CHAPTER FOUR
Gin dropped her suitcase to the porch with a loud sigh, fished in the rusty mailbox to no avail, and fumbled with her key at the lock. The door swung open at her touch. She stared at Flo, who was garbed in the green kimono that was signal of a rest-day, and who stared back in gloomy impassivity. Her lips were puffed and her eyes were red.
“Hello!” cried Gin. “Why are you here?”
“Well, guess.” Flo shuffled over to the sofa and a pile of stockings that needed darning. “I got up early this morning and went down to the office, all ready and waiting. I’ve been packed for two days, I was so excited.”
“I know.”
“Well, the cars all lined up and everybody came except three of my dudes. They were a family. I guess they just decided not to come, without any notice. It was so late that Mr. God just put the other one into Rita’s car instead, and they sent her, and told me to go home. That means the third year running that I’ve missed out on the Hopi country.”
“Oh, you poor thing!” In all Gin’s rush of indignation she was afraid to say more. With her mouth open, waiting to pour forth incitement to rebellion, she looked at Flo’s miserable face and turned instead to her suit-case. The purple velvet blouse went into the rickety wardrobe, but after a quick survey of the rest of the contents she closed the bag and pushed it into the corner, ready for tomorrow.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” she added over her shoulder, draping her suit-coat on a hanger.
“Oh, well,” said Flo heavily, “I’ll be over all this by tomorrow, I suppose. I’ve been as sore as this before. I’m just mad because I turned down a date for tomorrow night and now I’ll be in town after all, probably.”
“It’s a rotten deal. Call up and say your plans have changed. Where are the cigarettes?”
“On the table behind you. No, I’m not going to call up now. I’m ashamed to do it; I talked too much about the Hopi trip. I might as well give up trying to keep any contacts in this damned town. They’re always being mixed up. What sort of crowd did you have?”
“Ghastly.” Gin sat down on the couch and propped her feet up, taking a long comfortable puff. “It was a married couple with a kid and an old lady who kept saying, ‘Now, young woman, tell me what I’m going to see!’ Whenever I tried to tell her she’d look over my head with a patient expression.”
“I can just see her. They come in packages.” Flo picked up another stocking and spread her fingers out in the heel. “Gin, I’m fed up. Really.”
“Naturally,” said Gin, as comfortingly as possible.
“No, it isn’t just that. I’ve been thinking over the whole situation. I’ve been here since the beginning of the Detour: I’ve had three years of it. Where am I? What have I got out of it?”
“What have you got?” Gin smiled and watched the smoke. “Oh, you’ve got a swell Navajo belt.”
“Yes, a belt and a half dozen shirts I wouldn’t dream of wearing if they weren’t part of the uniform, and a lot of silver junk that I’m sick of looking at. I’d sell it if I didn’t need it for the effect.”
“But of course there’s the experience. Many a girl of your age is hanging around in New York or Chicago trying to catch a husband so she can stop playing the typewriter eight hours a day. This is fun. Honestly it is: think of the city, and the dirt!”
“Experience.” Flo pronounced it carefully, with a burlesque tone of rapture. “You like that word. It’s the same thing as adventure, isn’t it?”
“Just about.”
“Yeah. I used to have ideas about adventure, too.”
“Oh, you’re old and weary. Forget it.”
“No, I’m telling you an idea. I think that adventure isn’t worth a damn unless you can talk about it afterwards. It’s all in the story. I know.”
“Well, go ahead and tell the story. Who’s stopping you?”
“Who wants to hear it? The couriers don’t want to hear about it; they have the same thing every day. I can’t talk to the dudes about it. They just want to hear how many Indians are born every year.”
“Or if the couriers aren’t Mexican, really. Or how many stamps to use on letters to Chicago. Well, tell your friends. They enjoy it.”
“What friends? I haven’t any.”
Gin was tired of it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Flo. Snap out of it.”
