The Power of the Dog Read online

  ‘Well, hell,’ the young fellow said, blushing.

  ‘You got to learn to show respect. You got an awful lot to learn about love.’

  In the fall the brothers with their hired hands trailed a thousand head of steers twenty-five miles down the road to the stockyards in the tiny settlement of Beech. Unless the weather was miserable, the rain beating out of the north, the sleet cutting the face or the cold hindering the circulation of the blood, the event had something of the quality of an outing, or picnic; the young fellows thought of the lunches Mrs Lewis the cook had put up to be eaten at noon when the shadows hid under the sagebrush; they thought of the saloon across the highway from the yards and of the rooms over the saloon where the whores lived.

  When the sun rose red and the frost fled from the surface of the short, dry grass, the herd was already lined out over the length of a half mile; caught under the bewitching spell of the dark and that holy quality of the dawn that turns men in upon themselves, the cowhands were silent and the brothers were silent, listening to the step-step-step of the cattle and the crackling sound of sagebrush crushed under cloven hoofs; squeak-squeak-squeak of saddle leather and the ringing of German silver bit chains. The new sun rising above the eastern hills showed a world so vast and hostile to individual hope that the young cowhands clung to memories of home, kitchen stoves, mothers’ voices, the cloakroom at school and the cries of children let out at recess. Raising their chins, they fixed their eyes now on an abandoned log shack, opened to the weather, where stray horses in summer sought a little shade, where years before a man like them had failed; where the road wandered near a barbed wire fence, a rusty sign peppered with bullet holes urged them to chew a brand of tobacco that no longer existed; ahead, hunched over the pommel of his saddle, rode the oldest man in the bunkhouse, gray, lined of face, one who like them must have once dreamed of a little place, a few acres, a homestead, a few cattle, a green meadow, a woman to be a wife; God knew, maybe a child.

  Then the sun loomed higher out of the hills and the new warmth nourished their hopes and they talked, laughed, joked; their plans would materialize; when they got to be old like that fellow up there hunched over his saddle, they would have a little place. They would have their money; they would make plans. In the meantime the nose of their horse was pointed toward the stockyards, to the saloon, to the women upstairs.

  The brothers, too, had been silent in the darkness, known to each other only by their shapes, the lean one and the stocky one — by their shapes and the long familiar squeak of the other’s saddle. So, thought Phil comfortably, they had always been silent at the beginning of a drive, thoughts turned inward upon the past, and the silence now told him that the past had not changed, not changed much. Yes, he did resent the stage, the dark green Stearns-Knight that nowadays blatted its way headlong through the herd of cattle — much too fast, if you asked Phil. Once the driver had dared sound his horn, and the noise had so frightened the cattle that Phil rode right over to the creeping car and, towering up there on his sorrel horse, he gave the driver a good piece of his mind. You should have seen the passengers in the back seat make themselves small!

  ‘God damn scissorbills,’ he growled. ‘George, did you hear that son of a bitch honk his horn. Dear good Jesus, they don’t give a good hot damn how much weight they run off your stock. Like to see every damn car blowed up.’

  But George, loyal to the Reo (as he was loyal to all he owned), looked ahead over the backs of the cattle. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘Oh hell, Phil, man’s got to go with the times.’

  ‘The times!’ Phil said, and spit. Ten years before there was a proper stage with a real man there on the box, handling the reins, fine four-horse rig. ‘What was the driver’s name, Fatso?’ Phil asked George. He seldom forgot a name, but here was a way to launch into the new morning’s conversation.

  ‘Harmon,’ George said.

  ‘By God, you’re right.’ That got them back into the past, to when they were kids, got them back to where they could reminisce about Bronco Henry, back to the time of the last stinking Indians before the government got onto itself for a change and shipped them off to the reservation. Phil recalled to this day the swaybacked old horses the Indians rode away on, the rickety old buggies the old Indians piled themselves into. All one week the Indians had straggled past the ranchhouse on their way down to the reservation in southern Idaho, stirring up the dust and making the ranch dogs bark. Only the chief was not with them, that shifty old character. He had died.

