He drove his truck and trailer at top speed, the gray stallion’s tail streaming over the trailer gate and glowing bright red in the taillights. At the top of one of the great rises she saw the lights of Comanche in the distance and the faint sparks of distant houses. After a good many miles she saw him turn into a ranch gate. She slowed and turned in. After a mile or a mile and a half she came to a stone house shaded by two massive live oaks. Behind the house was a large barn and a shearing platform with a fire burning on its level concrete table. Several men sat around the fire and threw chunks of wood into it. The fan of the windmill rolled with a continual knocking clank where one of the blades was missing.
He came out to greet her, closing the doors of the house behind him. He walked out from beneath the shadow of the galleria with his canvas coat collar turned up. A loose spur rang on the stony ground.
She said, “I got to turn Smoky out.”
“My boy will do that.” He turned toward the house and shouted, “Innis? Innis? Get out here and turn this woman’s horse in the lot.” He sat and watched as his young son held on to Joe’s lead rope and walked him toward the barn and the corrals. “Come in.” He stood up. “I got a windmill crew here. I guess they already ate. The cook’s here.”
She followed him to the house and they walked across the galleria floor and its veined limestones and through a set of double doors. It was hard to shut the doors. He had to slam them twice.
“Sit down,” he said. “While I get this fire going. What can I offer you?” Jeanine sat on a hard-backed chair in front of the fire. Everett sat down and unbuckled his spurs and pulled them from his boots. He dropped them on the telephone stand. Jeanine realized he was not wearing his spurs in the house as a gesture of politeness, and that if there wasn’t a woman around he and his son and the cook and the boys probably wore their spurs at the dining room table and hooked them on the chair rungs and caught them in the curtains. They probably wore them in the bathtub and in bed as far as she knew.
“You know, I think I would drink a bottle of beer.”
Everett said, “All right.” He went to the kitchen door and called to the cook.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get this young woman a bottle of beer.”
The cook came out again with the beer. His face sparkled with a week’s growth of red beard and he was covered with a heavy rubber apron as if he had been scalding turkeys.
He said, “Them boys is finished up and ate. I guess I’ll go on back.”
“Well, tell them I’d come out but I got business.”
The cook rubbed his whiskery chin. “I’ll do it,” he said. Then he went back in the kitchen.
Everett found a bottle of whiskey inside a glass-fronted bookcase. He took up a coffee cup from the dining room table and blew the dust out of it and then poured two fingers of whiskey into it. He opened her beer bottle on his belt buckle and handed it to her. He sat down again. He tipped up the coffee cup to drink his whiskey and then stood up and quietly choked and threw the rest of the whiskey into the fire. He threw the cup after it and it smashed against the grate. He went and took the bottle out of the bookcase and dropped it into a wastebasket.
“I’ll find out who did that,” he said. Jeanine moved her earrings from one hand to another. She heard voices outside; men laughing. The broken cup was full of blue flames where it held some dangerous, low-grade fuel.
“I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Everett,” she said.
“I know you’re not. Where are you staying tonight?”
“Here,” Jeanine said. “You’ve got to have a spare room around here somewhere. Unless that whole windmill crew is coming in here. I know you got a spare room.”
“You’d better drive on into Ranger. To save your reputation.” He sat back and took in her short, thatched hair of various sunburnt colors and her slight body and her nervous hands.
“I don’t have one,” she said.
“I’d be happy to tell you the name of a tourist court in Ranger. I’ll give you five dollars to go there and get a cabin.”
“No. Why should I drive on tonight? I’m wore out.”
He said, “You’re a hard woman, Jeanine.”
“Make it ten and I’ll think about it.”
He bit his lower lip to keep from laughing at her. “You’re out of my price range.” He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see your paper.”
She handed him the bill of sale from her tweed jacket pocket and he sat down at a long dining room table with it. Jeanine walked around the room. On the walls were photographs of him and his wife at about the time Jeanine had seen her last, it must have been five or six years ago. His wife wore a sheer dress with a tiny collar and a straw hat. The picture had been taken in the bright daylight so that the shadows were very black and her eyes were squinted against the sun. Ross Everett and his wife stood at a train station with suitcases around them and a freight wagon behind them. It was the San Angelo station because Jeanine could see the sign. They were going somewhere and they were happy and they smiled at whoever was taking the picture. Jeanine turned away.