“But I haven’t. Who on earth would take the trouble to go on being a friend of any of us when we’re always leaving town? It takes too much energy. As soon as I make a dinner date the office deadheads me to Albuquerque to wait for some railroad official who’s taking a free vacation to the canyon or something. People get tired of that. No one ever asks me for bridge any more. I never have time to write letters: I don’t even feel like it. I bet a soldier gets just this way, living in training camp.... The only people I ever see in any connected way are the other girls and the drivers and the Indians. And the nigger in the lavatory on the Chief, when I’m on the trains.” She broke off the thread and rolled up two stockings. “We’re pathetic figures. Don’t you realize it? I’ve been realizing it all day.”
“Have it your own way,” said Gin. “In my artless fashion I thought I was enjoying myself, but have it your own way. Have a drink.”
“I don’t care if I do.”
Gin went into the kitchen, knelt down before a cabinet that was shrouded in a cretonne curtain, and pulled out a glass keg of corn liquor. She poured out two small glasses and went back to the living room.
Flo tasted hers and said again, “I’m fed up.” Gin watched her curiously and felt a little depressed. Sometimes she too had a feeling of hopelessness; it was probably the same thing now with Flo. Were they coming to her more often lately? Would she too become chronically tired and aggrieved? How long before she began to indulge in that dangerous game of wondering what it was all about? She drank the corn thoughtfully, thinking about her first days here. It had all been fun, but most especially, she remembered the party the old girls had given for the new, when they had begun to tell their favorite stories about dudes. There was the girl who gave them the list of W. C.’s available for every trip, and made them practice how to ask the gentlemen if they needed them.
“You don’t really need to say anything to them. You just say to the nearest woman in a loud whisper, ‘Would you like to...?’ and they’ll watch where you go, if they have any sense.”
Then there had been the last lecture, when Mr. God gave them a little talk on the aims of the company and ended his address with a delicate plea for—well, for what? Sobriety and morality, probably. What he said was, “I need hardly add that we assume that every girl is a lady, in the best sense of the word....”
They had giggled at that, all the way back to the apartment. It was fun, the whole idea; tearing over the countryside all day and not knowing every evening where you would be the next night. Flo was tired, that was all: it would pass——
“We might cut up tonight,” she said aloud. “There’s a new movie isn’t there? Or would you like to hire a car and go out of town somewhere? Come on, let’s do that.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Flo grumbled. “It costs too much. I don’t know if I’ll last till next pay day as it is. I tell you, though, we might get dressed up and eat at the hotel instead of fixing something here.”
“Yes, that wouldn’t be bad. Is there any hot water? Oh, wait a minute.” The phone was ringing: she ran to answer it and called back, “Flo, it’s Tom and he says it’s going to be moonlight. He and Wally want us to go up the canyon for a picnic. Should I tell him we’ll fix the supper?”
Flo frowned, as usual, and protested. “But there’s nothing in the house....”
“Now, don’t be that way. We can send for something. It’ll do us good. Come on.”
“Oh, all right. Who’s going?”
“Just us and the cowboys. Tom says he can have the horses here by seven. Hurry and make up your mind, he’s waiting.”
“It’s all right with me.” She hesitated, struggling with her woe, then hurried into the kitchen and started to slice bread.
They were well on the way by the time the moon appeared over a dip in the range of hills to the east. The night air was warm; in the moonlit darkness their shadows were grotesquely different in size. Tom’s hat was the largest thing about him; it swept in a beautiful curve above his sharp face. He rode ahead of the others, glancing around to talk to Flo, who followed stiff and a little ill at ease in the saddle, perpetually thinking and talking of her horse. Gin and Wally rode side by side, but Wally was immense and the horse he rode was also immense: when Gin said anything to him she had to look up. She didn’t say much: Wally was in a reminiscent mood and kept the conversation going without any help.
“I mind at one of the shows at Cheyenne,” he said, “the judges was just beginning to catch on the wild cow milking trick. I won out because they caught everybody else.”
“What is the trick? I never heard of it.”