  Phil liked to recall to George the many times while trailing cattle down that his sharp eyes had fixed on Indian arrowheads which he picked up and added to his remarkable collection. He couldn’t recall that George had ever found an arrowhead. Phil grinned to himself. How could he? For George always looked straight ahead, as he did now, over the dusty backs of the cattle.

  Now exactly, Phil wondered, where should he begin the day’s conversation? So special a day, this day. Should he begin with Bronco Henry? Or with an incident of last year — the car, trying to get through the river of cattle, that ran off the side into a ditch? Two women and a man, all in knickerbockers, damnedest thing you ever saw, and then there they gauped at the car tipped almost on its side, them just looking. Phil had been glad that George was in the lead of the herd, for George would have hooked onto the car with his rope and pulled them out, and they wouldn’t have learned their lesson.

  Or begin this morning with the most important fact, that this was the twenty-fifth year they had been together driving cattle? Twenty-five years! How proud they had felt that time, and how old! To Phil there was some kind of stuff in the fact that they made the first round trip in the nice round year of nineteen hundred, nineteen hundred and naught. Jesus! Jesus! Bronco Henry wasn’t older then than he and George were now — not much older, to tell the truth, than the young fellows with them today, dressed up in their fancy duds. They didn’t know who the hell they were any more, the young fellows — cowhands or moving picture people. Phil had never seen a moving picture and by God never would, but these young fellows had magazines about the moving pictures in the bunkhouse, and a fellow name of W.S. Hart had got to be sort of their God. Look how they creased their hats now, look at the silk bandannas they knotted around their necks, and the fancy chaps! He’d heard that one of them had sent away for made-to-order boots with fancy inlays — spent a month’s pay on some damn thing to put on his feet. And then wondered why they ended up on the county! Well, Phil mused, there you were. The more ignorant people were, the more they felt they had to decorate their backs.

  George had sort of moseyed over to the right, and now Phil moved diagonally through the plodding cattle, humming soothingly so they wouldn’t get their dander up. ‘Well, Georgie boy,’ he grinned, ‘I guess this is it.’

  For brothers, they rode differently, sat so differently on their saddle horses, the one slouching easily, the reins loose in his naked hands; the other straight, rigid in the saddle, gut pulled in, looking straight ahead. ‘It?’ George asked, turning his head. ‘What’s it, Phil?’

  ‘What’s it? What’s it, Fatso boy? Today is twenty-five years. Nineteen hundred and nothing. Nineteen naught, naught. Recall that?’

  ‘Fact is, I forgot,’ George said.

  Now, how could he have forgot, Phil wondered. What had he thought about all year? ‘Twenty-five years. Sort of makes it sort of a silver anniversary, or whatever,’ Phil said, ‘don’t it?’ In jocular or angry moods, Phil used bad grammer to point up his words.

  ‘Long time ago,’ George remarked.

  ‘Well,’ Phil said, ‘not too God damned long.’ He had not mentioned the matter to emphasize how long it had been since they were kids. Phil himself didn’t feel a year older than when he was twelve and George ten — only one hell of a lot smarter. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, George, we had some great old times.’

  ‘I guess we did at that.’ George reached in his shirt pocket for his Bull Durham sack; he looped both reins around the sad
dle horn, removed his gloves and rolled a cigarette; he rolled a thick, funnel-shaped cigarette.

  Phil looked at it and snorted. Damned if he was going to carry the whole burden of the anniversary conversation. What ailed George? Gut hurting him? Swell fellow to camp with this fall! Been funny all summer. ‘Say, Fatso,’ he remarked. ‘You never did learn to roll a smoke with one hand.’ And with that, Phil rode abruptly through the herd to talk to the young fellows, moving his lips as he prepared to tell them of how Bronco Henry, sick with fever, had made one of the prettiest rides a fellow ever saw — at age forty-eight. God damn it — sometimes he longed to tell the whole story. One reason he hated booze, he was afraid of it, afraid of what he might tell.

