Steel Beach (45 page)

Before things got out of hand Mayor Dillon stood up on a table and fired his pistol three times in the air. Things got quiet soon enough, and the Mayor swayed and would have toppled but for the ladies on each side of him, propping him up. Next to the Doctor, Mayor Dillon was the town’s most notorious drunk.

“Hildy,” he intoned, in a voice any politician for the last thousand years would have recognized, “when the good citizens of New Austin heard of your recent misfortune we knew we couldn’t just let it lie. Am I right, folks?”

He was greeted with a huge cheer and a great guzzling of beer.

“We know how it is with city folks.
In
surance, filin’
claims
,
forms
to fill out, shit like that.” He belched hugely and went on. “Well, we ain’t like that. A neighbor needs a hand, and the people of West Texas are there to help out.”

“Mister Mayor,” I started, tentatively, “there’s been a—”

“Shut up, Hildy,” he said, and belched again. “No, we ain’t like that, are we, friends?”

“
NO!!
” shouted the citizens of New Austin.

“No, we ain’t. When misfortune befalls one of us, it befalls us all. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, Hildy, but when you showed up here, some of us figured you for a weekender.” He thumped himself on the chest and leaned forward, almost toppling once more, his eyes bulging as if daring me to disbelieve the incredible statement he was about to make. “
I
figured you for a weekender, Hildy,
me
, Mayor Matthew Thomas Dillon, mayor of this great town nigh these seven years.” He hung his head theatrically. Then his head popped up, as if on a spring. “But we were wrong. In this last little while, you’ve showed yourself a true Texan. You built yourself a cabin. You came into town and sat down with us, drank with us, ate with us, gambled with us.”

“Gambled,
hah
!” Sourdough mumbled. “That weren’t gamblin’.” He got a lot of laughs.

“Mayor Dillon,” I pleaded, “
please
let me say—”

“Not until I’ve said my piece,” he roared, amiably. “Then, four days ago, disaster struck. And let me say there’s those of us who aren’t completely cut off from the outside world, Hildy, there’s those of us who keep up. We knew you’d just lost your job on the outside, and we figured you were trying to make a new start here in God’s Country. Now, back outside, where you come from, folks would have just
tsk-tsk
ed about it and said what a shame. Not Texans. So here it is, Hildy,” and he swept his arm in a huge circle meant to indicate the spanking new cabin, and this time he
did
fall from the table, taking his bargirl escort with him. But he popped up like a cork, dignity intact. “That there’s your new house, and this here’s your housewarming party.”

Which I’d figured out shortly after he’d mounted the table. And oh, dear god, did ever woman feel such mixed emotions.

How I got through that night I’ll never know.

Following the speech came the giving of gifts. I got everything from the ritual bread and salt from my ex-wife, Dora, to a spanking new cast-iron cook stove from the owner of the general store. I accepted a rocking chair and a pair of pigs, who promptly got loose and led everyone a merry chase. There was a new bed and two hand-sewn quilts to put on it. I was gifted with apple pies and fireplace tools, a roll of chicken wire and a china tea set, bars of soap rendered from lard, a sack of nails, five chickens, an iron skillet…  the list went on and on. Rich or poor, everyone for miles around gave me something. When a little girl came up and gave me a tea cozy she’d crocheted herself I finally broke down and cried. It was a relief in a way; I’d been smiling so hard and so long I thought my face would crack. It went over well. Everyone patted me on the back and there was not a dry eye in the house.

Then the night’s festivities began in earnest. The beef was sliced and the beans dished out, plates were heaped high, and people sat around gorging themselves. I drank everything that was handed to me, but I never felt like I got drunk. I must have been, to some degree, because the rest of the evening exists for me as a series of unconnected scenes.

One I remember was me, the Mayor, and Sourdough sitting on a log before the fire with a square dance happening behind us. We must have been talking, but I have no idea what we’d been talking about. Memory returns as the Mayor says:

“Hildy, some of us were sitting around talking over to the Alamo Saloon the other day.”

“You tell her, Mayor Dillon,” a girl shouted behind us, then whirled away into the dance again.

“Harrumph,” said the Mayor. “I need to drop in at the saloon from time to time to keep up on the needs of my constituents, you see.”

