FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

THE SHERIFF

a quarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a Barren Sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.

He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

For fourteen years I’ve watched it with my boys, and not one year has passed without a thieving or a disturbance caught up like some bad notion by our townsmen. Man and woman, out here at least, don’t learn to keep to their own houses of a night. I’ve found them, plenty of them, faces that I knew, some I didn’t know, in the most unlikely lots or ditches or clear under a porch. If I didn’t find them first there were others did. I slept light, waiting for those to come and tell me.

There was one death.

But a man gets used to a pair of handcuffs on his hip. The string our tank key is hung from — we only got the one cell — has been around my neck the entire fourteen years. And there’s not one shirt I own but what it’s got badge holes through the pocket. Some men don’t commit crimes, but they’re ready to. I’ve had two ranchers come to me in the middle of the night with a horse between them, and they trusted me to know whose horse it was. A man gets used to staying around a jail. I did. And there’s one thing sure; it’ll never have to hold no woman. There are other rooms in town for that.

I used to follow the tracks of a single horse for miles in my pickup truck and that man I trailed — there were only a few prints in the sand like someone stirred it with a stick — had committed a violation, was running all the time I drove. Or I was called to pay a visit to some woman who discovered a man on her place. I wore my cartridge belt summer or winter and my sleeves rolled up.

It was the men or women who didn’t have no place to hide that gave me trouble. Them people too easy found doing things a man can’t talk about, things that happened or not depending on whether you arrived five minutes early or five late. They broke the law all right, directly they couldn’t quiet down and talk when I was near enough to see. It almost depended on how much white showed from the side of the road before my torch was even lit. I took them in. I’ve got no time to waste with men like that.

But I never caught them Lampson brothers at it. Others I have. There’s families in this country, where there’s a daughter or son and daughter — or perhaps even a young mother without children, or a widow — and they’re the ones that have forced my hand. I ain’t keen on nodding at the father or husband when it’s over, either. I don’t like to see a man who’s got to count heads all night — or who takes to going out himself.

But not the Lampson boys. No one ever even thought they had done one thing to shame us, at least not before the older married. And the younger’s record is still clear.

I used to know the younger well.

It’s not easy holding reins on people, keeping watch. There’s something about a single street, some houses and four or five hundred square miles of ground that seems to make them worse. A hand comes in off a ranch, yellowed, with his mouth still closed, and there’s no way of telling what he’s done. It takes hours to find out. I didn’t even meet the younger Lampson until the day his brother married. I went to that wedding.

But two years before, I saw the older.

In my job a man’s teeth start to grind, his jaws don’t seem to set well when he’s got to write up warrants and serve them too. It’s a day’s work to stop cars, take strangers by the elbow, and see public places closed on time. And I had to identify them. A man’s eyes burn, he ain’t too comfortable when he has got to stand in front of his own cell door, to stare at the one who is now inside and won’t even look you in the face. Or worse, wants to talk. Why, when a person has a visitor in town, harmless enough for some, perhaps, I’ve got to ask around if I hear about it. You never really know if they’re relatives or even friends. A different window burning in a house at night — anything could happen. You take to drinking coffee and know how full or empty the local courtroom is going to be before you even get there. And it’s often. A man gets kind of sick at the law when he don’t know who has come into town or left it.

But the day I saw him I was feeling good. Nothing could have bothered me when I first saw the older Lampson. I was just Deputy at the time. Just barely hanging onto and still learning about the harm that is done right in a kitchen or in an open field.

I took the call. And that cheered the day for me because it was only the voice of a little girl, and I suppose I thought to hear of a killing or of a man with his hand pierced on a fork. “Honey,” I told her, “I’ll come over.” If she had been grown, I would have considered more. It wasn’t far to drive. I think though of how far that little girl must have walked, in a bathing suit, and I don’t know as I could stand it now. Whoever owned that telephone didn’t even help her or else she just wanted to make the call herself.

It was twenty mile but I had my truck.

I remember a day like that. There was nothing really wrong; I found her at the roadside, standing bareheaded and with thin hair, in a sun as heavy as I ever saw. She wore one of them square bathing suits, pinched high like she had it awhile, with straight wide straps pulled across her shoulders. As soon as I parked the car and locked it, and without moving, she spoke:

“I got a friend. She’s holding him.”

That’s all. She turned and led the way toward the nearby river.

In those days, before they choked her off, that river widened or narrowed as it pleased, one day going fast, the next slow. But no matter how it flowed and until it dried, it carried its own high load of mud and a body lost upstream or down would have been hid for good. I knew children shouldn’t play around it.

But they run loose out here like their parents. And you can’t tell what children see or what they find. They’re skinned up and bandaged from climbing around where people big enough to do wrong have done it, or tried to, since sometimes me and my boys can stop them before they’re through. Right in the middle of the desert where there is hardly sign of bird or animal you are liable to find some scrap or garment that once belonged personally to a woman. That’s evidence. A man is wise if he keeps to town. But even there he comes across it.

So I walked quiet as I could when I first smelled that brown water and caught sight of the shadows from shrub and cactus that grew more heavy in those days, when the crime rate was high around the river and the daylight offenders were the worst. I knew this little girl had found one of the spots where water, meant just to liven up men half dead or draw together cattle, drives men and women to undress and swim and maybe kill themselves. That water towed under many.

I’ve dragged it. That was part of my job, as well as bringing out liquor to a horse with heaves or holding a basin under a man’s wrists that was slashed in jail. He lived. I hate the sight of a dragging iron with all them rusty points that you lower from the end of a slippery rope. We never caught much with it anyway. I don’t like boats.

This time we didn’t need an iron. And I didn’t figure to have to use my gun, not with this child safe enough to come and get me, leaving her friend to wait. But I had it ready.

The shrubbery didn’t cover us at all. I think he saw us from the first. I didn’t care if he did; the thing to do was to crouch down as we was and watch before jumping up to scare him or chase him away. I took my time. There are other times when you have to step right in, when you are Sheriff or even Deputy, and catch hold of a bare shoulder or head of hair, keeping your face turned back so as it don’t get bruised, and drag them off. Maybe you get splashed with a glass of beer or your hand gets bit, but they have to be broke apart. Fast. I would rather help a woman have a baby than fight with them that don’t or that don’t care. But sometimes it’s better not to move.

We watched.

We sat there in the sun like we had fish poles and all day to wait for what would happen, like that little girl and me would have supper when we got back and it could keep, with no trouble at home, until we did.

But the one we watched — he must have had his fish already. He looked fit. Fit enough to swim the river at least instead of squatting on the other bank. I think that girl knew it too. He might not have bolted either had I got right up and hollared at him. He liked it where he was. The girl pointed to her friend who sat alone on the sand about half way out a spit that stuck into the river but didn’t join the other side. It was the spot he would make for. If he decided to try.

“She’s afraid.”

“And you ain’t?” I whispered back. The towhead girl — plenty of our children out here have white hair, usually not cut too even — was drawing in the sand. Now and then she kind of pulled at her bathing suit or twisted her head and back like she might if she was older or like she wanted to get up and run.

As far as I could see, he didn’t care. He seemed to be staring at the water. I might have had him in the jail house, there was nothing about him said I couldn’t. On the other hand, there was nothing stamped him bad. I know when to bide my temper and just size up the stride of a man or the way he hangs back when you ask him what he is at. I tried to make out what his hands were doing, but he had them hid. I didn’t suspect him much, though I’d like to have seen if they were small and kind of pink with short tapering fingers.

He wasn’t suspecting either. He didn’t know how close I watch a man. I lit my pipe, seeing he wouldn’t go no matter what. I’ve seen all kinds, men I had to drive out and below town myself, set them down and make sure they headed south out of sight; others I caught before they entered. And if I stop a couple, I may let them go, I may not. You got to watch them if they are in pair.

But I have never seen one just squatting in the desert. He’s not sick, more like he’s healthier than most around here. Most men stop at a river bank to drink, cool their feet, and get across and be done with it. Here’s a man, I thought, is snarled with this river. He’ll have more trouble with it yet, I figured.

There wasn’t any tree to give him shade. You might see a man like him on an island — him and that opposite bank started to look that way to me — someone who had been left there or thrown ashore and you wouldn’t know whether to go up to him or not. It was too late to hail him now. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

But I wasn’t going to leave him there to do what he pleased. And he was set for something, because his pants were off, already rolled up and slung over his shoulder when we got there. My pipe went out and I found I was watching him so hard I sat chewing on it dry. He still wore his suspenders — bright yellow like a shirt I owned but which no Deputy could ever wear — and they just hung down, unfastened.

If there had been any kind of house around, I might have understood. But there he was, casting a small patch of shadow on water so dark it hardly showed, a man who didn’t look ready to cause trouble and didn’t seem to be got up for any kind of work. He was only half dressed and certainly alone, and yet he didn’t look to need no bothering. The towhead wasn’t minding him, I could see that.

I’m quick to feel out a stranger. In my job you find that other men ain’t like yourself, not when they open their mouths and you see they got no teeth or pull out a billfold filled with too much money or none at all. Most men is soft and childish or else they got to tell you something behind the house. For all I knew he was only looking at his picture in the water. It finally came to me I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for him.

“Honey,” I said, “I can’t arrest that man.” She didn’t answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain’t happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. “He ain’t hurt,” I said. “He ain’t drunk. I don’t think he’s got a gun. That’s enough.” But he was something to stare at for an hour or two.

Either he’s a man escaped already from another prison, where he stayed in the fields or worked out on the roads — and that wasn’t likely — or else he comes naturally by his skin to stand the burn marks of such a sun. And that’s good. He had no hat. I can sit or even stand in it myself the whole day without my mind becoming clouded or even getting up a thirst. I could see that he could too. But there is a limit, when it seemed he didn’t want to talk.

