Incident at Twenty-Mile Page 11

  "No thanks, Doc. I'll just make my rounds then get back to my office."

  "Well, been nice meeting you, Ringo. Don't work too late."

  MATTHEW FOUND RUTH LILLIAN alone in the Mercantile, reading by a kerosene lamp. She explained that her father had gone up to take a nap.

  "It's pretty late for a nap, isn't it? Or pretty early?"

  "He calls it a nap because he won't admit that he can't work hard anymore. His 'nap' will last until morning."

  "I've noticed how your pa has to stop to catch his breath all the time."

  "It's his heart. It ain't much good."

  "I'm awful sorry to hear that, Ruth Lillian."

  She made a tight, resigned shrug; and her profile in the lamplight tugged at Matthew's heart. "He hides it," she said. "He's ashamed not to be healthy, like he thinks a man ought to be. That's why he didn't want to take you on to help with the heavy work. He thinks that being grumpy will hide the fact that he's sick. But everyone in town knows. And they're out there, circling like vultures."

  "Circling? What for?"

  "They want the Mercantile! Except for the weekly beef, everything passes through this store. Food, clothes, lamp oil, coal, tobacco-everything. The Bjorkvists would love to get their hands on it. And Professor Murphy, too. Sometimes I can almost feel them out there in the dark, hoping, and plotting, all greedy and mean and… small! But they're never, ever going to get this store. Pa's taught me everything about running it. How to order things and how to keep records and all that, so I'll be able to fend for myself as long as the mine holds out. If I have to, that is. I mean, if pa's heart…" She shook her head to banish the possibility.

  A moth tapped plumply against the lamp chimney and circled over its updraft: intrigued, infatuated, baffled… then suddenly incinerated. Ruth Lillian curled her hand over the top of the lamp and blew into her palm to put it out. She pushed open the squeaking screen door and went out onto the porch, where she stood resting her cheek against a pillar, looking out past the cliff edge to stars hanging in the matte-black sky.

  Matthew followed her out, softly closing the screen door behind him. "But if you had the store, you'd need help with the heavy work. Lugging supplies up from the train on Sundays, and bagging the coal, and things like that."

  "Oh, I'd find help."

  "Where?"

  She shrugged. Then her eyes took on a teasing glint. "Maybe I'd offer Professor Murphy a job as my shop assistant. Wouldn't that burn his tail feathers!"

  "It'd burn mine, too."

  "How come?"

  "Why wouldn't you ask me to help you, instead of old Murphy?"

  "You?" A sudden chill caused her to rub her upper arms, and she left her hands on her arms, as though hugging herself. Her voice slipped to a minor key. "You won't be around, Matthew."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "By the time my pa… By that time you'll be out in the world somewhere. Chasing after life."

  Matthew nodded thoughtfully. Yes, that was probably true. He'd be out chasing after life. A loner. A drifter who went his own way and did what had to be done, like the Ringo-But, no. No, he couldn't leave Twenty-Mile. Not for a long time. Maybe never.

  A burst of laughter from the Traveller's Welcome interrupted these musings. The bat-winged bar doors clattered open, and someone came hurtling out, arms flaying, and ended up sprawled in the dust. He got up slowly. Dusted himself off. Then calmly walked back in, as though he had just been passing by and had been attracted by the light and the laughter.

  "Why don't you close up and go to bed, Ruth Lillian?"

  "I can't. Every once in a while a drunk miner gets it into his head that he needs something from the store. Last week a man came crying and blubbering and saying he forgot his little girl's birthday and he just had to have a doll. And he wanted it right then! If we're not open, they'll break in and mess things up. So someone has to be in the shop day and night till the miners go back up to the Lode. Pa and me take turns."

  "So you're going to stay up all night?"

  "Looks like."

  "You want me to stay with you?"

  "No, thanks. I'll be all right."

  "You're sure?"

  She nodded vaguely, her eyes still on the scattering of stars along the horizon.

  Matthew looked at her profile, and his heart expanded with feelings for her. He wanted very much to touch her, to hold her hand, maybe even… He surreptitiously scrubbed his palm on his trousers to make sure it was dry. Just as he reached out to her, she turned and took his hand… and shook it firmly.