“No, they don’t do it no more. You’ve got to show milk in the bottle to win: the first one who gets to the stand with milk in the bottle wins the money. The boys used to carry milk right along with them, in the bottle, in their pocket, and make a few motions at the cow with it and then run along to the judges’ stand. It was just a race really. This time the judges was watching out and they felt the bottles and the milk was cold so that let them out.”
“And yours wasn’t cold?”
“Oh no,” said Wally. “I’d been carrying the milk in my mouth: it was right warm. That was the only money I took at that show.”
The creaking of the saddles and the mixed beat of the horses’ hoofs added to a peaceful rhythm of night noises. Passing a farmyard, a little black dog darted out with fierce yaps and Gin’s horse jumped nervously and started to trot. The other three fell into the stride; gathering speed, they cantered up a rise in the road and swung around a bend into the canyon itself. A light breeze met them. Gin closed her eyes, giving herself up to the feeling. She was thinking about Teddy. It was a good thing she had managed to get out of the house tonight. She’d been spending too many evenings waiting for him to call up.
“Probably this is one of the evenings he’ll decide to call,” she thought, and tried to be glad that she wouldn’t be there to answer the phone. “When I see him again I’ll tell him I was in town, and that’ll show him that I don’t always wait for him.” But would it do any good? Would it have any effect, and if so, what effect did she want it to have? She couldn’t figure out how she felt about him. He exasperated her: she always made up her mind to quarrel with him next time she saw him—perhaps a quarrel would break down his easy, lazy indifference to everything—and then when she saw him, she always forgot. It was only when she wasn’t with him that she was so exasperated. Silly to feel anything about him at all. They didn’t know each other very well: they hardly ever saw each other. She wondered whether to speak to Flo about it. But Flo had no use for the Camino crowd at all: she refused to consider them human. “Nuts,” she called them, and forgot all about them.
The soft ceaseless flow of words from Wally and the loping horses pushed Gin into an exaltation, after a little. She was part of the Western world at last: not the West of the daytime where people brushed their teeth and went to offices, but the real West that existed in the fifteen-cent magazines on drugstore racks and the old films that were shown at the theatre Saturday nights.
Baldy slowed down suddenly to a walk, stopped by the horses ahead of him. They all hesitated a moment, then followed Tom’s lead and turned down a path that led to the canyon river.
“I remember a good place along here,” he said, and they splashed and waded to a flat plot of ground with a few bushes leaning over from the slope. Here they swung off and tied the horses, gathering a few small logs and sticks.
“We brought coffee,” Wally said, “so as to have a fire.” They had brought something else too: a bottle of milky liquor that Tom claimed was tequila.
Gin disagreed on principle. “You’re crazy. There never is any tequila in Santa Fé. Every time some bootlegger goes wrong on his gin he sells the batch to cowboys and calls it tequila.”
“I brought it myself from Juarez,” said Tom. “It ain’t gin. If you don’t want it, pass it up. I can use it.”
Flo said bravely, “Well, I’ll try it. I need something new to get cheered up. I don’t care what it is. If I get sick they’ll have to let me off the trip tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Gin, “I didn’t say I didn’t want it. Hand it over.”
They munched sandwiches and cake in silence. Gin tasted the drink and silently admitted that she was wrong. It might not be tequila, but it was something very strange. It had a chilling effect at first, and after each swallow settled down in her stomach like a stubborn little lump of lead before it seemed to melt and spread. The others finished the food before she noticed: there were only three limp jelly sandwiches left.
“You made them,” said Flo, unkindly. “Eat ’em. I told you not to. Have more coffee.”
“She don’t want coffee,” Tom interposed. “Give her the bottle.”
Flo said in a discouraged tone, “It’s having no effect whatever. I thought I could get happy tonight and forget my troubles, but I’m just the same, only worse.”
“It always acts like that when you set out for a good one,” said Wally. “One night last year I started out for a three-day party and I kept going all night and went to bed in the morning cold sober.”
“It’s a strange life,” Gin suddenly said. She hugged her knees and rocked backward, staring at the sky. “People trying to make themselves crazy with bottles of poison, when everything is all right as it is.”
“What’s that?” Wally looked worried.
