“What was that?” Hackberry said.
“You’re listing, bud.”
“What day is it?”
“Same day it was when you pissed out the window of the gambling hall,” the man in rubber pants said.
“Pobrecito,” the girl said.
“Who you talking about, girl?” Hackberry said. “Who are you people?”
The man and the girl dropped their eyes and didn’t answer. Hackberry walked unsteadily down the alley into the street, knocking against a trash can and a rain barrel, the ground tilting as dramatically as a seesaw. A wagon splashed through a deep hole and splattered him with mud. The horses and wagons and buggies and water troughs and buildings on the street were whirling around him as though he were standing in the midst of a funnel. He stepped up on a wooden walkway in front of a barbershop and sat down on a chair someone had left outside. He folded his hands between his knees and hung his head as though in mourning, hoping he wouldn’t get sick. Would his alcoholic misery never end? Dawn was a few hours away, and his entire day was already a bed of nails. In spite of his condition, he now had a chance at a new life, with a family and the simple pleasures whiskey had stolen from him.
He looked up and down the walkway. He could smell coffee boiling and meat and
hash browns and eggs cooking on a griddle. Then Harry Longabaugh and Harvey Logan came out of a café, backlit by the electric lights. They were admiring a palomino gelding with a gold and silver tail tethered to a hitching rail. Neither man looked in his direction. Logan was puffing on a cigar that looked like a stick protruding from his thick mustache. Longabaugh stretched and gazed at the eastern sky, as though in anticipation of another fine day.
What a joke, Hackberry thought. Men for whom he had nothing but contempt had extricated him from a problem he had thought unsolvable. Here’s to you, boys, he thought. May you find a shady place when you get to the big blaze below.
Then he watched Harvey Logan some more and realized he had been slickered by a man who had the psychological complexity of a centipede. Logan had taken the cigar from his mouth and was blowing on the tip, heating it into a red coal. A winged cockroach, as thick as a man’s thumb, was crawling up one of the wood posts that supported the colonnade. Logan blew softly on the cigar’s tip one more time and touched it to the roach’s head and watched the roach sizzle and fall to the walkway. He ground the roach into paste under his boot, then rocked on his heels and resumed smoking the cigar.
“She was telling the truth, wasn’t she?” Hackberry said behind him.
Logan sniffed at the air and didn’t turn around. “You smell puke?” he said.
“He can’t hardly stand up, Harvey. Let it go,” Longabaugh said.
Logan yawned. “Yes, time to hit the mattress.” He fished in his pocket and flipped a silver dollar over his shoulder onto the walkway. “There’s a bathhouse run by a Chinaman down the street. He sells powders for crab lice, too.”
Logan and Longabaugh walked toward the livery, chatting about a baseball game that was to be played that morning. Hackberry hooked one arm around the wood post, barely able to keep from falling into the street, his thirst so great he would have swallowed a quart of kerosene if it were handy.
MAGGIE COULD FEEL the days starting to dwindle down. The nights were cool and damp, the autumnal change stealing across the land, bleeding the sky of its summer light and drying up the water in the creeks and burning the bloom on the flowers. For Maggie, it was a bit like watching the world come to an end. Since she was seven years old, she had experienced moments like these, and rather than achieve understanding of them, she’d discovered they grew worse as the years passed. They always occurred when she was alone and the house played tricks on her mind and whispered words to her that were unintelligible. Her breath would suddenly come short, as though someone had pressed his thumb against her throat, and a sensation as gray as winter would foul her blood and invade her glands and turn her skin to sandpaper.
She looked at the scorched chunks of limestone in the fireplace and the ashes and twists of burned paper that had been there since spring. She wondered if she should build a fire. Her body longed for the comfort of a warm hearth and the cheery petals of flame on a big log. But she knew the house would be overheated in minutes, and if her husband walked in, he would have one more tool to use against her, to take power from her, to reassert himself as head of the household.
You have a hard edge, Maggie, her father had said when she was fourteen, just before he put her on the train for New Mexico. You don’t give quarter. You need to learn mercy, girl. I guarantee you’ll like the boarding school. You’ll find kind and genteel folk there, people who’ll set a better example than I have. God be with you.
Benedict Arnold, she had thought. Weakling and scapegoater of your daughter.
When she was seven, he had given her a puppy named Napoleon. He told her not to leave Napoleon alone in the yard or coyotes would get him. Then, after infecting her with the cruel image of her puppy being torn apart, he went to town and told her to help her mother, who was eight months pregnant.
Maggie was playing jacks in the barn when she heard her mother call from the bedroom window. She started out the door, then stopped. Napoleon had climbed up on a stack of hay bales and was chasing his tail in a circle. “Come down here, you bad dog. I have to see what Mommy wants,” she said.
Napoleon tumbled backward, wedging himself between two bales.
“See what you’ve gone and done, you silly puppy,” she said.
She heard her mother call again, louder this time, a thread of pain in her voice. Maggie climbed up on a bale, trying to reach down and catch her pup by the neck. Finally, she was able to get her hand under his stomach and lift him over the bale and skid down on the barn floor with Napoleon held against her chest. She brushed the straw off his face and set him on a folded tarpaulin and looked for a piece of twine to tie through his collar. “I’ll be there in a minute, Mommy,” she called through the barn door.
There was no reply. Napoleon took off running deeper into the barn. “Napoleon, you’re going to get a spanking with a newspaper,” she said.
But she didn’t spank him. Nor did she go in the house. She listened to the silence a moment, then sat down and resumed her game, bouncing the rubber ball off the plank floor and scooping up as many jacks as she could while the ball was in the air.
Her father returned from town a half hour later. She heard him cry out from inside the house, then he was at the barn door, his face like a collapsed balloon, both of his hands shiny with blood.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“Here, in the barn.”