Wolf Moon (3 page)

    I paid my money, went down to the livery and got my horse, and rode out to see Gillian.

    

    

    It was a hardscrabble ranch house with a few hardscrabble outbuildings on the edge of some jack pines in the foothills of the blue, aloof mountains. It was not quite half a mile out of town.

    In the front yard a very pretty little girl of eight or so spoke with great intimacy to a dun pony no taller than she was. The little girl wore a blue gingham dress that set off her shining blond pigtails just fine. When she looked me full in the face, I saw the puzzlement in her eyes, the same puzzlement as in mine. She favored her mother, and that tumbled me into sorrow. I guess I hadn't any right to expect that Gillian would go without a man all these years. As for the little girl staring at me-I was long conditioned to people studying my scars, repelled and snake-charmed at the same time, but then I remembered my new blond beard that covered the scars. They couldn't be seen now except in the strongest sunlight. Yet the little girl still stared at me. "I don't think I've ever seen eyes that blue," I said.

    She smiled.

    "Are you enjoying the summer?"

    She nodded. "I'm Annie. I bet I know who you are. You're Chase. My mom talks about you all the time." It was a day of orange butterflies and white fluffy dandelions and quick silken birds the color of blooded sunsets. And now fancy little conversations.

    "I was going to write you a letter once," Annie said.

    "You were?"

    "Uh-huh, but Mom said I better not because of your major."

    She smiled, sweet and shy and pure little girl there in the bright prairie morning.

    "She said you were in the cavalry and that you had a real mean major named Thomkins who didn't want you to get letters."

    I handled it best I could. "He was pretty mean all right."

    "My mom's inside."

    "You think it'd be all right if I went and saw her?"

    "She's baking bread. She'll give you some if you ask."

    I grinned. "Then I'll make sure to ask."

    She put her tiny hand up in mine and led me up the earthen path to the slab front door of the ranch house. As we walked, I saw to the west a hillock where a well had been dug, probably an artesian that had failed because the water would not rise. Easier to walk to the distant creek and lug it back in buckets. Or make one of those homemade windmills you could now buy kits for.

    I could smell bread baking. It reminded me of my own ma and our own kitchen, back before all the troubles came to us Chase boys, and for a moment I was Annie's age again, all big eyes and empty rumbling belly.

    Annie pushed open the door and took me into the cool shadows of the house. The layout seemed to be big front room with a hallway leading to big kitchen in back. Between were two bedrooms set one on each side of the hallway. There wasn't much furniture, a tumble-down couch and chairs, a painting of an aggrieved Jesus, and a splendid vase lamp with an ornately painted globe. The flooring was hardwood shined slick and bright and covered occasionally with shaggy blue throw rugs.

    In the kitchen, I found Gillian just taking a loaf of bread from the oven and setting it on the windowsill to cool. To clear room, she had to shush a cardinal away, and looked guilty doing it.

    When she saw me there, led in by her little daughter, her face went blank and she paused, as if considering what to feel. I'd once promised Gillian I'd marry her, and never had; and when I was sent off to prison, she in turn promised she'd wait. But the birth of Annie had put the lie to that. I guess neither one of us knew what to feel, standing here and facing each other across a canyon of eight hard and lonely years.

    She was still pretty-not beautiful, not cute, pretty-with a long fragile neck and fine shining golden hair, Annie's hair, and a frank blue gaze that was never quite without a hint of grief. She'd had one of those childhoods that not even a long life could outlive. She wore gingham, which she always had, and a white frilly apron, and even from here I could see how years of work had made her quick, slender hands raw. She was neither old nor young now, but that graceful in-between when a girl becomes full woman. She looked good as hell to me, and I felt tongue-lost as a boy, having no idea what to say.

    "This is my mom," Annie said.

    I laughed. "I'm glad you told me that, honey."

    "He wants some bread."

    "Oh, he does, does he?" Gillian said.

    "And jam," Annie said definitively.

    "Doesn't he know how to speak for himself?" Gillian said.

    "He's so hungry, he can't talk."

    I wondered, what had happened to that shy little girl who'd greeted me on the walk?

    Gillian gaped at me a moment longer and said, "That sure is some beard you got there, Chase."

    A few minutes later Gillian shooed Annie outside and set about fixing me up with that warm fresh bread and strawberry jam her daughter wanted me to have.

    As she sliced the bread and poured us both coffee, she asked me how my first night here had gone, and I told her, with a laugh, all about how the chief of police had tried to recruit me.

    "Maybe you should do it," she said.

    "Huh?"

    She set down my bread and coffee, slid the jam pot over to my side of the table, and then sat down across from me. "Maybe you should do it."

    "Be a policeman?"

    "There are worse ways to make a living."

    "Seems you're forgetting where I've been the last few years."

    "Hollister doesn't know where you've been. And he wouldn't have any reason to check unless you did something wrong."

    We didn't speak for a time. She sat there and watched me eat. I tried not to smack my lips. I'd shared a cell with a man who snorted when he ate. I knew how aggravating noisy eaters could be.

    When only my coffee was left, I looked up at her. "I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me about Schroeder."

    "I was hoping you'd forget about Schroeder. Anyway, he calls himself Reeves now."

    "What does he do?"

    "Runs a bank. Has a partner who's very old, and lives in a big mansion by himself."

    "The bank been robbed since 'Reeves' bought in?"

    "No, but I imagine it's just a matter of time." She watched me the way Annie had when I'd first come into the yard. "Why don't you forget about him, Chase? That part of your life is gone now."

    "He killed my brothers."

