Phil saw George.
Phil’s eyes were day-blue. Expressionless? But some said innocent. But they were sharp, very sharp eyes, and the iris was no less sensitive than the cornea; so the subtlest change in light or shadow alerted Phil. Just as his bare hands sensed the hidden rot at the heart of the wood, the secret weakness, so did his eyes see around and beyond and into. He saw through Nature’s pathetic fraud called protective coloring, saw the vague outline of the stock-still doe, camouflaged against dry, thick branches, leaf and earth; smiling, he shot to kill. He knew if a timber wolf was lame, noted the fainter print of the favored paw in dust or snow, saw a quivering in the stubble and watched the grass snake unhinge its jaws and bolt down tiny new mice while the mother leapt in circles, screaming. His eyes followed the ragged flight of magpies seeking carrion, the bloated animal, the leg of beef gone rotten and dragged out behind the woodshed. In the sudden elbow of a stream where the baffled water turned upon itself he watched the trout ‘conceal’ itself in the shadow of a rock. But he saw more than Nature’s creatures. In Nature herself — in the supposedly random and innocent way she disposed and arranged herself — he saw the supernatural. In the outcropping of rocks on the hill that rose up before the ranchhouse, in the tangled growth of sagebrush that scarred the hill’s face like acne he saw the astonishing figure of a running dog. The lean hind legs thrust the powerful shoulders forward; the hot snout was lowered in pursuit of some frightened thing — some idea — that fled across the draws and ridges and shadows of the northern hills. But there was no doubt in Phil’s mind of the end of that pursuit. The dog would have its prey. Phil had only to raise his eyes to the hill to smell the dog’s breath. But vivid as that huge dog was, no one but one other had seen it, George least of all.
‘What do you see up there?’ George had once asked.
‘Nothing.’ But Phil’s lips were twisted in the faint smile of one who is in close touch with the arcane. So Phil lived — watching, noting, figuring — as the rest of us see and forget.
Now he stood at the forge in the blacksmith shop, gazing out through the wide doorway; one foot up on a block of wood he’d nailed to the side of the forge, he rested an arm along the smooth, worn beam of the bellows; he bent his long body easily at the waist; the bellows expanded, collapsed, a huge leather lung forcing the flames that heated strap iron for a sled runner. He watched the coal smoke drift out and settle low over the dry ryegrass, a dirty gray quilt. He sniffed, and scented certain snow.
It was a Sunday. The night before the young hired men had run off to town with friends who’d come in old used cars, gone off in their cheap suits with a check in their hands they’d cash at one of the saloons in Beech or Herndon — if they got that far. Phil smiled. Before breakfast Monday they’d be back — sick, hollow-eyed, broke, maybe diseased. Phil heard the bright clink of the latch on the bunkhouse door, saw the door open and two of the older men haul out a washtub of water and dump it; he watched them watch the water run and spread, sink into the earth. Age had taught them abstinence, if nothing else. Sundays they used to bathe, to wash clothes, pounding their socks and drawers with a coffee tin tacked onto the end of a shovel handle; they shaved, slapped on bay rum and then sat and rocked. Those who could write wrote letters, squeezing the pencil, squinting and forcing the cranky ABC’s between the wide lines of their coarse tablets. Later, they would shoot a few games of horseshoes or take a twenty-two rifle and pop off magpies back in the willows near the secret place where Phil bathed himself. Near there he had once in the late spring found a ramshackle nest — twigs every which way — and four young ’pies just on the verge of flight. The old ones coaxed the young, yammering away calling, encouraging. For the fun of it, Phil captured the young ones, took them back to the barn in a gunnysack — an idle thing to do, and once he got them home, he lost interest in them. They say if you slit their tongues, they’ll talk, but Phil had long ago found out that isn’t true.
It was a Sunday (like today) and he turned them over to one of the men in the bunkhouse who said he knew right well what to do with them.