“Sure, Mayor Dillon,” I said, knowing he spent an average of six hours each day at his usual table, and if what he’d been doing was feeling the pulse of the public then the voters of New Austin were the most thoroughly kept-up-on since the invention of democracy. Perhaps that accounted for the huge majorities he regularly achieved. Or maybe it was the fact that he ran unopposed.

“The consensus is, Hildy,” he intoned, “that you’ll never make a farmer.”

That should have come as news to no one. Aside from the fact that I doubted I had any talent for it and had not, in fact, had any plans to farm in the first place,
nobody
had ever run a successful farm in the Great Big Bubble known as West Texas. To farm, you need water, lots and lots of it. You could raise a vegetable garden, run cattle—though goats were better—and hogs seemed to thrive, but farming was right out.

“I think you’re right,” I said, and drank from the mason jar in my hand. As I did, the Parson sat next to me, and drank from his mason jar.

“We don’t really know if you plan to stay here,” the Mayor went on. “We don’t mean to pressure you either way; maybe you have plans for another job on the outside.” He raised his eyebrows, then his mason jar.

“Not particularly.”

“Well then.” He seemed about to go on, then looked puzzled. I’d been that drunk before, and knew the feeling. He hadn’t a clue as to what he’d been about to say.

“What the Mayor is trying to say,” the Parson chimed in, tactfully, “is that a life of saloon-crawling and gambling may not be the best for you.”

“Gambling,
hah
!” Sourdough put in. “That lady don’t gamble.”

“Shut up, Sourdough,” the Mayor said.

“Well, she don’t!” he said, defiantly. “Not three weeks ago, when she turned up that fourth ace with the biggest pot of the night, I
knowed
she was cheating!”

These would have been fighting words from almost anybody but Sourdough. Had they been uttered in the Alamo they’d have been reason enough to overturn the table and start shooting at each other—to the delight of the manufacturers of blank cartridges and the amusement of the tourists at the adjoining tables. From Sourdough, I decided to let it pass, especially since it was true. The big pot he mentioned, by the way, was about thirty-five cents.

“Calm down,” said the Parson. “If you think someone is cheating, you should say so right then and there.”

“Couldn’t!” Sourdough said. “Didn’t know how she done it.”

“Then she probably didn’t.”

“She sure as hell did. I know what I dealt her!” he said, triumphantly.

The Mayor and the Parson looked at each other owlishly, and decided to let it pass.

“What the Mayor is trying to say,” the Parson tried again, “is that perhaps you’d like to look for a job here in Texas.”

“Fact is,” the Mayor said, leaning close and looking me in the eye, “we’ve got an opening for a new schoolmarm right here in town, and we’d be right pleased if you’d take the job.”

When I finally realized they were serious, I almost told them my first reaction, which was that Luna would stop dead in her orbit before I’d consider anything so silly as standing up in front of a bunch of children and trying to teach them anything. But I couldn’t say that, so what I told them was that I’d think about it, which seemed to satisfy them.

I remember sitting with Dora, my arm around her, as she sobbed her heart out. I have no memory of what she might have been crying about, but do recall her kissing me with fiery passion and not wanting to take no for an answer until I steered her toward a more willing swain. Thus was my new bed broken in. It saw a lot of use before the night was over, but not from me.

Before that (it must have been before that; there was no one using the bed yet, and in a one room cabin you’d notice a thing like that) I taught half a dozen people my secret recipe for Hildy’s Famous Biscuits. We fired up the stove and assembled the ingredients and baked up several batches before the night was over. I did only the first one. After that, my students were eager to give it a try, and they all got eaten. I was desperate to do something for these people. I had a vague notion that at a house-raising you were supposed to provide food for your guests, but these people had brought their own, so what could I do? I’d have given them anything, anything at all.

One thing that hadn’t been provided yet was an outhouse. A rough-and-ready latrine had been dug in a suitable spot and, considering the amount of beer drunk, saw even more use than the bed. My worst moment that night came while squatting there and a voice quite close said “How’d the cabin burn down, Hildy?”

