Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“I didn’t ask for no map of Mexico,” he said. “I’ve been told there’s a yellow-haired girl right in this town.” Dish slowly got to his feet. “Well, just my sister,” he said.

Of course it was a rank lie, but it got the job done. Chick was not convinced by the information, but Wilbarger had ridden off and left him, and he was conscious of being outnumbered and disliked. To imply that a cowboy’s sister was a sporting woman might lead to prolonged fisticuffs, if not worse—and Dish Boggett looked to be a healthy specimen.

“In that case some fool has tolt me wrong,” Chick said, turning his horse toward the house.

Pea Eye, who liked to take life one simple step at a time, had not appreciated the subtleties of the situation.

“Where’d you get a sister, Dish?” he asked. Pea’s mode of living was modeled on the Captain’s. He barely went in the Dry Bean twice a year, preferring to wet his whistle on the front porch, where he would be assured of a short walk to bed if it got too wet. When he saw a woman it made him uncomfortable; the danger of deviating from proper behavior was too great. Generally when he spotted a female in his vicinity he took the modest way and kept his eyes on the ground.

Nonetheless, he had chanced to look up one morning as they were trailing a herd of Mexican cattle through Lonesome Dove. He had seen a yellow-haired girl looking out an open window at them. Her shoulders were bare, which startled him so that he dropped a rein. He had not forgotten the girl, and he occasionally stole a glance at the window if he happened to be riding by. It was a surprise to think she might have been Dish’s sister.

“Pea, when was you born?” Dish asked, grinning at Newt.

The question threw Pea into confusion. He had been thinking about the girl he had seen in the window; to be asked when he was born meant stopping one line of thought and trying to shift to another, more difficult line.

“Why you’d best ask the Captain that, Dish,” he said mildly. “I can’t never remember.” “Well, since we got the afternoon off I believe I’ll take a stroll,” Dish said. He ambled off toward town.

The prospect of getting to go with the men that night kept crowding into Newt’s mind.

“Where do you go when you go down south?” he asked Pea, who was still ruminating on the subject of his own birth.

“Oh, we just lope around till we strike some stock,” Pea said. “The Captain knows where to look.” “I hope I get to go,” Newt said.

Deets clapped him on the shoulder with a big black hand.

“You in a hurry to get shot at, my lord,” he said. Then he walked over and stood looking down into the unfinished well.

Deets was a man of few words but many looks. Newt had often had the feeling that Deets was the only one in the outfit who really understood his wishes and needs. Bolivar was kind from time to time, and Mr. Gus was usually kind, though his kindness was of a rather absentminded nature. He had many concerns to talk and argue about, and it was mostly when he got tired of thinking about everything else that he had the time to think about Newt.

The Captain was seldom really harsh with him unless he made a pure mess of some job, but the Captain never passed him a kind word, either. The Captain did not go around handing out kind words—but if he was in the mood to do so Newt knew he would be the last to get one. No compliment ever came to him from the Captain, no matter how well he worked.

It was a little discouraging: the harder he tried to please the Captain, the less the Captain seemed to be pleased. When Newt managed to do some job right, the Captain seemed to feel that he had been put under an obligation, which puzzledNewt and made him wonder what was the point of working well if it was only going to irritate the Captain. And yet all the Captain seemed to care about was working well.

Deets noticed his discouragement and did what he could to help pick his spirits up. Sometimes he helped out with jobs that were too much for Newt, and whenever a chance for complimenting a piece of work came, Deets paid the compliment himself. It was a help, though it couldn’t always make up for the feeling Newt had that the Captain held something against him. Newt had no idea what it could be, but it seemed there was something. Deets was the only one beside himself who seemed to be aware of it, but Newt could never work up the nerve to question Deets about it directly—he knew Deets wouldn’t want to talk about such things. Deets didn’t talk much anyway. He tended to express himself more with his eyes and his hands.

While Newt was thinking of night and Mexico, Dish Boggett strolled happily toward the Dry Bean saloon, thinking of Lorena. All day, laboring at the windlass or in the well, he had thought of her. The night had not gone as well as he had hoped it would—Lorena had not given him anything that could be construed as encouragement—but it occurred to Dish that maybe she just needed more time to get used to the notion that he loved her. If he could stay around a week or two she might get used to it, and even come to like it.

Behind the general store, an old Mexican saddlemaker was cutting a steerhide into strips from which to make a rope. It occurred to Dish that he might be more presentable if he walked down to the river and washed off some of the sweat that had dried on him during the day, but walking to the river meant losing time and he decided to let that notion slide.

What he did do was stop just back of the Dry Bean to tuck his shirttail in more neatly and dust off his pants.

It was while he was attending to his shirttail that he suddenly got a shock. He had stopped about twenty feet behind the building, which was just two stories of frame lumber. It was a still, hot afternoon, no breeze blowing. A strong fart could have been heard far up the street, but it was no fart that caught Dish’s ear. When he first heard the steady crackling, creaking sound he thought nothing of it, but a second or two later something dawned on him that almost made him feel sick. In spite of himself he stepped closer to the building, to confirm his fear.

From the corner just over his head, where Lorena had her room, came a crackling and a creaking sound such as two people can make in a bad bed with a cornshuck mattress over a weak spring. Lorena had such a bed; only last night it had made the same noise beneath them, loud enough that Dish wondered briefly, before pleasure overtook him, if anybody besides themselves was hearing it.

Now he was hearing it, standing with his shirttail half tucked in, while someone else was making it with Lorena. Memories of her body mingled with the sound, causing such a painful feeling in Dish’s breast that for a second he couldn’t move. He felt almost paralyzed, doomed to stand in the heat beneath the very room he had been hoping to enter himself. She was part of the sound—he knew just what chords she contributed to the awful music. Anger began to fill him, and for a moment its object was Xavier Wanz, who could at least have seen that Lorena had a cotton-tick mattress instead of those scratchy cornshucks, which weren’t even comfortable to sleep on.

In a second, though, Dish’s anger passed Xavier by, and surged in the direction of the man in the room above him, who was also above Lorena, using her body to produce the crackling and the creaking. He had no doubt it was the pockmarked weasel on the swaybacked gray, who had probably pretended to ride up to the house and then cut back down the dry bed of the creek straight to the saloon. It would be a move he would soon regret.