“Your paper is good,” he said.
He laid the bill of sale in front of him that said Smoky Joe Hancock, a two-year-old stallion, had been sold by Manuel Benavides to John C. Stoddard March 9, 1935. Height 15.2 hands. Color: seal. Markings: none. By Joe Hancock by John Wilkins by Peter McCue. Out of a Rainy Day mare on the Waggoner ranch.
He took another cigarette and set it on fire with a metal lighter. He squinted at her over the smoke.
“You don’t want to sell him.”
“I don’t know, I’ve kind of got to like him.” She sat down on the other side of the long table and crossed one blue-jean leg over the other, then uncrossed them again and nervously twisted her hands on her bony kneecaps. “Now all of a sudden.”
“I told you,” he said. “Don’t get all wrapped around the axle about a horse.”
She went to stand once again in front of the hooded fireplace. The place was a mess. There was a saddle turned up on its fork against the wall and a stack of old Farm and Ranch magazines beside it, and Time and the Providence Journal, which seemed to be a newspaper from the East somewhere. A plate with half a dried-out sandwich on a chair. Trophies for prize cattle, championship Angora goats. The ageless contradictions of ranch life where creatures were cherished against storms and against sickness and other creatures, sometimes at the risk of a person’s health and even life, and then slaughtered. There was a stuffed, dusty javelina head with a red plaster tongue sticking out between the teeth and a spur hanging from one of the curved tusks.
“Did you kill all this stuff?”
“Yes. I did.”
She untied her scarf and let it drape around her neck. It was getting warm; the fire had surrounded two large sections of live oak logs and lit up the zoo of taxidermy animals on the walls. She put the heel of her hand to her forehead and thrust her fingers into her hair.
“Tell me about Bea,” he said. She told him. As she spoke she saw Bea at the bottom of the well in the dim light like a cracked and discarded Skippy doll and the loose, fainting feeling of horror that had come over her when she saw her little sister and the blood. Of the doctor with his loose mouth and the smell of Lysol in the hospital.
“And she’s all right except for that leg?”
“Yes. She just needs a specialist. A surgeon. That’s how come I’m selling Smoky Joe to you.”
He stared at the fire for a moment. “And how are y’all holding out on that farm?”
“All right.”
“Lots of people are moving back to the country. At least you can raise chickens. Do y’all have chickens?”
“Yes. And Mayme got a job at the Magnolia office in Tarrant.”
He stared at the fire. “It seemed like things were going to get better for a while. In ’35. But the economy has cratered again.”
“That’s when I saw you last,” she said. “In Conroe. I mean before Tarrant last month. Last time I talked to you was in Conroe.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember me when I was fifteen?”
He started to say what it was he remembered and then he changed his mind. He got up and crossed the room, slamming storage doors and then he opened the gun cabinet. He found a bottle of Irish whiskey behind the stock of a shotgun. He poured some into a dusty wineglass that said san angelo class of ’26.
“Well, let’s give this a try,” he said. “Yes, I remember you very well. I remember you all very well.”
Jeanine wrapped her arms around herself. “I guess you read it in the papers.”
“Are you cold?”
“No, I’m nervous.”
“Yes, I read about it. I read about his arrest.”
Jeanine considered her bitten nails. “For gambling.”
He sat for a long time in silence; the fire erupted in sparks and the sparks winked out on the tile floor.
“No, Jeanine. For statutory rape.” The whiskey charged into his bloodstream. Jeanine held her beer bottle wrapped in her fingers, as if she would break it. His cigarette burned and smoked out of the folded architecture of his two hands and the smoke drifted toward the fireplace and its draft. Finally he asked her, “Did you know the girl?”
She took up a stick of kindling and shoved fiercely at the coals on the edge of the fireplace. “How would I know somebody like that?”
“Jeanine, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”
Jeanine felt her throat tighten and an odd, blocked feeling in her ears and realized that tears were rising to her eyes like mercury in a thermometer.
He said, “You’re about to break out crying.”
