The Work of Wolves (15 page)

"It does," she said. And she told how as a girl she had thought the world was hollow and that her father could fly around inside it. He had worked as a contract miner at Homestake Mine in Lead, in the Black Hills, and every day he'd gone a mile into the earth and returned. She couldn't imagine the network of shafts and runs and winzes that constituted the mine. Instead she imagined a hollow world into which he descended: a whole world, a round world, with its own interior sky, and the gold he found like coins in the ground down there, or in iron pots behind trees. She imagined her father down there, seeking, and always triumphant in discovery. It was a world, she said, she had borrowed from picture books, from fairy tales. And she put her father in it. She would sit at her desk in the elementary school in Deadwood, and if the lesson was boring she would think of her father underneath her, walking around, his head down, looking.

"He died down there," she said. "He had a heart attack and died almost instantly. I was eleven at the time. They put him on the elevator in the Yates shaft and sent him up. Six thousand feet. By that time I was old enough to understand what the mine was. But I had dreams for years afterwards of him flying through the earth, coming up. Sometimes in those dreams he'd be swimming. Even now, when I think of it, unless I catch myself, I think of it that way. Swimming or flying. I have to tell myself he was put in the cage, and they hauled his body up on cables. But what I see is the earth all hollow and him flying up through it. Maybe, when you get far enough from something, it's easier to replace what it was with what you wanted it to be."

She broke a corner off her sandwich, looked at it in her hand. "A mile up," she said. "It's a long way to come up, just to be buried."

"Were you close to 'm?"

She lifted the corner of bread and meat to her mouth, chewed for a few moments, nodded, swallowed. "I missed him terribly," she said. "When I was little, he found out I thought he went into some fairy tale world. And he let me think it. He'd tell me stories about meeting elves down there. Bargaining for gold. Striking deals. Outwitting them. I loved it. And I loved him for it even after I knew he was lying. He never did it to make fun of me. He just wanted me to have those dreams."

She paused, smiled. "Sometimes I think I've been looking for someone to lie to me well ever since."

Carson tilted a beer back, gazed for a while at the white rumps and sides of the antelope fading in the diminishing light, that shining that had started the conversation already gone and the sun itself gone. A little distance away the horses grazed.

"I don't think I could do that—go into a mine every day."

"It was a job. I think he liked it. Liked getting into that cage with his friends. Liked that drop. And then stepping out underground, everything self-contained down there. It's a complete world—not like I thought as a girl, but complete in a different way. Cut off from everything else. And then he got to come back up at the end of the shift and step out of the cage. Into this."

She nodded at the land, the world they sat in.

"Dividing his days," she said. "It was like having two lives for him, I think."

"So you're a miner's daughter. How'd you get out here?"

"Got married."

"A dumb question."

"No. A dumb answer."

So here was Magnus again. Carson wasn't sure he wanted to know the full answer. He imagined her as a small girl sitting in a desk dressed in what?—a yellow dress? blue jeans and a T-shirt decorated with glittering stars? straight hair? a pony tail?—thinking of her father flitting around in a world far beneath her feet. Her eyes staring at the front of the room. Pretending attention, but seeing something only she saw. He wondered how many people she'd shared that vision with. And if he should be one of them. Or if he should know anything at all about her marriage. But she was telling him, and he wasn't stopping her. Vega and Arcturus had emerged from the darkness of the sky above them, the first stars, and the horses were fast becoming indistinct shadows, and as she talked darkness deepened and the animals disappeared altogether, became no more than the sound of their cropping, the ripping grass, their teeth working, until the darkness swam with stars, and Carson felt pinned to the skin of the planet, and part of what pinned him was her voice.

She'd been married before. Young. It hadn't worked. She'd met her first husband when a Frisbee he threw hit a picnic table she was sitting at near Sheridan Lake and overturned her Pepsi into her lap. Apologies, embarrassment, dismissals, forgiveness, so on and so forth until marriage. She waved her fingers in the darkness talking about this. "Who needs a crystal ball?" she asked. "I marry a man who can't even throw a Frisbee well. How long is that going to last?"