‘Miserable bastards,’ the fellow had growled. For magpies ride about on the backs of horses and cattle and pick at sores they find there and eat the living flesh. They light on the ground in the spring and walk perkily forward, eyes bright, twisting their heads, seeing everything; they mean to pick a newborn calf’s eyes out.
The fellow had some dynamite caps, the size of twenty-two cartridges. ‘Naw,’ the fellow said, ‘I used to do some blasting.’ Up the anus of each magpie, he shoved a cap, and then a short length of fuse. Everybody gathered out behind the bunkhouse to watch. The sun was warm and promising; some men were called from the barn where they sunned themselves and chewed on matches.
‘What’s going on?’ Phil asked.
One of the men, a card, chuckled. ‘Ass-ass-ination,’ he remarked.
‘Well, you miserable bastards,’ the ass-ass-in said. One by one he tossed the young ’pies into the air. Their strange chance to escape gave them a brief skill and they soared, and leveled off, and then one by one they exploded up there; a few feathers drifted down like ash. Well, it was a quick death, quicker than shooting them or wringing their necks, and not a purposeless death either, like most, for it had afforded a little fun on a Sunday, Phil thought. ‘To be perfectly frank,’ he nodded to himself, moving his lips. Alone, Phil often talked or laughed to himself, aware that he did so, knowing it was not the speech of madness but merely his way of heightening or giving permanence to some thought as others will take a pencil and write it down. But he wasn’t sure he approved of what the fellow had done, and after the first two birds had exploded, he frowned and walked away.
‘What are they doing out back there?’ George had asked.
‘Usual thing,’ Phil had said. ‘Shooting at targets.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a rifle,’ George had said. Phil had gone into their bedroom and lain down on the bed, angry with himself and somehow angry with George. They had always been close, their lives had so complemented each other’s, one thin, one stocky, one clever, one plodding — they were like a single twin, and it irritated Phil when he couldn’t be frank; he felt lost and angry.
Now he removed his foot from the block nailed to the forge, chose the proper hammer from the rack beside him, took the length of strap iron to the anvil and began to beat and temper it; he thought George might hear the ringing anvil and mosey out and talk, if he ever finished reading his everlasting Saturday Evening Post. George had picked it up after breakfast, gone to his chair in the living room, crossed his legs, and begun to read. Recently he read the livelong day, and it was pulling teeth to get anything out of him. George never read anything worthwhile, as Phil did. Phil saw no point in reading short stories, stories about animals, mystery stories; you learn more about animals from observing them than from reading about them, more about mystery in simply contemplating.
Yes, it did smell of snow, and wasn’t it early in the day for the wind to rise? It whined in the rigging of the windlass they used to hoist up a fresh-killed beef; Phil looked off there to the butcher pen. Two magpies had lighted on the cowhide thrown over the fence flesh-side out, and they were rapt, cleaning it of remaining flesh and fat; the sudden wind blew them off balance and Phil smiled; how they scrabbled around before they got their footing and went to stuffing themselves again!
He returned to the forge with the strap iron, and looked out across the ryegrass that shook and shivered in the morning wind — useless stuff. Then Phil saw George.
He saw George walking across the road to the garage, and Phil took his foot down from the block.
What was George up to?
George opened one of the garage doors.
Phil paused, the bellows collapsed and sighed, the fire sank down, Phil watched George.
Something wrong with the old Reo?
Mmmm, Phil said to himself.
When George opened one of the garage doors it meant that he was going to work on the car, take out one of the spark plugs and clean it with his pocketknife, blow through the fuel line, God knew what all.
Phil felt it was good for George to have — and to feel he had — a special skill and function; thus Phil always allowed George to do the actual palavering with the cattle-buyers, merely listening to be sure George didn’t make a fool of himself. Recently Phil had gone out there to see what George was up to and found George sitting in the front seat behind the wheel, just sitting there. Phil had joined him. ‘What doing there? Dreaming?’
George had looked at him, and then coughed and then leaned forward and reached up under the dashboard, as if something were up under there. ‘Fuse,’ George murmured.
‘I wondered what you were up to.’
‘Oh, I’m never up to much, I guess,’ George said.
