Bright and Distant Shores Page 10

  “An eight-dollar filling seems about the going rate to me, gents. But this bonesetter in Chicago had me down for fifteen apiece and now I have a mouthful of mercury and metal. Feels heavy when I talk.” He hinged his jaw open to give them better vantage of his molars.

  The mortician had a shock of perfect black hair, small and neat teeth, a tiepin of gold crossed shovels. He leaned forward on his elbows. “Earthly reminders are everywhere, Clarence.”

  “Oh, digger, please!” said Clarence.

  “Teeth and bones.”

  “I’m not drunk enough for this vaquero. It’s like the day of the dead at that end of the table.”

  The undertaker shrugged, bit his bottom lip, settled back in his chair. He drew up his cigar from the side like a smoking sword from a scabbard.

  Arty fingered his dwindling stack of bills, morose, touching the presidential portraits with the tip of his pinky. His burgundy tie was so tight it jutted from his neck near to a right angle.

  “Shall we begin again?” Jethro asked with too much glee.

  “We’ve been waiting half the night,” said the banker’s son, letting his ice clink in his glass.

  Clarence said, “Seems we took a spell. Any longer and Winthrop was going to sell me a mausoleum, bury me like a goddamn emperor. Let’s proceed. Feels like midnight. Second shift. The dentist had me on the ether and I felt nothing but the blood being drained from my billfold. Let’s see, now, for the sake of the newcomer . . . stud horse poker with a five-dollar bring-in. No limit. No variations. That sound congenial to you, Owen Graves?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was a lackluster game, he knew, but at least there was no limit. It relied on patience more than skill at bluffing, with all but one card showing.

  Clarence dealt them each a facedown followed by a faceup. Wilson had the lowest upcard—a four—and placed his bring-in five dollars in the center of the table. He passed on betting more.

  The undertaker, a mouthful of smoke, said, “Consider the peace of mind that comes with prudent action. A burden lifted from the grieving.”

  “Shut your crumb-hole, Winthrop. You’re making me grum,” said Clarence, puckering.

  They each called and Clarence burned a card and set it to his left. He dealt them each another card faceup, Owen now with a queen and ten visible. He surveyed the open cards and raised to ten dollars. Jethro called with his king and ten showing. Arty—six and nine visible—folded with a flourish, his cards spinning across the table. The banker’s kid cornered up his hole card and raised twenty more dollars. He was showing a jack in addition to his four. The undertaker gently moved his cards toward the muck pile. Another round of faceups and it wasn’t long before Clarence, who had a seven, a nine, and a jack showing, began twitching with his class ring. He had nothing in the hole but intended to take it all the way to the river. Owen folded when he saw the flush cards he needed in Jethro’s hand. The game moved briskly to a showdown between Jethro and Wilson. Jethro turned an ace over, making two high pairs, and Wilson lost with numbers and a pair of jacks. Jethro collected the pot and stacked the bills in front of him. Owen took the liberty of dropping his matches and looked under the table. Sure enough, snug against Wilson’s left shin was a holster with a pearl-handled pistol in it.

  Apart from a three-hand winning streak on the part of Arty, and a few wins to Owen, Jethro dominated the game. Owen watched him handle his cards, his face anxious no matter what he had before him. He licked his lips, gritted his teeth, leaned forward in his seat, touched his brow with a kerchief, raised his arms winglike at his side. He was impossible to read. Meanwhile, Wilson seethed and burned, twice went to his valise for more banknotes. He played as if sheer rage could break his losing streak. Arty drank himself silent then fell asleep in his chair. The undertaker stayed sober as a tin whistle. Somewhere in the proceedings the steward had been sent to bed and they marauded the Troy-like fortress of the liquor cabinet. For two hours they drank straight from the bottle. The mound of cash in front of Jethro was obscene—close to five hundred dollars. The night thinned out and they hit the shallows of dawn somewhere in view of the Rockies, a blue rim paling up behind the peaks. Clarence blustered into song about lonesome boundary riders and loyal dogs and got up from the table. He swaggered in the direction of the mountain view, all those cliffs and evergreen ridges off the end of the balcony rail. Winthrop was still talking, addressing the Texan’s back as he lumbered away. He was needle-voiced, obdurate. Now he was saying, “The price of marble goes up and what do people do? They choose granite for the loved one. I say lock in the pink marble at today’s prices.”

