Sliphammer

He went inside. The place was sick-eningly rich with the aura of beer, whisky, smoke, vomit, and sweat. There were no windows and it was almost pitch dark. The bar was a row of roughhewn planks thrown across a series of barrels. There were a few half-broken tables, and packing crates which served as chairs. Knowing full well what he was doing, he bought a bottle of cheap whisky and carried it to a table in the darkest corner, sat down, leaned his back against the wall, and began to drink.

Fuzzily, he supposed it was nighttime. The place was filling up with miners. Trembling violenty, he sat hunched over the half-empty second bottle, hands pinched between his squeezed-together knees. Lamps were lit; it was brighter than it had been during the day. He felt coiling spasms in his groin and knew he had to relieve himself. He stood up-too fast: blood sank from his head and the room got darker. He leaned one hand on the wall to steady himself and tightened his gut, tensing all his muscles to build pressure until finally light came back into the room and he walked across it with shuffling, tentative steps.. He bumped into a few people and was shoved roughly away once. Finally he made his way outside and went stumbling into the alley alongside the saloon. It smelled of excrement. He unbuttoned his fly; he had to brace his hands against the wall to keep himself from falling while he urinated. Afterwards he buttoned up and lurched down the street, dimly aware he had better get back to his own part of town before he passed out; otherwise they would roll him for the few dollars in his Levi’s, and perhaps kill him for the hell of it. He kept a crafty eye out for would-be assassins but no one disturbed him in Poverty Row. A train rumbled across the trestle, showering him with soot and cinders. He staggered into Main Street in time to see an ore wagon run over a dog. The dog crawled a few feet toward the shelter of a raised porch, then lay whimpering in the street, movements slowing. By the time Tree came by, the dog was dead. He hunkered down to touch it; there was no heartbeat. As he crouched there, tears welled in his eyes and stained his cheeks.

He was violently sick in the alley beside the hotel. He dragged himself inside, ignored the clerk’s righteously arch glance, and lurched back through the corridor to his room. He had emptied himself but he still felt sick. When he opened the door, the tenpe

He was lurching with sobs when someone shook his ankle. He turned his head sluggishly, ludicrously; he couldn’t turn it far enough; he had to roll over on his back; and when he did, he almost fell off the bed. He braced one arm against the floor and from that awkward drunken position saw Caroline, her curved, husky body silhouetted against the faint lamplight in the corridor beyond the open door.

The only way to get up was to get down. He rolled his legs and body off the bed, got his feet on the floor, and levered himself clumsily upright; sitting on the edge of the bed he scraped both hands down his face, wiping his eyes.

She was moving around the room. A match exploded, the lamp came alight; she walked back to the door to push it shut. When he looked up she was standing in front of him, looking down at his face.

She said, “Go ahead. I already did my crying.”

“All done.”

“You feel tougher now, Jerr?”

His mind was mired, his tongue thick; he had to think out what he said, and form the words with care. He said very slowly, “I think maybe I don’t ever want to be that tough.”

“God help you if you were.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “You’re drunk, but besides that-how are you, Jerr?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying-you feel terrible.”

“Why the hell should you care?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and began again: clearly it was not what she had meant to say. “The funeral’s in the morning, in a few hours.”

“I’ll make it.”

“I know you will.”

“He was my brother,” he mumbled, slurring thick. “Half brother anyway. God damn it I let him down, I killed him, but God damn it God damn it I loved him!”

There was a stretch of silence at the end of which, with amazing abruptness, she slapped his face.

His head rocked back; he blinked and squinted at her. “What the hell was that for?”

“Shut up about killing him. You didn’t kiU him.”

“If I’d thrown him out of town the way I should have, he’d be alive.”

“No. He’d just have come back.”

“I thought you were the one who put him up to it.”

“If you want to blame me,” she said, “go ahead. I’ve been doing that myself. If anybody killed him it was me, not you. I wanted-”

He said with savage hastiness, “What did you want?”

She stood up, She had her back to him. “I wanted to make him into a man like you,” she said in a small voice.

He cackled.

It made her wheel. She lifted her hand as if to slap him again. He neither flinched nor guarded himself; he only stared at her brandished hand with a morose, vacuous scowl.

Slowly her hand dropped to her side. She shook her head. “Don’t you see, you couldn’t have stopped him. You couldn’t have kept it from happening. Maybe not the way it happened, but it would have happened sometime and someplace because I was too selfish and too stupid and too damned mixed up to know you can’t change anybody. I wanted to make him into something he wasn’t and I got him killed. And now,” she said with acid bitterness, “now I know. I’ had to learn from this that you can’t ever change anybody, you just have to accept them for what they are. Jesus, Jerr, Rafe was a goddamned good wrangler, he loved horses.”

She wasn’t crying but she refused to look at him; she turned her back again and he saw her small, tough hands bunched into fists, womanly fists, the thumbs inside the curled fingers.

She said, “Are you listening all right? Can you pay attention?”

“I guess so.”

“I have to say something and I don’t want to, and if I don’t say it to you now I probably won’t ever have the guts to again.”

He shook his head at her back. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but I think you’d better save it. Neither one of us is thinking too straight.”

Her fists tightened; he couldn’t see her face. He had to lean forward to hear her: “I’ve got to, Jerr, I’ve got to-I want you to listen to what I say and don’t interrupt. I put my hooks in Rafe because I wanted him to be you. I took him because I couldn’t get you, do you understand? He wasn’t you, he never would have been-let me finish! — but he was the closest thing there was to you. I tried to change him into you because you were the one I really wanted, and I knew as soon as we were married that I couldn’t do it but I wouldn’t give up, I couldn’t then, and you see what it did to him. It’s not your fault, what happened. It’s mine. Mine and Reese Cooley’s.”

He didn’t believe her. She wasn’t telling the truth; she meant the lie to show, she meant him to see through the falsehood, she just wanted to give him an out so he’d quit blaming himself. It had to be hke that; her story was too absurd. He said sourly, “Sure-sure. You say I was the one you wanted. You couldn’t get me. You flatter a man, Caroline. I never knew you even knew I existed until you and Rafe decided to get married.”