Phil couldn’t remember George working on the car on Sunday, and George hadn’t said anything about anything being wrong with it, and there’d been plenty of opportunity to say, if there was.
Phil stood in the wide doorway of the shop spraddle-legged, looking with his day-blue eyes across to the garage. He had built it himself there under the hill before the house.
Now George was inside the garage, and Phil was just about to walk over there when the other door opened! Strange, on a Sunday morning, to see both doors open!
George was starting the car. In a moment blue plumes of smoke shot out the exhaust pipe, then turned gray, then white, and George was backing out, the gray day showing pale on the little oval window at the rear of the old Reo. Without looking back, George drove down the road.
Phil watched from the shop until the car was a black speck disappearing over the rise down there, upended the unfinished sled runner against the wall of the shop and walked swiftly to the house. In the bedroom he lay on his back on the bed, his fingers threaded under the back of his head; he lay there awhile and then sat up and took his banjo down from the shelf in the closet, got it out of the case and picked at it a little, head cocked, frowning. A little out of tune?
Cleared his throat, looked straight ahead, and tried ‘Red Wing,’ and then ‘Jolly Coppersmith.’ When the notes of that had died away, he cleared his throat and put the banjo away. It was all right, it was in tune. He lay down again.
The triangle at the back door rang for dinner. Phil heard the men clattering in to the back dining room; the outside door slammed behind them and they seemed to be having a good time, laughing and joking. Phil heard the angry voice of Mrs Lewis, maybe crabbing about the men’s letting the cold in — sort of an old joke; then Phil got up and stood in the room because Mrs Lewis might now come into the hall to announce dinner and Phil didn’t like people to see him lying down, not even on Sunday. When Mrs Lewis lumbered into the front dining room with the big roast, Phil was already at the table, looking out across the gray fields with his day-blue eyes.
‘Brother George has gone down the road,’ he told Mrs Lewis. ‘He ain’t back yet. Put a slab of meat on a plate and some spuds in the warming oven for him when he comes.’
‘You expect him, then,’ Mrs Lewis said.
‘Yes, I expect him,’ Phil said. When Mrs Lewis had gone into the kitchen and closed the door against the unholy racket of the hired men, Phil went around to George’s place where by habit Mrs Lewis had set the roast, cut himself off a chunk, helped himself to braised potatoes and turnips, and took it around to his own place. He looked out the window again, and then set to. Before he had finished, Mrs Lewis brought in the soggy peach cobbler. It had begun to snow.
Dinner over and Mrs Lewis vanished to her quarters out back, Phil lay down again. Animals he and George had killed looked down with eyes that wanted washing — three deer, an elk, a mountain sheep, a mountain goat. The antelope had always been there.
Phil had to smile. When they were kids, and Phil those two years older, kids six and eight, Phil used to spoof George, spoof him and tell him the antelope was alive. Didn’t George see it shake its head once in awhile? George’s eyes would get big and his mouth would pucker and he’d turn to the wall.
‘You can’t get away from him,’ Phil would say. ‘He’s looking at you right now, and a-shaking his old mean head.’ It’d make George wet the bed in his sleep, and Phil would tease about that, too. The Old Lady had had to get George a rubber sheet. He bet he could make George blush about that sheet right now.
But all the other animals they’d killed themselves. The Old Gent never killed anything, wasn’t any kind of hunter, never even a rancher, really, a gentleman rancher, so to speak. Somebody must have given the antelope to the Old Gent, somebody trying to suck up to him.
The animals looked down. It had got so dark Phil had a notion to turn on the light, but he had never done that in daytime, and never would. The snow was coming fast. Suppose it kept on like this, and Georgie boy got stuck in the snow? Did he have his snow chains with him?
Although George was slow to learn, once he learned, he never forgot anything, kept it locked inside him. You could say, George, how many benches of hay did we stack in 1916? and he’d tell you, and you could check with the figures he kept in the roll-top in the office. He never used a bookmark or turned down the page of a book because he could remember the number of the page he stopped on, a curious mechanical knowledge, a mechanical memory that many such people are said to have. Phil thought it was because George’s mind was slower than his own that George could remember so. George didn’t think about so many things, and riveted his entire brain on those few things.