  “You’re all gum, digger. Shut the hell up and come out here,” Clarence called.

  Winthrop got up and Owen followed him. Jethro and Wilson played on. The sun was cresting in a valley like some dim candle at the end of a hallway. Clarence threw out a hand at the wake of backlit sagebrush but said nothing. They were drunk, bottomed out, awed.

  “Where do you think we are?” Owen asked.

  “This is the American West,” said Clarence. “Owen Graves, tell the mortician not to say anything just now.”

  “I think he heard you,” Owen said.

  The undertaker shrugged and smiled at himself. Back at the table there was a sliding chair and a brandished weapon. The moment, now that it was here, seemed inevitable. Like an eye-bolt swung into place. Wilson scarlet and wordless with ire and Jethro with his hands limply in front of his chest. Neither of them looked sure of what to do next. The gun demanded some attention and a sort of escalation, so Wilson obliged with: “He’s been cheating me all night. This is against all probability. Thirty-five hands in a row.”

  Jethro shook his head and turned to the men on the balcony.

  The undertaker took a somber step forward but, for once, had nothing to say.

  Owen said, “Put the gun away. He’s no cheat.”

  But Wilson blinked hard and squinted down at the short barrel, his thumb squeezed pink.

  Clarence said, “This is all disappointing me a great deal.” He loosened his shoulders and reached inside his coat jacket and pulled out a Schofield revolver, its chestnut handle bent like the nape of a horse’s neck, the blued iron somehow serene in the first glint of dawn. “Kid, this thing will wake the wives, not to mention poor Arty Bloomberg.”

  Arty continued to sleep with his head on his chest.

  Clarence said, “How about putting your handgun on the table? The lawmen out this way will fry you up like a skirt steak. Be reasonable. Don’t get shot before breakfast.”

  They all looked at Clarence’s unequivocal weapon, almost a foot long, still-stocked in the air as if it were resting on a fence post. Owen could see the inner lining of Clarence’s coat and made out a tailored gun pocket stitched out with canvas. It ran the length of his ribs. Wilson turned his head slowly and looked over his cocked shoulder. The rails clacked and Arty gently snored. A curtain was drawn back farther down the car and somebody’s wife emerged from a sleeping nook, hair tousled, barefoot in her nightgown, tiptoeing to the washroom. She did not look back at the lounge but it was enough for Wilson to come to his senses. He placed his pistol on the table and rubbed his eyes with both thumbs. Jethro bundled up his banknotes and began jamming them into his pockets. Clarence moved to the table and picked up the firearm. “I prefer something with barrel. A dueling pistol but with caliber to say you mean it.” He removed the bullets and handed the weapon back to Wilson. “You lost badly but there was no cheating at that table. I can guarantee you that. You ride the rest of the way to California with the immigrants or I’ll tell the conductor what you just did. He’ll have some marshals or other kinds of lawmen meet the train.” The banker’s son unfurled his shirtsleeves, buttoned his cuffs, but would not look Clarence in the face. They watched him walk away.

  After a moment, Clarence said, “I could eat a substantial breakfast after that ballyhoo. You almost had a casket order there, Winnie.”

  “I believe I could have had several,
” said Winthrop, lightened.

  Clarence said, “What time does the dining car open? I believe Jethro is buying us some eggs and bacon. Maybe some biscuits.”

  Jethro wiped his hands down his trousers and grinned. His neck was raked with sweat.

  Owen touched Jethro’s arm and said to the others, “We’ll be along in a little bit.”

  Clarence and Winthrop woke Arty and walked him groggily to breakfast, recounting what he’d slept through. Owen stepped out onto the balcony and Jethro followed him. They stood a while without talking. The landscape was warming through with browns and grays, the low ledges of caprock and gypsum still choked with shadow. A herd of antelope fed in a low meadow and Owen counted them to over a hundred. Jethro grabbed the balcony rail and turned his back to the panorama. He had a rosette of dollar bills protruding from his coat pocket, corners up like a pressed handkerchief.

  “I need a better view,” said Owen.

