Lonely Dove

That much slow progress would have discouraged most women, but Lorena didn’t allow her mind to dwell on it. She had her flat days, of course, but that was mostly because Lonesome Dove itself was so flat. She got tired of looking out the window all day and seeing nothing but brown land and gray chaparral. In the middle of the day the sun was so hot the land looked white. She could see the river from her window, and Mexico. Lippy told her she could make a fortune if she cared to establish herself in Mexico, but Lorena didn’t care to. From what she could see of the country it didn’t look any more interesting than Texas, and the men stunk just as bad as Texans, if not worse. Gus McCrae claimed to have been to San Francisco, and would talk to her for hours about how blue the water was in the bay, and how the ships came in from everywhere. In the end he overtalked it, like he did everything. Once or twice Lorena felt she had a clear picture of it, listening to Gus, but by the time he finally quit talking she would have lost it and just be lying there, wishing it would cool off. In that respect, Gus was unusual, for most men didn’t talk. He would blab right up until he shoved his old carrot in, and then would be blabbing again, before it was even dry. Generous as he was by local standards—he gave her five dollars in gold every single time—Lorena still felt a little underpaid. It should have been five dollars for wetting his carrot and another five dollars for listening to all the blab. Some of it was interesting, but Lorena couldn’t keep her mind on so much talk. It didn’t seem to hurt Gus’s feelings any. He talked just as cheerful whether she was listening or not, and he never tried to talk her into giving him two pokes for the price of one, as most of the younger men did. It was peculiar that he was her most regular customer, because he was also her oldest. She made a point of not letting anything men did surprise her much, but secretly it did surprise her a little that a man as old as Gus would still be so partial to it. In that respect he put a lot of younger men to shame, including Mosby Marlin, who had held her up for two years over in east Texas. Compared to Gus, Mosby couldn’t even be said to have a carrot, though he did have a kind of little stringy r****h that he was far too proud of. She had only been seventeen when she met Mosby, and both her parents were dead. Her pa fell out in Vicksburg, and her ma only made it to Baton Rouge, so it was Baton Rouge where she was stranded when Mosby found her. She hadn’t done any sporting up to that time, though she had developed early and had even had some trouble with her own pa, though he was feverish to the point of delirium when the trouble happened. He died soon after. She knew Mosby was a drunkard from the first, but he told her he was a Southern gentleman and he had an expensive buggy and a fine pair of horses, so she believed him. Mosby claimed that he wanted to marry her, and Lorena believed that too, and let him drag her off to a big old drafty house near a place called Gladewater. The house was huge, but it didn’t even have glass in the windows or rugs or anything; they had to set smoke pots in the rooms to keep the mosquitoes from eating them alive, which the mosquitoes did anyway. Mosby had a mother and two mean sisters and no money, and no intention of marrying Lorena anyway, though he kept claiming he would for a while. In fact, the womenfolk treated Lorena worse than they treated the nigras, and they didn’t treat the nigras good. They didn’t treat Mosby good, either, or one another good—about the only creatures that ever saw any kindness around that house were Mosby’s hounds. Mosby assured her he’d set the hounds on her if she ever tried to run away. It was in the nights, when Lorena had to lay there with the smoke from the smoke pots so thick she couldn’t breathe, and the clouds of mosquitoes nearly as thick as the smoke, and Mosby constantly bothering her with his r****h, that Lorena’s spirits sunk so low she ceased to want to talk. She became a silent woman. Soon after, the sporting started, because Mosby lost so much money one night that he offered two of his friends a poke in exchange for his debt. Lorena was so surprised that she didn’t have time to arm herself, and the men had their way, but the next morning when the two were gone she went at Mosby with his own quirt and cut his face so badly they put her in the cellar for two days and didn’t even bring her food. Two or three months later it happened again with some more friends, and this time Lorena didn’t fight. She was so tired of Mosby and his r****h and the smoke pots that she was willing to consider anything different. The mother and the mean sisters wanted to drive her out of the house, and Lorena would have been glad to go, but Mosby threw such a fit that one of the sisters ran off herself to live with an aunt. Then one night Mosby just plain sold a poke to a traveling man of some kind: he seemed to be planning to do it regular, only the second man he sold her to happened to take a fancy to Lorena. His name was John Tinkersley, the tallest andprettiest man Lorena had seen up to that point, and the cleanest. When he asked her if she was really married to Mosby she said no. Tinkersley suggested then and there that she accompany him to San Antonio. Lorena was glad to agree Mosby was so shocked by her decision that he offered to go get the preacher and marry her on the spot, but by that tim Lorena had figured out that being married to Mosby would be even worse than what she had already been through Mosby tried for a while to work himself up to a fight, but he was no match for Tinkersley and he knew it. The best h could salvage was to sell Tinkersley a horse for Lorena, plus the sidesaddle that belonged to the sister who had run off San Antonio was a big improvement over Gladewater, if only because there were no smoke pots and few mosquitoes They kept two rooms in a hotel—not the finest in town but fine enough—and Tinkersley bought Lorena some prett