I whispered, “Ain’t it time to go?”

“No,” she answered.

“Well, we are,” I said. Maybe he was looking at them little girls, the one hardly hid behind a thorn, the other sitting on her thin legs out there in the sand, maybe not. He must have felt as queer coming across two children that way as they did seeing a grown man perched down like he was on the edge of a river quiet. I don’t know what he thought when he saw me.

I figured that maybe if I stood up he would. He didn’t. I made the girl get up and brush the sand off herself too. When I stretch out, as I did then, I’m tall enough for a man to see me. I looked right at him, at his shirt tails that was as good as pants to another, at the easy way he slouched as if, had there been some driftwood within reach, he might have built a fire. He was young.

“I’ll drive you girls home,” I told them, “you’ll be missed.”

I thought that when we turned and walked away he would stop playing at us and swim across. I would have taken him in my car that day. Men sometimes misjudge a route out here, they’re liable to stray miles. They’re lucky if they get a ride.

He stayed.

He probably had a car himself, I never learned. He might have had it parked back behind a dune where I thought the country was flat as it is most everywhere; he probably found a hollow and hid it there with all the things he carried and everything that made him what he was inside it.

That’s where I should have looked for trouble.

a man lay buried just below the water level of the dam. He was embedded in the earth and entangled with a caterpillar, pump engine and a hundred feet of hose, somewhere inside the mountain that was protected from the lake on one side by rock and gravel and kept from erosion on its southward slope by partially grown rows of yellow grass. This man — he was remembered in Mistletoe, Government City, and would be as long as the Great Slide came to mind with every ale case struck open — was the brother of one who still hung on, having a place in the fields southwest of the official lines of the town. Boundaries were still marked with transit stakes ten years old.

In the sunset the survivor of the two, who had not taken part in the battle of the river and who had been on the range when the Slide occurred, drove his team of four horses across the sand of the southward slope, the machine under his seat spitting out seeds, grinding its unaligned rods. His voice carried all the way to the town on the bluff. He rode the boards holding the dry lines in one hand and a flattened cigarette pinched in the other, one knee cocked up and his hat pulled low over blackened cheeks and chin. Six days a week he nursed the animals across the sunward, dry side of the dam for twenty-five dollars a day, and the wind blew sand in his ears and blew the horses’ manes the wrong way. A few hundred yards above his head, from the sharp-rocked track across the top of the dam, the dark, rarely fished miles of water narrowed into a cone through the hills of the badlands. Below him, in the middle of the mosquito flat and at the edge of the man-made delta and surrounded by piles of iron pipe and small, corrugated iron huts, red lead painted sections of the half completed turbine tower rose among steel girders spiked with insulators and weighted with hundreds of high tension, lead-in wires.

The day shift of the Metal and Lumber Company had stopped work an hour ago, and now the cowboy drove his team without the firing of the riveters or torches blasting sand from the air. For a moment the sun touched the black mounds of earth behind the tower and drifted off, down the almost dry channel as far as he could see, where once the wide river would have lost its mud color and changed to orange, then purple, in the days before Mistletoe even existed and when the fishing was good any place he sat down to cast.

When he heard a shrill faraway whistle in Clare, twenty miles away, he climbed down, unhitched the team, left the old machine for the night still dropping a few seeds, and let the horses tug him easily toward home on the end of the reins. For a whole day he had been sowing flowers, back and forth, on the mile long stretch of his brother’s grave, and now the horses were tired and he was thirsty. Man and animals cut down from the crest of the dam to the high weeded plateau, basined in the rear by the long gravel approach and fronting on the filled in section of the horseshoe town. Soon the crest would be topped with a macadam road and the street lamps, if ever wired and the last switches installed, would be lit against the horizon.

The four brown dray horses chomped slowly across the dry track, swaying in the rear but shaking their round noses and twitching their ears in excitement, stumbling now and then in a hole by the road so heavily that it seemed they must fall. Passing one prong of the few hundred brown houses of Mistletoe, Luke Lampson waved to the Finn, a crippled ex-bronc rider hammering on a stoop with two white canes.

Then, digging his long heels into the turf, he pulled the horses as a station wagon swung close, raising the dust. He waved again, this time at the tin helmeted Metal and Lumber night shift men, setting off to throw sparks from the tower until dawn. He followed the thin sticks hung from a string of barbed wire through the darkening fields, slapping at the mosquitoes that bit through his pants, until, after once more placing a few light logs across the gate, he could look down on the plank and tar paper buildings of his ranch. He turned the horses loose and they trotted downhill, for all their age like young dogs.

“Slow down there,” he called, afraid that they would hit the wire in the darkness and skin open their broad two-sided chests. He splashed water on his face at the washstand by the house and looked over the bare country toward Mistletoe. He could see the light of fine sparks from the tower; they were at work already.

Only a few mile twists of wire sheared the damp land into fields and made it claim to a farm, a ranch, a fallen barn. Phosphorescent clumps of weed and sage rolled airily in sight, but lone animals moved invisibly though a hoof click on stone carried for miles through the warm evening.

Mosquitoes beat against the inside and outside of the windows and Luke Lampson’s horses thudded out of range of the house and, motionless, hung their heads over the furthest stretch of wire. Luke stomped up the steps, two potato sacks filled with sand, pushed open the door wobbling on leather hinges, and walked across the leaning floor to the bunk on his bowed, tightly denimed, tired legs.

“Evening, Ma,” he said and pulled off the cracked, square-toed, lady-size cowboy boots. And, more tiredly, under his breath:

“Evening, Maverick,” and he glanced once at the Mandan who squatted by the dusty blanket hanging from the foot of the bunk. The black hair hung over her face.

The woman at the wood stove shook the skillet and it spit on the red iron.

“What’s the matter, Ma, you out of sorts?”

“Not so’s anybody’d see.”

Luke lay back on the pile of covers and, lighting a short end of cigarette, flipped the wooden match to a tin can of water on the far side of the room. A pair of antlers, patches of hair and dried skin stuck to the yellow bone chip of skull, hung crookedly on the wall above the can. An old branch lay cradled in the horns. Luke rubbed his feet together — even in summer he wore thick-woven socks — and, with the toes of one foot sticking through a long raveling hole, scratched. The Mandan, crouching out of sight and never smiling, reached up one dark arm and with a long stem of hay tickled at the bare toes. But the black little feet, tough with rocks and hot with sand, did not feel it. He went on smoking.

“At least you could make her help. Me doing all this heavy work.”

“Go on, Maverick, give her a hand.”

The Indian climbed slowly to her feet, pulled down her red sweater, smoothed her faded, straw covered plaid skirt and padding to the open shelves, reached for thick lipped cups and plates. Her charm bracelets jangled as each piece of china was set heavily on the dark planks of the table. She kept out of the stove woman’s way.

“That’s the one job I like doing myself.” Ma splattered onions in the pan. “Light work. And I never get to do it.”

“Go fetch some water,” Luke said to the girl. “Shut the door,” he called. It remained open and mosquitoes hummed in and out.

“I ain’t here the whole day long,” Luke swung his feet to the floor. “I don’t see what’s to keep you from sprawling right here on this bunk from sunup to dark. If you want.” Luke’s face, black with the sun, would fit a palm of the woman’s hand and when he rocked across the floor it caught the fire from the stove. He rolled like a child playing sailor, loosening his neckerchief.

Ma shook her head. “That’s where she sneaks off to. I couldn’t do it.” The Mandan returned with the load of water; she carried the bucket almost as lightly as the older woman, who could lug six brimming gallons the whole mile long trail as easily as two pint jars of honey. Reaching under the bunk, the Indian pulled out her dusty, high heeled, patent leather store shoes. She squeezed them onto bare feet and sat down to table. She ate from the edge of the knife, her black sides of hair falling into the bowl of food. Now and then she watched the cowboy scowling into his mug behind the hurricane lamp.

Ma never sat to any meal. She kept her back to the world and her face toward the red range, toward the cartons of matches, the row of pans and long handled forks. Sometimes she pushed the lid off the skillet and stole a bite on a long blackened prong or a sip from a wooden spoon. She refilled their plates without turning around. But the Mandan had to pour the coffee.

The deep dish skillet, as big around as a butter tub, was never off the stove and the flames were never allowed to die from under it. The fat was rarely changed and it boiled and snapped from one month to the next. Whether it was a piece of fish dropped into it or a slab of beef pulled out, it tasted of the black countryside. Tempered by the heat of wood coals, warming the room itself in winter, the skillet was slated over with layer on layer of charred mineral, encrusted with drippings, accumulating from the inside out fragments of every meal. Not a night went by but what Ma, quickly awakened in the darkness, got up to feed the fire and make sure the skillet burned. It was Ma’s pot, the iron of her life, to which came the pickings of her garden, the produce of her monthly shopping trips to Clare, the eggs she got each morning from the coop and whatever Luke might bring home at night — rhubarb, apples or a quarter head of cabbage. She kept it steaming.

Ma was not Luke Lampson’s mother. Hattie Lampson now lay buried on the bluff where once the tents were pitched. Ma had married, to the south in Clare and when the project was first conceived, Luke’s older brother, the Lampson incarcerated in the dam. Sometimes, rarely, wearing rubber boots and a shawl and carrying an egg basket, she would walk the high shoulder of mud, rock and gravel, and look down the water toward the badlands.

“You never knew nothing about it,” she told Luke, “you were out where it was dry. You never even saw the Great Slide.” She moved the skillet a little off the fire.

Luke got up from the table and looked at the Mandan. “You do those dishes for Ma. You hear?” She leaned on the boards, hid her face behind her hands and went on eating.