  "Good night, Matthew."

  "Ah-h… well, good night, Ruth Lillian."

  A COUPLE OF NIGHTS later, they found themselves again on the wooden front steps of the Mercantile, watching lightning blossom then fade in the clouds on the distant horizon, while thunder growled grumpily from mountain to mountain. Sitting side by side, they spoke in quiet voices about things they used to do, and think about, and believe, when they were kids. Now and then, something they recalled was attached by hidden threads of memory to some other event or moment, and their talk would drift to that, like when Ruth Lillian said out of a deep silence, "… The giants are moving their furniture again."

  "Huh?"

  "Thunder used to scare me something terrible when I was little. Then one stormy night Pa told me that thunder was giants in the sky moving their furniture. A real loud clap meant they'd dropped their piano. I was never afraid after that."

  Shortly before sundown, a brash of plump raindrops had plopped dark spots into the dust of the street, but no real rain had followed, only the cool winds that swirl at the edges of a storm. And now the night air still carried the exciting, nose-tingling smell of storm: that mixture of electricity and dust.

  "You were lucky to have a pa that cared about you being scared," Matthew said. Then he added quickly, "Of course, my pa was like that, too. Always explaining things to me. He knew about everything. That's why everyone looked up to him and respected him."

  She hummed a vague note of agreement, but she wasn't really listening because mentioning the night she learned about thunder and the giants had somehow evoked the memory of her vanity mirror, the vanity mirror her mother had given her. Her father had broken it in a rage the night her mother ran off.

  "I used to have this mirror," she said quietly. "I would sit in front of it for hours, staring deep into my eyes, until I got this funny feeling that the person in the glass was a stranger who happened to look like me. That was eerie enough, but then I'd start wondering: and who's the other person, the one inside my head, looking out through my eyes at the strange girl in the mirror? Then I'd say my name aloud over and over. Ruth Lillian, Ruth Lillian, Ruth Lil-li-an, until the sounds didn't make any sense, and pretty soon I'd get the feeling that I was right on the edge of finding out something that was too scary to know. You ever felt like that, Matthew?"

  "No. Just the Cracker-Jacks box."

  She turned to him and blinked. "Cracker-Jacks?"

  "Cracker-Jacks is popcorn with caramel on it and a few peanuts. And there's a little toy in-"

  "I know what Cracker-Jacks are, Matthew. But what do they have to do with anything?"

  "Well, the box is something like your mirror. I mean, on a Cracker-Jacks box there's a sailor boy holding a smaller Cracker-Jacks box. And one day it suddenly came to me that there must be another, smaller sailor boy on that smaller box, and he must be holding another, even smaller box of Cracker-Jacks, and on that box, there must be a little teeny sailor boy holding a little teeny box of Cracker-Jacks, and on that box there must be… And it would go on forever! Everything getting littler and littler, forever. I felt dizzy thinking about it. And scared. Kind of like your mirror. See what I mean?"

  Ruth Lillian did see what he meant… sort of.

  "I once had this teacher that liked me? And when I told her about the Cracker-Jack sailor boys getting smaller and smaller, she said it was called infinity. And she made the sign of infinity on the bla
ckboard. It looked like a Lazy-8 cattle brand."

  "What looked like a Lazy-8 cattle brand?" Mr. Kane asked from the doorway, startling them. He had padded down from his bedroom to see why Ruth Lillian had not come up to bed yet.

  Matthew stood up quickly, but immediately wished he hadn't, because that made it look like they were doing something they shouldn't, which they weren't. "Infinity, sir."

  "Infinity? You've been sitting out here all this time talking about infinity?"

  "Yes," Ruth Lillian said. "And mirrors. And Cracker-Jack."

  Mr. Kane shook his head wearily. "Go to bed. It's late."

  "All right. Good night, Matthew."

  "Good night, Ruth Lillian. Good night, sir."

  "Hm…? Oh, yes. Good night."

  DURING HIS FIRST WEEKS in Twenty-Mile, Matthew had seemed to be succeeding with the second phase of his technique for survival in new places: Once inside, be nice, and play by their rules. Everyone was impressed by his willingness to work hard for small wages. "Look at that kid go, will you?" But after the shine wore off, people came to take his good-humored hard work for granted. "That's just the way the kid is. He likes working hard. Guess it takes all kinds."