"Maybe he did it on purpose."

"Not him. He was probably stoned when he threw it."

"I thought I could change him," she went on. "Or that he'd change for me. Marriage as a project. I suppose it's dumb to be hurt when someone stays the way he was when you met him, but I was. When it was all over, I didn't know what to do. I took a job at a gambling hall in Deadwood. The Golden Spike—how do you like that name? They told me it was supposed to refer to the railroad."

She ran change and served drinks and wore a frilly Old West costume and fended off passes. She was part of the décor, part of the promise, part of the distraction, to keep people from realizing they were losing. Another bell. Another light. Another cherry that almost but didn't quite line up.

"I did it for two years," she said. "I kept thinking I'd get promoted or that things would change. That's me. Always thinking something is going to change just because I'm involved. And then I quit thinking and just hated it. And then..."

"Then what?" Carson asked when she didn't go on.

She shrugged. He couldn't see her shoulders move, but he heard cloth rustle, and the slightest change in the warmth coming from her, the slightest current of air.

"Then," she said, "hating the job became the reason for keeping it. I didn't have anything else, so hating that job told me I was at least alive. I guess I got afraid that if I lost the job I'd lose the hate, and then there'd be nothing."

"Sounds like a quality life."

"I think it happens to a lot of people."

"Does it?"

"You've never hated something enough to hang onto it?"

"Got an old Case tractor I hate about as much as anything. But I'd just like to get rid of it, if I could afford a different one. It'd be goin some to hate it enough to go right through wantin to get rid of it to wantin to keep it again."

Her hand came out of the darkness and touched his knee, just the knuckles grazing him, a little rap. "You're a dope. It's not the same thing."

"Didn't say it was. So what happened then?"

Then she'd met Magnus Yarborough.

"Just another gambler," she said. "Except he looked at me."

"Looked at you?"

Carson heard her hair rustle, knew she was shaking her head. "Not like that. He took his eyes off the reels when I asked him if he wanted a drink. You know how unusual that is? He spun them, and then looked away from them. Never watched them stop. Just looked at me and answered my question. I was impressed."

"That's quite a trick, is it?"

"You don't know."

"Of course I'll have a drink," Magnus had said. "This machine takes my money, but the establishment allows me to pay for a drink so that I don't care. How can I resist a deal like that?"

But he'd said it so cheerfully that she'd asked him, "Why do you come here if you know you're not going to win?"

"I have a strong feeling I could ask you the same thing."

She'd been startled. The statement was like a dart that went to her soul, penetrated a secret she thought she held private.

"Who knows?" she asked Carson. "He might have been just waiting to use that line. I wouldn't put it past him. But I'd gotten so out of touch with myself. Everything there was fake. Fake promises. Fake smiles. You know why they have mirrors all over those places? To make you forget what a little hole you're in. And to remind you to smile about it. I'd become a fake. But I thought no one else noticed. I thought my fakiness had turned into some kind of mystery. It just took one person to notice it, and I toppled. I thought he'd gone right to the core, some deep part of me. I didn't know myself any better than that."

She was both explaining and apologizing. There was no sign on the apology, but that's what it was. Another thing he couldn't place: When had it happened that she thought she had to apologize for anything in her life to him?

But he didn't have time to think about it. She went on talking. She'd stood there, gazing at Magnus, feeling exposed and thrilled. Across the gambling floor, bells clanged, and a woman screamed. A girl, barely old enough to gamble, stood in front of a slot machine that poured out coins in an endless stream. A waterfall of money. The coins spilled over the cup the girl placed under them and sprayed to the floor and rolled across the carpet in diminishing circles, hundreds of them. A casino employee rushed up with another cup, and it filled, and still the quarters chugged from the machine. The girl stood paralyzed, charmed, watching the cascade of metal, while her companions knelt on the floor and began to scoop up the money in handfuls.

"She's destroyed," Magnus said.

"Destroyed?" Rebecca asked.