Thus George never forgot to pull up the weights of the big clock that stood by the front door in the living room. Every Sunday afternoon at exactly four, George rose from his chair, walked to the clock, looked it straight in the face, reached up on top where the key was hidden, inserted the key in the long narrow glass door, turned it, opened the door, reached in with his thick, soft hands, carefully that he might not disturb the heavy brass pendulum that caught a pattern of light, two wedges, their points kissing at the center; then George pulled on first one and then the other chain, hand over hand, as if climbing a rope, slowly, strongly, surely. Having closed the little door and hidden away the little key, George would again look straight into the face of the clock, and then at his accurate pocket watch.
And that was that! But wonderful to watch. It was more than watching a man wind a fool clock. It was watching a man seeing to it that things went on as they had, and always would.
When the Old Lady and the Old Gent had run off to Salt Lake City to live in the fancy hotel in the middle of a winter week after a sort of set-to between them and Phil, the clock was briefly left an orphan, for the Old Gent had always wound it. Phil wondered what would happen when four o’clock came without the Old Gent, and made opportunity to be in the living room at three, and read Asia awhile so it wouldn’t be obvious he wanted to know what would happen at four. He hated tipping his hand. He had begun reading the same line over and over after the clock struck the three-quarter hour. Suppose at four that George made no move, just sat there with the Saturday Evening Post? Should he prompt George, or should he wind the clock himself? No, it was not the sort of responsibility he himself wanted nor thought he should have to shoulder.
There was a little click, tiny gears meshing; then a small interval of time. Then came the chimes announcing the hour.
BONG.
Phil snuffed up an obstruction. The sound died off in the room. Phil could almost smell the death of time. Then George rose. George laid the Saturday Evening Post in the seat of his chair without looking at it and walked to the clock.
The whole operation was done by George with the dignity of the Old Gent, and Phil, smiling to himself behind Asia magazine, knew that George had been watching the Old Gent for years, preparing himself for this moment of stepping easily into the breach. Phil needn’t have worried, but you do wonder sometimes if people are what you think they are, or if you only think that they are and they are what they are and not what you think.
For a moment Phil wanted to rise and congratulate George for not disppointing him, for being what he hoped he was, thought he was, knew he was. But of course that wouldn’t do, because there had never been any spoken sentiment between them and never would be. Their relationship was not one based on words. He’d never known anybody yet who talked too much who wasn’t a God damned fool.
So there was no reason to wonder whether George had his snow chains with him, except that he had left so suddenly. The chains were kept stretched between two spikes driven in the wall of the garage so they wouldn’t tangle; that was like George, too. But suppose it kept on snowing, and he didn’t have his chains?
Phil felt he needed a little fresh ozone anyway, so he picked up his hat from the top of the bookcase where they had always kept their hats and the binoculars, slapped it on his head, got into his old blue denim jumper, and walked through the living room past the clock and out. Snowing pretty hard, all right. He paused and breathed deep, looking into the falling snow. He hacked and spit. Couple of stray cattle hunched up there on the hill against the barbed wire fence.
He stood in the garage out of the snow and wind; the concrete floor was hidden under the clay the Reo had brought in over the years, two humpy ridges of it where it fell out from under the fenders, or whatever you call them.
And no chains on the spikes.
Course not. Phil knew George wouldn’t forget. George hadn’t forgot to wind the clock, either, for in passing it Phil had noticed the weights had already been pulled up out of sight. George had wound it sometime before he went off down the road — had never intended getting home by four! Serve George right if he got stuck and had to walk the whole damned distance from where he’d got stuck. But when he did get home, damned if Phil was going to make any inquiries, and that was a gut! You bet your little own sweet life, it was a gut! He tramped back to the house and lay on his bed.
Just past midnight an automobile pulled into the side yard.
Ah!