  He couldn't rid himself of the feeling that he wasn't really respected by any of them. And in some cases it was worse than just lack of respect. While he was having his weekly meal with Doc and the other miners at the boardinghouse, he'd sometimes look up and see Oskar Bjorkvist staring at him from the kitchen door, resentment seething in his eyes. Oskar's mother constantly berated him for letting a stranger come into town and snap up all the jobs that were rightfully his-money he could be earning if he weren't such a stupid!.. lazy!.. She punctuated her fury by slapping his ears so hard they were hot and red for hours.

  Nor had Professor Murphy reacted in a friendly way when, after the two-week trial period was over, Matthew had asked that his seventy-five cents for half a day's hard labor be doubled to a dollar fifty. Twenty-Mile's Tonsorial Maestro had rankled at having to come up with an additional six-bits, and he accused Matthew of having "roped him in" by offering to do the work for one price, then blackmailing him for more. Matthew admitted that the original arrangement was his way of letting the Professor see a sample of his work, but he didn't feel it was blackmail to ask for a buck fifty for a whole day's hard work when he got that much for doing odd jobs for B. J. Stone and Coots up at the Livery. Professor Murphy responded with a snort.

  In the end, Murphy reluctantly compromised, offering a dollar and a quarter, but he warned Matthew that he'd be considering "other arrangements." And the following Sunday morning Matthew arrived at the barbershop to find Oskar Bjorkvist scrubbing out the bath barrels. But the viscous-minded boy used up two bars of Fels-Naphtha, broke the long-handled brush, and did such a poor job that Professor Murphy had to spend the next morning re-cleaning them, swearing and growling, his wig in constant danger as he grunted over the rims of the barrels that cut into his potbelly. So Matthew got his job back (at a dollar and a half), and Oskar Bjorkvist, who had received a proud maternal pat on the cheek only the day before, got such a slap on the ear that his head ached for hours.

  ONE NIGHT, AFTER BEING irritable throughout supper because he'd had particularly sharp chest pains that afternoon, Mr. Kane went to bed early. After cleaning up the dishes, Matthew spent his customary half hour with Ruth Lillian out in the cool of the porch, she gazing out across to the foothills while he looked wistfully at her profile, just visible in the starglow of a moonless night.

  "What you thinking about?" he asked.

  "Hm-m? Oh, nothing really. I was just wondering what was the most important thing a person can have in this life. Beauty? Brains? Wealth?"

  "Respect," Matthew said without having to consider.

  "Respect?"

  "Respect may not seem important to you because you and your pa have always had it. But not me. And as for my pa…"

  "But everyone likes you, Matthew."

  "That ain't true, Ruth Lillian. And even if it was, liking ain't respecting. Mr. Anthony Bradford Chumms wrote that a man who don't command respect ain't but half a man. That's why I want respect, even from people like Professor Murphy, and the Bjorkvists, and the Benson brothers, and — "

  "The Benson brothers?"

  "Oh… they were just some kids who…" He shrugged, reluctant to explain. But after a while, he began telling her about how his family had drifted from town to town, so he was always, always the new kid in school. And that meant taking a lot of razzing from bullies. One of the things he got teased about was his name. Kids used to chant, "Dub-chek… chek… chek… chek," making the sound you make when you're calling chickens to feed.

  "But… I thought your name was Chumms. Matthew Bradford Chumms."

  "Well, yes… that's… my name now. But when I was little they used to call me…" He looked down and scrubbed one palm hard with the other thumb. Then he lifted his head and looked her straight in the eye. "Ruth Lillian, I lied when I said my name was Chumms. It's really… Dubchek."

  "There's nothing wrong with Dubchek."

  "Except that it's not a real American name!"

  "Well, what about Kane? Kane's a Jewish name."

  "It is? Yeah, but it sounds American. That's what counts."

  "Is that why you fought with those Benson boys? Because they poked fun at your name?"

  "No, it was more than that. We'd just moved to Bushnell, Nebraska, and right from the first I had trouble with the Benson brothers. They were bigger than us other kids 'cause they'd flunked twice. I hated school because of them, and I'd of played sick and stayed home, except there was this schoolmarm who took a shine to me and said I had the richest imagination of any boy in school."