"Now she thinks she's a winner. She'll spend the rest of her life trying to prove it. Feed ten times that amount back into those machines, trying to do it again. Poor girl. Nothing worse than letting someone convince you you're a winner."

"I think he enjoyed it," Rebecca said, turning in the dark to look at Carson. He knew she was looking at him, but he didn't turn his head. "He liked the irony. The way he could point it out. Stand above it all and notice."

She shifted her balance, bumped against Carson, reached up and wrapped her elbows around her knees. From out of the dark came the horses' quiet cropping of the grass. They both listened to it for a while. Carson reached down to the beer bottle he'd emptied before, picked it up by the neck, twirled it in his fingers. Then Rebecca told how Magnus had put another quarter into his machine and spun the reels and ignored them and looked at her instead and asked, "So?"

She didn't know what he meant.

"So why do you stay in this place if you know you're not going to win?"

It never occurred to her that she'd asked him the question first and he should answer first.

"It's a living," she replied.

"That's why you work. Not why you work here."

The palest light was seeping into the world, the moon rising behind them. Carson thought that in another half-hour it would be light enough to ride home. There was nothing to do until then but talk. No need to suggest they leave.

"You know," Rebecca said, staring over her knees. "I'd never thought of quitting that job until he said that. I thought every day of doing something that would get me fired. But it was all just dreaming. Never once occurred to me to just quit. So the first person who suggests to me there's life after a lousy job, I marry. You'd think I could've thought of something else, huh?"

"Guess you thought it was the best thing." He spun the bottle between his fingers and thumb, feeling the smooth glass rotate.

"Maybe. Or I didn't think at all."

Then she said, "I think we all do that, don't you? A new idea comes along, and it shows us a new life, or a new way of doing things, or whatever. And it shuts us down. It's like having that idea is enough, and we don't follow through to other ideas. We stop with that one. Let our lives end. Do you think that happens, Carson?"

"Your life's not ended, Reb."

She let go her knees with one hand and reached across his body and stopped the twirling beer bottle. It seemed as if that small thing had been turning the gears of the world, and suddenly everything stopped. Sound quit moving in the air, and the breeze eddied to stillness, and Carson was looking into her face, so close, her eyes wide, her lips half-parted, skin gleaming on the moon side, the other side enshadowed. There was grief and yearning on that face, but nothing even close to tears, and her grip on the bottle had been so sudden and strong that his fingers and thumb slipped on the neck in their turning. She stared at him, some expectation on her face that he couldn't at first decipher, and her face was so soft in the light and so lovely it hurt. She didn't speak, but he read meaning there.

"OK," he said. "It ain't mine to say if your life's ended or not."

For another moment she gazed at him, searching his face. Then she let go the bottle, and he let it go too, and they heard it roll an inch or two in the grass, and she turned her face away and wrapped her knees again, and for a while they sat like that while sound and breeze resumed.

"He wouldn't let me wait," she said after a while. "Everything was right now. My manager came out. He used to stand by these pillars in the building and watch
his girls.
That's what he called us. He came around one of the pillars and leaned against it, and Magnus saw me look at him. He's an observant man. Maybe not for the best reasons, but he is observant. Never try to work a deal on him. He'll see everything you're trying to do. He doesn't care about money, really. For him, money's just a way to not be beat. Losing it or gaining it doesn't matter, as long as he isn't beat. He saw me look at my manager, and before I even knew I was looking, he said, 'Why don't you go tell your manager there that you're quitting your job because the distinguished gentleman you're talking to has asked you to dinner?'"

"That's smooth," Carson said.

"He always has words."

"So what'd you do?"

"It was like a dare. Throw away the life I had for a dinner. Even if the life wasn't worth as much as the dinner. Still, I felt this relief. This freedom. I had to wear a stupid, girly apron for making change. I reached back and untied it and turned around and walked to my manager with that apron and all its money swinging from my hand. I thought about whirling it around a couple of times and whacking him with it. But I just held it out. He had no idea what I was doing."