  There was a set of grab irons that ran parallel and to the left of the balcony. Owen raised his left foot and planted it on the first rung. He hoisted himself over and pulled his right foot in behind. Jethro watched him climb up to the roof of the car.

  Owen pivoted his torso and sat on the edge, his feet dangling above the doorway as if wetting his feet poolside. “Are you coming up?” he called down. He didn’t like the grin on Jethro’s face and all those pockets full of small denominations. It bothered him. He couldn’t be sure the kid hadn’t cheated and if that were the case—if he was a card counter or another form of unrepentant cheat—then he’d be murdered at sea and Owen would be denied his voyage payment. Owen would be doing both of them a favor by flushing him out now.

  Jethro looked up, puzzled, pretended he hadn’t heard. He even went so far as to raise a cupped hand to one ear.

  Owen beckoned with one arm.

  Jethro blew some air between his lips and took his hands slowly off the rail. He stepped toward the grab irons and took hold of the third rung. Climbing up, his two feet steadied on each rung before the next step. He pressed his face close to the train, refusing to acknowledge the churning ground below. Owen offered him a hand when he got to the top and Jethro grabbed hold of the wrist. He hefted himself level and sat down awkwardly. For a full minute he breathed, adjusted his trousers, kicked out his legs. When the commotion subsided, Owen pointed off to a stand of ponderosa pines and wildflowers. Jethro nodded appreciatively and turned to see the train bend into a curve.

  “I need to know . . .” Owen said.

  “What?” yelled Jethro.

  “Did you cheat?”

  Jethro lifted one side of his mouth, incredulous. He surveyed the flitting landscape with a kind of skepticism. Finally he yelled back, “I’ve never cheated at anything in my life.”

  Owen cupped his hands around his mouth and leaned close. “The probability is off. So many winning hands in a row.”

  “They don’t fool around when it comes to parlor games at Harvard. I played every night of the week. Freshmen to senior. Also twenty-one. Or vingt-et-un as we called it in the dorms.”

  Owen stared at him blankly. “Just the same, don’t be winning like that when we’re at sea. You’re liable to end up with your throat slit.”

  Jethro touched his throat without meaning to. “I should lose on purpose?”

  “Just to vary things.”

  They sat for a moment while Jethro let this revelation sink in with some heavy nodding. There was a roaring sound coming up behind them. Owen turned his head and saw the white face of a mountain bearing down the line. The middle cars were pressing into the full black of a tunnel, two feet of clearance above the train’s roofline. He could feel the wind shearing out of the mountainside as the train smashed into the darkness. He took hold of Jethro’s elbow and pitched off the back, a dozen feet down onto the balcony. Jethro landed in a crumpled heap, gripping one ankle. His boating hat came off and blew, end over end, onto the tracks. They watched it for a second as it righted and pinwheeled for an open meadow, its red club stripe wobbling through the sagebrush. Owen felt his eardrums flinch at the colossal wall of noise before the world shuttered to black.

  10.

  Argus and Malini rowed south for days across the sun-glazed straits of the Bismarck Archipelago, coming ashore at night to sleep on windblown skerries and coral atolls, huddled on nameless islands, flying foxes wheeling above their heads. They ate rats, skinks, lizards, sandpipers, crabs, whatever they could catch with their hands. Argus flinted driftwood fires and harvested rainwater from pandanus leaves. He fashioned a hat for his sister from woven reeds. It never once touched her head and she used it to gather minnows at the shoreline. Her years among the Kuk, days spent in the deep shade of strangler figs, had made her quieter, more introspective. They went hours without talking, lulled by the groan of the oarlocks and the lapping of the water. Malini thought Argus looked weak in the hot sun and whenever they landed he searched for places to sit in the dappled shade. He didn’t act like a coastal boy. He kept saying in English that he was trying to collect his thoughts, and when he translated this into Poumetan for her benefit she stared at him in confusion. She watched his eyes twitch when he said grace at night and wanted to know what he could have to say to anybody before eating a fish the size of his middle finger. When they spoke it was about the missionary jobs they would both have—Argus as a houseboy and Malini as a governess or cook or laundress in a white cotton dress and apron. More than anything, Malini wanted to be around children, preferably girls with good singing voices.