“I know it. I don’t want to.” If she started crying it would never stop. “Why?” she said. She lifted her head to him in search of an answer. “Why did he have to do that to us?”
Everett took a long breath and blew it out his nose, along with smoke. He said, “I’m not the person to ask, sweetheart, but then you’re not asking me.” He got up and walked over to the fireplace beside her and threw his cigarette butt into it. The flames shone across the tiled floor and she heard footsteps in the kitchen, the low voices of children being very quiet and very intent. Then a slashing, sprung noise and the pinging sound of broken crockery.
He turned toward the kitchen and said, “Innis!”
Jeanine wiped at her eyes firmly. Ross reached to his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief, shook it out of its folds and handed it to her. She took it and scrubbed at her eyes and blew her nose.
The door from the kitchen opened. The boy stood there, his face spotted with large freckles, the doorknob in his hand. He wore a very dirty small Stetson and a stained sweater that zipped up the front. Behind him another boy kicked pieces of a china plate under the kitchen table.
“Yes, sir?”
“What are you doing?”
“Well, me and Aaron were going to get something to eat.” He had a slingshot in his hand cut from the Y crotch of a branch. It was made with strips of inner tube for slings and a leather pocket made of an old shoe tongue.
“You were going to get something to eat with a slingshot?”
Innis glanced down at the primitive weapon in his hand. “Kind of.” He stuck it into his coat pocket. “We were shooting at rats and Aaron broke one of those Spodes.”
Another smash. Jeanine saw chips of china spray across the kitchen floor.
Ross stood up. “Damn it!”
“Well, we were going to sit up and wait for that coon.” The boy had fair hair cut short with a whirled cowlick in the middle of his forehead. “Since I can’t use the twenty-two on him. Can Aaron stay all night?” He turned and said, “Aaron, stop shooting.”
“Not tonight.”
The boy stood silent in the doorway. He glanced at Jeanine and pressed his lips together and regarded his boot toes.
“Why not?”
Ross said, “Somebody is going to get snatched bald-headed in a minute. Aaron’s dad is going home. Aaron is going with him.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed.
Jeanine set her beer bottle down on the tiles beside the fireplace.
“I’ll drink another beer,” she said.
“No.” He said it in an absentminded sort of way. He crooked his forefinger over the bridge of his nose. “You’ll be up all night peeing.” He stood beside her, watching the fire. “The bathroom is behind the kitchen.” He lit another cigarette. Flaming bits of paper fell to the floor and he stepped on them. She watched the smoke wander into the bars of light and out again. “I’ll make you out a bill of sale,” he said.
She got up and walked from one end of his dining room to the other while he wrote. He used it for an office. His desk was the long dark dining table, made in the fashion of the 1920s, when people liked that spare straight look, and it was scarred with cigarette burns and lamp rings. Apparently he and the boy ate in the kitchen, probably living on tamales and chili and mutton or whatever the cook made up for them.
“It’s hard to give him up,” she said.
“You don’t have the money to campaign him properly. He needs to run on the good tracks in New Mexico and Arizona. He needs to get used to a starting gate, he needs to be exercised the right way, consistently.” Everett saw how spare she was, not big enough to hold the horse to a working gallop. Not much bigger than his son. “He’ll go down on one of these brush tracks before long and break a leg and you don’t even have the money for vet bills.”
“You saw him run today.” She had a stubborn edge to her voice. “He’s worth more than three hundred.”
“Then try to get it somewhere else.”
Jeanine sat and listened to footsteps coming down a hall somewhere. A door opened and then the sound of running water.
“How do I know you’ll treat him well?” It was the last objection she could think of.
“Look at my other horses,” he said. “I beat them regularly. I use a hammer.”
Jeanine lifted her shoulders. “I guess I’ve got to.”
He thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll pay you two hundred and you can have a percentage in his winnings. Ten percent.”
Jeanine paused and then whispered the math to herself.
“But how would I get it?”
“I’ll hand it to you, sweetheart.” He drank up his whiskey. “I hate to take a good horse away from an ignoramus like you.”
“That sounds like a deal.” She didn’t smile. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t ever bet anymore.”
“You’re not. I’ll do it.”
