Presence: Stories Page 10

  Guido blinked against the warming sun, watching the other two, then he looked off to his right where the passes were, and the fingers of his mind felt around beyond those passes into the bowls and hollows of the mountains where last week he had spotted the small herd of wild horses grazing. Now he felt the lightness he had been hoping to feel for three days, the bodiless urge to fly. For three days he had kept away from the plane because a certain carelessness had been itching at him, a feeling that he always thought would lead him to his death. About five weeks ago he had come up to this desert with Gay Langland and he had chased seven mustangs out of the mountains. But this time he had dived to within a foot of the mountainside, and afterward, as they sat around the fire eating dinner, Guido had had the feeling that he had made that deep dive so he could die. And the thought of his dead wife had come to him again, and the other thought that always came into his mind with her dead face. It was the wonderment, the quiet pressing-in of the awareness that he had never wanted a woman after she had been buried with the stillborn baby beside her in the graveyard outside Bowie. Seven years now he had waited for some real yearning for a woman, and nothing at all had come to him. It pleasured him to know that he was free of that, and it sometimes made him careless in the plane, as though some great bang and a wreckage would make him again what he had been. By now he could go around in Bowie for a week and only in an odd moment recall that he hadn’t even looked at a girl walking by, and the feeling of carelessness would come on him, a kind of loose gaiety, as though everything was comical. Until he had made that dive and pulled out with his nose almost scraping the grass, and he had climbed upward with his mouth hanging open and his body in a sweat. So that through these past three days up here he had refused to let himself take off until the wind had utterly died, and he had clung to moroseness. He wanted to take off in the absolute grip of his own wits, leaving nothing to chance. Now there was no wind at all, and he felt he had pressed the sinister gaiety out of his mind. He left the dying fire and walked past Gay and Perce and down the gentle slope to the plane, looking like a stout, serious football coach before the kick-off.

  He glanced over the fuselage and at the bald doughnut tires and he loved the plane. Again, as always, he looked at the weakened starboard shock absorber, which no longer held its spread so that the plane stood tilted a little to one side, and told himself that it was not serious. He heard the truck motor starting and he unfastened the knots of the ropes holding the plane to the spikes driven into the desert floor. Then the truck pulled up, and young Perce Howland dropped off and went over to the tail handle, gripped it, lifted the tail off the ground, and swung the plane around so she faced out across the endless desert and away from the mountains. Then they unwound the rubber hose from the gas drum on the truck and stuck the nozzle into the gas tank behind the engine, and Perce turned the pump crank.

  Guido then walked around the wing and over to the cockpit, whose right door was folded down, leaving the inside open to the air. He reached in and took out his ripped leather flight jacket and got into it.

  Perce stood leaning against the truck fender now, grinning. “That sure is a ventilated type jacket, Guido,” he said.

  Then Guido said, “I can’t get my size any more.” The jacket had one sleeve off at the elbow, and the dried leather was split open down the back, showing the lamb’s-wool lining. He had bombed Germany in this jacket long ago. He reached in behind the seat and took out a goggle case, slipped his goggles out, replaced the case, set his goggles securely on his face, and reached in again and took out a shotgun pistol and four shells from a little wooden box beside his seat. He loaded the pistol and laid it carefully under his seat. Then he got into the cockpit, sat in his seat, drew the strap over his belly and buckled it. Meantime Gay had taken his position before the propeller.

  Guido called through the open doorway of the cockpit, “Turn her over, Gay-boy!”

  Gay stepped up to the propeller, glanced down behind his heels to be sure no stone waited to trip him when he stepped back, pulled down on the blade, and hopped back watchfully.

  “Give her another!” Guido called in the silence.

  Gay stepped up again, again glancing around his heels, and pulled the blade down. The engine inhaled and exhaled, and they could all hear the oily clank of her inner shafts turning loosely.

  “Ignition on, Gay-boy!” Guido called and threw the switch.

  This time Gay inspected the ground around him even more carefully and pulled his hatbrim down tighter on his head. Perce stood leaning on the truck’s front fender, spitting and chewing, his eyes softly squinted against the brazen sun. Gay reached up and pulled the propeller down and jumped back. A puff of smoke floated up from the engine ports.

  “Goddam car gas,” Guido said. “Ignition on. Go again, Gay-boy!” They were buying low octane to save money.

  Gay again stepped up to the propeller, swung the blade down, and the engine said its “Chaaahh!” and the ports breathed white smoke into the morning air. Gay walked over to Perce and stood beside him, watching. The fuselage shuddered and the propeller turned into a wheel, and the dust blew pleasantly from behind the plane and toward the mountains. Guido gunned her, and she tumbled toward the open desert, bumping along over the sage clumps and crunching whitened skeletons of cattle killed by the winter. The stiff-backed plane grew smaller, shouldering its way over the broken ground, and then its nose turned upward and there was space between the doughnut tires and the desert, and lazily it climbed, turning back the way it had come. It flew over the heads of Perce and Gay, and Guido waved down, a stranger now, fiercely goggled and wrapped in leather, and they could see him exposed to the waist, turning from them to look through the windshield at the mountains ahead of him. The plane flew away, climbing smoothly, losing itself against the orange and purple walls that vaulted up from the desert to hide from the cowboys’ eyes the wild animals they wanted for themselves.