  Now a small gray bird whirred out of the brush. Phil’s sorrel shied and stumbled. Phil felt a sudden fury, and anguish like nausea. ‘God damned old fool!’ he cried, yanking up the sorrel’s head, giving him a good sharp jab with the spurs. Twenty-five years since he’d ridden side by side with Bronco Henry.

  Now the sun was high, the shadows shortened, the hours ahead were hot and long. Yes, and so were the years long, Phil thought, and the shadows they cast.

  If the wind was right and your nose was keen, you might smell the stockyards at Beech long before you saw them; they lay close to the river that was almost dry this time of year, shrunk away from its banks and so placid the surface reflected the arching and empty sky, sometimes the magpies that flapped across, searching out carrion, gophers and rabbits dead of tularemia or a calf dead and bloated with what they called blackleg in that country. Yes, if the wind was right and your nose was keen you got the odor of water and of the sulfur-and-alkali stink of the sluggish creek that there at the yards met the river and polluted it.

  If the sun was right and your eyes sharp, you sometimes saw the settlement first appear as a mirage floating just above the horizon, the yards, the stockcars spotted at the chutes, the two false-fronted saloons with rooms upstairs, the shabby white school with the short bell tower — all surrounded by sagebrush and a bare spot where the boys played ball and the girls skipped rope. Across from that bare spot was the building called The Inn, and behind it rose a bare hill on whose slopes thin wild horses grazed, the perpetual wind worrying their tangled manes and tails. Summer and winter that wind howled, shrieking down the slope of the hill over the graveyard at the base where rusty barbed wire and rotting posts kept stray animals from trampling the graves and toppling the fruit jars that often held flowers — Johnny-jump-ups in spring, Indian paintbrush later, but only the recent dead could be certain of flowers. Flowers wilted suddenly in that sun and their message was ephemeral, and quickly the stems festered in the fruit jars.

  He was a clever one who thought to decorate one recent grave with paper flowers, and over them to turn a fruit jar upside down, against the rain.

  Hearts always beat a little faster in Beech when word got around that someone had seen dust rising off the flat, that a bunch of cattle were being trailed in by a bunch of free-spending cowhands; in the two saloons the bartenders looked to the level of the rotgut in the bottles behind the bar and set out the real whiskey, down from Canada, for those with the wherewithal — the ranchers who liked to make big gestures.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ a bartender said to a drummer who had blown in the night before on the train from Salt Lake City. ‘Stay off the highway and don’t go gawking at the cattle when they trail in, or you’ll like to spook them and they’ll have trouble gettin’ ’em in the yards. Coupla years ago they shot right over the head of a fellow gawkin’ around spookin’ the cattle. Christ, you should a seen him run for cover, coattails a-flappin’!’

  ‘Sounds like the Wild West,’ the drummer said sarcastically. He had meant to sell small electric light plants to the saloons, to the school and to the hotel called The Inn, but had no takers.

  ‘Hell, it is the Wild West,’ the bartender said. ‘Far as I know, the only electric lights in the valley are up to the Burbank ranch. The rest of us use lamps.’

  ‘The Burbank ranch,’ the drummer said, and looked at the girlie calendar behind the bar. You could see her garter.

  ‘It’s their outfit coming in this afternoon. Thousand head. Eight, ten cowhands. And the brothers. Take my advice and stay inside and don’t cause a stampede. What’ll it be, Dolly?’ he asked a blonde. ‘My, but you smell pretty.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Florida water it is, and my drink is gin as you right well know.’

  ‘The Burbank outfit’s on the way in.’

  ‘I seen them from the upstairs,’ Dolly said. ‘And oh how I dread it.’

  ‘Well, you got your friend now to help out.’

  ‘Lot a good she is. She’s sick.’

  ‘Hey? She got the same thing old Alma had, remember?’

  ‘T.B.? Oh, hell no. She’s got her usual flowers.’

  Hearts beat a little faster, too, in the only dining room in town at the small hotel called The Inn. The dining room was ready and the beds upstairs. The register at the desk was open to a clean new page and beside it, smelling of cedar wood, was a fresh-sharpened pencil.