clothes. Of course he financed that by selling the horse and the sidesaddle, which disappointed Lorena a little. She ha discovered that she liked riding. She would have been happy to ride on to San Francisco, but Tinkersley had no interest i that. Clean and tall and pretty as he was, he turned out, in the end, to be no better bargain than Mosby. If he had a sof spot, it was for himself, not for her. He even spent money getting his fingernails cut, which was something Lorena ha never dreamed a man would do. For all that, he was a hard man. Fighting with Mosby had been like fighting with a littl boy, whereas the first time she talked back to Tinkersley he hit her so hard her head cracked a washpot on the burea behind her. Her ears rang for three days. He threatened to do worse than that, too, and Lorena didn’t suppose they wer idle threats. She held her tongue around Tinkersley from then on. He made it clear that marriage wasn’t what he had ha in mind when he took her away from Mosby, which was all right in itself, since she had already got out of the habit o thinking about marriage That didn’t mean she was in the habit of thinking about herself as a sporting woman, but it was precisely that habit tha Tinkersley expected her to acquire “Well, you’re already trained, ain’t you?” he said. Lorena didn’t consider what had happened in Gladewater any trainin for anything, but then it was clear there wasn’t anything respectable she was trained for, even if she could get away fro Tinkersley without being killed. For a few days she had thought Tinkersley might love her, but he soon made it clear tha she meant about as much to him as a good saddle. She knew that for the time being the sporting life was about her onl choice. At least the hotel room was nice and there were no mean sisters. Most of the sports who came to see her wer men Tinkersley gambled with in the bar down below. Once in a while a nice one would even give her a little mone directly, instead of leaving it with Tinkersley, but Tinkersley was smart about such things and he found her hiding plac and cleaned her out the day they took the stage to Matamoros. He might not have done it if he hadn’t had a string o losses, but the fact that he was handsome didn’t mean that he was a good gambler, as several of the sports pointed ou to Lorena. He was just a middling gambler, and he had such a run of bad luck in San Antonio that he decided there migh be less competition down on the border It was on that trip that they had the real fight. Lorena felt swollen with anger about the money—swollen enough, finally not to be scared of him. What she wanted was to kill him for being so determined to leave her absolutely nothing. If sh had known more about guns she would have killed him. She thought with a gun you just pulled the trigger, but it turne out his had to be c****d first. Tinkersley was lying on the bed drunk, but not so drunk he didn’t notice when she stuck hi own gun in his stomach. When she realized it wasn’t going to go off she had just time to hit him in the face with it, a lic that actually won the fight for her, although before he gave up and went to look for a doctor to stitch his jaw u Tinkersley did bite her on the upper lip as they were rolling around, Lorena still hoping the gun would shoot The bite had left a faint little scar just above her upper lip; to Lorena’s amusement it was that trifling scar that seemed t make men crazy for a time with her. Of course it wasn’t just the scar—she had developed well and had also gotte prettier as she got older. But the scar played its part. Tinkersley got drunk in Lonesome Dove the day he left her, and h told everyone in the Dry Bean that she was a murderous woman. So she had a reputation in the town before she eve unpacked her clothes. Tinkersley had left her with no money at all, but fortunately she could cook when she had to; th Dry Bean was the only place in Lonesome Dove that served food, and Lorena had been able to talk Xavier Wanz, wh owned it, into letting her do the cooking until the cowboys got over being scared of her and began to approach her Augustus was the man who got it started. While he was pulling off his boots the first time he smiled at her “Where’d you get that scar?” he asked “Somebody bit me,” Lorena said Once Gus became a regular, she had no trouble making a living in the town, although in the summer, when the cowboy were mostly off on the trail, pickings sometimes grew slim. While she was well past the point of trusting men, she soo perceived that Gus was in a class by himself, at least in Lonesome Dove. He wasn’t mean, and he didn’t treat her like mos men treated a sporting woman. She knew he would probably even help her if she ever really needed help. It seemed t her he had got rid of something other men hadn’t got rid of—some meanness or some need. He was the one man beside Lippy she would sometimes talk to—a little. With most of the sports she had nothing at all to say.In fact, her silence soon came to be widely commented on. It was part of her, like the scar, and, like the scar, it drew men to her even though it made them deeply uneasy. It was not a trick, either, although she knew it unnerved the sports and made matters go quicker. Silent happened to be how she felt when men were with her. In respect to her silence, too, Gus McCrae was different. At first he seemed not to notice it—certainly he didn’t let it bother him. Then it began to amuse him, which was not a reaction Lorena had had from anyone else. Most men chattered like squirrels when they were with her, no doubt hoping she would say something back. Of course Gus was a great blabber, but his blabbing wasn’t really like the chattering the other sports did. He was just full of opinion, which he freely poured out, as much for his own amusement as for anything. Lorena had never particularly looked at life as if it was something funny, but Gus did. Even her lack of talk struck him as funny. One day he walked in and sat down in a chair, the usual look of amusement on his face. Lorena assumed he was going