Prairie Nocturne Page 18

  Wes had never thought of himself as someone trouble follows around, but if Susan was any evidence, that seemed open to question right about now. “Last night you escaped a whipping or worse,” he tried to keep it crisp. “Lord only knows what they would do to Monty if they get the chance.”

  “And you’re going to put it to him that he has to take off out of here.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You were about to. He’s not yours to ball up and toss somewhere!” By now her words were practically molten. “Can’t you see, you’re taking away exactly the chance you wanted to give him. Monty and I still have work to do, and it can’t be done if you simply throw him to the wind.”

  “Susan, please. You’re going to have to turn loose of him sometime.”

  “When he’s good and ready, of course I will. Wes, you wouldn’t send a soldier out when he was only partway through his training, you know you wouldn’t, and how can you think this is any different?”

  The rap at the door forestalled what he was about to say.

  Monty stepped in with the look of a man holding himself together by the knots in his middle. He stood his distance from all three of them, but his head inclined a smallest notch in Susan’s direction. The remorse in that she answered with her own. She was dismayed to see he was wearing town clothes.

  No one even went near Good morning. Monty’s voice found its footing before anyone else’s could. “I guess, Major, I’m going to have to draw all those wages after all.”

  “Monty, maybe—”

  “Wait, Wes.” Susan brushed at his words as if erasing a blackboard. “Please, there’s something Monty and I have to go over first. A minute alone, may we?”

  Williamson etiquette came to rest on Whit. Wordlessly he gestured them to the office.

  After the two of them were out of the room, Whit turned to his brother. “Going to lose some of the crew. Saw it in their faces at breakfast.”

  Wes nodded. “Any others we want off the place?”

  “I can think of a couple or three.”

  “The ones we stick with, jack up their wages a bit. That never hurts loyalty.”

  * * *

  “Didn’t mean to lay you open to trouble.” Staying standing, Monty put his hands on the back of a chair and kneaded the leather. “I never thought, with the Major and all—”

  “Shush about that.”

  The chair leather still was receiving a going-over. “No, I’ve got to make you know. Whosever bright idea, I wouldn’t have opened my mouth on that boat if I’d known this was coming.”

  “Don’t let me hear anything of the sort from you, now or ever.” Anger spots as round as dollars had come to her cheeks. He cocked a look at her. Ever? Where does that come into the picture? “Your music,” she was saying as if to drum it in, “is worth whatever the Knighty-nights hiding under their stupid sheets try to put any of us through. Never mind shaking your head, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to a voice like yours. Climb over them with it, you have to—Monty, it’s the only way for you to leave them behind. Up in life is the best distance to be from those who want at you.” For all she knew she was the first person from Scotch Heaven ever to be in the Double W’s inmost lair, but she gestured to the office and its furnishings and its shelves of the royal maroon ledgers of the Williamsons as if showing him around. “You don’t have to ask very far around here to discover that.”

  Monty could not hold it all in any longer.

  “ ‘Climb,’ that’s right in there with ‘breathe’ and ‘enunciate,’ is it?” He accidentally kicked a leg of the desk, startling her, as he set off around the room. What could only be called grief for all the hours they had put in and now lost coarsened his voice. “But how’s that supposed to happen if I get grabbed on to as quick as somebody decides they don’t like the look of me? Look at us here, all I wanted was to sing and all you did was to try and get it out of me—”

  “We’ll only know ‘all’ when we hear it from you onstage.”

  “—and we’re treated like a pair of sneaks. Whoever those were last night, some of them had to know me a long time, from town and around. I’ve lived here all my life that counts any. Never drew a second look when I sloped along doing the chores or driving the Major around. Why’s it any different when I try to make something of myself? If I was yay-high”—he put a spread hand at the height of a seven-year-old—“and you were giving me lessons, everybody’d think it was just cute. Or if you were—” His words ran to a halt.

  “—dried up as a prune?” Susan provided.