But it was only the young fellows coming home from a spree. Until he heard them talking and singing and then somebody shouting, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake cut the comedy’ — until then Phil thought they might have rescued George and brought him home, but if they’d had George with them, they’d not be singing out there. Phil sat up in bed and then swung his long legs down over the side, thinking maybe he’d ought to go out and see if they’d seen anything of George. But why would they hear? And it would look bad. No need for them to know anything — that George was gone. Phil lay down again and laced his long fingers behind his head.
The clock struck two.
Then George came. Instead of coming right into the bedroom and undressing in the dark and getting right into the hay, he remained for some time in the living room. Sitting in a chair? Standing by the fireplace under the Old Lady’s portrait? Smoking? Whatever George was doing, he was quiet about it. Phil waited.
Then by and by George walked down the hall and turned into the room. Phil heard him sit on the bed, heard the squeak. George grunted and pulled off his boots. No, not his boots. His shoes. Sounded like shoes. Then Phil saw George’s black shadow rise, and George was unbuckling his belt.
Phil made a sudden groan, a wild-animal sound as if surfacing out of sleep. ‘Ahhhh!’ he groaned several times. ‘Hey — who’s there?’
‘Pipe down,’ George said quietly. ‘It’s me.’
‘What in hell time is it?’ Phil wondered if George, for some reason, would lie.
‘After two.’
‘Christ! Wake a man up this hour.’
‘Well, go back to sleep.’
‘No, guess I’ll have me a smoke, long’s I been woke.’ Phil’s hands were never confused by the dark. He reached out, felt for and picked up his book of papers and tobacco. Match flared, and he took a drag and coughed. ‘Run into any snow down below?’
‘None to speak of,’ said George.
‘How far down’d you get?’ asked Phil.
‘Beech. That’s where I aimed for.’
‘Beech?’ And then Phil violated a principle. He pried. But he covered up the violation with a light, light voice and a jaunty lilt. ‘What you doing down there, Georgie boy? Maybe a little tom-cattin’?’
Small silence, and the wind under the door. ‘I was talking with Mrs Gordon.’
‘Yeah. She cried on your shoulder, didn’t she.’
‘So she did.’
She! She could mean the end of the world, as Phil knew it.
Ever since they were kids some of the Eastern relatives would wander out every few years to be entertained, and with them they’d bring friends, girls usually, and it was pretty obvious by the time he and George could get a hard on what the Old Lady had in mind, and it was pretty obvious what the girls had in mind too. Indigent aristocrats, Phil called them, come out to recoup their fortunes. All of them talked as if they had a pork chop wedged in their teeth. Phil had little use for dudes, male or female, and from the first he simply took to the high timber whenever they were around, and George would get caught with them for the picnics the Old Lady arranged; George would have to take them off to Yellowstone Park. Good Lord! When George first started riding herds of relatives and indigent aristocrats off to Yellowstone Park, they had those old six-horse stages.
All George had to do was look at himself in the mirror to know what the girlies wanted was not him, but his name and money, a good soft berth for the rest of their conniving lives. Oh, they’d get George out for moonlight rides over the years, and it would have served them right if George had knocked them up and sent them packing, but of course the upper crust doesn’t often get knocked up. Just the bottom crust.
But George had escaped, and so far as Phil knew never answered the letters, the billets-doux that trickled back from Boston and the better suburbs about what a ‘lovely’ time they’d had and how ‘quaint’ the West was, my dear, and wouldn’t it be enchanting if in the winter ‘season’ George — and so on. Phil had to snort to think of Georgie boy dolled up in a soup-and-fish, couldn’t think of anything but a penguin tripping the light fantastic with the tomato soup queen. ‘The New People,’ the Old Lady called them.
‘I will never forget the Western moon,’ one of the damn fools wrote to George. Well, apparently George forgot the little dolly that remembered.