  • • •

  They would have at least two hours before the plane flew out of the mountains driving the horses before it, so they washed the three tin plates and the cups and stored them in the aluminum grub box. If Guido did find horses they would break camp and return to Bowie tonight, so they packed up their bedrolls with sailors’ tidiness and laid them neatly side by side on the ground. The six great truck tires, each with its looped rope coiled within, lay in two piles on the bed of the truck. Gay Langland looked them over and touched them with his hand and stood for a moment trying to think if there was anything they were leaving behind. He jumped up on the truck to see that the cap was screwed tight on the gas drum, which was lashed to the back of the cab up front, and it was. Then he hopped down to the ground and got into the cab and started the engine. Perce was already sitting there with his hat tipped forward against the yellow sunlight pouring through the windshield. A thin and concerned border collie came trotting up as Gay started to close his door, and he invited her into the cab. She leaped up, and he snugged her into the space between the clutch and the left wall of the cab. “Damn near forgot Belle,” he said, and they started off.

  Gay owned the truck and he wanted to preserve the front end, which he knew could be twisted out of line on broken ground. So he started off slowly. They could hear the gas sloshing in the drum behind them outside. It was getting warm now. They rode in silence, staring ahead at the two-track trail they were following across the bone-cluttered sagebrush. Thirty miles ahead stood the lava mountains that were the northern border of this desert, the bed of a bowl seven thousand feet up, a place no one ever saw except the few cowboys searching for stray cattle every few months. People in Bowie, sixty miles away, did not know of this place. There were the two of them and the truck and the dog, and now that they were on the move they felt between them the comfort of purpose and their isolation, and Perce slumped in his seat, blinking as though he would go to sleep again, and Gay smoked a cigarette and let his body flow from side to side with the pitching
of the truck.

  There was a moving cloud of dust in the distance toward the left, and Gay said, “Antelope,” and Perce tipped his hat back and looked. “Must be doin’ sixty,” he said, and Gay said, “More. I chased one once and I was doin’ more than sixty and he lost me.” Perce shook his head in wonder, and they turned to look ahead again.

  After he had thought awhile Perce said, “We better get over to Largo by tomorrow if we’re gonna get into that rodeo. They’s gonna be a crowd trying to sign up for that one.”

  “We’ll drive down in the morning,” Gay said.

  “I’ll have to see about gettin’ me some stock.”

  “We’ll get there early tomorrow; you’ll get stock if you come in early.”

  “Like to win some money,” Perce said. “I just wish I get me a good horse down there.”

  “They be glad to fix you up, Perce. You’re known pretty good around there now. They’ll fix you up with some good stock,” Gay said. Perce was one of the best bronc riders, and the rodeos liked to have it known he would appear.

  Then there was silence. Gay had to hold the gear-shift lever in high or it would slip out into neutral when they hit bumps. The transmission fork was worn out, he knew, and the front tires were going too. He dropped one hand to his pants pocket and felt the four silver dollars he had from the ten Roslyn had given him when they had left her days ago.

  As though he had read Gay’s mind, Perce said, “Roslyn would’ve liked it up here. She’d liked to have seen that antelope, I bet.” Perce grinned as both of them usually did at Roslyn’s eastern surprise at everything they did and saw and said.

  “Yeah,” Gay said, “she likes to see things.” Through the corners of his eyes he watched the younger man, who was looking ahead with a little grin on his face. “She’s damned good sport, old Roslyn,” Gay said.

  “Sure is,” Perce Howland said. And Gay watched him for any sign of guile, but there was only a look of glad appreciation. “First woman like that I ever met,” the younger man said.

  “They’s more,” Gay said. “Some of them eastern women fool you sometimes. They got education but they’re good sports. And damn good women too, some of them.”

  There was a silence. Then the younger man asked, “You get to know a lot of them? Eastern women?”

  “Ah, I get one once in a while,” Gay said.

  “Only educated women I ever know, they was back home near Teachers College. Students. Y’know,” he said, warming to the memory, “I used to think, hell, education’s everything. But when I saw the husbands some of them got married to—schoolteachers and everything, why I don’t give them much credit. And they just as soon climb on a man as tell him good morning. I was teachin’ them to ride for a while near home.”

  “Just because a woman’s educated don’t mean much. Woman’s a woman,” Gay said. The image of his wife came into his mind. For a moment he wondered if she was still living with the same man he had beaten up when he discovered them together in a parked car six years ago.

  “You divorced?” Perce asked.

  “No. I never bothered with it,” Gay said. It always surprised him how Perce said just what was on his mind sometimes. “How’d you know I was thinkin’ of that?” he asked, grinning with embarrassment. But he was too curious to keep silent.

  “Hell, I didn’t know,” Perce said.

  “You’re always doin’ that. I think of somethin’ and you go ahead and say it.”

  “That’s funny,” Perce said.