  “—a lady older than what you are, there wouldn’t be no problem either, would there.” He drew a breath. “But there is.”

  “Those, last night.” She hammered the point for him again. “They’re in no way entitled to decide your life or mine either.”

  “Doesn’t seem to stop them from trying. Last night gave me the definite impression that if I don’t watch my every step, I’ll end up leading St. Pete’s choir. And in your case, they don’t just have it in for cats.”

  Impatiently she waved that away. Monty wished she had done anything but that. He had stepped in here as primed as he could be for goodbye, and here she was ready to take on the Klan to both of their last drops. He let it burst:

  “All right, you can stand there and say you’re not going to let them put the run on you. It’s different for you. You’re—”

  “—white and female and possessed of a singing voice about half the quality of yours.”

  “Will you stop!”

  “I don’t say we can go on as if not a thing happened. But idiots of the world aside, sooner or later you’ll still have to get back to work if you’re going to live up to your voice.”

  He furrowed up, which she took as a favorable sign. “What on?”

  “Presentation, stagecraft, adjustment to audience,” she immediately ticked off on as many fingers and stopped as if running out of capacity.

  He studied her for the long part of a minute, then shook his head.

  “Then what’s your next stop?” she asked tiredly.

  “Really trying to figure that out, I am. Where am I supposed to go?” He circled the room as his sentences came out like stones being slung. “Down South, where they maybe won’t even take time to light up a cross before they fling a rope around my neck? Talk the Major into some la-de-dah job at his New York place and still never amount to anything? Quit the whole country? As I savvy it, those old tickets from Africa were one-way.”

  Susan let it all roll out of him. He came to rest across the room from her, facing away.

  “Monty. Monty?” she said until he would look in her direction. “Just so you know. I had a rope around my neck once.”

  “You don’t mean the business end of a rope.”

  “Oh, don’t I? A lasso. With a noose at its end. All right, a loop, but it very nearly came to the same.”

  Is she making this up? flashed into his mind. Just as rapidly followed by: Be the first time. She has about as much guff in her as that inkwell. His mouth dry, finally he managed to say: “Probably shouldn’t be, but I’m here listening.”

  He watched her try a smile that did not quite catch hold. “It was in Havre, rodeo time. That’s always risky, isn’t it.” Then she rushed on. “During the campaign for the vote, this of course was. We won over the mayor’s wife to our side, and so three or four of us who could ride were allowed into the parade. Little knowing.” Bit by bit she had been pulling this out of herself, onto the score sheets of the operetta. “Banners across us, of course, with slogans sewn on. I remember mine was, ‘Eve was his equal, why can’t she vote?’ ” She gestured as if the next was inevitable. “A cowboy bunch down by the depot took it into their heads that it would be fun to rope the suffs. They were drunk, stupid, hateful—some of all, I suppose. The one who threw in my direction didn’t get it all the way on to me.” She drew a hand across the top of her chest. “The loop settled there, and then my horse spooked.
It yanked up tight on my neck, the fool was too drunk to let go. It hurt like anything, and I couldn’t breathe until someone jumped in and caught the horse.” Her hand traced the slender column of her throat, then dropped.

  He stared over at her. “Lucky you’re still on this earth.”

  “There was a week when I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t sing, Monty. Could barely even croak, and didn’t dare do much of that. I had to write out anything I wanted to say. You can imagine—”

  He could. The flaming words on paper if this woman could not speak, let alone sing.

  Godamighty, no limit to the things they do to us when they get the least little chance. All at once he put his face in his hands. Susan started across the room to him, but did not know what she would do when she reached there. A grown man she had driven to tears; she hadn’t wanted this. But when she tentatively lifted Monty’s hands away from his face the worked-leather cheeks were dry, his expression set. He spoke as if into the teeth of a grit-filled wind:

  “Say we keep on. How would we? Where, even?”

  “That’s the Major’s department.”

