The Hour of Lead (29 page)

That night, Wendy put the child down and turned out her own light. She waited at the door for him. His heavy boots clattered the earth and his huge shadow blocked the street's light. He was blinded by the dark room and collided with her. His force pressed her a step back. She had planned to take his hands and speak to him. She could see his eyes reflect the only lantern she'd kept lit. He turned slowly with one open hand raised, as if for balance, and
clouted her. She landed on the floor, stunned, but unhurt. The wind blew cold. When she'd focused her eyes, he stood over her and glared into his palm and its fingers like he'd rid himself of them at first opportunity.

“It's all right,” she said. “You didn't mean it.” But he had cleared the steps and galloped across the vacant lot. She saw him cross through the streetlight glows as he loped, a man, then a shadow, then gone, then a man again, then shadow until he was out of sight completely.

•

M
ATT SLEPT IN A PARK
and walked four miles to work. Two or three of the fellows offered him a lift, but he just kept to his fast gait. At the shop, they chatted fishing and quality tobacco, and, though he never did partake, their voices grated him, so he packed metal sheets two or three at a time onto a flatbed. When he had loaded the truck, he wheeled it to the forms and hammered each into the ground with blows that would stagger an elk. He didn't take lunch and by one-thirty had beat enough metal to occupy the framers and cement crews for three shifts. The foreman approached him.

“That's the whole of it.”

“Get them to cut some more.”

“You've done two weeks' work in two days and you been doing it a month straight. There isn't any more to do.” The foreman rubbed his jaw. He was a red-faced Scot, veins splintered from drinking, less boss than goat herder. He'd order men to perform a task and they would do it or do something else, depending on their moods. Matt had little use for the man.

“These other men. They have families, too. They work regular, union work. There's no work left to do, and if them bigwigs find out,
they'll shit can half the crew. Play a hand of cards in the rigger's loft. Come in late. Go home early.”

Matt undid his gloves and set them on the saw table. “I guess I'll have to quit you, then,” he said.

The foreman drove his hands into his pocket. Matt could see the gaggle of men behind who had put him up to it. An unsociable man is hard enough to take; one who worked them out of a check was intolerable. He stared at them. They scattered like children. He punched his card into the clock.

At the river, he perched over the rock bank. Across the water, they had blasted the end from a bluff to fit concrete; upriver the engineers constructed parks they envisioned as campgrounds for visitors. The State laid asphalt and merchants threw up shops at the bottom and top of the hill.

He wondered if he could light out now, if he had enough of family to sustain him. Most of his life he had squandered with men alone. In sentimental moods, they would recall wives or children, but each remembered only long enough to glimpse what they could not make real in a thousand years of trying. They shared the same primitive illness. He smoked and wondered what kept men like him from entering into a peace with their lives, what trick of being had they not mastered. He worried whether Wendy had enough firewood, then recalled he'd split and stacked a pile next to the front door a few days past.

He climbed the big hill the locals called Millard Grade because Walter Millard flew a Plymouth off it into a state trooper's living room. Atop, he bent and sucked breaths until his wind returned. The small town's lights scattered between him and the Bureau of Reclamation plant, blue against the snow, and, beyond that the black, blocked river. West was only darkness. He'd passed the last house and considered the only road that led into town from here. He left it for the brush. A mile or so and there was a box canyon and trees and a spring.

He climbed a fence. Cows lowed. He could see their bulky masses in the moonlight. On the field's other side was a granite spill; with no discernible trail, he covered the distance in a straight line. He'd sold his good horse to a banker who worked a few cattle. The pasture was near and Matt found it. He whistled low and the horse trotted to him. He led it to the gate. Inside the barn were a bridle and a blanket.

He swung himself aboard and started the long climb from the coulee. There was enough wood, he told himself, and an axe to bust more. Four miles and he arrived at a lone pine on a cattle path and under it built his pallet. The fire he started was a weak one. He fed it with sage limbs and leaves and needles to keep it from notice.

•

H
E HAD DETERMINED TO SEE
the Jarms place once more, but misjudged his bearings and two nights later recognized he had reached Garrett's ground. He shot a rabbit and roasted it on a driftwood fire, the fuel remaining from last spring's runoff. He drank from the Palouse than spat. The water tasted of metal and smelled dead with fertilizer leachings. He melted some snow, and settled himself for the night.

Morning, he tied and hobbled the horse, then climbed from the river's cut and hiked the three miles to Garrett's home. At a hilltop eyebrow too steep to plow, he examined the house below. Across the drive a giant machine shed loomed. The open sliding door revealed a rodweeder and harrow and, behind, a combine, the header detached. Metal clanked against metal inside. Two gangly boys fetched tools from a trap wagon. Garrett scolded them for a wrong-sized wrench. The boys blamed each other. The disagreement nearly ended in blows. An hour later, the pickup ignition
cranked and Garrett directed both boys from the cab. They huddled in the truck bed as he traveled the road toward town.

Matt descended to the house. A dog bounded toward him and Matt readied for an attack, but when he feinted a kick, the dog cut and circled. A woman in a plain dress met his gaze. She looked like a girl in a statue, and her face, though drawn, was the kind in magazine stands.

“I'm an acquaintance of your husband's,” Matt said.

“He went to town for parts. He'll be back shortly,” the woman said.

Matt nodded. The woman measured him. “Would you like to come inside?”

He stamped his feet on the porch boards. She waved him to a chair and he perched at its edge letting the furnace heat bloom over his hands. Her brown eyes passed over him. She returned from the kitchen with a cup holding coffee and brandy. He sniffed it, and drank. She poured him another. A spinning wheel stood in one corner of the room. No grease in the joints, he saw; it was a decoration. He sipped his fortified coffee. The woman sat, examining the grain of the pine table. She tapped her cup with her nails, like a clock ticking. When she stopped, the quiet seemed louder than the sound.

