought to his mind's edges. At the game, chips clacked like plates in a kitchen and Jarms opened a hand with a fifty-dollar bet. Three players called. Two drew two cards, another one. Jarms didn't take any. He raised two hundred. The players glanced at him over the fan of their cards. Jarms closed his hand and placed it face down on the table. The bootlegger raised him a hundred. Jarms countered with a hundred dollar raise of his own, which the bootlegger bumped two hundred. Jarms, at the end of his stack, called.

The bootlegger held three kings, Jarms a straight. The bootlegger
pushed the pot Jarms's direction and Jarms stacked the chips in colors; when one column became untenable, he started another. The next hand he won as well, with three nines, and before too long pulled another pot without a call.

Garrett rose but Jarms stopped him. “You do something like shooting that dog again and I'll kill you.” Garrett stared at him. Jarms said, “I'll plan it careful as a jailbreak and you will be no more and everything you know will be no more. What you own will still be here. But you won't own it and you won't know who owns it. Because you will be dead. I ain't woofin'.” It was clear to Matt he wasn't and to Garrett, as well.

“I believe the subject was your mother,” Garrett said. “I'm not a barking dog either.”

“Well fight or deal,” the bootlegger said. Jarms shuffled the cards and Garrett exited offering no more reply.

Jarms won two more hands in the next half an hour. Matt watched him shuffle the cards lengthwise then the other way, the cards intertwining like fingers, one over the other. He passed the cards across the apron and listened to the bets, calling without much regard to his own hand and asked no cards to draw. He bet fifty dollars and was upped and in return bumped the bet two hundred and the table folded. This time, before hooking in his winnings, he lay his cards face up. He had not even a pair. The next fellow shuffled the cards, but the play insulted everyone at the table. A man with the wind behind him ought to travel quiet, but Jarms was not the kind to permit a successful bluff to go unappreciated, no matter what it cost him. It was less arrogance than the emptiness in a joke absent the punch line.

The next hand Jarms lost with a low pair and the next with one shy of a flush. Two later, he check-raised into a ten-high straight, smiling all the while. He was not playing like a man bored or one with no ken for the game. He apprehended the cards and each player's nature as well as anyone at the table. Matt realized it wasn't
money or entertainment he pursued, it was self-annihilation. It came to him that the man had been bent on such a course since they'd encountered one another and was too generous to be humane about it. Maybe with Roland's health declining, Jarms was free to take broader strokes in drawing his own blood.

He pondered it for what seemed like an hour, until he smelled smoke and saw an orange flick bounce in the window glass. Outside, he rounded a corner to Main Street. Flames piled from the Chinese restaurant. A Chinese boy outside clanged two pans together. Two women lugged water buckets from a trough. The fire had overrun the parlor and kitchen. The tables glimmered, cloths curling over them. The Chinese spoke their rattle. They'd bailed the trough nearly dry.

In a top window where bedrooms were, a shadow passed and passed again. The fire had left the back stairs heaped on the ground. In a shed, a bucket of sixteen penny nails and a hammer hung on a nail. Around front was a porch column and Matt pounded a nail into it as a step and drove another for a handhold. He grasped the eave. Heat had slickened the shingles, but he pulled himself up and steadied his feet. Something thumped him from behind. It was Jarms.

“What're you doing?” Matt asked him.

“Putting you out.”

They flattened Jarms's coat over the window and cleared the glass. Smoke boiled out the opening. Matt broke the way, Jarms, behind. They knocked through two rooms before discovering an old man huddled in a closet, holding a boxload of photographs and letters.

Matt piled the man's keepsakes into a pillowcase. He headed them all the same direction as the flames. They would be drawing to the broken window. Matt could smell his jacket burn. He shoved Jarms through the broken glass, then the Chinese. He and the memorabilia tumbled across the edge and disappeared. Outside, the cool darkness looked like good water,
and Matt wanted to soak himself in it. Faces stared up at him. Matt stepped onto the shingles. They were slick as melting ice and he tumbled off the roof and ended up on the ground on all fours. Burning scraps rained upon him. His back smoldered; his hands had lost their hair.

A fire engine had arrived and soaked Matt with a hose. The water both hurt and soothed him. He bent and began peeling his smoldering boot leather. The pictures lay in the children's laps. They examined the grain images and letters that looked like smaller pictures. Their grandfather coughed and spat and the Chinese women attempted to slake his thirst by ladling water into his mouth.

Later the town's doctor arrived. He covered Matt with bag balm and wrapped gauze around his bare feet.

“Change it every day for two weeks or it'll infect. He'll howl like an Indian,” the doctor warned.

“I don't guess he will,” Jarms told him. “He never complained while it was happening.”

Jarms managed a whiskey bottle and made Matt swallow some before he got into the car. They passed the smoldering fire and the firemen letting it. Matt lay in the seat as they climbed out of the ravine that held the town. Above, the hills stretched and rose and fell and the road was just a gravel line dividing them.

Matt drank and drank again when Jarms failed to retrieve the bottle. He broke a sweat and shivered until he couldn't stop himself.

“Garrett, he was there,” Matt said.

“There, hell, he lit the damned place,” Jarms said. The dashlight made him green. They rode awhile in the quiet. “He knows I got a stake in the place, but that's not the real reason. He's like a dragon in old stories. He tears things up just by being.”

“How come you tolerate him?”

“I'm sentimental concerning dragons.”

Matt said nothing more, feeling mostly fear himself, more even
than pain. Jarms saw it, Matt knew, and Matt was amazed that the man's vision into the world had won him so little, aside from good cheer. Jarms opened his hand for the bottle. He drove into the night, letting Matt doze until they hit houselights.

Stopped, Jarms eased Matt from the car and led him toward the barn.

“This ain't home?” Matt whispered.

