Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“I’ll find out who did that,” he said. Jeanine moved her earrings from one hand to another. She heard voices outside; men laughing. The broken cup was full of blue flames where it held some dangerous, low-grade fuel.

“I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Everett,” she said.

“I know you’re not. Where are you staying tonight?”

“Here,” Jeanine said. “You’ve got to have a spare room around here somewhere. Unless that whole windmill crew is coming in here. I know you got a spare room.”

“You’d better drive on into Ranger. To save your reputation.” He sat back and took in her short, thatched hair of various sunburnt colors and her slight body and her nervous hands.

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“I’d be happy to tell you the name of a tourist court in Ranger. I’ll give you five dollars to go there and get a cabin.”

“No. Why should I drive on tonight? I’m wore out.”

He said, “You’re a hard woman, Jeanine.”

“Make it ten and I’ll think about it.”

He bit his lower lip to keep from laughing at her. “You’re out of my price range.” He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see your paper.”

She handed him the bill of sale from her tweed jacket pocket and he sat down at a long dining room table with it. Jeanine walked around the room. On the walls were photographs of him and his wife at about the time Jeanine had seen her last, it must have been five or six years ago. His wife wore a sheer dress with a tiny collar and a straw hat. The picture had been taken in the bright daylight so that the shadows were very black and her eyes were squinted against the sun. Ross Everett and his wife stood at a train station with suitcases around them and a freight wagon behind them. It was the San Angelo station because Jeanine could see the sign. They were going somewhere and they were happy and they smiled at whoever was taking the picture. Jeanine turned away.

“Your paper is good,” he said.

He laid the bill of sale in front of him that said Smoky Joe Hancock, a two-year-old stallion, had been sold by Manuel Benavides to John C. Stoddard March 9, 1935. Height 15.2 hands. Color: seal. Markings: none. By Joe Hancock by John Wilkins by Peter McCue. Out of a Rainy Day mare on the Waggoner ranch.

He took another cigarette and set it on fire with a metal lighter. He squinted at her over the smoke.

“You don’t want to sell him.”

“I don’t know, I’ve kind of got to like him.” She sat down on the other side of the long table and crossed one blue-jean leg over the other, then uncrossed them again and nervously twisted her hands on her bony kneecaps. “Now all of a sudden.”

“I told you,” he said. “Don’t get all wrapped around the axle about a horse.”

She went to stand once again in front of the hooded fireplace. The place was a mess. There was a saddle turned up on its fork against the wall and a stack of old Farm and Ranch magazines beside it, and Time and the Providence Journal, which seemed to be a newspaper from the East somewhere. A plate with half a dried-out sandwich on a chair. Trophies for prize cattle, championship Angora goats. The ageless contradictions of ranch life where creatures were cherished against storms and against sickness and other creatures, sometimes at the risk of a person’s health and even life, and then slaughtered. There was a stuffed, dusty javelina head with a red plaster tongue sticking out between the teeth and a spur hanging from one of the curved tusks.

“Did you kill all this stuff?”

“Yes. I did.”

She untied her scarf and let it drape around her neck. It was getting warm; the fire had surrounded two large sections of live oak logs and lit up the zoo of taxidermy animals on the walls. She put the heel of her hand to her forehead and thrust her fingers into her hair.

“Tell me about Bea,” he said. She told him. As she spoke she saw Bea at the bottom of the well in the dim light like a cracked and discarded Skippy doll and the loose, fainting feeling of horror that had come over her when she saw her little sister and the blood. Of the doctor with his loose mouth and the smell of Lysol in the hospital.

“And she’s all right except for that leg?”

“Yes. She just needs a specialist. A surgeon. That’s how come I’m selling Smoky Joe to you.”

He stared at the fire for a moment. “And how are y’all holding out on that farm?”

“All right.”

“Lots of people are moving back to the country. At least you can raise chickens. Do y’all have chickens?”

“Yes. And Mayme got a job at the Magnolia office in Tarrant.”

He stared at the fire. “It seemed like things were going to get better for a while. In ’35. But the economy has cratered again.”

“That’s when I saw you last,” she said. “In Conroe. I mean before Tarrant last month. Last time I talked to you was in Conroe.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember me when I was fifteen?”

He started to say what it was he remembered and then he changed his mind. He got up and crossed the room, slamming storage doors and then he opened the gun cabinet. He found a bottle of Irish whiskey behind the stock of a shotgun. He poured some into a dusty wineglass that said san angelo class of ’26.

“Well, let’s give this a try,” he said. “Yes, I remember you very well. I remember you all very well.”

Jeanine wrapped her arms around herself. “I guess you read it in the papers.”

“Are you cold?”

“No, I’m nervous.”

“Yes, I read about it. I read about his arrest.”

Jeanine considered her bitten nails. “For gambling.”

He sat for a long time in silence; the fire erupted in sparks and the sparks winked out on the tile floor.

“No, Jeanine. For statutory rape.” The whiskey charged into his bloodstream. Jeanine held her beer bottle wrapped in her fingers, as if she would break it. His cigarette burned and smoked out of the folded architecture of his two hands and the smoke drifted toward the fireplace and its draft. Finally he asked her, “Did you know the girl?”

She took up a stick of kindling and shoved fiercely at the coals on the edge of the fireplace. “How would I know somebody like that?”

“Jeanine, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

Jeanine felt her throat tighten and an odd, blocked feeling in her ears and realized that tears were rising to her eyes like mercury in a thermometer.

He said, “You’re about to break out crying.”

“I know it. I don’t want to.” If she started crying it would never stop. “Why?” she said. She lifted her head to him in search of an answer. “Why did he have to do that to us?”

Everett took a long breath and blew it out his nose, along with smoke. He said, “I’m not the person to ask, sweetheart, but then you’re not asking me.” He got up and walked over to the fireplace beside her and threw his cigarette butt into it. The flames shone across the tiled floor and she heard footsteps in the kitchen, the low voices of children being very quiet and very intent. Then a slashing, sprung noise and the pinging sound of broken crockery.

He turned toward the kitchen and said, “Innis!”

Jeanine wiped at her eyes firmly. Ross reached to his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief, shook it out of its folds and handed it to her. She took it and scrubbed at her eyes and blew her nose.

The door from the kitchen opened. The boy stood there, his face spotted with large freckles, the doorknob in his hand. He wore a very dirty small Stetson and a stained sweater that zipped up the front. Behind him another boy kicked pieces of a china plate under the kitchen table.

“Yes, sir?”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, me and Aaron were going to get something to eat.” He had a slingshot in his hand cut from the Y crotch of a branch. It was made with strips of inner tube for slings and a leather pocket made of an old shoe tongue.