“She never says anything when I’m around.” Ma licked at the edge of the spoon and opened the draft a notch.

“You just don’t understand how she speaks, that’s all.” Luke undid his belt and shuffled among a pile of men and women’s clothing until he found a fresh black and white checked shirt. He pulled on his best pair of boots and polished the toes with the blanket tip.

Smelling of hair oil — the Mandan groomed herself from the same bottle — he rolled the brim of his hat, wiped at the sweatband, and drew it sharply over his eyes. He hopped to the ground over the potato sacks with the same jump and spring with which he used to run across the barn dance floor when the river was still indefinitely harnessed and the proposed streets on the bluff were not approved by the central office. He stood in the light of the hurricane lamp and ahead, above the rise in the darkness where his own place ended, he saw the small glow in the sky, as if far into the plains a few branders crouched by embers and sets of cooling irons.

“Them boys are flaring up tonight for sure,” he said and, whistling through his teeth, stepped out of sight. The night shift men were on the scaffold welding and below, by an iron hut, Harry Bohn put a pot of coffee back on the fire and prepared to return to Mistletoe.

Ma turned from her skillet and called out. “Don’t you say anything against Mulge. I won’t have it!”

He was almost to the gate logs in the wire and he looked back once at the ranch house, through the door that appeared to open on an empty room. Against the mosquito horizon he made out the high, thick logged, stockade-like breaking corral and a moldy Mexican saddle athwart the top-most beam. He could have seen the slanting, tack room shack and the chicken rest behind, but between the horse and fowl structures and the ranch house itself there lay a patch of darkness broad enough to hide two dung wagons end to end or a pack of dogs.

They were waiting for him there. Each strap in place, not a buckle rattled. The Red Devils sat their machines quietly and their gloved hands waited over switches, ready to twist the handle grips for speed. They sat straight, tilted slightly forward, faces hidden by drawn goggles and fastened helmets, the front wheels in an even row all leaning to the left as tight polished boots raised, rested lightly on the starting pedals. The straight, grounded left legs were parallel in black flaring britches and from the several creatures sitting double, with arms locked patiently around wood hard belts, there was never a murmur. Not a foot slipped nor did the saddle springs creak. Between the empty corral and the woman’s kitchen the motorcycles filled the darkness, the first almost touching the logs and the last within arm’s length of the cardboard wall. The black, deep-grooved tires were clean and hard. It was as if they had made no flying circuits that evening nor left rubber burns and cuts in the sand where few humans gather, in the gullies of rattlesnakes or before the coils of braided whips. Their saddlebags were still unopened, they had not slept. They watched as hunters by a pond in the marsh from which a single old bird, flapping and beating across the flat water, is unable to rise. License plates had been stripped from the mudguards.

Luke Lampson walked on a dry ridge in the middle of the wagon track. After a quarter mile through failing truck gardens and stony sand, he met the asphalt highway, heard pebbles shake loose under the thistle, a scratching in the brambles. A thin lizard leaped from the ridge and away down the brown clay rut.

A breeze came from the funnel of badlands. Cooled across the water, it was warmed as soon as it touched these acres rising and falling from the boundary of the dam in flats and hollows. At times he could smell the fresh, exposed side of the mountain that had been under the water line all day. A buried man now drained above the tide. Luke wondered if his body ever shifted in the sand, he thought of it when seeding. “Someday he’ll worm himself right out to the open air,” the cowboy said. “Mighty like he’s crawling around in there right now, winding his way up toward the side I’ve-sown.” The whistle bleated beyond Gov City and the Metal and Lumber men climbed down.

Luke Lampson stopped to light up a Personally-Rolled. It was a long walk across three provinces.

Where the scuff country met the broad back of the highway and little clumps of sand and weed were kept from spreading by the long raised shoulder of the road, there, nosed to the edge of the empty speed lanes, he saw the head and taillights of a parked car. It was long. Between the yellow glare of fog and headlights and the blinking red danger arrows in the rear, stretched the darkness that was the car itself, too long to house in any ordinary driveway. Luke knew that on its sloping top, in aluminum racks, would be the airplane luggage, built up like blocks and, neatly strapped and rolled on top of it all, the tree green unused camping tent. Fresh wooden tent stakes, tied with clean white fishing line, would never be taken from the rear compartment.

“Tourists,” he thought. “One of those big black tires has let them down. They don’t know whether to spit on it or buy another.” The front light beams carried for two hundred yards and in that full white incandescence he could see the fence posts and a croo ked, hand painted Poison Water sign.

A man and woman crouched before the solid radiator in the light. They were holding something between them.

“Wrong,” thought Luke, “guess they’ve hit a dog. Or maybe a jack rabbit. Probably never seen them that big before.” He stepped over the wire, pushing it down between the rusted barbs, and shielded his eyes.

“He’s been bit,” said Camper, the owner of the car, and glanced at the boy between his knees. The man Camper wore a yellow, large collared shirt with even tails worn outside the flannel trousers. He watched Luke through dark cat-eye glasses and puffed in fast heavy breaths.

His wife loosed her perfume on the air as if she carried a broken phial of it in a hidden pocket of the green silk slacks. She got out of their way.

“You see, I had to stop. There weren’t any roadstands or hotels, not a light anywhere. So I just pulled off the road and stepped out of the light and then the kid has to come out too. For two hundred miles I wouldn’t stop, not with warning signs posted every fifty feet. It’s a hell of a thing when you can’t take a leak without kicking up a pack of rattlers.” His white socks bulged through the braided sandals and he slapped his arms.

The boy looked as if he had been dropped in a bucket of cold water.

Luke pushed his hat on the back of his head, and taking the tin box from his rear pocket, squatted opposite but close to Camper. The woman waited in the car, raising and lowering the aerial, pushing one station button after the next and heard only a squall of electricity on iron ore.

“I can see you ain’t from around here,” said Luke. He squinted into the light, fixed the blade into the little handle and draped the short length of hose, used as a siphon by some of the men in Clare, across his knee.

“Like hell,” answered the driver. “I know where I am. I used to work around here, but the wife doesn’t know it. Let me tell you, I practically built that dam alone. Yes, sir, I remember still, the ‘cheapest earth filled dam in the western hemisphere’ it was supposed to be. And the Slide — I suppose you know about it — was like a whole corner of the world fell in.”

“I recollect it,” said Luke.

“I was surprised not to find any lights, not even a lunch wagon on the road.” The driver leaned closer to watch. “I must’ve missed the turning into town. ‘There isn’t any town way out here,’ says my wife, but I know better. I thought we’d just fly through for a quick look around. And of course to stop some place. I was surprised to see the place so run down, not a sign or anything. Why, you wouldn’t even know the dam was here.”

“It’s here all right,” said Luke.

He twisted up the leg, tied the rubber hose so that the lower calf went white and the upper darkened, making the child appear ready for transfusion. Keeping the blade out of the child’s sight, he peered at the fang marks in the coloring flesh. A crack of static burst from the car. “Try another station, Lou,” called Camper and they heard the whirr as the window was rolled shut.

His tin kit lay open in the dust at his heels, the extra blade catching the light, the label worn off the green corked bottle of iodine. Luke squeezed the leg, satisfied himself with the set of punctures, tightened the rubber tubing, shifted a bit, took up a packet of matches and, striking three or four, heated the blade.

Luke had seen them stricken before: Ma was not immune to rattlers on the water trail and even the Mandan was struck one blow from a startled head. The snakes were driven further and further from the bluff and new highway, and gathered wherever a few rocks or sticks could hide them deeper in the fields. He had killed them with rake handles. Once he ground an old flathead down with his long heel. But still their bodies might dart from a forkful of hay or dash from under pail or wheel to strike.

The blade turned blue. Luke once more picked up the leg and sank the point quickly in and out until two crosses had been cut and, the knife still hanging from his fingers, Camper holding the child’s shoulders, he relaxed his face and posture and sucked the wounds, his eyes growing heavy in the headlights, staring, as if the venom had a hard and needy taste to a man who, in all his youth on the infested range, had never himself been bitten. He took it as one of his four drays copped the bar of salt, hung over it, and kept it from the rest.

Specks of red appeared on Camper’s yellow shirt and with one hand he swatted, all the while watching the cowboy draw, turn, spit and stoop again. The mosquitoes filtered across the headlight, hummed and settled, biting into the driver’s white arms and neck. “Hurry up,” called the woman, her voice muffled behind the glass.

“This country’s hell on a man,” said Camper. He lit a cigarette and sat down more comfortably on the curving bumper. He watched the cowboy repack the tin and wipe his hands. “By the way,” he rubbed his arms, “how deep is she these days?”

“Eighteen feet, six inches round noon,” answered Luke, “but she’s down a little now.”

“That’s a lot of water.” He reached for his pocket. “I hate to be shoving off. Kind of like to wait until dawn and take a look around. I know there’s fishing. But the wife’ll be howling how she wants a hotel with screens on the windows and a girl to bring in the towels and washing water. Wait a minute,” he looked at Luke’s boots with steer heads carved above the ankles. “Can I give you something?”

“Naw. You just come back sometime when the sun’s up and it’s been raining a few days before. Come back and see her when she’s brimming!”

“I will,” called Camper, “I sure will.”

Luke Lampson finally walked into the dark acres adjoining the few lamps and measured streets of Mistletoe. Approached from almost any side, it was open country, sand, clay and nests of weed; the horseshoe street was swept abruptly from a rutted field. Children’s dolls and slides always lay toward the flagpole center, never behind the houses on the plain. Luke entered town by picking his way between two single story cabins and crossing the street before him to the drugstore: Estrellita’s. He straightened his hat, brushed the burrs from his pants and pushed through the patched screen door.