  2

  The wind was never idle in Beech summer or winter, nor was the windmill atop the shed behind The Inn. The ratchet and chain to pull the fin that dragged the face of the mill out of the wind-stream had broken long before the Gordons moved there. Winter and summer it turned, the shaft attached to the excentric purposelessly moving slowly up and down, doing no work, attached to nothing, squeaking, squeaking so painfully that sleep was difficult for the infrequent transients trapped in the town. Shortly after the Gordons moved there, Johnny Gordon the husband had tried to stop the thing, following a sharp complaint; he got a shaky ladder up against the shed, climbed up and tried to figure it all out. A sudden mean shift of wind turned the flying blades against him, tore his coat and cut his shoulder. He left it alone, after that.

  ‘We never should’ve moved here in the first place,’ he often told Rose, his wife, and when he told her she would look at him with her great eyes, begging him not to say it again, but saying nothing with her mouth. She was all eyes, that young woman.

  Still, it was not only her eyes that had attracted him to her in the first place, in Chicago where he was finishing his internship at a desperate little hospital, mostly colored and charity patients. To escape the pain and the filth and squalor he largely lived with, he began to go in a few nights a week to a moving picture palace. Oh, he thought, if he could meet up with a girl with the warmth and tenderness and fortitude of Miss Mary Pickford, whose smile and whose eyes melted the human heart, her dimples, her glance! Once, a little drunk, he confessed his dream to two young doctors who hooted at him. ‘You talk too much,’ they advised him. But still he clutched his dream close, embroidered it, so that now in its fruition it included a vine-covered cottage and a white picket fence.

  And imagine! He sat one night down front near the piano whose bright tunes and thumping base explained and underlined the flickering drama before him. He was lost in his dream for a few moments after the lights came up. The young woman at the piano touched her hat, fussed at her hair, and fussing with it, turned. Imagine! She had been sitting there not ten feet from him, sitting there every time he’d been there. They stared at each other, and he smiled.

  He did not suggest that she come to his room; she didn’t look that kind, although his friends would have asked her right off, the ones who hooted at him.

  ‘She could always say no,’ they might have told him.

  He didn’t want it like that. And his hunch was right. Imagine asking a girl to your room who Sundays played the piano in a church.

  He said right off he was a doctor, hoping to impress her, to establish himself. ‘There’s a carnival by the lake,’ he offered. ‘They say it’s swell. You like carnivals?’

  ‘Just one of my favorite things!’

  ‘Say,’ Johnny asked. ‘What’s your favorite thing?’

  ‘Flowers,’ she said.

>   ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘That wasn’t a hint. But you asked me.’

  Her father certainly looked him over, even after he said he was a doctor. ‘We won’t be late, sir.’ Her father gave him a look and took his newspaper into another room.

  ‘Well, Mr Gordon,’ her mother remarked.

  ‘Doctor Gordon, Ma’am.’

  ‘… our only child. You understand how it is. Someday you may feel the same.’

  ‘Bet your boots I will.’ Breathless, he watched Rose pin the violets he’d brought to her coat; he’d never seen such affection in fingers.

  Her mother sighed. ‘She’s always loved flowers. When she was a little girl, she was always touching people’s flowers.’

  He’d say one thing for her — she was a game one! Game for all the rides, the roller coaster, and my, your stomach just left you, and the big pendulum you got into that swung and then went clean around. ‘Oh,’ she said, thrown against him, and he could smell the violets. ‘I’ll say one thing,’ she said when she caught her breath. ‘For a fellow who says he hasn’t got so much confidence, you have an awful lot to go on these terrible things!’

  ‘Oh, say, I’ve got plenty when you’re around.’

  But she would not go into the tents where freaks were shown, and he only suggested it to see how she felt about freaks. He hated it for freaks, especially when they smiled.

  Not, then, into the tent of freaks, but rather to hear a young man with a pointed beard sing songs from a new operetta; thus it was that Johnny and Rose emerged humming tunes from The Red Mill. Rose was not wearing the pretty little hat he first admired, decorated, he thought, with flowers. She wore instead a scarf tied round her head, sort of gypsylike.