The Hour of Lead (18 page)

The ferry cut the river water like a trowel. The crossing took ten minutes. Jarms aimed the Mercury through the draw and it hauled them from the valley into the next, a gentler valley, green with wheat and barley shot through the worked earth below. They ascended again and climbed a reach of switchbacked roads. Pavement gave way to gravel, which gave way to dirt logging tracks. They saw gutted rigs, decomposed in the long winters, and solitary houses constructed from what people could salvage from the chuck. As it grew night, starlight filled the sky so that it appeared a new heaven. The road became treacherous enough to demand Jarms's full attention and even he quieted. Matt slipped into a dreamless sleep and woke near first light, still in the car, high up. The bright air had thinned and cooled. The light knew no slant. It threaded through the trees and seemed to puddle on the ground. Grey snow still dotted the lee sides of the hills.

Matt packed the dog into the dewed grasses. She made water propped against a pine. The Tuocannon River stirred near. An old trail was spotty, but Matt sorted a way to the gravel bank. He hauled
the dog to his chest and stepped into the high currents. There, he unbandaged and bathed the wound. The dressing smelled clean. Nothing green or yellow oozed through his stitches. She whimpered, but drank when he cupped his hands for her.

Matt re-bandaged her on the gravel bank. He laid her in a sandy stretch to catch the sun. He rolled a cigarette and smoked then put his clothes on a rock and waded deeper. Hurried with runoff, the current nearly lifted him from his feet. It rippled his chest and calmed in the pit of his back like he was only a new stone to be worn into grit. He ached like a bad tooth, but remained. Most everything concerned with home he'd willed from his mind. Water, though, returned it. Drying on the bank, he tossed in pine straw blades one by one and watched them ride the surface before they disappeared or lost themselves in the sun's reflection.

“You want to fish?” Jarms asked him. He showed him the rigged poles. Matt dressed and followed, pausing to turn some earth with a fire shovel and collect worms in a tin can. Upriver he had backed into knee-deep scrub against the water to allow himself to drop his line behind a downed cedar. On a willow switch was a fourteen-inch German Brown strung by the gills.

Matt hunted a place removed enough from Jarms to avoid pressing his hole. A piece of basalt had given way a hundred yards up. He stood on the stacked rocks and baited his hook and attached the weight high enough to drop the worm under without it dragging the bottom. He looped the line into the bend and shallows or puckers where a fish might tarry, but found no luck.

An hour later Jarms shouted, “Turn that rock over.”

Underneath, Matt poked at what looked like a cocoon constructed from pebbles. A spidery creature emerged.

“Good bait.”

Matt split the crusty insect on his hook. His third cast drew a strike, and after two more, he landed a fair-sized trout then another. He held
up the largest, a two pounder, for Jarms to see. Jarms pawed the air, dismissing him. Jarms cast upriver and reeled. The sun bounced on the water and flickered his greened shadow between rows of white light. His eyes were slits, his face clenched, but not like those angry, fisted faces he was accustomed to. This one was simply looking close.

They squandered the afternoon, till the sun spread itself upon the pine and west mountains' edges. At the camp's fire Jarms sat astraddle a peachbox and fried headless trout in a skillet. The hot iron hissed and the fish skin gilded then blackened. The dog's head lay in Matt's lap, eating the skin and meat he fed her.

“Had cats when I was little,” Jarms said. “They liked fish fine. Never seen a dog take to it.”

“It's the salt,” Matt said.

“That animal all you've got for kin? Aside from those passed, I mean.”

“I've got a mother may still be alive. She's on the ranch.”

“You've got a ranch and you're hiring out here.”

“The family's ranch.”

“Aren't you family?”

“Only by blood.”

Jarms laughed. “There's a middle missing in that story. All I see is a tail and some legs.”

“A girl shot me.”

“On purpose?”

“The gun was pointed my direction and I wasn't but five feet away.”

“You commit some kind of crime?”

“Probably,” Matt said. “I wanted to marry her.”

“Well unless she was wed already, you should be legal.”

“Maybe so,” Matt said. “Bullet was just letting me down easy.”

Jarms laughed and so did Matt. They began eating the rest of their catch.

“Woman really shot you?

Matt untucked his shirt and showed him the wound.

Jarms said. “That's a rough parting.”

“She's probably married with a brood by now,” Matt said.

They were quiet a while. The dog's ears pitched when the coyotes began their nightly chatter. A couple of owls occasionally answered and the crickets sawed without let-up.

“You still working on your baby?”

“I am,” Jarms replied.

“Even with Roland the way he is?”

“Roland ain't so bad he won't enjoy a child.” Jarms paused to fork a bite of trout and separate the bones. “I didn't think it would require so much time to make a baby, though. Way they warn you about it when you're a pup, you'd think each time you matched plumbing with someone a baby would come.”

“I wouldn't know anything about it,” Matt said.

The next day, the car unwound the breaks from the Snake to the ranch. Water under the ferry, spanked a little by the wind, turned another shade of dark than the trees or the night. The Mercury lifted them from the canyon to the softer hills above and finally toward Jarms's own country. The old man was ready for shut-eye and his own sack, but Jarms insisted on treating Matt to a restaurant meal. The dog would keep in the car.

“I got no money,” Matt said. He kept it in Roland's house safe. Matt would've settled for a tally on the notepad, but Roland insisted on counting the bills out to him every month and allowing Matt to place them in the vault.

“You don't need any,” Jarms replied.

Matt gazed into the car's side window. It had been years since he'd seen his own face. Flashes of a likeness appeared when he doused himself in the trough, but all he really recalled was the blunt shape of his head.

“They favor you?” Jarms asked.

“One was my twin.”

“You know what he'd looked like, at least,” Jarms replied.

