Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“’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.

WHEN AUGUSTUS LEFT CALL sitting on the steps he took a slow stroll through the wagon yard and down the street, stopping for a moment on the sandy bottom of Hat Creek to strap on his pistol. The night was quiet as sleep, no night when he expected to have to shoot anybody, but it was only wise to have the pistol handy in case he had to whack a drunk. It was an old Colt dragoon with a seven-inch barrel and, as he was fond of saying, weighed about as much as the leg he strapped it to. One whack would usually satisfy most drunks, and two whacks would drop an ox if Augustus cared to put his weight into it.

The border nights had qualities that he had come to admire, different as they were from the qualities of nights in Tennessee. In Tennessee, as he remembered, nights tended to get mushy, with a cottony mist drifting into the hollows.

Border nights were so dry you could smell the dirt, and clear as dew. In fact, the nights were so clear it was tricky; even with hardly any moon the stars were bright enough that every bush and fence post cast a shadow. Pea Eye, who had a jumpy disposition, was always shying from shadows, and he had even blazed away at innocent chaparral bushes on occasion, mistaking them for bandits.

Augustus was not particularly nervous, but even so he had hardly started down the street before he got a scare: a little ball of shadow ran right at his feet. He jumped sideways, fearing snakebite, although his brain knew snakes didn’t roll like balls. Then he saw an armadillo hustle past his feet. Once he saw what it was, he tried to give it a kick to teach it not to walk in the street scaring people, but the armadillo hurried right along as if it had as much right to the street as a banker.

The town was not roaring with people, nor was it bright with lights, though a light was on at the Pumphreys’, whose daughter was about to have a baby. The Pumphreys ran a store; the baby their daughter was expecting would arrive in the world to find itself fatherless, since the boy who had married the Pumphrey girl had drowned in the Republican River in the fall of the year, with the girl only just pregnant.

There was only one horse hitched outside the Dry Bean when Augustus strolled up—a rangy sorrel that he recognized as belonging to a cowboy named Dishwater Boggett, so named because he had once rushed into camp so thirsty from a dry drive that he wouldn’t wait his turn at the water barrel and had filled up on some dishwater the cook had been about to throw out. Seeing the sorrel gave Augustus a prime feeling because Dish Boggett loved card playing, though he lacked even minimal skills. Of course he also probably lacked ante money, but that didn’t necessarily rule out a game. Dish was a good hand and could always get hired—Augustus didn’t mind playing for futures with such a man.

When he stepped in the door, everybody was looking peeved, probably because Lippy was banging away at “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” a song that he loved to excess and played as if he hoped it could be heard in the capital of Mexico.

Xavier Wanz, the little Frenchman who owned the place, was nervously wiping his tables with a wet rag. Xavier seemed to think keeping the tables well wiped was the crucial factor in his business, though Augustus was often forced to point out to him that such a view was nonsense. Most of the patrons of the Dry Bean were so lacking in fastidiousness that they wouldn’t have noticed a dead skunk on the tables, much less a few crumbs and spilled drinks.

Xavier himself had a near-monopoly on fastidiousness in Lonesome Dove. He wore a white shirt the year round, clipped his little mustache once a week and even wore a bow tie, or, at least, a black shoestring that did its best to serve as a bow tie. Some cowpoke had swiped Xavier’s last real bow tie, probably meaning to try and impress some girl somewhere up the trail. Since the shoestring was limp, and not stiff like a bow tie should be, it merely added to the melancholy of Xavier’s appearance, which would have been melancholy enough without it. He had been born in New Orleans and had ended up in Lonesome Dove because someone had convinced him Texas was the land of opportunity. Though he soon discovered otherwise, he was too proud or too fatalistic to attempt to correct his mistake. He approached day-to-day life in the Dry Bean with a resigned temper, which on occasion stopped being resigned and became explosive. When it exploded, the placid air was apt to be rent by Creole curses.

“Good evening, my good friend,” Augustus said. He said it with as much gravity as he could muster, since Xavier appreciated a certain formality.

In return, Xavier nodded stiffly. It was hard to extend the amenities when Lippy was at the height of a performance.

Dish Boggett was sitting at one of the tables with Lorena, hoping to persuade her to give him a poke on credit. Though Dish was barely twenty-two, he wore a walrus mustache that made him look years older than he was, and much more solemn. In color the mustache was stuck between yellow and brown—kind of prairie-dog-colored, Augustus thought. He frequently suggested to Dish that if he wanted to eat prairie dog he ought to remember to pick his teeth, a reference to the mustache whose subtlety was lost on Dish.

Lorena had her usual look—the look of a woman who was somewhere else. She had a fine head of blond hair, whose softness alone set her apart in a country where most women’s hair had a consistency not much softer than saddle strings.