Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Dish belted his pants and strode grimly around the saloon to the north side. It was necessary to go all the way around the building to get out of hearing of the bed sounds. He fully meant to kill the little weasel when he came out of the saloon.

Dish was no gunfighter, but some things could not be borne. He took out his pistol and checked his loads, surprised at how fast life could suck you along; that morning he had awoke with no plans except to be a cowboy, and now he was about to become a man-killer, which would put his whole future in doubt. The man might have powerful friends, who would hunt him down. Still, feeling what he felt, he could see no other course to follow.

He holstered his pistol and stepped around the corner, expecting to stand by the swaybacked gray until the cowboy came out, so the challenge could be given.

But stepping around the corner brought another shock. There was no swaybacked gray tied to the hitch rail in front of the saloon. In fact, there were no horses at all in front of the saloon. Over at the Pumphreys’ store a couple of big strapping boys were loading rolls of barbed wire into a wagon. Otherwise the street was empty.

It put Dish in a deep quandary. He had been more than ready to commit murder, but how he had no victim to commit it on. For a moment he tried to convince himself he hadn’t heard what he had heard. Perhaps Lorena was just bouncing on the cornshucks for the sake of bouncing. But that theory wouldn’t hold. Even a lighthearted girl wouldn’t want to bounce on a cornshuck mattress on a hot afternoon, and anyway Lorena wasn’t a lighthearted girl. Some man had prompted the

bouncing:

the question was, Who?

Dish looked inside, only to discover that the Dry Bean was as empty as a church house on Saturday night. There was nosign of Xavier or Lippy, and, worse, the creaking hadn’t stopped. He could still hear it from the front door. It was too much for Dish. He hurried off the porch and up the street, but it soon hit him that he had no place to go, not unless he wanted to collect his horse and strike out for the Matagorda, leaving Captain Call to think what he would.

Dish wasn’t quite ready to do that—at least not until he found out who his rival was. Instead, he walked up one side of the street and down the other, feeling silly for doing it. He went all the way to the river, but there was nothing to see there except a strip of brown water and a big coyote. The coyote stood in the shallow, eating a frog.

Dish sat by the river an hour, and when he got back to the Dry Bean everything was back to normal. Xavier Wanz was standing at the door with a wet rag in his hand, and Lippy was sitting on the bar shaving a big corn off his thumb with a straight razor. They didn’t count for much, in Dish’s view.

What counted was that Lorena, looking prettily flushed, was sitting at a table with Jake Spoon, the coffee-eyed stranger with the pearl-handled pistol. Jake had his hat pushed back on his head and was addressing her, with his eyes at least, as if he had known her for years. There was a single glass of whiskey sitting on the table. From the doorway Dish saw Lorena take a sip out of the glass and then casually hand it to Jake, who took more than a sip.

The sight embarrassed Dish profoundly—it went to the pit of his stomach, like the sound of the creaking bed when he first heard it. He had never seen his ma and pa drink from the same glass, and they had been married people. And yet, the day before, he had been practically unable to get Lorie to look at him at all, and him a top hand, not just some drifter.

In a flash, as he stood half-through the swinging doors, Dish’s whole conception of woman changed; it was as if lightning had struck, burning his old notions to a crisp in one instant. Nothing was going to be as he had imagined it—maybe nothing ever would again. He started to go back out the door, so he could at least go off and adjust to his new life alone, but he had lingered a moment too long. Both Jake and Lorena looked up from one another and saw him in the door.

Lorena didn’t change expression, but Jake at once gave him a friendly look and lifted his hand.

“Hooray,” he said. “Come on in, son. I hope you’ve the start of a crowd. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a dern gloomy saloon.” Lippy, content beneath his bowler, turned and shook his lip in Dish’s direction for a moment. Then he blew the shavings of his corn off the bar.

“Dish ain’t much of a crowd,” he said.

Dish stepped in, wishing once again that he had never heard of the town of Lonesome Dove.

Jake Spoon waved at Xavier. “Davie, bring your poison,” he said. He refused to call Xavier anything but Davie. “Anybody’s that’s had to dig a dern well in this heat deserves a free drink and I’m buying it,” Jake added.

He motioned at a chair, and Dish took it, feeling red in the face one second and pale the next. He longed to know what Lorena was feeling about it all, and when Jake turned his head a minute, he cast her a glance. Her eyes were unusually bright, but they didn’t see him. They returned continually to Jake, who was paying her no particular mind. She tapped her fingers on the table three or four times, a little absently, as if keeping time with her own thoughts, and she drank two more sips from Jake’s glass. There were tiny beads of sweat above her upper lip, one right at the edge of the faint scar, but she didn’t look bothered by the heat or anything else.

Dish could hardly pull his eyes away, she was so pretty, and when he did he caught Jake Spoon looking at him. But Jake’s look was entirely friendly—he seemed plain glad for company.

“If I was to try well-digging, I doubt I’d survive an hour,” he said. “You boys ought to stand up to Call and make him dig his own well.” At that point Xavier brought out a bottle and a glass. Jake took the bottle himself and poured liberally. “This is better likker than they got in Arkansas,” he said.

“Arkansas,” Xavier said contemptuously, as if the word spoke for itself.

At that point Dish felt himself lose belief in what was happening. There was no place he would rather not be than at a table with Lorie and another man, yet that appeared to be where he was. Lorie didn’t seem to mind him being there, but on the other hand it was clear she would not have minded if he were a thousand miles away. Xavier stood by his elbow, with the rag dripping onto his pants leg, and Jake Spoon drank whiskey and looked friendly. With Jake’s hat pushed back, Dish could see a little strip of white skin right at his forehead, skin the sun never struck.

For a time Dish lost all sense of what life was about. He even lost the sense that he was a cowboy, the strongest sense he had to work with. He was just a fellow with a glass in his hand, whose life had suddenly turned to mud. The day before he had been a top hand, but what did that mean anymore? Though the day was hot and bright, Dish felt cold and cloudy, so puzzled by the strange business called life that he couldn’t think where to look, much less what to say. He took a drink and then another and then several, and, though life remained cloudy, the inside of the cloud began to be warm. By themiddle of the second bottle he had stopped worrying about Lorie and Jake Spoon and was sitting by the piano, singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” while Lippy played.

AUGUSTUS WAS on the front porch, biding his time, when Wilbarger rode up. Biding his time seemed to him the friendly thing to do, inasmuch as Jake Spoon had ridden a long way and had likely been scared to seek out womankind during his trip. Jake was one of those men who seemed to stay in rut the year round, a great source of annoyance to Call, who was never visibly in rut. Augustus was subject to it, but, as he often said, he wasn’t going to let it drive him like a mute—a low joke that still went over the heads of most of the people who heard it. He enjoyed a root, as he called it, but if conditions weren’t favorable, could make do with whiskey for lengthy spells. It was clear that with Jake just back, conditions wouldn’t be too favorable that afternoon, so he repaired to his jug with the neighborly intention of giving Jake an hour or two to whittle down his need before he followed along and tried to interest him in a card game.

Wilbarger of course was a surprise. He trotted his big black horse right up to the porch, which surprised the blue pigs as much as it did Augustus. They woke up and grunted at the horse.