“Howdy, Lampson, howdy, Lampson,” murmured and softly echoed the men around oilclothed tables.

“Evening, gentlemen.”

He crossed to the counter and settled himself on a chromium stool.

“A bottle of pop, Mary Jane,” he said to the little girl in apron and white soda fountain cap.

Luke hooked his heels on a rung, spread his sharp knees and leaned over the straw. His back was to the men, his head hidden under the curled black brim. He looked into the rear kitchenette where an old man fried hamburgers and the girl did her lessons; he looked through the connecting door to the billiard room and back to his drink. There was only one light in the billiard hall, a pair of feet on the edge of a table and the row of cues. On the few nights of the week when a customer might enter, beer was served him and the light turned up. But those men who used to pride themselves on studied shots and drop ashes on the green cloth, now took to Estrellita’s. They watched the cowboy, his stooped shoulders, the split in his shirt, the white calf of his leg between the top of the boot and the rolled denim.

“Any of you boys seen Bohn?”

They waited a moment and then: “Naw, Luke, not tonight.”

“Ain’t seen him since an hour.”

“Reckon he’s in to Clare.”

The little girl laughed, pulled the primer over her face and the chef slammed a handful of meat on the griddle. With the point of his knife he pierced the bun, slit it, laid it flat and smeared on margarine. They heard the meatcake sizzling.

Across from Estrellita’s was the Metal and Lumber Gymnasium where the welders played the linesmen, where raffles were held and any entertainment, resulting in proceeds for the town, occurred. The grilled windows were open, lights were strung over the slippery hardwood, the instrumentalists followed the scores of their sheet music bought in Clare. Luke paid his dime at the door.

h e’s here,” said Wade of the man with the red wagon.

“Saw him, did you?”

“Yes, sir, I got a look at him.”

There was a desk and a chair on rollers for the Sheriff of Clare and a cane chair for his visitor. But both men stood. In the jail office they did not face each other, rather they waited side by side, the Sheriff’s hand on the other’s arm, talking slowly, not quite in whispers. They did not move but rested on their feet, alert by standing, old now, steady, for nights which kept them from slumbering, together watchful, dimly awake..

“I knew he was coming, Wade. I heard of it.” The Sheriff gently laid down the fat, wingfolded body of his Stetson.

No move was made to sit or turn and take the few steps to the open door from which they could have seen a street, a ridge of roof, the sloping, dry and distant night. Their backs remained without effort toward those sights, dim or broad, which might have made them think men slept in safety. Facing walls, the rear of the jail, they breathed together with a faint heave as if pollen and dust tracked them — all day they inhaled the clouds raised by a passing few youths — and the air were still laden long after the setting of the sun. They waited, come to a stop in the middle of the narrow stone room where dried cigarettes lay strewn on the faded blotter of the half open desk, where a winter coat hung from a peg, and the arm of each was made easy by touching the other’s. A thin light hung above their heads from a long cord more rope than wire. Separately they stared at the floor, pausing a moment in those outer, less confining parts of a jail. They smiled.

“I guess someone will send for you, if there’s need at all.”

“No. I think you better get him, Wade.”

Slowly, without looking back, they walked toward the center of the building, down a corridor to the complete darkness of the cell. They reached the coolness of that last room, divided in half and from the glow of the night by bars, and could be no longer hailed from the street. One side cell, the other bare, with iron rods embedded in the floor and ceiling, it was a room in which two men might meet out of town and in which, once before, a hanging had occurred from scarce planks, a hasty rope, and behind a canvas sheet still wet with turpentine and daubs of paint.

Smoke hardly rose from burning corn silk, no smell of tar or soap. Yet by the tank door — locked — the large shadows of the Sheriff and his friend, allowed owners of the cage, were free to lean against the metal, hold to greasy iron and hear the tinkering of jacknife, the strapping of wrists and tying of the hood. Wind, sand, bugs and daily voices rose and fell sealed beyond the walls of tin and whitewashed brick. The two of them were spread, like men leaning over a fence, against the open slender rails of the tank.

“Wade, let’s take a look at her.” The voice, the rubbing, creasing sounds of the Sheriff drifted away from bars cool to the forehead. He stepped backwards, groped toward the wall and light cord. “She don’t change.” A match flared on his trousers, sulphur fumed in the darkness and for a moment Wade saw the bodies of sleeping prisoners on the tank room floor.

“Twelve years ago, Wade, I left this cell unguarded. And that night, when a break or most anything could have blown, I saw Luke Lampson. I spoke to him; I went along to see his brother married. And the jail held. She’s just as strong tonight.” He pulled the cord and both of them, waiting, rubbed their eyes. The Sheriff looked up, saw the gleam, specks of brown and black in the iron, the square slab of the lock. Wade interrupted.

“Sheriff, is them convicts?”

“Sure. But you know, Wade,” again the hand lay on the other’s arm, “I can’t be in this room and touch these shining bars but what that wedding comes to mind and I see him.”

“Sheriff. Tell me about these men. They’re not just borrowing a place to sleep?”

“I caught them little devils tonight, Wade. Others are still loose. I think I’ll let them go in the morning. They ain’t much use to hold.” He turned slowly, raised his eyes and settled his shoulder tightly between the bars, thrust his body into the pen. A swift prisoner could have caught and twisted the fat arm, an animal torn it with one slash. “I think of Luke right here. This is where I come back to, where I could remember straight, after the wedding. He wanted to come too; I didn’t bring him. I wouldn’t let him further than the office. There’s not many like you, Wade, who want to hang around a jail, who have that need for the taste of lime and light that’s different through ordinary window glass. I didn’t know if to trust him. But ever after, Wade, this room’s been full of fire. I like stone, a man of the law has got to like things hard; he’s got to like the extra weight of a gun and the sound of a closing door. He’s got to watch the men he guards when they’re shaving from a basin on their knees. I was alone for weeks at that time. I didn’t even leave the jail to eat.

“Wade, I wasn’t the man to witness marriage. But he wanted it. We stood together, we pushed through all them women. And if I wanted I could have broke it up, I could have run the lot of them out of town. This cell here hasn’t changed, it’s just kept some of that celebration ever since the time I met him.”

“ Sheriff,” Wade peered at the sleepers — one lay almost near enough to touch by stretching a restless foot — and his body slackened, fists settled heavily, arms rested high, “have they been fed?”

“Watered,” continued the Sheriff in a voice low and wandering from the heat, “I watered them.” The other nodded. “You know, Wade, I didn’t even see his brother that night. Two years before I saw him though. I knew that he was marrying, but for all I care he didn’t speak that night.

“But Luke spoke. By the time they had been married half an hour, with all those women trailing after them, and set maybe in some dark room with a latch on the door — I never cared to know where they spent that night — we were in the office, tipping easy together in our chairs. He could have been one of my boys right then, Wade. He was young enough. I could tell he liked it. But I sent him back and waited for morning by myself.”

“You’re not alone tonight, Sheriff. But, you sure these men ain’t sick?”

“Wade, stop putting me off my thought. They’re just locked up for the night is all.” The Sheriff turned, placed his wide face between the bars so that they pressed on his temples and stared into the cell.

The prisoners did not rise. Occasional words, lights burning past the hour, caused no awakening fumble or sudden oath. A few Red Devils lay awkwardly spread eagle in the cell, the black driving mitten of one flung upon the seamless snout of another, tangled, sleeping, perhaps ready to spring with wild rubber limbs high and low against the bars. In captivity, sometime during the night, they had heaped themselves in the middle of the painted floor like a stack of slashed and darkened tires. The Sheriff and Wade slumped, grinned.

“Sheriff, watch this.” Wade, beginning silently to shake, stooped and squeezed, pushed his leg recklessly through the bars. He puffed and it thrust forward, trousers sticking and riding up the bulky calf.

“Wade,” the Sheriff chuckled and whispered, “you’ll get it bit off.”

The dusty shoe of a full sized man probed toward the small formless foot of the nearest sprawled prisoner. Wade hung low and twisted, stopped breathing and bent his head to aim. The Sheriff waited.

He kicked, then kicked again and suddenly pulling and swaying with all his weight he cursed, strained and drew it back. The Devil’s foot moved a few inches and lay still.

“Hell,” Wade caught his breath, “they’re harmless.”

“I told you. But, Wade,” the fingers pressed, relaxed, “go get him for me.”

The red wagon stood at the end of the street. Now and then a volley of firecrackers burst from a huddle of black braided Indians and with a dismal but high pitched cry they scattered, then returned panting toward the wagon. Or a single brave, eyes closed and ankle shoes clumping in the dust, would break from the rest and race with terrified showy speed away from the leaning red spectacle of the traveling house, straight up the center of the empty street.

The fireworks were old. Hoarded in leantos and one room cabins among families of fifteen children and ancient long haired eagle men, they were unearthed, armfuls brought into the street, supplied by bareback riders with pockets stuffed, lathered in haste. The paper cartridges exploded with stored energy or fizzled dangerously in clouds of smoke, the breath of a long horned animal on its knees. Above the clamor of the young men — their legs worked to the rattling of dry stones — the oldest Indian alive, without eyes, chin wrinkled into the mouth, clothed in baggy coat on the shoulders of which scraped his yellowed hair, stood rigidly still and, smiling or grimacing, waved in jerky circles a hissing sparkler.

One of the runners who had left with shouts and returned in a low scuffle, emerged from the alleys between the main buildings of Clare and quietly, whispering, crept to the front of the wagon to hold a bag of gray kernels under the strange horse’s nose. Suddenly it thrashed its tail and ate.