“Well here, then.” She handed him back a ten-dollar bill. “Put it on Smoky whenever you race him.”
“All right.”
“Well, write it out,” said Jeanine. “And sign it.”
He opened a drawer beneath the table edge, one of those drawers where people used to keep the silver. In it were a metal cash box and a revolver. He opened the cash box and took two one-hundred-dollar bills. He found a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote out a new bill of sale and a percentage agreement. He handed it to her. She paused and read it over. He waved away the drifting veils of cigarette smoke. The lamp sat between them on the table and shone on their faces and hands and they were reflected in the black windows like some old portrait of conspirators or highwaymen, their treasure before them, dividing the spoils. She signed her name to the paper.
She shoved the bills and her winnings into her jacket pocket. Everett drew their chairs closer to the fire and they sat side by side, for the night was growing intensely cold and the cold crept through the walls of the old house, slipped under the warped baseboards. The fire was collapsing into crumbling red coals.
He turned his dark blue eyes to her and then away again. He listened for any new damages going on in the kitchen. “If that kid breaks something else I’ll kill him.” He swirled the final drops of whiskey in his glass. “He does this when I have somebody to visit.”
“Like who?” said Jeanine. She didn’t know why she asked it.
“Women.” Everett shoved at a log with his boot. “Find yourself a room. Make sure it’s the one with the window looking out at the shearing platform. So the windmill crew can see you and you can scandalize the place. Try upstairs. There’s blankets somewhere.”
Jeanine found her way through the kitchen and then opened a door to one side of it. It was a boy’s room. Archie comics and the Red Ryder puppet and balsa wood airplanes. Faded small jeans on the floor. Old-fashioned square wooden stirrups and boxes of twenty-two ammunition. The boy was probably still outside with his slingshot, waiting up for the midnight visit of a raccoon or a ringtailed wildcat. They all thirsted for the blood of chickens and the yolks of eggs.
She opened another door; a room jammed full of old-style folded canvas cowboy beds and cooking pots. It was camping gear, roundup gear. It had all come back from the fall works unwashed and it stank of campfire smoke and bacon grease. Unlucky the woman who had to clean that mess up. Jeanine closed the door and climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a hallway. The old wooden floor creaked beneath her feet.
She knew she was not going to be able to sleep. She saw framed photographs on the hallway walls, people in 1920s clothes. She didn’t stop to see who they were, they were frightening, they might be of his dead wife. At the end of the hall was a tall window framed in stone like the door to another world. Jeanine saw outside a sudden graininess to the night air and realized snow was falling. She put her face to the glass. Out beside the shearing platform a fire still burnt and snow fell into its lit red heart, like moths drawn to light.
She opened the last door in the hallway and in that room found a bed with bright pillow shams. Three mirrors at a vanity reflected her dark figure in the doorway, wavering like a trinity of selves. She reached for the light chain and pulled it and sat on the bed. He was crazy to keep her room like this. Jeanine wished she hadn’t found it. She couldn’t make herself turn off the light but lay back, wrapped in blankets that she found in a trunk at the foot of the bed.
She saw a wardrobe built into a corner and its shut door was worrisome to her. As to what might be in it. Her clothes. Some part of a person always remained in their clothes somehow. Snow pinged at the window, it came sweeping down out of the Texas Panhandle unobstructed. He didn’t want anybody here. Except some sort of women; casual women. That’s why he kept her room like this. And he blamed it on the boy.
At last she pulled the light chain. She knew she would not sleep. She got up again and drew a chair to the window. She leaned her forehead against the pane to watch the mysterious and rare sight of a fall of snow.
The fire outside died and the last of the windmill crew left in a trailing glitter of red taillights that winked out in the restless foaming of the snowstorm.
She saw Ross Everett walk out of the house, moving through the dark. Snow settled on the shoulders of his canvas coat. He sat down beside the still water of the windmill tank. He sat and smoked and watched the surface of the water twilled by the grainy fall of the snow, a rough and luminous weave. The fan of the windmill turned, clanking, in the hard wind. He threw his cigarette into the water. A sudden gust of wind shook the window, the old glass panes vaulted in their frames and Jeanine’s dim reflection moved in strange angles.