  MEDICINE LINE

  · 1924 ·

  WAS HE LOSING his marbles, Monty wondered every little while, or did this constitute the exact last place on earth he could have expected to be plunked down in and told to set up housekeeping? And the music that came with it wasn’t helping any.

  “Jake and Roany was a-chousin’ along

  And Jake was a-singin’ what he called a song—

  Oh-da-lay-de-oh-da-lay-de-ooo . . .”

  “Now there’s homegrown music for you,” the announcer’s voice crackled out of the radio set with professional enthusiasm. Not in my book, Monty grumbled to himself as he made his bed, the only chore he could find left to do. Call that a yodel? “That was the Medicine Line’s own Prairie Troubadour, Andy Olswanger, singing a traditional cowboy song,” the announcer rattled on, “right here in our studio. Well done, Andy! Say, friends, we here at station CINE, the voice of Medicine Hat and the province of Alberta”—a gulp of distance, then the sound wavered in strong again—“bringing you the finest listening that radio has to offer, from the Medicine Line to the High Line, all across these splendid wide open spaces where two nations meet in—”

  Bunch of open spaces between their ears, Monty fumed as he stepped over and pinched off any more yowling from either the yodeler or the announcer. Putting that on the air. Yet, it had only been last night, late, when the radio set swept voices in from anywhere, that he had come across Roland Hayes singing from Minneapolis. He had nearly shouted across to Miss Susan to come over and hear, but that was complicated, even here.

  As he had been doing all morning, he told himself to set his face for it. Complication was not going to leave either of them alone for a while now. Glancing around the strange room, he did not feel beckoned by any of the well-intentioned motley furniture and sank himself down on the freshly made bed. His mind ticked on their situation as steadily as the unhelpful clock beside him. The Major had better be on the mark about this crazy hidey-hole, or the clucks would come nightriding again, ready to scorch the life out of more than grass this time. Flock of bastards them anyway. Lying there trying to be calm as he could, the thought of the Klan pack kept setting off reactions like a string of firecrackers in him. What he wouldn’t give to take on those Klan buzzards, one to one, he didn’t care whether with rifle, jackknife, tire iron, name it. On the immediate other hand, what he wouldn’t give to be a thousand miles from here about now. Somewhere that he wouldn’t stick out like this from rubbing up too close to white people.

  But her, cooped up here with him. These Klan hoodoos had her on their bent little minds, too, and she was about as white as they come. So maybe that wasn’t the cure either. Tired of trying to calculate it all, right now he would settle for the most temporary of medicine; he half-hurt all over from his desperation to get back into the swing of singing.

  Once again he checked the three-legged clock on the apple box that was his new bedside stand. He could scarcely believe it, but it was still twenty minutes yet before his lesson could happen, under her decree that it took two hours for breakfast to settle. Privately he figured she was underestimating the staying power of Mrs. Gustafson’s stiff hotcakes, but he wasn’t going to broach anything that produced more waiting.

  Too restless to stay on his back, he rolled onto his feet and prowled back over to the window. The windowglass was the old wavy kind. The sprawling parade ground, the tired old barracks across the way, the windbreak of skimpy dried-up cottonwoods that had never quite died and never quite flourished here, all had a waver to them, as if flowing in place; as if the air still held the slightly turbulent rhythm of parading cavalry.

  * * *

  The afternoon before, they came to Fort Assinniboine in a cavalcade of horsepower and dust, with Monty driving Wes in the Duesenberg, Susan in her Tin Lizzie, and three clattering Double W trucks of furniture and provisions. Out on the paintless verandah of what had been the commandant’s quarters stood the Gustafsons, Vikings of the prairie, awaiting them.

  “Sit tight,” Wes instructed Monty, “while I get our marching orders.” Ignoring how stiff his game leg was from the long car ride, he pegged his way to Susan’s car and told her the same. A man none of them knew had come out of the guardhouse on the far side of the expanse between Officers’ Row and the barracks. Pulling on his suitcoat and walking carefully around the patches of cheatgrass that infested the parade ground, he advanced to them. Not looking forward to meeting him, let alone spending the time ahead under the eyes of him and his, Susan scanned around at the gaunt files of empty reddish-brown buildings, as sudden up out of the prairie as ruins scoured free by a shift in desert dunes.