The women of the tribe were waiting. Just beyond range of a sooted and yellow lantern that had been lighted, fanned, and set crookedly near the pair of weathered steps dropped on hinges from the back of the wagon, they bundled together and their brown skeletal cheekbones now and then twitched with pain. Their blank eyes turned upwards to the low but thick red door.

The wagon consisted of four rear wheels, extra high, and a little two windowed hut daubed with one barn color coat of paint. A tin chimney, that could be removed and wired to the side, stuck abruptly from the center of the sharp pointed roof and poured a fresh, foreign smelling smoke into the hot night air. It mixed with whiffs of gunpowder. Large, outsized shutters, stolen from a Victorian estate and thick enough to be bulletproof, were nailed across the windows. The house wagon was rough, gaudy, a small fortress of unmatched parts, with an air about it of harsh and lonely ill-repute. It was a cramped and wandering hovel. Yet high over the horse’s sloping rump, the driver’s seat was draped with a soft silk-haired sheepskin. The dirty but comfortable curls hung to the floorboards and over the rusty springs.

Fat, hands in pockets, grinning, Wade worked his way down the street, careful to keep in shadow. He knew the Indians could see him, the wet shirt and trousers white. He stayed in the dark. For a time he sat, a drunk rolled in a corner, on an empty porch of the provisional store, resting. He saw a tin can blown suddenly into the air. The sharp-mouthed Indians leapt across the street to the sound of beating drums. He chuckled quietly from deep beneath his leather belt, watched them burn down, tormented by the moon.

Wade again crept lumbering toward the hut on wheels. The thin stick of the chimney turned a spotted orange. In a row of gray false fronts, among a few gilt lettered windows — a town laid out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains — the red wagon took its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road.

Wade, abstractly picking a tooth, saw the squaws clustered about the doll size steps. They looked darkly or, a few old and with toothless gums, happily, up to the bright light burning through splits and knotholes in the rain warped door. In the pack he saw one, two, that were maidens in unbelted dresses. The paralytic old chief’s sparkler flashed on their tightly drawn black hair. It was a circle he could not enter, never touch those with woodsmoke under their fingernails. The months of the maiden Indians came with the tearing of young dogs; Wade scratched his neck and looked at the gently stooping shoulders.

Suddenly, as bright lips parted, the stolid door flew open. In the heat of the boiling pot stove Cap Leech stood above them, holding by the throat a brown chested boy, the other hand dripping an instrument of metal.

Cap Leech dropped him. The boy — until that one moment the men outside had cried in his stead, he had curled his tongue and perspired — fell in pain from the platform. But Wade, as well as the audience of women, saw that he had jumped. And when he hit the ground he glanced quickly at foster mothers, sisters, clutched his jaw and screamed. The women babbled and turned away. Cap Leech raised the metal, flicked it, and the small skin wrapped molar landed among them. Dismayed, they fought for it, picked it up.

The street was empty except for the fiery Cap Leech still framed in the midget doorway and Wade trembling at his feet. A last string of firecrackers rattled and died. The little man with bare arms did not move.

“What do you want?”

His voice was hoarse from long speechless months. He wore black trousers and a stained vest folded low on a thin scarred waist. He stood with his back baking toward the stove the color of which, a cool glow, increased minute by minute. Glancing at the lantern, “Put it out,” he said. Wade sank down and grunted.

Cap Leech did not watch him lay his head on its side, burn his nose, blow, and blow again. With eyes bleakly commanding up and down the street as if the Indians still congregated, he continued merely to wipe, almost polish, the hammer pliers shape of metal. The duster-sized piece of waste rag fluffed up and down as he worked with thin fast fingers. Then, done looking at the town, he flung the tool backward, not turning to aim, and shoved the rag into his hip pocket. The pincers crashed behind the stove.

“It was the Sheriff told me to come over,” said Wade and brushed at the soot streaks on his trousers.

Cap Leech stepped into the flames and slammed the door. Wade listened to the hurried sounds, the clattering of small objects, a ransacked scuffling. After a pause he heard the whisper of iron, the shooting of grated coal, and the sudden breathing of the fire. Leech reappeared from beneath the wagon, scowled, flung up the steps and fastened a padlock through the rings.

“Bring that lantern,” he said.

He sank into the sheepskin and pushed the stiff, long handled brake. Wade saw that on his feet he wore only a toe curled pair of bedroom slippers.

With the easing forward of the hickory lever and the release of the wooden grip which bound the wheels and which, on wallowing hills, was apt to lock and pitch the wagon into the limbs of a bare tree, smoke flattened from the pipe and the men leaned backward, pulled with the head down charge of a blind horse chased by fire. The driver held a loose rein, ran his other hand through the shedding yellow locks on the seat and, shaggy toes pointed restfully together, stared with eyes that never watered toward the horizon, above and beyond any obstacle that might have crossed their path. The son of a light boned suffragette, kept alive by a spirit half stimulant, half sleep, he bounced unconscious of the twisting wagon frame, the knocks of the makeshift caisson.

“Turn around! Turn around, you’ve passed it.”

“Whoa,” said Cap Leech, sending not a signal down the reins, and the horse stopped. An obedient, angular wrenching of the shafts, a tilt as one wheel skidded up and across the sidewalk planking, and again Wade’s damp wavy hair scratched in his eyes. The stove at their backs was fanned by speed, not wind, and occasionally, without noise, chunked airy wads of ember from the funnel topped chimney, fireballs that floated in the wake of the blood letter.

The ministerial tie strings, knotted, but no longer in a bow, the high collar flapping about the neck, the ease with which he overrode the country familiar or not, all marked a man who had been anesthetized, against whose chest villagers of fifty years had spit their brains.

He drove with the one hand uselessly extended and peered far ahead of the low stars, dismissed without thinking Clare’s shut houses. He would travel unlighted roads to reach the distant end of the river, the last of his line. Echoing moans met him at the limits of every township.

Cap Leech did not stop his horse — wide at the rump it tapered to the small head, jet black prehistoric animal that could run forever — before the jail, but turned it instead, with a whisper to the pinned down ears, between the stone wall and vacant wooden wall. H? discovered, without an extra movement, the still and littered end of Clare. The wheels rocked in the glassy sand, the horse exhaled.

“You give me a ride here,” said Wade. Leech nimbly disappeared on the other side of the wagon. The silent flatlands, the lonely shrub, the plains, moved in upon the town and passed across the weeded railroad line carrying part of Clare off into the night, a few hundred yards into what was once grazing country, now shorn, beyond which there was nothing. Behind, on the streets they had just left, the loping body of a wild dog appeared at the cloudless, hardly sleeping skyline, turned and bounded into the jail.

“I’ll tell you what it says.” The Sheriff glanced at Wade, looked at Cap Leech from the side of his eye, wrinkled, brown, a mole. “Put his bag in the corner.” But for a moment longer he read to himself, holding with both hands the thumb-pressed pages of the yellow paper book. The thick dry lips hung loose, dissociated from the mind that had been concentrating for a long while and in a bad light. “The new of the moon is best,” he said briefly and was again silent. To study, he needed the rough cut desk, gum, dust, and streaks of coal dark ink under his fingers. He was gathered over the printed sheet, deciphering sign by sign, breathing at the end of every sentence. Now and then he stopped and his eyes retraced slowly to the top of the page.

“Why don’t you let Wade there take your bag?”

But the zodiac was strong and he fell once more to creasing the paper against the round of his knee, tongue tip appearing at the corner of his mouth. He considered the indoor gardener’s calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and church holidays, with a slow beating of his heart and patient, slight movements in the cane chair. A gambled harvest, the weather, and days on which accidents were most likely to occur, he calculated; and he discovered, prodding the elements, that they were in the old of the moon. He shut it, leaned forward, and carefully lay it before him on sheets scrawled with dates of years long past and those still to come.

“Wade,” staring at Cap Leech, “go bring me that pointing dog. She shouldn’t be out back.”

The Sheriff stretched forth a palm like a large gland, then Leech; and they shook hands in the last quarter, some few hours after the Minnesota medicine man, hardly planning to pause, had entered Clare. And, having allowed the Sheriff to grasp his own quick fingers — despite lotions of disinfectants and the protection of rubber gloves in the past they were covered with growths of small warts — Cap Leech placed his black satchel on the desk between them, snapped it open. The odor of herbs and germicides, a sharp perfume, rose among the smells of leather and tarnished handcuffs. One smell was strongest, living faintly upon the body of the man with the small bag. Leech pushed up the dirty rolls of his sleeves — nothing tied concealed to that gray flesh — and, reaching into the satchel, brought forth a small tin can and placed it also on the desk. The can and a few pieces of metal were all that remained of the Leech who in his youth had stood thin, well washed, and stern before the cadaver of an aged negro.

Ether. It lay in the bottom of the can like turpentine. The Sheriff bowed slowly forward, sniffed once, twice. He breathed such fumes never before found floating in the far-country kitchens. But, foreign as they were even to the Sheriff, they were fumes that vaguely suggested the fractured leg, were tainted with the going under or coming out of a whimpering sleep. His head nodded. Then the Sheriff straightened and, fumbling with the blade of a little knife, cut at the insides of an apple-large cob pipe. It filled his hand, was covered with kernelless pock holes, missing teeth. He puffed quickly and the sweet fumes disappeared in tobacco smoke.

“You use that on them, then,” said the Sheriff.

“Sometimes,” answered Leech, “sometimes I don’t.”

“It’s in your clothes.” The Clare Sheriff was invested with the office to inspect, whip, or detain any unique descendant of the fork country pale families, was in a position to remember when they settled and how well or poorly they had grown. But before him stood a man concerned even more than himself with noxious growth, who was allowed, obviously schooled, to approach his fellow men with the intimate puncture of a needle.

