Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

It is terribly still. The burned barn rides along in the corner of my eye, a black blot. I can feel the destroyed house at my back. The sombre windmill scatters sparrows into the air which wheel, shimmer in the sunlight like the leaves of an aspen, and then, one by one, drop back down solemnly on the struts of the windmill, pegs on a clothesline.

The question presses me. “What in Christ happened here?”

McAdoo points his finger at the house, at the barn, at the windmill. “This?”

“Yes.”

“I knew the man owned this place, Austin Noble. He and his wife moved out here from Nebraska. Noble’d been a cattle-buyer. They was an old couple, Austin and his wife, didn’t have no kids, nothing was holding them in Nebraska; get shut of the winter cold, they figured, eat oranges in California. So they sold up in Nebraska, bought this place; he kept a few horses, she kept a few chickens. Hired a man to farm the rest of the land. They was here about a year and his wife took sick, something about the heart, the lungs.” He shrugs. “Might been both. She died. One morning, he gets up, sets fire to the house. Walks out in the yard, puts a torch to the barn. Next, the windmill. Hired man seen it. He run and hid himself in that clump of trees yonder. Austin was making for the bunkhouse but then he must have recollected he had a man living there. He stops in his tracks, takes a pistol out of his pocket, puts in it his mouth, pulls the trigger.” McAdoo halts, directs me. “Just over there.” He resumes walking. “Property went to a brother of Austin’s in Omaha. He figures to sell it to one of them movie studios – they turn it into another Universal, another Inceville – make him a rich man. Big shit ideas. He don’t know you going to pass property off on them boys you got to sell scenery. Ain’t no fucking scenery to speak of here. But that’s right to my purpose. He can set tight in Omaha waiting for an offer and I can set tight here until he gets one.”

The bunkhouse must once have housed eight or ten men, but now it’s sadly decayed, its footings raggedly fringed with last year’s brown grass and this year’s verdigris weeds. The only sign of life is the swallows ducking in and out of mud nests daubed under the eaves, scrolling the palimpsest of dusk with their pursuit of insects. McAdoo pushes the door open and I follow him in. Because of the tar-papered windows, a kerosene lamp sits on an apple box at the far end of a room long and narrow as a shooting gallery, the light making luminous the sheets of an unmade bed. German expressionism, I think to myself. A lot of cameramen would give their eyeteeth for that shot.

McAdoo waves me down the room. As he does, his suit jacket flaps open and I glimpse a pistol in the waistband of his pants. He put the jacket on to conceal his weapon. With a man carrying a pistol at my back, the short walk down the room lengthens alarmingly.

Signs of the former occupants have not all been erased. Against either wall, to the left and to the right, the skeletons of iron cots stand, skinned of their mattresses, a pile of old magazines stacked at the foot of one of them. Defunct calendars curl on the walls. I slip by a cast-iron stove with a coal-scuttle tipped beside it.

Halting in the pool of lamplight, McAdoo indicates a wooden chair. “Set yourself,” he says, sagging down on his bed. The harsh light shining up from the apple box drills his eyes even deeper into his skull, bathes the bony forehead in a fierce, waxy glow. His face appears on the verge of melting. Putting a hand inside his coat he draws out the revolver and lays it down on the mattress beside his leg. “You armed?” he asks quietly.

“God, no, I’m not armed.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not armed.”

“Stand up and hold out your arms,” he orders. His hands run expertly down my sides, pat my pockets, slide down the inside of my trousers. “All right, set again,” he says. “We don’t have to think about that no more.”

I settle myself gingerly on the chair.

“You got to watch your step in these lonesome parts,” he remarks. “I blame these picture people. Every lazy no-account’s heard how they’ll pay you five dollar a day to stand in a crowd, holler and wave your arms. Easy money, no work, they think. Flame for the wrong kind of moths. A week ago I come in here and some ugly son of a bitch and his head lice is laying in my bed. Drifter. Clear out my bunk, I said. Know what he done? Give me a big smile, fiddled out his cod and asked for a suck. If I didn’t run the bastards off, this place’d be just the same as one of them goddamn downtown missions. I’d be lying awake of a night listening to old men bugger each other. No thanks to that music. This is my home.” He pauses. “And I don’t recall offering you no invitation.”

“Point taken. You didn’t.”

“That’s right. I didn’t.” He waits.

I light a cigarette, my hands are trembling. I pass McAdoo the pack.

“Obliged,” he says. “This is my first in a goodly time.” He wolfs down the smoke, makes to return the package.

“Keep them,” I say.

He presses them into my palm. His fingers feel like they’ve been whittled from something cold and hard, like ivory.

“What I mean is, keep them, you’re a long way from supplies,” I say by way of apology.

“I make out fine. I come here with supplies,” he declares. “Coffee, dried peas, beans. I planted me a truck garden, some of it’s showing now. There’s quail abouts, and rabbit for flesh. I shot a small doe last month. There’s still some deer in this country, not many, but some.”

“You’re living wild then.”

“Hell, a roof ain’t wild. This ain’t living wild.”

“Tobacco doesn’t grow wild for the picking,” I say. “You take it.”

He doesn’t object this time, just tucks the cigarettes away in his shirt pocket. But I guess he feels his need has compromised him. He says angrily, “I tell you this Hollywood is one sour pot of milk, can hardly see it for the flies.” He gets to his feet with a savage jerk of the shoulders and moves to the stove. In a barely audible voice he remarks, “Nothing colder’n a cold stove. Why’s that? I get a bad headache I always lay her on a cold stove.” He stoops over, presses his forehead to the stove, his hands loosely cupped around the swell of the fire-box. A strange, oddly disturbing sight, as if he is resting his head on a woman’s breast, his hands on her hips. Consolation. The old man doesn’t stir. I can hear my watch measuring the stillness. Maybe he’s faint with hunger.

Alarmed, I rise to my feet. “Mr. McAdoo? Mr. McAdoo? Are you all right?”

The head slowly lifts from the cold iron; the head slowly turns. His voice is gentle, bleak. “What you want from me, son? Who are you?”

The voice beckons me, I feel myself fading out of the lamplight, drifting into the tar-papered gloom surrounding the stove. At the far end of the bunkhouse, I catch a stain of light seeping through the one dirty pane of glass, puddling on the board floor. The swallows rustling under the eaves purl like running water. We are face to face now, the black eyes glitter at me. I say, “I’m not the police.”

“Hell, I know that. I weren’t born yesterday. I been christened, son.”

“I’m a writer.”

“Newspaper writer?”

“I used to be. But not any more. I write books now. I want to write a book about the Old West. Everyone tells me you’re the man to talk to. That you have the stories. A writer needs stories. They all said talk to Shorty McAdoo if you want the real dope, the truth.”

Surprisingly, my little encomium angers him. “I ain’t interested in all that old dead shit. I know the truth.”

“It’s history,” I say, lamely. “It’s something we all ought to know.”