Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“You were going to get something to eat with a slingshot?”

Innis glanced down at the primitive weapon in his hand. “Kind of.” He stuck it into his coat pocket. “We were shooting at rats and Aaron broke one of those Spodes.”

Another smash. Jeanine saw chips of china spray across the kitchen floor.

Ross stood up. “Damn it!”

“Well, we were going to sit up and wait for that coon.” The boy had fair hair cut short with a whirled cowlick in the middle of his forehead. “Since I can’t use the twenty-two on him. Can Aaron stay all night?” He turned and said, “Aaron, stop shooting.”

“Not tonight.”

The boy stood silent in the doorway. He glanced at Jeanine and pressed his lips together and regarded his boot toes.

“Why not?”

Ross said, “Somebody is going to get snatched bald-headed in a minute. Aaron’s dad is going home. Aaron is going with him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed.

Jeanine set her beer bottle down on the tiles beside the fireplace.

“I’ll drink another beer,” she said.

“No.” He said it in an absentminded sort of way. He crooked his forefinger over the bridge of his nose. “You’ll be up all night peeing.” He stood beside her, watching the fire. “The bathroom is behind the kitchen.” He lit another cigarette. Flaming bits of paper fell to the floor and he stepped on them. She watched the smoke wander into the bars of light and out again. “I’ll make you out a bill of sale,” he said.

She got up and walked from one end of his dining room to the other while he wrote. He used it for an office. His desk was the long dark dining table, made in the fashion of the 1920s, when people liked that spare straight look, and it was scarred with cigarette burns and lamp rings. Apparently he and the boy ate in the kitchen, probably living on tamales and chili and mutton or whatever the cook made up for them.

“It’s hard to give him up,” she said.

“You don’t have the money to campaign him properly. He needs to run on the good tracks in New Mexico and Arizona. He needs to get used to a starting gate, he needs to be exercised the right way, consistently.” Everett saw how spare she was, not big enough to hold the horse to a working gallop. Not much bigger than his son. “He’ll go down on one of these brush tracks before long and break a leg and you don’t even have the money for vet bills.”

“You saw him run today.” She had a stubborn edge to her voice. “He’s worth more than three hundred.”

“Then try to get it somewhere else.”

Jeanine sat and listened to footsteps coming down a hall somewhere. A door opened and then the sound of running water.

“How do I know you’ll treat him well?” It was the last objection she could think of.

“Look at my other horses,” he said. “I beat them regularly. I use a hammer.”

Jeanine lifted her shoulders. “I guess I’ve got to.”

He thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll pay you two hundred and you can have a percentage in his winnings. Ten percent.”

Jeanine paused and then whispered the math to herself.

“But how would I get it?”

“I’ll hand it to you, sweetheart.” He drank up his whiskey. “I hate to take a good horse away from an ignoramus like you.”

“That sounds like a deal.” She didn’t smile. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t ever bet anymore.”

“You’re not. I’ll do it.”

“Well here, then.” She handed him back a ten-dollar bill. “Put it on Smoky whenever you race him.”

“All right.”

“Well, write it out,” said Jeanine. “And sign it.”

He opened a drawer beneath the table edge, one of those drawers where people used to keep the silver. In it were a metal cash box and a revolver. He opened the cash box and took two one-hundred-dollar bills. He found a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote out a new bill of sale and a percentage agreement. He handed it to her. She paused and read it over. He waved away the drifting veils of cigarette smoke. The lamp sat between them on the table and shone on their faces and hands and they were reflected in the black windows like some old portrait of conspirators or highwaymen, their treasure before them, dividing the spoils. She signed her name to the paper.

She shoved the bills and her winnings into her jacket pocket. Everett drew their chairs closer to the fire and they sat side by side, for the night was growing intensely cold and the cold crept through the walls of the old house, slipped under the warped baseboards. The fire was collapsing into crumbling red coals.

He turned his dark blue eyes to her and then away again. He listened for any new damages going on in the kitchen. “If that kid breaks something else I’ll kill him.” He swirled the final drops of whiskey in his glass. “He does this when I have somebody to visit.”

“Like who?” said Jeanine. She didn’t know why she asked it.

“Women.” Everett shoved at a log with his boot. “Find yourself a room. Make sure it’s the one with the window looking out at the shearing platform. So the windmill crew can see you and you can scandalize the place. Try upstairs. There’s blankets somewhere.”

Jeanine found her way through the kitchen and then opened a door to one side of it. It was a boy’s room. Archie comics and the Red Ryder puppet and balsa wood airplanes. Faded small jeans on the floor. Old-fashioned square wooden stirrups and boxes of twenty-two ammunition. The boy was probably still outside with his slingshot, waiting up for the midnight visit of a raccoon or a ringtailed wildcat. They all thirsted for the blood of chickens and the yolks of eggs.

She opened another door; a room jammed full of old-style folded canvas cowboy beds and cooking pots. It was camping gear, roundup gear. It had all come back from the fall works unwashed and it stank of campfire smoke and bacon grease. Unlucky the woman who had to clean that mess up. Jeanine closed the door and climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a hallway. The old wooden floor creaked beneath her feet.

She knew she was not going to be able to sleep. She saw framed photographs on the hallway walls, people in 1920s clothes. She didn’t stop to see who they were, they were frightening, they might be of his dead wife. At the end of the hall was a tall window framed in stone like the door to another world. Jeanine saw outside a sudden graininess to the night air and realized snow was falling. She put her face to the glass. Out beside the shearing platform a fire still burnt and snow fell into its lit red heart, like moths drawn to light.

She opened the last door in the hallway and in that room found a bed with bright pillow shams. Three mirrors at a vanity reflected her dark figure in the doorway, wavering like a trinity of selves. She reached for the light chain and pulled it and sat on the bed. He was crazy to keep her room like this. Jeanine wished she hadn’t found it. She couldn’t make herself turn off the light but lay back, wrapped in blankets that she found in a trunk at the foot of the bed.

She saw a wardrobe built into a corner and its shut door was worrisome to her. As to what might be in it. Her clothes. Some part of a person always remained in their clothes somehow. Snow pinged at the window, it came sweeping down out of the Texas Panhandle unobstructed. He didn’t want anybody here. Except some sort of women; casual women. That’s why he kept her room like this. And he blamed it on the boy.

At last she pulled the light chain. She knew she would not sleep. She got up again and drew a chair to the window. She leaned her forehead against the pane to watch the mysterious and rare sight of a fall of snow.

The fire outside died and the last of the windmill crew left in a trailing glitter of red taillights that winked out in the restless foaming of the snowstorm.