  Argus had obtained a compass and a chart from an island trading post but the map was full of inconsistencies and omissions. Entire islands were missing and the nautical distances were rounded estimates. They strained down the archipelago and when the trades died off Argus pulled into flattened sheets of turquoise, passing through the hulking shadows of mountain islands, the two of them craning their necks to see stunted trees with gnarled crowns staring down from a thousand feet above. Or they saw islands cleaved in two, one side barren from volcanic outpouring and the other side teeming with life. Fields of pumice and blackened lava, cinder cones stippled with liverwort, while the other side, beyond the dominion of ash, was a mutiny of hibiscus and fern.

  They steered alongside New Ireland but kept their distance because it was a traditional enemy of Poumeta. Seacoast elders and even their own father had spoken of New Irishmen with two thumbs on each hand, albinos with pink eyes, weekly earthquakes, tumbledown villages set beside boiling sulfur springs. The Lemakot in the north strangled widows and threw them into the cremation pyres of their dead husbands. If they defeated potential invaders the New Irish hanged the vanquished from banyan trees, flensed their windpipes, removed their heads, left their intestines to jerk in the sun. The reverend had confirmed these heathen atrocities. The preacher remembered navigating the New Irish coast in a steamer and the natives lining up to fire their Birmingham trade muskets at the ship, discouraging the good news of Jesus Kris from coming ashore. The New Hanover men weren’t much better, the reverend said. They would sell their own children for hoop iron and Winchesters and ate smoked red clay and carried daggers in their big mops of hair. But Argus also remembered hearing stories from a seafaring uncle who spoke of the New Irish with hushed reverence for their artistry and stature, the women lithe and kilted in ocher-dyed leaves and grasses, the men ferocious, athletic, hardworking, stocking their joss houses with cowrie shell money and tortoiseshell ornaments alive with fretwork. Whether they were ungodly brutes or savagely gifted artists with beautiful wives, Argus had no desire to learn for himself.

  The southeast trades came up most afternoons, smelling of salt. Argus luffed up into the wind and took shelter in leeward firths and sheltered bays. But if they were between calms and pulling in open waters there was nothing to do but ride it out, tossing over swell and spume, his shoulders and hands burning, his sister sullen and horribly seasick in the stern. The reverend had envied the Anglicans their mission whaleboats, each f
itted with a lugsail and jib for windy conditions. The old man joked that it was Calvinist thrift that had given him a sentence of infernal rowing and that he lapped the oar blades through his evening prayers. When Argus lay beside his sister at night, he felt his arms pulse with the day’s dip-draw passage and his dreams were all set in motion—sliding, falling, tumbling through water and air.

  In the stilled waters between islets, Malini held the map over her head to keep the sun off her face. She waved gnats and flies away with one hand. He had made her wear one of his clean cotton shirts because he couldn’t row with her nipples flouncing at him all day long. She kept the grass skirt and sat with her legs apart, her knees calloused and swaying. “We are dying out here,” she said with no particular emotion. “The seabirds are waiting to eat our faces.”

  “Tomorrow, you iron clothes and learn hymns.” To use the future tense in Poumetan he had to prefix everything with tomorrow.

  “I don’t want to sing hymns. I want to eat something bigger than a rat.”

  Argus looked into the sun-bleached distance and a line from the “Song of the Sea” came to him: The horse and the rider have drowned in the sea.

  It rained all afternoon, a deluge that forced them to look for shelter. Drenched and exhausted, they made for an island of yew and scrub, a copse of coconut palms fringing a beach. Malini hadn’t spoken to her brother for several hours and she leapt from the boat the instant it banked on the sand. She was eager to take matters into her own hands. The hunger was embarrassing, her brother a child in filthy rags. She took his leather suitcase box from the prow, took it up into a small clearing, emptied its contents into the wet sand, and proceeded to fill it with green coconuts. She remembered from her coastal days that there was more coconut water when they were unripe and the flesh was easier to pry from the husk. She would bring the coconuts along in the rowboat for the bloodiest stretches of daylight. Standing beneath each tree, she lobbed a heavy rock into the branches and took a step back as a nut landed at her feet. She knew perfectly well how to scale a tree, a custom the forest-dwelling Kuk had bestowed on their women, but out of respect for her brother she settled for the rock. Only Poumetan men were allowed to climb trees. Was he still Poumetan or was he Christian and half white?