“Stay still,” Jarms said. He undid Matt's belt buckle and unbuttoned his drawers.

“Roll,” Jarms said. He pushed Matt to one side, then the other until he'd dragged his drawers to his knees. He retrieved the girl from the house. She bent to inspect Matt's nakedness.

“I'm not using my hands,” she said.

“He's hurt,” Jarms told her.

But the girl was steadfast. Jarms sighed. He grabbed Matt's flaccid workings. He tugged him firm.

“Now just squat down,” he told the girl.

“I ain't going face-to-face with him.”

“You don't have to. Just look off somewhere.”

She straddled Matt and inched herself down. She blotted out the light from the doorway. Straw stuck to Matt's doctored back. Each thrust brought a new pain, until finally, he was falling apart inside her and she was pulling the suffering from him.

“You finished?” Jarms asked.

“I think,” Matt said.

“Good.”

Jarms set his hand over the girl's opening and hauled her off of him. He guided her to her back and held her legs over her head.

“Now get in there and cook,” he said.

Matt closed his eyes.

“You made us Roland's baby,” Jarms told him. Matt nodded. He knew he had. He knew it like he knew his own name.

20

T
HEY DIDN'T BRUSH HIS HAIR
, and, though cut, it was less a tangle, his head still appeared a tumbleweed, and his sloe-eyed gaze left him looking half-asleep well past noon. His clothes, aside from the hand-me-downs in which she had dressed him that first night, were thin as a veil where they had not been patched or let out to account for his growth. Beard peppered his chin. Lucky was sixteen, but so strange and uncultured that no number, outside height and weight, could accurately describe him. He followed her like a pup, nodded at what she told him, smiled in submission when it wasn't appropriate, and performed tasks with such vigor he missed their intent then moped when she corrected him. He hummed, though the sound was hardly musical, more like bugs careening about a light. The boy seemed unaware sound emitted from him at all.

He was underfoot at first, but once she'd assigned him a routine of duties he could manage on his own, he proved productive enough. And he was, of course, young and tireless. Wendy realized she must have been strange country for the boy to come upon.
Outside his mother, Wendy had witnessed him speak to no one until his first night on the ranch. Linda was not unneighborly when encountered but traveled wide circles to avoid such meetings. From birth, the boy knew little other than her voice. Wendy wondered if his mother's presence was as oppressive as Wendy herself found God or the comfort believers knew.

On the skyline, a pair of riders appeared and disappeared throughout the day. She recognized them the next day and the one following. Drifters, she figured, sharing part-time work at another ranch or laying over before a push west across the desert and the pass between here and Seattle, or north and west to the dam in the coulee. Perhaps they weren't paired at all, or only out of convenience or necessity, like she and the boy.

She broke from seeding the spring crop and studied the boy drive a nail in a post and twist and loop barbwire over the head, then hook the nail, and wire into the wood. Finished, he started another a foot higher. She wondered if cities were lonely, if a hundred people stacked into twenty apartment floors could remain separate. If distance and geography didn't keep them apart, what was loneliness, what did she share on a hillock, gazing across livestock and grain and a great river, a hundred square miles of country with a thousand others whose vista most days did not extend past a flat's walls or the streets piled with buildings? The boy looked up, found her, and grinned. She raised her hand to acknowledge him before returning to her planting.

Wendy's physical labor piled muscle and sinew upon her like a man's, and she perspired far beyond the restraint implied by femininity. The latter forced her to break her work into two-hour pieces with fifteen minutes between in which she undressed and dried the cold sweat with a bathing towel. When she glanced up and recognized the boy staring, she thought he might bolt, but instead he walked closer, his blinking eyes taking her in. Her chest was beaded
with sweat. She told herself it was good practice, her nakedness; there was knowledge in it he required. She put the towel in her fist and dragged it underneath each breast. Her nipples rose with the gesture.

The boy's eyes took her in. Her feet started blunt as quartered wood and her ankles thick, then muscled legs and thighs and boxy hips, and thin again at the waist. Above, she turned blocky geometry that only her breasts' arcs argued.

The boy undid his belt and opened his fly, fingers scrambling.

“What do you think you're doing?” she said.

He looked down at his pants and the disturbance there. “It's misbehaving,” he said. The horses' necks bent, their mouths pulling at the grass. She could hear the roots give way.

She turned her back to him. “Pull on it,” she said. A few tugs and she heard his zipper close and his belt buckle cinch and hasp.

•

E
ACH DAY, SHE DRIED HERSELF
and he spied on her from behind the sagebrush, and though she never condoned it, neither did she forbid it. The knowledge made her head light. The boy rustled in the high grass like a pheasant or a grouse and soon every wind or insect clatter, any time a rabbit broke brush distracted her. She suffered a broken hunger, persistent and impersonal; she wanted it to be the boy, though any resolution would multiply their loneliness. People's loins could not remain locked forever, ecstasy or not. At some point, sleep and food and drink turned necessary, and then where would they be?

She was ordinary, yet the boy's eyes had lifted her to more. It was she who clipped his hair and shuddered his manhood that first night. A part of her had hoped as much, but now her certainty of it left her uneasy. She knew nothing of the machinations of a body,
she realized, nothing of what one's flesh might do to another. It was smoke to her. Once, when she took to rest, he gathered the horse and seed and spelled her. She watched him clear the hill and kept her disappointment to herself.

•

S
OON, HE WAS SEEDING MORE
than she and putting up the horses at night to boot. When she rested under a lone pine, waiting for her turn—she would have to halt the boy, he'd never surrender a chore on his own—she would watch him and wonder if the boy was using these few days to make of her a rumor to be reheard throughout his life as she'd done with Matt these past years. She and the boy were bound for the same end, she decided. Oblivion. It should satisfy her, and she was surprised to find it did not.