to take his boots off and she went over to the bed, but when she looked around he was sitting there, one foot on the other knee, twirling the rowel of his spur. He always wore spurs, although it was not often she saw him on horseback. Once in a while, in the early morning, the bawling of cattle or the nickering of horses would awaken her and she would look out the window and see him and his partner and a gang of riders trailing their stock through the low brush to the east of town. Gus was noticeable, since he rode a big black horse that looked like it could have pulled three stagecoaches by itself. But he kept his spurs on even when he wasn’t riding so he would have them handy when he wanted something to jingle. “Them’s the only musical instruments I ever learned to play,” he told her once. Since he just sat there twirling his spur and smiling at her, Lorena didn’t know whether to get undressed or what. It was July, blistering hot. She had tried sprinkling the bedsheets, but the heat dried them sometimes before she could even lay down. “’I god, it’s hot,” Gus said. “We could all be living in Canada just as cheap. I doubt I’ve even got the energy to set my post.” Why come then? Lorena thought. Another unusual thing about Gus was that he could practically tell what she was thinking. In this case he looked abashed and dug a ten-dollar gold piece out of his pocket, which he pitched over to her. Lorena felt wary. It was five dollars too much, even if he did decide to set his post. She knew old men got crazy sometimes and wanted strange things—Lippy was a constant problem, and he had a hole in his stomach and could barely keep up his piano playing. But it turned out she had no need to worry about Gus. “I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.” It made no sense to Lorena, but she relaxed. There was no likelihood he would try anything crazy on her. “This is ten dollars,” she said, thinking maybe he just hadn’t noticed what kind of money he was handing over. “You know, prices are funny,” he said. “I’ve known a good many sporting girls and I’ve always wondered why they didn’t price more flexible. If I was in your place and I had to traipse upstairs with some of these old smelly sorts, I’d want a sight of money, whereas if it was some good-looking young sprout who kept himself barbered up, why a nickel might be enough,” Lorena remembered Tinkersley, who had had the use of her for two years, taken all she brought in, and then left her without a cent. “A nickel wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I can do without the barbering.” But Augustus was in a mood for discussion. “Say you put two dollars as your low figure,” he said. “That’s for the well- barbered sprout. What would the high figure be, for some big rank waddy who couldn’t even spell? The pint I’m making is that all men ain’t the same, so they shouldn’t be the same price, or am I wrong? Maybe from where you sit all men are the same.” Once she thought about it, Lorena saw his point. All men weren’t quite the same. A few were nice enough that she might notice them, and a goodly few were mean enough that she couldn’t help noticing them, but the majority were neither one nor the other. They were just men, and they left money, not memories. So far it was only the mean ones who had left memories. “Why’d you give me this ten?” she asked, willing to be a little curious, since it seemed it was going to be just talk anyway. “Hoping to get you to talk a minute,” Augustus said, smiling. He had the most white hair she had ever seen on a man. He mentioned once that it had turned white when he was thirty, making his life more dangerous, since the Indians would have considered the white scalp a prize.“I was married twice, you remember,” he said. “Should have been married a third time but the woman made a mistake and didn’t marry me.” “What’s that got to do with this money?” Lorena asked. “The pint is, I ain’t a natural bachelor,” Augustus said. “There’s days when a little bit of talk with a female is worth any price. I figure the reason you don’t have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk. Listening to women ain’t the fashion in this part of the country. But I expect you got a life story like everybody else. If you’d like to tell it, I’m the one that’d like to hear it.” Lorena thought that over. Gus didn’t seem uncomfortable. He just set there, twirling his rowel. “In these parts what your business is all about is woman’s company anyway,” he said. “Now in a cold clime it might be different. A cold clime will perk a boy up and make him want to wiggle his bean. But down here in this heat it’s mostly company they’re after.” There was something to that. Men looked at her sometimes like they wished she would be their sweetheart—the young ones particularly, but some of the old ones too. One or two had even wanted her to let them keep her, though where they meant to do the keeping she didn’t know. She was already living in the only spare bedroom in Lonesome Dove. Little marriages were what they wanted—just something that would last until they started up the trail. Some girls did it that way—hitched up with one cowboy for a month or six weeks and got presents and played at being respectable. She had known girls who did it that way in San Antonio. The thing that struck her was that the girls seemed to believe it as much as the cowboys did. They would act just as silly as respectable girls, getting jealous of one another and pouting all day if their boys didn’t act to suit them. Lorena had no interest in conducting things that way. The men who came to see her would have to realize that she was not interested in playacting. After a bit, she decided she wasn’t interested in telling Augustus her life story, either. She buttoned her dress back up and handed him the ten dollars. “It ain’t worth ten dollars,” she said. “Even if I could remember it all.” Augustus stuck the money back in his pocket. “I ought to know better than to try and buy conversation,” he said, still grinning. “Let’s go down and play some cards.”