I almost fell in the trench. It was too dark to make out faces; all I could see was a tall shape in the night, swaying slightly, like most of us. I thought I recognized the voice. It was far too late to admit to him what had really happened, so I said I didn’t know.

“It happens, it happens,” he said. “Just about had to be your cooking fire, that’s why I gave you the stove.” It was Jake, as I had thought, the owner of the general store and the richest man in town.

“Thanks, Jake, it’s sure a beauty.” I thought I saw him square his shoulders, then I heard the sound of his zipper. I hadn’t known Jake well at all. He’d sat in on a few hands of poker at the saloon, but about all he could talk about was the new merchandise he was getting in or how many pickles he’d sold last week or how the town should extend the wooden sidewalks all the way down Congress Street to the church. He was a businessman and a booster, stolid, unimaginative, not at all the type I’d ever liked to spend much time around. It had flabbergasted me when he pulled up in his wagon with the stove on the back, a miracle of period engineering from the foundries of Pennsylvania, gleaming with polished brightwork.

“Some of the merchants in town were talking about it while your cabin was going up,” he said, losing me at first. “We’re of the opinion that New Austin’s outgrown the days of the bucket brigade. You weren’t here, but three years ago the old schoolhouse burned to the ground. Some say it was children that did it.”

I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised; I was on their side. I stood up and re-arranged my skirt and wished I was elsewhere, but I owed it to him to at least listen to what he had to say.

“We all pretty much had to stand around and watch it burn,” he said. “By the time we got there, no amount of buckets were going to do any good. That’s why some of the merchants in town are getting up a subscription for the acquisition of a pumping engine. I’m told they make a fine one in Pennsylvania these days.”

Just about everything we could use in Texas was made in Pennsylvania; they’d been at this historical business a lot longer than we had…  which was yet another topic of conversation at Jake’s rump Chamber of Commerce meetings: how to reverse the balance of trade by encouraging light manufacturing. About all West Texas exported at this stage in its history was backgrounds for western movies, ham, beef, and goat’s milk.

He zipped up and we started back toward the party.

“So you think if you’d had the engine, my cabin could have been saved?”

“Well…  no, not really. What with the time it would take to get out here once you’d come into town and sounded the alarm, and the fact that you don’t have a well yet and we couldn’t hope to get enough hose to stretch to the nearest one…  ”

“I see.” But I didn’t. I had the feeling something else was expected of me but too many things had happened at once for me to see the obvious.

“It would only be really useful to the town, I’ll admit it. But I think it’s worth the expense. If one of these fires ever got out of control the whole town could burn down. That used to happen, you know, back on Old Earth. Still, I don’t suppose you people in outlying areas can really be expected—”

A great light dawned, and I quickly interrupted him and said sure, Jake, I’d be happy to contribute, just put me down for…  what’s your usual share? So little? Yes, you’re right, it’s well worth while.

And while shaking his hand I found that for the first time I really liked Jake, and at the same time pitied him. For all his stuffiness, he did have the welfare of the community at heart. The pity came in because he was in the wrong place. He was always going to be looking for ways to bring “progress” to New Austin, a place where real progress was not only discouraged but actually forbidden. There were statutory limits to growth in West Texas, for entirely sensible reasons. Why build it in the first place if you’re only going to let it turn into another suburb of King City?

But people like Jake came and went—this according to Dora—with regularity. Within a few years he’d have plans for electrification, then freeways, then an airport and a bowling alley and a nickelodeon. Then the disneyland Board of Governors would veto his grandiose schemes and he’d leave, once again angry at the world.

Because the reason a man like him had probably come here in the first place was the search for an illusory freedom and a dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for free enterprise in the larger society. He would have thrived on pre-Invasion Earth. The newer, less outward-bound human society he found himself born into chafed his entrepreneurial instincts.

Et tu
, Hildy? Journalist, cover thyself. Why do you think you started your damn cabin on the lone prairie? Wasn’t it from vaguely-formed notions of always being constricted, of endless limitations on the dreams you had as a child? How dare you pity this man, you failed muckraker? If he ended up in this toy cowboy town because he yearned to be free of the endless restrictions needed in a machine-managed economy, what do you think brought you here, at last? Neither of us thought it out, but we came, just the same.