Matt closed his eyes and squinted into the sun lifting from the bottom horizon. Living alone had left him intuition like a woman. Sometimes it served him well. Others it hardly mattered. Some futures were already put down and he couldn't guess them gone.

“You'll likely be the one finding old Roland when he goes.”

“It's not the finding that matters,” Matt said.

The road turned onto another on which the county had laid gravel. Jarms hit the throttle and let the engine whine. They opened the windows and the air rushed past, ruffling their hair and tearing Matt's eyes. His chest filled with it. He could see why driving attracted Jarms. It was faster than riding and a sight less wear on a person's backside and, with the window open, you still knew you were covering country. Matt missed seeing it up close, though. The outside seemed like what he couldn't remember. He wondered if Jarms saw it this way, too, and if his driving was a trick to avoid recollection.

They could see Colfax in the canyon below. A few lights burned in the houses below in the canyon's shade. The dog slept in the backseat. Jarms brought a whiskey bottle from under the seat. He drank and sighed and offered it to Matt. The alcohol warmed him and turned the dwindling light yellow and lazy.

“I been gone two days,” Jarms said. “You think they'll still know me?”

“I believe so,” Matt said.

“I need a reason to stay out.”

“How about to help at the ranch.”

“Hell, you do more when I'm not around than when I am.”

“Tending Roland, then.”

“That will just aggravate the both of us.” Jarms grinned. “You
know, I don't like town any more than you or the old man,” he said. “It's just that it likes me so much and I flatter easy.”

The town was lighting up with the evening. Cars clattered the street, though horses still outnumbered them. The whiskey made Matt thoughtful. He wondered what it ought to feel like to be his own age, or even Roland's. It surprised him to be considering such things. He had encountered those who lived young to fend years off, and claimed they never contemplated age, though if their conduct was evidence they considered it without end. Matt avoided the subject for a simpler reason. He'd figured on dying. And now that he hadn't, he pondered how one went about growing old. It seemed a worthy aspiration, aging. He'd done so little properly, it might fit him when the time came. Jarms lit a cigarette.

“I heard your cards aren't good,” Matt said.

Jarms laughed. “Cards turn around.”

Jarms smoked his cigarette, then rolled and lit a second. He smoked like he drank and like Matt imagined he played poker, as if a clock ticked at his mind, faster with each stroke.

They took a meal inside a beef and taters place along with two pints of ale.

Jarms squared the bill. “I believe I'll see a hand or two,” he said. “Care to join me?”

“I doubt I could muster an ante.”

“You could sit at another table,” Jarms said. “No rule against watching. No advantage. There will be plenty of whiskey. I haven't yet seen you drunk. Might be more entertaining than an inside straight.”

They crossed the cobbled road and entered a room behind the butcher's shop. Matt hunted a chair out of the main table's orange light. The players' faces appeared brown and their wrinkles were exaggerated under it. Shadows and brows dark hooded their eyes.

Jarms sat next to a man Matt would later discover who had
earned his fortune smuggling Canadian whiskey from the Columbia River into the Snake and farm counties bordering it. He exchanged the money in Jarms's wallet for chips from his own significant stack. No one spoke of his debt to the players at the table. Matt wondered if such conversation was unseemly. Poker here required manners, it appeared. Another player lit a cigar from a bundle and passed the others. Jarms chewed an end, then smoked. The table turned hazy and sleep was closing over Matt, the voices and the chip clack and the rattle of the cards like water's rhythmic rock or the give and take of air in the lungs of the men.

A whiskey bottle arrived at Matt's table along with a glass. Matt sipped it and felt the cloud that hung upon the game envelop him, as well. A smell like stale blankets entered the room and a congested sensation in his heart seemed a little like he imagined dying might until his pulse returned to itself, matching the beat of the card game. Bets and chips followed, lights pulsed at the same tempo, the smoke some other beatless music that matched the hum in his head. He nodded and listened and opened his eyes and studied the bourbon still pitching back and forth in a short glass. Light played on the fluid arcs as they rose; the force had ebbed too much to produce a wave or a crest, so he shook the bottle violently and studied the bourbon, which foamed and pitched and tinked, and settled once more. Matt set the bottle down and drank from the glass. Smoke from the table climbed over him and he contemplated himself within it; no self at all, an existence by absence, like a decayed tooth pliered from a gum. Once that laudanum lapsed and the thorny molar or bicuspid rattled in a barber tray, the others may perform their duties steadfastly, the hole is what aches when the wind whistles through. Solitude, that altar at which the dime-store novelists and moving picture heroes genuflected, held no cross, no chalice, no smoldering incense, no priest; the sanctuary no pews, nor hymnals, nor choir to sing them; no priest led the
congregation, no sermons, no holy book to quote. The sanctuary, in fact, contained nothing, as was appropriate.

Garrett appeared at the table. Jarms nodded at him. “Dog killer,” he said.

The others glanced up.

“He kills dogs,” Jarms told them. “People's pets. Maybe he'll have the nerve to try a coyote one day.”

“That's an unusual manner to address your benefactor,” the old bootlegger said.

“Garrett hasn't done anyone a favor he couldn't cash ever.”

“Paid your markers,” the bootlegger replied.

Jarms glanced at Garrett. “You hadn't ought to have done that,” Jarms said. The cards passed and Jarms quickly folded. He said, “You ain't ever going to own me. Hard as you try, you son of a bitch.”

“If I'm a son of a bitch, who's your mother?”

“My mother is a she-wolf.”

“She was a woman just like ordinary. She bore you and left.”

“Must have been a Cassandra,” Jarms said.

“I know this county,” Garrett said. “Greek don't seem much worth to me. Your mother, I know her, too.”