“Why don’t you sit down?” said the Sheriff. Now and then he still caught a taste, some sort of chloride or oxide, at least a poison, of the medicine man’s evaporating drug. “What else you got in that bag?” He picked up his pamphlet, licked his thumb, then with a sweep cleared the smothered desk. “You fellows have it all,” he said in a friendly, uncertain voice to the stranger who, sixty himself, might have been discovered plucking under the chin an old man suffering a head cold. “Hurt them when you want to, collecting all those bottles and knives. But,” and the Sheriff looked to the door, “there’s not much doctoring or tooth pulling for you here.”

“That so.”

“I don’t believe there’s a tree standing within a hundred mile where you could hang a shingle. If there was, they’d tear it down.”

Cap Leech lifted the tin can, sniffed, fixed the cotton stopper. Those eye whites, dull bits of glass pressed against the skin, hovered over the floor. Without raising them he began to laugh, “Open your hand.” Slowly, in the fat of the Sheriff’s upturned palm, he drew a circle with his broken fingertip. “Disease,” he said, “thriving. Catch a fly in your fist and you could infect the town.” Quickly, with the iced cotton, he swabbed the hand, let it go. “Clean. For awhile.”

“Wade,” the Sheriff drew back and called, “come here, Wade!”

In a stoop Wade pulled the pointer through the doorway. It brought with it the smell of rain, the smell of paws, forelegs and chest soaked in storm and caked with the mud of a downpour; it twisted its head, drops beating against its eyes, and shook, would have spattered the walls, between Wade’s knees. All day it shied and staggered under the sun. But by nightfall it was able to force moisture, to yelp at the shell-like roll of a cloudburst in its ears, to walk as if leaving puddles across the floor, to smell as if the rain had actually come down and driven it bleating and thin into a rivulet filling ditch.

Wade walked stiff-legged, raised his head to smile, and pulled, lifted the dog by its throat. All four of the animal’s legs were rigid, hind legs clamped straight up and down, front paws crossed over its bleeding snout. He dropped the dog in the middle of the room, released the matted fur. His hands were wet, the bottoms of his trousers damp.

“Sheriff, this dog is scratched.”

“Scratched?”

“Yes, sir. She’s cut up.”

“Got ahold of her, did they?”

“Yes, sir. They must have claws.”

The first motorcycle the Sheriff saw appeared at dusk, bounded around a corner of the granary and sped without lights down one gutter of the sanded street. He had raised a hand against it, started at the whirr of wheels spoked with dirt and a few oily flower stems, and had begun to run clumsily, freshly shaved and scented, as it jumped the wooden walk, leapt, a small thunderbird, and flashed through a plate glass window.

The Sheriff sat down, stared thoughtfully at the animal whose rump still clung to the air, whose injured nose lay hidden. Then, slowly, he reached for it, lifted it with a brief grunt until its chest was on his lap. And he waited until the nose was uncovered, while it probed blindly, and at last allowed his fat cheek to be licked, touched with blood. He chuckled, “She’s been out back.”

After shoving and kissing the round face of the Sheriff — the tongue that was clamped between its own teeth flicked once the lobe of his ear — the slick keen head of the pointer dropped and with slow high climbing motions the dog stepped and pawed ungainly hind legs against his trousers, attempted to thrust and double its whole body onto his knees. The Sheriff held his breath, slowly pushed the pointer to the floor.

Without a murmur it slunk off. “She’s sick,” said the Sheriff and watched for some expression to curl across the healer’s cleft face. Not a grimace appeared, but slowly, with slackening pulse, he seemed to unwind and, reaching once more the tin can for a whiff of salts, dropped a white hand tolerantly to the desk top. There was a switch up his spine, a spark of truth in the watery tapping of his fingers. “Don’t say anything,” the Sheriff stepped forward, then behind the desk, “I’ll do the talking.” He rubbed the prognosticator’s pamphlet against his beard. “He’ll listen,” thought the Sheriff, “no traveling man’s that good.”

Beyond them bloomed the desert that had starved to silence the calls of loveless dogs, buried under successive sand waves the hoof prints of single fading riders or the footprints of man and woman running with clothes bundled quickly beneath their arms. Any nomad tribes that had once burned raiding fires at night were gone, human drops sprinkled and spent in the sand, as bodies slipped from the edge of the horse blanket, had been settled upon and obscured by wingless insects or fried, like the heads of small but ruddy desert flowers, in the sun of one afternoon.

“I said,” stuffing a fistful of tobacco over the white ash in the bottom of the pipe, “there’s just one man who died out here. Only the one death that come to anything. For ten, even twelve years, in all that time there ain’t been a single robber shot in the head, no rancher fatally struck by snakes. It hasn’t been long enough for any man to grow old enough to die…”

The jail, with its door standing open and another locked, kept all men who spit or talked within its walls comfortable on gray lead painted floor or dry cane, confidential, close, by its very smell and heat of confinement, preserved them amidst the circles of the desert. No sound passed between the padlock and smoky boulder. The scratching of infected toes, the whispering from swollen, hair covered throats, died near the foundations of the jail. Away, no voice called for help, the desert might have sunk from sight, beyond detection and points of the compass.

Only the soft voice croaking full of stories and the listener, at that hour, feeling just old enough to wait. The Sheriff looked up and down the page, turned, flipped another one and paused. “ Aquarius is poor,” he said and thought, “That will hold him, ain’t a chemical sounds that good to the ear.” He added, “ Sagittarius is poor, also.”

The purveyor of menthol, iodine, and peppermint stepped to the window as the drone continued. There were no dark house fronts, no flashing signs. Only the dented black plains stretched from the window to the horizon without a flicker of movement except for a shadow that now and then crossed the buzzing screen. For a long while Cap Leech stood pressed against the wall, listening. He looked toward the cow country for some speck of a herd against the night sky or a lone rider nodding over the pommel. The mosquitoes ticked against the screen in his face.

The Sheriff scowled into the magic page. “ Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.” He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

i n the beginning, before the sights were even taken for Mistletoe, Government City, before the women and children arrived, when stray cows could stop wherever they pleased below the high ground to water, and the water in its turn could slug downstream to flood, when the nearest city, not including Clare which was only a post on the plain, was over the line into the next state — at that time, as winter came on and workers migrated to the project anyway, upon the whole head of the bluff there was founded a colony of a thousand tents that smoked like an Indian village through the hard snow. Ten or twenty men to a tent, they penny-anted by lantern light and only came out into the falling snow to watch when a load of shovels arrived or the crated yellow tractor was slid from the rear of a truck and left in a shallow dune to await spring. For days the men tramped out in small groups to lean over, and touch, and inspect the box of spare parts that someone had struck open with an iron bar. The temperature went down.

There were no streets and hardly a pathway, no community hall or cookhouse; fires were built before each tent and the tin cans, thrown behind one, landed in the dooryard of the next and slid beneath the snow. A ton of steel cable was finally shipped in and remained a solid mountain for the winter. In hours when the snowfall ceased and the eye could travel far over the white flat lands, the new workers would creep from the tents and standing on the bluff in the wind, look down upon the widening overflow, the ice blocked river. New sheepskin coated friends were made in these lulls on the ridge.

Men landed in camp all through the months of sleet and snow. Tents trickled down the slope, clustered in pockets and mushroomed in four or five protected holes in the land. Fat Chance, Reshuffle, Dynamite, they were unrecorded towns still remembered by a few in Gov City.

The storms tossed heavier than ever on Christmas, the river was out of sight and only the explosions of the ice told them it was there below. Tent flaps were staked down, the cans burning a skim of gasoline covered them all with soot. Hardly a worker dared face the gales that out of the northern moose country turned and vaulted in the hail swept bowl; nor would they walk far on the cornerless white range. But one old driller, stumbling a few yards from his place in the circle, carrying a shovel and wad of excelsior, discovered, in a dry notch of stone and sand, a short green frozen twig of pine. He nailed it to the ridgepole. And grinning down at the men, shaking his beard that was still black, he threw the shovel into its public corner and pointed upward.

“That there’s Mistletoe!” he cried.

When it finally thawed and the river rose, when the mud sloshed over the top of their boots and shoepacks, the women came. From that time on the wash was hung to dry out of doors. In the sun — when it was warm and a fresh breeze rose from the receding banks — in mid-morning, whole lines of workmen hunched forward on crates or squatted in the sand and earth that was still damp, with dirty towels on their shoulders, not turning to talk, staring off where birds were flying or hills emerging from the prairie, getting haircuts from their wives.

As the tide was stopped and in the dry season the river, at its weakest, was pinched off, the old bed became a flat of seepage and puddles of dead water. When the men turned the tideland into a shipyard, built barges and could swarm from one bank to the other, poles and lines were raised and Gov City finally telegraphed to Clare.

“There isn’t any town out here.”

“Sure there is,” said Camper to his wife, “not so small either, if I can find it.” He braced the fluid steering wheel against his stomach, squinted at the enormous thorny balls of sage that rolled in slow motion before the headlights.

“You’re dreaming again. No one’s dumb enough to put a town out here. Take us back to the highway.”

Sharp lifeless blades of prairie grass scratched at the undersides of the automobile, crackled to the slow turning of the tires. The armored vehicle with its veils of glass, shrouded in blunt searching beams of light and swinging, dipping its useless aerial in the hot air, prowled forward toward the unknown dried out river, now and then dropping its front bumper into a mound of sand. Camper pressed, released the accelerator with his sandaled foot, watched for signs of a track not wholly lost, saw only the yellow powder, the needles of a still and tangled earth. He felt that the inflated rubber of his car wheels must be crushing colonies of red ants, crazed lizards, bugs caught before they had time to hum and fly. He sat on the edge of the padded leather seat.