  Not wanting to make Ruth Lillian jealous, he didn't mention the secret, painfully intense love he had nourished for this pretty young teacher, nor the apple he had stolen from somebody's back yard and buffed on his shirt until it had a deep ruby shine, but then didn't have the courage to put onto her desk for fear the kids would ridicule him. In the end, he ate it behind his book to get rid of the evidence, but the teacher caught him and chided him for eating in class. But he did tell Ruth Lillian about the dictionary the schoolmarm gave him as a prize for a story he'd written. The dictionary wasn't new. It was better than new; it was her own, with her name written in it and all. He still had it, and he'd keep it for ever and ever.

  When he went up to the front of the class to receive the dictionary, the Benson brothers had scowled at him and shown their teeth. And later in the school yard they called him a liar, because his story was about a boy who had a brave father who was hard to live up to, while his pa was a drunk who couldn't keep a job because he stole and lied and was nothing but a low-down Dubchek… chek… chek… chek.

  "And they beat you up?" Ruth Lillian asked.

  "They tried." Matthew told her how the Bensons gathered a bunch of younger boys behind the outhouses and described what they were going to do to the schoolmarm, when it was their folks' turn to board her. They told how they were going to sneak into her room when she was sleeping and-He stopped short.

  "Something dirty, I suppose," Ruth Lillian said dully, knowing what sewers most boys' minds were.

  "Awful dirty. Too dirty for me to tell you."

  "And you stood up for her?"

  "Well… yes. So the oldest Benson pushed me against the wall, and the next thing I knew we were at it — me against all of them. Even the smaller kids joined in. I couldn't do much, what with all their hands grabbing at me and dragging me down. But I wasn't scared, because I'd gone to the Other Place, and I couldn't feel anything, so it didn't matter how hard they punched me. I got in a lucky shot and gave the younger Benson a cut lip. Then they really went crazy! They all started punching and kicking! And the older Benson got me around the neck and shouted into my ear, asking how I liked it: getting beat up, just like my ma got beat up every night by my drunken pa! And the next thing I know, I'd wriggled the kids off me and I had
that Benson by his hair and I was banging his head on the ground! And his nose started to bleed! But I kept banging away until his teeth clicked and his eyes got glassy! And all the kids started screaming that I was killing him! But it didn't matter to me because I was in the Other Place, so I just kept banging away… banging away… banging away…"

  Matthew stopped and swallowed hard several times, his heart thumping beneath his ribs. Ruth Lillian was looking at him oddly, so he forced his breathing to calm down before saying, "Well, there was this man who visited the schoolmarm during recess sometimes. Her beau, I guess. I think he was a teacher too, because he wore glasses and talked sort of refined. Well, he came running out of the schoolhouse shouting and slapping heads to break through the ring of kids, and he snatched me up and shook me and asked did I want to kill that boy? And the schoolmarm came pushing through and knelt down by the Benson kid and waved air at him until he gagged and spit and came to. Then she looked stern at me and told her beau that I was a new boy in town, and that new boys always caused trouble, trying to prove how tough they were, and then this beau of hers snatched me around some more and asked me if I thought I was tough, and all the kids were looking at me and grinning, so, naturally, I said, you bet! Plenty damned tough! And the schoolmarm said it wasn't my fault because my folks were… she didn't want to say what. But the smaller Benson piped up that my pa was a drunk and always beat up my ma! And the man said that was too bad, but it didn't excuse me being a troublemaker and pounding kids' heads on the ground until they were half-dead. And then he put his face up close to mine and said, 'If you think you're all that tough, little man, why don't you try to take a poke at me?' I could tell he was sure I wouldn't do it, and that he was sort of showing off for the schoolmarm, letting her see that he knew how to handle children. But all the kids were standing there, grinning, and the bigger Benson was sneering at me through his bloody nose, so what could I do? I mean, what could I do? I gave him my hardest shot. It broke his glasses, and he went down-from surprise, mostly. The schoolmarm knelt over him, dabbing his cut eyebrow with her handkerchief. She looked up at me and screamed, 'Go home! Go home, and never come back, you hear?' So I… I went home and never came back."