  They rode on in silence. They were nearing the middle of the desert, where they would turn east. Gay was driving faster now because he wanted to get to the rendezvous and sit quietly waiting for the plane to appear. He held on to the gear-shift lever and felt it trying to spring out of high and into neutral. It would have to be fixed. The time was coming fast when he would need about fifty dollars or have to sell the truck, because it would be useless without repairs. Without a truck and without a horse he would be down to what was in his pocket.

  Perce spoke out of the silence. “If I don’t win Saturday I’m gonna have to do somethin’ for money.”

  “Goddam, you always say what’s in my mind.”

  Perce laughed. His face looked very young and pink. “Why?”

  “I was just now thinkin’,” Gay said, “what I’m gonna do for money.”

  “Well, Roslyn give you some,” Perce said.

  He said it innocently, and Gay knew it was innocent, and yet he felt angry blood moving into his neck. Something had happened in these five weeks, and Gay did not know for sure what it was. Roslyn had taken to calling Perce cute, and now and again she would bend over and kiss him on the back of the neck when he was sitting in the living-room chair, drinking with them.

  Not that that meant anything in itself, because he’d known eastern women before who’d do something like that and it was just their way. Especially college-graduate divorced women. What he wondered at was Perce’s way of hardly even noticing what she did to him. Sometimes it was like he’d already had her and could ignore her, the way a man will who knows he’s boss. But then Gay thought it might just be that he really wasn’t interested, or maybe that he was keeping cool in deference to Gay.

  Again Gay felt a terrible longing to earn money working. He sensed the bottom of his life falling if it turned out Roslyn had really been loving this boy beside him. It had happened to him once before with his wife, but this frightened him more and he did not know exactly why. Not that he couldn’t do without Roslyn. There wasn’t anybody or anything he couldn’t do without. She was about his age and full of laughter that was not laughter and gaiety that was not gaiety and adventurousness that was labored, and he knew all this perfectly well even as he laughed with her and was high with her in the bars and rodeos. He had only lived once, and that was when he had had his house and his wife and his children. He knew the difference, but you never kept anything, and he had never particularly thought about keeping anything or losing anything. He had been all his life like Perce Howland, sitting beside him now, a man moving on or ready to. It was only when he discovered his wife with a stranger that he knew he had had a stake to which he had been pleasurably tethered. He had not seen her or his children for years and only rarely thought about any of them. Any more than his father had thought of him very much after the day he had gotten on his pony, when he was fourteen, to go to town from the ranch, and had kept going into Montana and stayed there for three years. He lived in this country as his father did, and it was the same endless range wherever he went, and it connected him sufficiently with his father and his wife and his children. All might turn up sometime in some town or at some rodeo, where he might happen to look over his shoulder and see his daughter or one of his sons, or they might never turn up. He had neither left anyone nor not-left as long as they were all alive on these ranges, for everything here was always beyond the farthest shot of vision and far away, and mostly he had worked alone or with one or two men, between distant mountains anyway.

  In the distance now he could see the shimmering wall of the heat waves rising from the clay flatland they wanted to get to. Now they were approaching closer, and it opened to them beyond the heat waves, and they could see once again how vast it was, a prehistoric lake bed thirty miles long by seventeen miles wide, couched between the two mountain ranges. It was a flat, beige waste without grass or bush or stone, where a man might drive a car at a hundred miles an hour with his hands off the wheel and never hit anything at all. They drove in silence. The truck stopped bouncing as the tires rolled over harder ground where there were fewer sage clumps. The waves of heat were dense before them, nearly touchable. Now the truck rolled smoothly and they were on the clay lake bed, and when they had gone a few hundred yards onto it Gay pulled up and shut off the engine. The air was still in a dead, sunlit silence. When he opened his door he could hear a squeak in the hinge he had never noticed before. W
hen they walked around they could hear their shirts rasping against their backs and the brush of a sleeve against their trousers.

  They stood on the clay ground, which was as hard as concrete, and turned to look the way they had come. They looked back toward the mountains at whose feet they had camped and slept, and scanned their ridges for Guido’s plane. It was too early for him, and they made themselves busy, taking the gas drum off the truck and setting it a few yards away on the ground, because they would want the truck bed clear when the time came to run the horses down. Then they climbed up and sat inside the tires with their necks against the tire beads and their legs hanging over.

  Perce said, “I sure hope they’s five up in there.”

  “Guido saw five, he said.”

  “He said he wasn’t sure if one wasn’t only a colt,” Perce said.

  Gay let himself keep silent. He felt he was going to argue with Perce. He watched Perce through the corners of his eyes, saw the flat, blond cheeks and the strong, lean neck, and there was something tricky about Perce now. “How long you think you’ll be stayin’ around here, Perce?” he asked.

  They were both watching the distant ridges for a sign of the plane.

  “Don’t know,” Perce said and spat over the side of the truck. “I’m gettin’ a little tired of this, though.”

  “Well, it’s better than wages, Perce.”

  “Hell, yes. Anything’s better than wages.”

  Gay’s eyes crinkled. “You’re a real misfit, boy.”

  “That suits me fine,” Perce said. They often had this conversation and savored it. “Better than workin’ for some goddam cow outfit buckarooin’ so somebody else can buy gas for his Cadillac.”