“What’s the matter with you? Turn around!”

“Only a minute now, Lou, you’ll see. A real town, I know it.”

“You can’t kid me. You just want a chance to use that tent. I’ll sleep in the car.”

He could not find it. Once he stopped the automobile — all its wide tapering body listed — and climbed out, leaving the door open, its sharp edge jammed in the sand. He looked back to the sound of the heavy engine on weeded soil, to the small light burning over the blue blouse, the green silk slacks of the woman. Then, bent double, he stepped in front of the headlights and peered closely at a few square feet of ground, looking for some trace of a house, a piece of wood once shaped by saw, a brick that had burned under the fire of a kiln; as if he expected to find the town or its remnants in a hole at his feet. The cowboy had spoken of it, he himself remembered it and yet, picking up a handful of grit and dust, perhaps she was right.

“I don’t see it,” he said. The bites itched on his chest and shoulders.

“I could tell from the highway,” his wife answered. “There weren’t any signs.”

Though not stopped by barrier — fence, rock or ravine — the automobile was sucked close to the loose and dibbled earth, slowed by the invisible roots of parasite plants stretched like strings across its path, exhausted of speed and air. Camper felt a harsh and lazy magnetism that, foot by foot, might crack its windows, strip it of paint and draw the stuffing from the seats. He watched for something to steer by.

“You can’t expect to find a town just anywhere,” said his wife.

And at that moment they were attacked for the second time during the night by snakes. They ran over it. Flat and elongated, driven upon in sleep, it wheeled, rattling from fangs to tail, chased them, caught up with the car, slithered beneath it, raced ahead into the light and reared. The snake tottered, seemed to bounce when it became blind, and, as Camper touched the brake, lunged so that it appeared to have shoulders, smashed its flat pear skull against the solid, curved glass of one headlamp, piercing, thrusting to put out the light.

“Go back and kill it! Go on, get out of this car!”

Quickly he drove ahead, reaching one hand through the darkness to quiet her, and saw, hardly above the sands, the railless, short rotten planks of an abandoned sidewalk starting from the desert.

“I told you, I knew she was still here!”

Lou put her forehead against the glass.

She lifted the boy into his left arm, piled his right with towels. In a free hand he clutched the cowhide suitcase.

“There’s nobody here,” she hissed as they climbed the boot smooth dormitory steps. The rooms, down segregated corridors, were dark, not a light nor single man appeared in the foyer on the walls of which hung pictures — a girl, a horse’s head — torn from magazines. Standing together for a moment on the cold linoleum floor, Camper imagined forty bearded shovelers and forty china mugs stretched along the bare planks of a makeshift table: a silent, before dawn meal.

The soft, fibreboard walls of the corridor sagged, split at the bottoms. Sand swept across the floor. Camper padded forward, stopped, moved again in his extra wide, sea rotted sandals; behind him the red high heels of the woman cracked.

“Try that one, Lou,” he whispered, and in a narrow room, screen half ripped from the window, they looked upon a tousled iron bed, a body that slept beneath a raincoat.

“Here,” he said, “try ‘22’.” The number was splashed on the door in peeling whitewash.

“Open it yourself!”

Camper squeezed the rattling glass knob between his fingers, pushed, shielded by all he carried, leaned into the dust and mold. “No,” he whispered, staring a moment, “not this one, either.”

The lamp, beside a card table with a hole ripped in its center, worked, but the lock catch dangled from the door jamb.

“Keep the shades down,” he told her after each trip to the car, “there’s no sense letting everyone know we’re here.”

“Everyone! You got a nerve.” She sat on a campstool, stretched herself, blew down the front of her blouse. As soon as Camper had set up the cots and slipped the small revolver under one pillow, settled the boy in his mother’s bed and untangled the mosquito netting, he stooped and plied quickly, methodically, through his own valise. He removed the delicate rod, the clock-like reel, the green and yellow dun flies.

“The best fishing in the world is right here, Lou,” he mumbled and collected the bright and pointed gear.

She stood up, wet with silk. “You think I’ll swallow that? You got eyes, you’ve driven across it as well as me. After five hundred miles they wouldn’t dump garbage on and not a spot to get a drink in, you think I’m going to believe there’s water in this place? Let alone a fish!” She watched him pin the flies to his flowing collar, stick the collapsed rod in a pocket above his wide and boneless hip. She considered the smile on his face, the flipping hands.

Suddenly she rose still higher, spit, shouted after him down the rank and hollow hall: “You dirty little dog,” laughing, trembling at her own intuition, “you been here before!”

She was alone. She listened, pulled the sheet across the boy, went immediately to the window and raised the shade. And, breasts half thrust, half fallen against the screen, she found herself unable to move as she stared into a watchful, silent figure pressed close to the other side.

The creature continued to watch. It was made of leather. Straps, black buckles and breathing hose filled out a face as small as hers, stripped of hair and bound tightly in alligator skin. It was constructed as a baseball, bound about a small core of rubber. The driving goggles poked up from the shiny cork top and a pair of smoked glasses fastened in the leather gave it malevolent and overflowing eyes. There was a snapped flap on one side that hid an orifice drilled for earphones. Its snout was pressed against the screen, pushing a small bulge into the room.

The snout began to move. It poked without sight toward the flattened slippery flesh of Camper’s wife. And with that first sound of scraping she turned her back, swayed, stepped quickly from the room.

There were men, perhaps women, in the building who, thought Camper’s wife, still confiscated fatback and a few blunt tools from local ordinance and who, despite buck tooth, caved chin, lockjaw and blisters still existed, warped and blackened in the wake of the caterpillar and dusty mare. As she walked away from her own door left ajar, she heard the wriggling of their toes, put her ear against the walls, softly knocked. She sniffed for the spot where Camper himself, years before, had squinted through the screens or rolled asleep. With crimping fingers she tucked the bottom of her blouse into the slacks.

“He won’t catch anything,” she thought.

A light burned in the kitchen. She stood on the threshold and watched as an old woman, after setting a pie tin before one of two men at the table and opening the stove on the coals, grunted, smiled, lifted heavy blue skirts and tucked a dollar bill, closely folded, into the top of a fattened snow white stocking.

“Sit down,” said Harry Bohn to the Finn, “I ain’t done dinner.”

“I’m going home.”

“Sit down.” Bohn began the pie and the crippled Finn, knocking a chair free of the table with one of his fluttering canes, sat on the edge of it, braces grinding, and watched him chew. Lou saw that the cook, Norwegian, fat, expected the whole pie to be eaten, saw that the small man, fidgeting, wore no clothes except his airy overalls. He was slight, wrapped around by the thinness tight upon a body that had lost weight never to regain it. His white canes tapped constantly, he drummed them as another might his fingertips.

“You wouldn’t run off on me, would you, Finn?”

“I got things. Lots of things to do, Bohn.” The top of his overalls flared stiffly from the middle of his back, one broad strap and brass button slipped from a shoulder, pinched, transparent. “So I can’t sit around with you,” snapped the lightweight ex-bronc rider, who in the beginning had ridden from many chutes with spurs entangled high on an animal’s withers.

“Tonight,” Bohn leaned back, his lips bubbled, “you’re going to.”

He saw the woman in the doorway. His mouth fell open — blue mash, blue gums and teeth — he saw her stare, he frowned and put his hands on the table as if to rise. “Yes, sir,” fingers sprung without thought into a fist, eyes back to the Finn, “we don’t get around it. You ain’t going to move, unless I say.” And the cook behind him, leaning between his needs, his body, and the fire, licking her lips as he, nodding before he spoke, looked at the same time toward the doorway and shook her silver braids, spoke to Camper’s wife.

“No supper. You’re too late.”

“That’s right,” Bohn’s eyes in the plate, hiding the mouth with the back of his hand, “kitchen’s closed.”

For Lou his mouth was open, his chin still sagged. The berries, the purple fish roe, still hung in the air and filled a vanished face; she saw a crawling, half digested bunch of grapes, a birthmark — at a single mouthful — swelling into sight between his lips. Bohn never looked at her again.

He had an old man’s kidney. He had an old man’s tumorous girth and thickly dying wind, a hardening on the surface of his armpits. Chest and shoulders were solidified against youth, bulged in what he assumed to be the paunch of middle age; he was strapping, suffered a neuralgia in winter, a painful unlimbering in the spring. A few fingers were broken, snubbed, since an old man labors from stone to knife to saw to possible tractor accident and back to the single burning of a match flame short in argument. He could laugh, sparsely, at the exploits of men over fifty who enacted, he believed, all they claimed; his own prowess, he told them, had been struck off, like a head of hair, by maturity. And he was, except for a few patches that had to be shaved monthly by a barber, bald; lost by pernicious exposure to the sun, kept from water and finally pulled out one night in a troubled sleep by bloody, rasping fingertips. He mimicked, with unclean, pyretic dignity, the limp folds under the chin, the cockles in the cheeks, the gasp of wisdom and inflammation, the rock-like, seasoned cough of the prime, half invalided buck.

Bohn argued at, commanded his world and saw it under the pale of bitter years when imaginary friends die off. From this weathered mask and within this swollen body of whore-wounded time — he was thirty years old — skipped eyes blue and lively, curious for abuse, soured at the sight of visiting women passing close and strange among the undershirts, the beards of the members of his town.

“Thegna’s finished for the day, pooed over all the cabbage you care to, ain’t you, Thegna?” And now and then, instead of speaking to or looking at the mustang buster, he thrust an arm across the table, struck the wood to keep the small man in his place. “You loved the boys already, ain’t you, Thegna?” The one arm on her waist, the other, just out of reach, aiming at the Finn, “In Fat Chance worried all of us at once.”