Matt approached the hearth and rotated the burning logs. He added another. Pine, it went up quickly and sap popped embers at the screen. He watched the woman extend her hands and stocking feet to the furnace and listened as she sipped her drink.

“Are you married?” she asked. She held her cup with both hands.

Matt said, “I don't know if I am anymore.”

She returned her cup to the kitchen and offered to tour him through the house. The kitchen had views up the valley and the bedrooms were as large as sitting rooms. She discussed paintings on her wall by her father from whom she had not heard in some years. The Depression broke him, she said.

“They're fine pictures,” Matt told her.

She let her hand pet the frame of one.

“My husband envied them. He didn't want me to have family except him. And the children, of course. I used to ask him to make inquiries, but they came to nothing.” She led him to her sewing room. A photograph of one sister with whom she had not spoken since she left home for college and, eventually, Garrett. Though the girl was only grammar school age, Matt recognized the mouth and the shape of the jaw. She was Angel's mother.

Matt excused himself and retired outside to smoke. He sat for an hour watching the sun set, enjoying the coffee Garrett's wife freshened, then excused himself before Garrett and the boys returned.

Near the hill's crest, he recognized the moon was at his back. It was full and bright and clear. He could see the creases and folds and rounded humps of the country underneath it. He did not sleep until he'd covered the three days to Grand Coulee. He would catch on with the dam again even if he had to bust rock. At home, he'd split wood and build them a crib for it, so Wendy wouldn't have to venture into the snow to feed the stove.

In town, he left the horse and bridle with their owner. It was day, but no one noticed. He found the pawn man in the cathouse and swapped his good coat for a loan. He'd be back for it in a month, he told the man. At the hardware, he bought a simple Colt automatic pistol with the lightest trigger in the store. It cost forty-eight dollars, which left him enough for a box of shells. With the last fourteen cents he added some hard candies. His clothes were a mess, but the gun merchant said nothing to him about it. They were afraid, he figured, either because he was big or because he was strange. It didn't matter. It had once, he knew. He'd tried to convince himself otherwise, but it had. It was a pleasant sensation leaving that behind, one he fastened himself to on the walk to the house.

He knocked on the door then opened it. The baby turned; so did Wendy.

“What happened to you,” she asked.

He opened a paper bag and dug out the gun.

“Here,” he said. He showed her how to undo the magazine and held a bullet into the light. “It's to use. If I ever hurt you, again.” He clipped the magazine and set the loaded pistol in her hand.

She pointed the barrel down and offered it back to him. When he wouldn't accept it, she laid it on a high shelf above the oven where Angel couldn't reach. Matt walked to the bed to peel his things. Wendy had built a curtain around it. He pulled it shut, but, when he turned, she'd opened it. She gave Angel one of the candies. It would occupy her a while, she said. Matt shivered. She lay her coat across his shoulders and bustled him under the blankets. She undressed and joined him. She attached herself to his chest like she meant to pull the chill from him. It was familiar, and he realized it was not unlike the storm. She was guessing right, he decided. Just guessing and hoping. That was all faith was.

He went to sleep in the middle of the day, thinking it was simple as that. He woke to darkness and Wendy's breath and the child between them. He thought for a moment what had passed was a troubling dream they were just now rousing from. He slipped his finger in Angel's still tiny palm and felt its grip as he had at first. He wondered at her need for him, even in sleep, and was grateful for it. He let her go and watched as she turned, trying to recapture the warmth of someone's touch. He found Wendy's back, and pressed gently, hoping to draw the same sensation from her. She set her hand on his chest. He felt her pulse race. She patted him like she'd touch some new animal, one she doubted, like it was herself the touch reassured.

32

L
UCKY NEVER ENJOYED INVESTIGATIVE WORK
. F.B.I. men all believed themselves wily, but they frittered days begging handouts from others not far removed in ethics or intellect from those they tracked. If he wanted information, Lucky asked: once. If he preferred another response, he twisted the question or the respondent until satisfied. With nothing to go on, he decided to look into his employer to peel the orange.

He selected a booth in Jack's Chinese Restaurant's Kicking Mule Cocktail Lounge. A beer light behind the bar and the lamp over the cash register were the only light. A Chinese boy delivered him a T-bone steak—the menu's only American item—four evenings in a row.

Once a youngster in a suit who peddled for the furniture store complained about farmers so tight they still had their mothers' feather tick mattresses. Well into his vodka tonics, the man cussed Garrett. Those listening stared into their drinks silently, and the young man stopped mid-sentence until the bartender dialed the
black-and-white TV to baseball and his companion switched subjects. A day after, an old pensioner in worn shirt and trousers attempted to connive more tab from the bartender. Lucky sent him a round. The man tipped the drink, and Lucky rose to join him at the bar. Lucky mentioned Garrett. He had once been Garrett's partner in drink. The man offered a few tales of whipping Indians and the old Chinese restaurant they once frequented, but Lucky could cajole no more he could call useful.

Finally, Lucky told a hospital clerk he needed names for a family reunion and that he required the birth for the county between 1890 and 1920. She would not permit him to check out the official hospital records, but agreed to allow him a records cubicle and a legal pad. He found Garrett easily. Born to Helen and Webster, first name James, middle Henry, but learned no more from the hospital. He visited the county clerk and tallied the land plots with the family name. They expanded steadily from the first filing in 1872, but, in the thirties, the family's holdings doubled. Garrett was wealthier than Lucky had surmised. Lucky scribbled road names that bracketed and intersected the newest acquisitions, then returned to his cruiser and drove. It took him most of the day to cover all the roads. The country was rolling hills, nothing but tilled ground; none scrub but the little that banked the river and creeks.