“It’s a strange life,” she repeated. “Everything is peculiar. Don’t you think so? Really, don’t you?”
Flo sighed audibly. “Leave her alone; she’s off again.”
“But it is,” Gin persisted. A messianic zeal possessed her: she must convey the message in her soul or die unappeased. The moon, the bushes, the beautiful silent horses, all waited with an understanding patience while she spoke to these scoffers. “It is,” she said again. “Here I am sitting by a fire out in the middle of Nature, wearing pants and drinking tequila. I mean here I am, and ten years ago—five years ago—I was living in cities and wearing skirts and now here I am. It’s wonderful.”
“That’s all right,” said Tom. “Of course it’s wonderful.”
“It’s so peculiar. Can’t you see?” Her eyes filled with tears; her soul filled with a passionate sensibility of life and all its lovely factors; the moon, the fire, the horses.... She stretched out on the ground and put her head on her arm, thinking it over.
Tom rose to his feet, leaned over her, and pulled her gently by the arm. “Come on, Gin. Come on back to town with me and we’ll get some more funny thoughts.”
She stumbled after him in the dark and let him untie the horse and help her up to the saddle. They cantered most of the way home; as they swung through the narrow streets at the edge of town she peered through the windows, catching quick flashes of lit rooms with quiet women sewing, or standing at stoves, or washing dishes. Suddenly she felt desolate and lonely, envious of these people who had homes and dull quiet duties.
Tom waved her in to the living-room while he led the horses to the corral. “You wait there and think about life.”
She sat on his camp cot and reflected. It was a big bare room, with a bearskin and a beaded vest on the wall for decoration. There was a table with a Victrola and several bottles, and on the window-sill there were stacks of the little fifteen-cent magazines with pictures on them of bucking broncos and cheering cowboys in furry chaps. The last of the West was here, in these dude-wranglers with their tall stories and their horses. Now she was sad with a tender melancholy, and somewhat sleepy. What were they all looking for here in the mountains? Why did they come? She shook her head.
“Now,” said Tom in the doorway. “What’s it all about?” He handed her a glass. “You ought to feel better with this,” he said. He sat down next to her on the bed and put his arm around her. “What’s eating you?” he asked gently. “Tell me about it and you’ll feel better.”
Her face buried in his shoulder, she answered, “Nothing. I feel sleepy. I’m all right.”
“Sure nothing’s the matter?”
Again she shook her head.
“Well,” he said, “I think there is. You don’t come around as much as you used to. You’ve been running around with that funny crowd, the queer ones.”
“Why, Tom!” With exaggerated indignation, she sat erect and stared at him.
“Sure you are. I saw you at the show the other night with Madden.”
“He’s not queer,” she protested.
“He ain’t? Then I don’t know anything about queer ones. Take your medicine there.”
An hour or so passed in jerks; quick lovely spaces of time with the Victrola playing and short horrible periods that dragged on for years, when she relapsed into stupidity and stared at the beaded vest and tried not to talk about life. She saw Tom once in a while, as it were, looking at her and grinning in a monotonous way: she leaned against his shoulder in an unpleasant spell of dizziness, and it was there that Flo found her when she came stamping in with Wally. She heard Flo’s sharp voice.
“Look at that! Did you ever? We’d better get a taxi.” And in the car that crept through the dark streets she sat up suddenly and said, “Well, I seem to have done it instead of you.”
“You did,” said Flo. “Lie down.”
“I’m all right.” She sat up and tried to put off her remorse until next morning. “Where are the boys?”
“I made them stay at the stable. It’s too late for them to come out.”
“What time is it?”
“Three o’clock, I think.”
The house was squat and ominous in the dark; the moon had long since set. Gin crept to bed by the light of the reading-lamp; she felt somehow that the bright light would outrage the hour. Her head felt very light. It wouldn’t next day.
“Flo,” she called across the room, after she had settled down. There was something to talk over with Flo. What was it? Too much trouble....
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! What is it?”
“I’m perfectly sober,” Gin said. There was no challenge and she continued, “But just the same, life’s peculiar.”