  “What, Wes, no sense owning a fort if you can’t put it to use?” her astonishment had spoken for her when he singled out this as the refuge for her and Monty and his voice-in-training.

  “Something new in the history of amortization,” he’d admitted with a trace of amusement inadvertently showing on him. Sober-faced again in an instant, he’d looked as if there was more he wanted to tell her than what she heard in his eventual words: “It’s remote, up there. It wouldn’t hurt for the two of you to be out of sight for a while.”

  “Why not good and far out of sight?” she had demanded to know, unsure as ever why he wanted to play his cards this way or even what game they were now in. “Let’s think about this. If I had to I could quit Montana until we’re done, and you know after the other night Monty would, that quick.”

  “Not until”—Susan had caught the hesitation there in him again—“we settle some scores. If we don’t, neither of you will ever be rid of these pests. Susan, something like this is supposed to be up my alley. Trust me on it, can’t you?” Which would have been easier if she hadn’t recognized the public-speaking pirouette he then performed with his tone of voice: “Besides, you’ll all but be out of the country. The Medicine Line”—the old Indian phrase for the boundary with Canada and the prospect of sanctuary there, she knew as well as he—“is just about in sight from the fort.”

  “That’s guff, Wes. It’s not like you to count on the Mounties riding to the rescue, rooty toot toot.”

  Unexpectedly he had smiled again, but with grim lines in parentheses around it this time. “We’ll have some troops of our own. You’ll see.”

  The main one of these was finishing his roundabout trek to them now, looking apologetic for the time it had taken him to negotiate the weedy parade ground. Susan saw that except for the way his eyebrows were steadily up like little hoisted battle flags, he seemed mild enough, the kind who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. She understood perfectly well, though, that what she had caught a glimpse of while he was shrugging into that suitcoat was a shoulder holster.

  “Bailey,” Wes met the man and introduced him to Susan with that single grated word. “As you know, Miss Duff and I have had a taste of how well you do your work.”

  “I�
��m in the business I’m in, Major.” To Susan’s hot stare, he seemed impervious as anyone could be who ferreted out trysts in hotels for a living.

  “Why else would I want you?” Wes observed dryly. His gaze was fixed past the private investigator to the weather-worn guardhouse where the small fleet of cars with Butte license plates was parked. “All your men solid?”

  “They know their stuff. Busted enough miners’ heads for Pinkerton, in their day.” Bailey put the next with surprising delicacy. “They’re all Catholics, just to make sure they remember what side they’re on in this.”

  “In that case, come meet our other interested party.” With Susan next to him but willfully silent, Wes led on to the sun-catching Duesenberg where Monty had been taking this all in by rearview mirror and applied ear.

  Act like you know what you’re doing, fool, he counseled himself and climbed out trying to look as if a private eye was assigned to him every day. Bailey went along, and from the grave way he shook hands with him Monty might have been footing the bill instead of Wes. Wes liked that. “Give us a look around,” he instructed Bailey moderately enough.

  “Rattlers,” Bailey reminded everybody even though his cautious tread already had, and without a further word, the man led the three of them back over toward the guardhouse. Along that side of the parade ground, brick barracks stood lined up for what seemed half a mile, a number of them gutted by fire, the surviving ones looking rundown and rough to the hand from pockmarks made by decades of blowing grit. Monty chuffed a rill of dust with one foot; it more than likely was left over from the dust storm, and he wondered how long it would be until the next one. Out here like this where the tallest thing to break the wind was sagebrush, the buildings of the fort were like morsels on an immense platter for the weather to pick at. Even on a comparatively benign day such as this, restless squadrons of soft-edged little clouds dragged disconcerting shadows across the prairie anywhere he looked.