Then figure, if you will, why George who might have had some of the finest ass on the East coast could get himself mixed up with a floozy with a suicide husband and who used to play, used to tickle the ivories, in some honky-tonk. The Old Lady would croak. Get out those smelling salts of hers. Suppose he had to introduce the woman to relatives? Laugh as he might, Phil respected quality, real quality, and at least if he’d got hooked up with the moonlight girl, George would have taken her out into public without first pulling a sack over his head. Couldn’t he see what the woman was up to? Did somebody have to come right out and tell him? If he wanted a piece of ass, if that’s what he was so all-fired hot on getting, you can bet your last buck he could get it without a license.
Phil chuckled to himself. Reminded him of a story. Fellow went to the sheriff in a little town for a marriage license and after he’d gone the sheriff discovered he’d given out a hunting license instead of a marriage license so he hightails it over to the hotel where the couple are shacked up and pounds on the door and shouts out, ‘If you ain’t done it, don’t do it. Tain’t for it.’
Oh no, you don’t need a license.
Or maybe he had got her knocked up?
Well, there were ways around that, too, unless your heart was bigger than your head, and sometimes Phil thought that’s the way it was with George.
The Old Lady would have a hemorrhage.
The Saturday Evening Post went unread, the brown paper tubes that contained it began to pile up on the table like cordwood. Without saying anything to Phil, George drove right down the road after breakfast Sundays and sometimes didn’t get back until all hours. One of the hired men happened to pass it on to Phil that George and the woman — her name was Rose — were seen on the streets of Herndon, but Phil turned away and pretended not to hear.
You could tell, maybe, what George really thought of the woman, what he really wanted of her, because he hadn’t brought her to the ranch; if George were serious, he’d certainly want her on the ranch, wouldn’t he, instead of sneaking around with her on the streets of Herndon after dark?
Phil did a lot of carving and whittling Sundays; and some braiding. He started working on a new map of the ranch to put up on the wall in the office, a present for George, one to remind him, perhaps, of his responsibilities to the family. Phil whistled a lot and lay on his bed thinking.
Early in December a sudden cold snap followed snow. The sun rose late and tired over the sagebrush hill before the house; right on top of the hill, visible from the front windows and front porch, Phil and George had built a stone cairn of rounds and rounds of flat shale at the very spot where the sun rose on the twenty-first of June — oh, hell, when was it they built it? Aught-one? Around there, anyway. The sun that morning of the cold snap was far south of it, drifting. After breakfast they still needed lights on in the living room; and the pop of the electric light plant echoed against the hill. Phil walked out onto the front porch and stood sniffing. Across the fields he heard a coyote howling — unusual at such a late hour — and then the damned fool dogs began barking. Phil scratched a match with his thumbnail and looked at the thermometer tacked up on one of the thick log pillars that held up the overhanging roof. He whistled, and peered again. Fifty-six below! There was something to tell George, something to start the conversation of the day.
‘Well, George,’ he said. ‘Guess I’ll have to get out my gloves today.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Fifty-six below, young fellow! It’s like the old days!’
‘Phil,’ said George.
‘What’s it you want to know, old-timer?’
‘Phil did you write to the Old Lady?’
‘Yeah. I shot them a line the other day.’
‘You said something about Rose.’
‘Rose? Oh, Rose. Well, frankly speaking, old-timer, you know well as I do what the Old Lady would say if you got mixed up with her. You know what the Old Lady would think, what she’d feel. George, we’ve always been close, family people, what? Think what the Old Lady would feel.’
‘The Old Lady would feel,’ said George, ‘what one Mrs Burbank would feel for another Mrs Burbank.’
‘Come again?’ Phil cocked his head, to hear better.
‘We were married Sunday,’ George said. ‘She’s got rid of her property down there.’
Phil was so God damned shocked he went outside and stood in the barn. Just the morning for his saddle horse to act up, shying around in the stall as if he’d never seen Phil before, the ignorant bastard, so Phil took the horse out of the stall and tied him up close and then slapped him over the head again and again with the saddle blanket to teach him a thing or two. The dirty God damned fool, and Phil clouted him again. The horse strained at the rope and rolled his eyes so the whites showed.