    "They'd want you to go on with your life, Chase." She'd known both my brothers. While to the town they'd been bank robbers, to her they were never more than rambunctious boys who'd eventually settle down. "I knew them, Chase, and what they wanted for you. They didn't want you to be the way they were."

    And then she was crying.

    We were sitting in the kitchen with the scent of bread sweet on the air and a jay on the window ledge and the breeze soft and warm on the underside of the curtains. And I didn't know what to do.

    I just went over to her and knelt down beside her and took her tiny hand and held it gently as I could. I kept saying over and over, "Oh, Gillian, come on now; oh, Gillian, please," and things like that, but neither words nor touches helped, she just sat there and cried without sound, her frail body shaking with her grief.

    And then Annie was in the doorway saying, "Did Chase hurt you, Mommy?"

    Gillian got herself together quickly, brought apron to nose and eyes to daub tears, and cleared her throat sternly to speak. "No, hon, he didn't hurt me."

    "I wouldn't like him if he hurt you, Mommy."

    "It's fine, honey, really. You go on back outside now."

    Annie looked at me for a time, confused and ready to hate me if Gillian said to, and then turned and slowly left the doorway.

    We sat in silence again until she said, "I don't want you to come out here anymore."

    "Oh, God, Gillian. You don't know how long I've waited to-"

    "I was hoping prison would change you. Force you to grow up and forget about Reeves." She sounded as if she were about to start crying again. "But it hasn't. I was just fooling myself all those years while I waited." I wanted to point out that she'd been doing more than "waiting," what with having a daughter during that time.

    But the words died in my throat, and I felt guilty for making Gillian carry on this way.

    She put her head down on the table and started crying again, her slender shoulders shaking miserably. I leaned over and kissed her on the back of the head and slipped out through the gathering blue shadows of the afternoon.

    As I walked over to my horse, Annie looked up from combing her pony and said, "Is my mommy still sad?"

    I swung up in the saddle and said, "Right now she is. But if you go in and see her, she won't be."

    She nodded solemnly, put down the brush she was using and set off walking to the ranch house.

    

    

    "You got a name, son?"

    "Chase."

    "You got a first name?"

    "Sorry. Guess people usually call me plain 'Chase.' First name's Robert."

    "Well, son, I wish I could help you, but I can't. See that Indian out there on the loading dock?"

    "Yessir."

    "That sonofabitch does the work of three white men and he don't complain half as much as they do."

    "Good worker, huh?"

    "Good? Hell, great. That's why I don't need nobody right now. But I tell ya. If you're around town in three, four weeks, you try me again, 'cause you never can tell."

    "That's right. You never can tell."

    "Good luck, son, you shouldn't have no problem, big strong young man like you."

    "Yessir. And thank you, sir."

    That's how it went all afternoon. I went up and down the alleys, knocking on the back doors of every business I could find, and it was always the same story.
Just hired me somebody last week
; or
business been a little slow lately
; or
why don't ya try down the street, son?

    Near dusk, when I was walking into the lumberyard, I saw Chief Hollister and he gave me a smirk as if he knew that I wasn't getting anywhere and that I'd been damned foolish to turn down his offer.

    As I had been.

    

    

    That night, I sat in a chair next to Annie's bed reading aloud a book called
Standard Fairy Tales
. Nearby a kerosene lantern flickered light through the cottage. "How tall was Jack's beanstalk?"

    "Didn't you already ask me that?"

    She giggled. "Uh-huh."

    "It was eighty feet tall."

    "Last time you said it was sixty feet tall."

    "I lied."

    She giggled again. "You don't lie. My mom says you're a good man."

    I looked up from my book to Gillian in the rocker in the corner. She was knitting. The rocker squeaked pleasantly back and forth, back and forth, as a slow summer rain pattered on the full-grown leaves of the elm trees on either side of the house.

    "You said I was a good man?" I asked Gillian.

    She smiled her easy smile. "I believe I said something like that, yes."

    "Well, I just want you to know that I'm mighty grateful. It's nice to have somebody thinking nice thoughts about me."

    "Did you really like my roast beef tonight?"

    "I liked it very much."

    "You didn't think it was tough?"

    "I thought it was tender."

    "You really mean that?"

    "I really mean that."

    Truth was, the meat had been tough as hell. Cooking had never been one of Gillian's strengths. Great baker-breads and rolls and pies-but terrible, terrible cook.

    "I like to close my eyes and hear you read, Chase. I like it as much as Annie does."

    "I'll read some more."

    "I remember when you wrote and told me-when you were away, I mean-how that man taught you to read."

    "When you were in the Army?" Annie said.

    "Yes." I looked over at Gillian again. "When I was in the Army."

    "Tell me about the Army. You promised."

    "When we have a little more time, I'll tell you."

    "Don't we have time now?"

    "Nope."

    "How come?"

    "Because we've got to find out what the giant's going to do to Jack."

    "Go on, Chase," Gillian said. "Annie and I'll close our eyes and you read."

    So they closed their eyes and I read.

    

    

    Later on that night, after Annie fell asleep, Gillian and I went down to the willow by the creek that ran in the back of her yard, and made love standing up, the way we used to sometimes in the old days.

    When her dress was down and my pants were up, we walked along the creek listening to the frogs and the crickets and the owls. The rain had stopped and everything smelled minty and fresh in the midnight moon.

    "You never did answer that one letter of mine, Chase."

    "Which letter was that?"

    "The one where I asked you if you'd ever say you loved me."

    "I guess I figured you knew."

    We walked a little more in silence. Stars filled the sky and everything smelled cool and fresh after the rain. "Annie sure likes you."

    "I sure like her."

    "Says she hopes she sees you some more."