Lou looked quickly at the small but rotund cook.

Bohn broke away. He stood up and immediately, with a clatter of sticks, the frail, the chronically thin ex-rider left the table.

Bohn stopped in the doorway and whispered once more to the trussed and stocky, water-eyed and trembling woman. “Thegna, did you pull on your big hip boots when the dam slid in?”

She nodded, back against the stove, and continued to bow up and down her flushed and weeping head. The apron shot up in warm and baffled flight.

“Thegna here will learn you,” he said as he quickly passed the flash of blue-green silk.

Lou escaped the flaying of the tumbling canes.

He shied, big and halting as he was, at the web texture of the flyless slacks and at the emerald apparatus that lived and breathed, but further at the metal relic buried in the middle of her chest, visible, through the silk, in its modest wedge. At that time it was the only cross in Mistletoe, Lou the only woman despite several who gathered in the cook’s room for cards.

Below the window and under the stare of searchlights brilliant atop dry and root choked posts, a file of creaking men sat still the length of the dormitory wall. Their backs were encrusted to the glittering tar board and they could not stir, singly mushroomed in a row, did not twist white and curious faces toward the upstairs window at the sound of women, the exchange, starting overhead, of far carrying tones and smiles. The sound was enough, was robbed of sweetness near the ground by the chemically white light and itching in their feet; by the guitar that was struck now and then shortly above the rattling of the pails, crouched upon by the player who sang, suddenly muffled, as a man talking to himself and not in serenade.

Tin helmets at their sides, after a day of clinging to the turbine tower and before bed, they stilled the creeping of the fungus across their feet by immersion, waved them automatically, spreading the toes, in the medicinal, violet fluid that filled the pails. Septic patches of flaking skin and trails of the discharge from the soles of their feet caked the bottoms of their shoes and in the early morning reimpregnated cooling sores, fired, a sudden yeast, under men’s weight on the earth. But at night they rolled their trousers above the knee, sat still. Beyond the crushed glass of the lot they faced and away in the darkness, stretched open snares and painful walks, sand, black brush and the dam. They hung their heads, at night retreated in blue denim and with phosphorescent joints and bones to the gritty wall — and did not, after women slept and from the porch of a store, watch through heavy cobwebbed evenings for a moonrise. The women were awake.

“You better tell me about him,” demanded Lou. She leaned at the window and several times, in the beginning, looked down on the black and waxen heads, well lit naked legs, the narrow backs. “Been here before and damned himself. Or had a good time.” She glanced down again — searchlights hit her egg blue breast and sparkling cross — and breathed deeply, staring after caterpillars curled on a branch. “He’s short.” She looked at the gold braids, tarnished, at the cook with canvas hips, and she began to breathe like the fat woman, through her mouth. Already, giggling and without a word, the cook’s head shook in denial, admitting no eye on her bosom, no rocks thrown. “He sweats in bed,” said Camper’s wife. “He can stick things into himself and not feel. If he’s mad he cries. Remember?”

The journeying man was followed: a bandog with a trailing chain, by fighters brawling a hundred steps behind, by a fish that escaped in the years before or a woman pointing no sooner had he passed. He stepped fidgeting through the darkness, thinking now and then of the dead man, while, in the body of one and the backbiting of the other, he was described between two women lashed together for the night.

“A blue spot on his chest? Punches you in his sleep? Come on,” Lou urged in the foreknowledge of a young girl, “you weren’t just cooking all that time.” And she played upon the drawstrings of the bag they shared, pledged that dual experience imposed by birth — in its welter all men were innocent — to outlast, roundabout and broad, the lone conception men carried in a joke and for which they fought time and again. “Any other place I wouldn’t have missed him,” trying to judge the years and deducting pounds accordingly, squinting at the woman’s shape of old, “telling me he just come here to fish! He can do that in the bathtub.” And the cook stood stolid, no keener than when she had backed against the stove.

Lou flung away her own blonde hair. She slouched, eyes level with the cook’s, gained weight, inched like a man to the window where perfume would be safely lost into the salty night. Had she a bandana she would have tied it around her head, blown out her cheeks. She hid her bright fingers in the pockets of her slacks. She swayed, gone white, as if she too had just kissed a mouth thick with pie and tobacco leaves, just come from a man in black blucher shoes and pants swelled with a bladder beneath the belt. “Think,” she said, “I want to know. Did he have the nerve?” Then, against the snapping of the guitar and smell of scattered red pepper seeds: “He ran straight to it all right. Like a buried bone!”

Thegna revolved, clapped both hands into crimson cheeks and spun so that the back of her head became as blunt and sealed as her face. Her eyes disappeared, popped in pain — nerves, glitter, fluid— into her head as in laughter an egg or thimble is suddenly swallowed whole and the body continues to shake while vomiting through the nose. In the old days Thegna had fired upon thieving Indians, shot her rifle on the fourth of July and, unarmed, stormed once to the reservation to organize a convention of stercoricolous squaws. She was the first to order a crystal set and the last to give up wearing a money belt. One braid flew loose and clung flatly to her shortened arm’s thick end, one breast trailed the other.

“Stop it,” hissed Camper’s wife, “shut up!”

But the laughter of the cook was dry, the fat goose flurry came in silence and the earth jug color rose, ebbed, beamed from her body, friendless, harmless, a howl on lips too old to part. Without stopping or turning to the door she spoke: “Fatima,” words clearly, distinctly extracted from the pounding bulk, “this is the visiting lady. She’ll play with us.”

Three disappointed women and then a fourth made long-jointed simple gestures toward the chairs they wished to sit in. They smelled of the tedder and handfuls of dry grass. Their heads turned slowly from objects knocked against to the cook, to Camper’s wife, moved along a thread of angular, impaired vision with apologetic sidelong sweeps, with shrugs of caution. They took single heavy steps as if the room had been reversed since the night before. Tall, large bones easily injured, deprived of something they were intent upon, not noticing and hardly afraid of the stranger, they fiddled, settled to restlessness somehow conscious of the years it would take them to make friends.

“You sit anywhere, Mrs.,” said the cook, “we don’t play partners.”

And Lou heard a sudden back country blow on metal strings — a hand clapped across the neck of the guitar below — and thought, bitterly hoped, that it might jerk them into the corridors, send them dancing.

A few old couples waltzed. They came from some watering point, perhaps near the hills, or from some dry plot of garden even further away than One Hundred Acres Grassland. Their overalls bagged, buttons flashed, armpits darkened halfway to belts and sashes.

Luke looked them over. He stepped by silent women, by men fanning themselves with wide brimmed hats, and approached the band. The cornet player stood up. Streamers sagged the whole length of the gym, and the raffling wheel, red, yellow and green with rusty nails driven round the hub to catch the tab and pick the winner, was pushed out of the way behind the bandstand, taller than a man.

The two dime collectors at the door in white shirtsleeves and muddy boots, shared a pack of cigarettes and ripped matches across their britches. They began to whistle a song together that their fathers, two buddy muckers, had taught them from Reshuffle days.

“Hey, Luke,” two little girls stood out of reach and clutched each other’s arms, “where’s Mr. Bohn? Where is he, Luke?”

He considered for a moment and then: “Bohn ain’t worked his way up this far as yet.”

An old man and woman, he in his straw sun hat and she hiding her face in smiles, were urged to keep dancing by scattered applause and the hoots of children.

“Great dance, eh, Luke?”

As the man with moustaches saw Luke stride to the shower stairs, he called, “If Bohn gets here, I’ll tell him he needs a good cold washing.”

“Much obliged.”

Luke switched on the light, cut loose the torrent of water piped directly from the dam, left his boots on the bottom step and catching his breath, soaped and drenched himself. The slippery wooden slats cut into and relieved his itching feet.

The stalls were made of planking from the scaffolds. Black and smooth after years of steaming and under the spray of alkaline soap, uneven in height and thickness, chopped into bath hole walls and darkened by ten years of scrubbers, these boards had been the beams and stanchions of the trestle across the river, had been the ribs and machine marred decks of barges. They were salvaged from long piles on the banks, turned from sea craft to bridge, to tool shed, scrapped and saved. They were never burned. A few long awkward unsinkable beams had been hooked from the still churning water around the catastrophe itself. They survived the Slide, floated and were towed landward to dry. At one time the river was filled with the lattice of new lumber, white sawdust fell on the muddy current and the prairie ranchers, riding out of the dunes and through the tents on the bluff to watch, saw wood come into the sand country and not only cut, but cut to special sizes. They stole it until guards mounted on the piles. Then they joined the crews to be near it.

The walls of the shower stalls were rough above the shoulder line from hobnail boots and still bore the deep impression of the chains. The spike holes were large enough to peer through. Meetings were made in the showers, began or ended there in the roar of midnight waters behind soaked green trenchcoats hung across the openings. The waste troughs under the floor slats were caked white and year after year pieces of soap, fallen through the bars, clogged the wired drains, turned thick and dissolved.

Luke washed under his arms, hunching forward to keep his hat and cigarette out of the wild stream, stuck one leg and then the other into the spray and hopped out, shaking, cold, standing on his toes as if he still wore high heels. He hurried to the stairway, a white bowlegged ranger dressed down to the neck and was dry before the shirt, pants and boots were pulled from the heap. He swung shut the iron wheel of the valve and heard the many damp closets dripping in the darkness.

He reached the landing of the stairs in time to hear the shooting, to see the musicians jump and the old men slam the women out of the way. He heard the grinding of the tires, the squawk of mudguard mounted horns, the scraping of the rider’s boots steadying their machines. One of the dime collectors appeared in the doorway.

“Do they come in or not?”