скачать книгу бесплатно
“He cleaned up, washing his hands with snow, fed the team, and then boiled up another pan of coffee. He fried himself a big mess of deer liver and onions and heated up some more of the biscuits. After he ate, he sat on a log and lit his pipe.”
“I’ll bet he was tired,” Jack said, just to be saying something. “Not being in bed all the night before and all that.”
“He still had something left to tend to,” Dad said. “It was almost dark when he spotted Old Buell slinking back toward camp. He was out on the open, coming back along the trail Pete had broken though the snow. His belly looked full, and his muzzle and ears were all bloody the same way Pete’s had been.”
“He found the other dog’s deer, I’ll betcha.” Jack laughed. “You said he was a smart old dog.”
Beyond the kitchen doorway, one of my shadowy dogs crept slowly toward the warmth of the pilot-light campfire, his eyes sad and friendly, like the eyes of the hound some kid up the block owned.
“Well, Dad watched him for a minute or two, and then he took his rifle, pulled back the hammer, and shot Old Buell right between the eyes.”
The world beyond the doorway shattered like a broken mirror and fell apart back into the kitchen again. I jerked up and looked straight into my father’s face. It was very grim, and his eyes were very intent on Jack, as if he were telling my brother something awfully important.
He went on without seeming to notice my startled jump. “Old Buell went end over end when that bullet hit him. Then he kicked a couple times and didn’t move anymore. Dad didn’t even go over to look at him. He just reloaded the rifle and set it where it was handy, and then he and Old Pete climbed up into the wagon and went to bed.
“The next morning, he hitched up the team, loaded up the deer carcasses, and started back home. It took him three days again to get back to the wheat ranch, and Granddad and Grandma were sure glad to see him.” My father lifted me off his lap, leaned back and lit a cigarette.
“It took them a good two days to cut up the deer and put them down in pickling crocks. After they finished it all up and Dad and Granddad were sitting in the kitchen, smoking their pipes with their sock feet up on the open oven door, Granddad turned to my Dad and said, “Sam, whatever happened to Old Buell, anyway? Did he run off?”
“Well, Dad took a deep breath. He knew Granddad had been awful fond of that old hound. ‘Had to shoot him,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t hunt—wouldn’t even hunt his own food. Caught him feeding on Pete’s kill.’
“Well, I guess Granddad thought about that for a while. Then he finally said, ‘Only thing you could do, Sam, I guess. Kind of a shame, though. Old Buell was a good dog when he was younger. Had him a long time.’”
The wind in the chimney suddenly sounded very loud and cold and lonesome.
“But why’d he shoot him?” I finally protested.
“He just wasn’t any good anymore,” Dad said, “and when a dog wasn’t any good in those days, they didn’t want him around. Same way with people. If they’re no good, why keep them around?” He looked straight at Jack when he said it.
“Well, I sure wouldn’t shoot my own dog,” I objected.
Dad shrugged. “It was different then. Maybe if things were still the way they were back then, the world would be a lot easier to live in.”
That night when we were in bed in the cold bedroom upstairs, listening to Mom and the Old Man yelling at each other down in the living room, I said it again to Jack. “I sure wouldn’t shoot my own dog.”
“Aw, you’re just a kid,” he said. “That was just a story. Grandpa didn’t really shoot any dog. Dad just said that.”
“Dad doesn’t tell lies,” I said. “If you say that again, I’m gonna hit you.”
Jack snorted with contempt.
“Or maybe I’ll shoot you,” I said extravagantly. “Maybe some day I’ll just decide that you’re no good, and I’ll take my gun and shoot you. Bang! Just like that, and you’ll be dead, and I’ll betcha you wouldn’t like that at all.”
Jack snorted again and rolled over to go to sleep, or to wrestle with the problem of being grown-up and still being afraid, which was to worry at him for the rest of his life. But I lay awake for a long time staring into the darkness. And when I drifted into sleep, the forest in the kitchen echoed with the hollow roar of that old rifle, and my shadowy old dog with the sad, friendly eyes tumbled over and over in the snow.
In the years since that night I’ve had that same dream again and again—not every night, sometimes only once or twice a year—but it’s the only thing I can think of that hasn’t changed since I was a boy.
The Gathering
1
I guess that if it hadn’t been for that poker game, I’d have never really gotten to know my brother. That puts the whole thing into the realm of pure chance right at the outset.
I’d been drafted into the Army after college. I sort of resented the whole thing but not enough to run off to Canada or to go to jail. Some of my buddies got kind of excited and made a lot of noise about “principle” and what-not, but I was the one staring down the mouth of that double-barrelled shotgun called either/or. When I asked them what the hell the difference was between the Establishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to Nam and the Antiestablishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to a federal penitentiary, they got decidedly huffy about the whole thing.
Sue, my girlfriend, who felt she had to call and check in with her mother if we were going to be five minutes late getting home from a movie, told me on the eve, as they used to say, of my departure that she’d run off to Canada with me if I really wanted her to. Since I didn’t figure any job in Canada would earn me enough to pay the phone bill she’d run up calling Momma every time she had to go to the biffy, I nobly turned her down. She seemed awfully relieved.
I suppose that ultimately I went in without any fuss because it didn’t really mean anything to me one way or the other. None of it did.
As it all turned out, I went to Germany instead of the Far East. So I soaked up Kultur and German beer and played nursemaid to an eight-inch howitzer for about eighteen months, holding off the red threat. I finished up my hitch in late July and came back on a troopship. That’s where I got into the poker game.
Naturally, it was Benson who roped me into it. Benson and I had been inducted together in Seattle and had been in the same outfit in Germany. He was a nice enough kid, but he couldn’t walk past a deck of cards or a pair of dice if his life depended on it. He’d been at me a couple times and I’d brushed him off, but on the third day out from Bremerhaven he caught me in the chow line that wandered up and down the gray-painted corridors of the ship. He knew I had about twenty dollars I hadn’t managed to spend before we were shipped out.
“Come on, Alders. What the hell? It’s only for small change.” His eyes were already red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but his fatigue pockets jingled a lot. He must have been winning for a change.
“Oh, horseshit, Benson,” I told him. “I just don’t get that much kick out of playing poker.”
“What the fuck else is there to do?”
He had a point there. I’d gotten tired of looking at the North Atlantic after about twenty minutes. It’s possibly the dullest stretch of ocean in the world—if you’re lucky. Anyway, I know he’d be at me until I sat in for a while, and it really didn’t make that much difference to me. Maybe that’s why I started winning.
“All right, Arsch-loch.” I gave in. “I’ll take your goddamn money. It doesn’t make a shit to me.” So, after chow, I went and played poker.
The game was in the forward cargo hold. They’d restacked the five hundred or so duffle bags until there was a cleared-out place in the middle of the room. Then they’d rigged a table out of a dozen or so bags, a slab of cardboard, and a GI blanket. The light wasn’t too good, and the placed smelled of the bilges, and after you’ve sat on some guy’s extra pair of boots inside his duffle bag for about six hours, your ass feels like he’s been walking on it, but we stuck it out. Like Benson said, what else was there to do?
The game was seven-card stud, seven players. No spit-in-the-ocean, or no-peek, or three-card-lowball. There were seven players—not always the same seven guys, but there were always seven players.
The first day I sat in the game most of the play was in coins. Even so, I came out about forty dollars ahead. I quit for the day about midnight and gave my seat to the Spec-4 who’d been drooling down my back for three hours. He was still there when I drifted back the next morning.
“I guess you want your seat back, huh?”
“No, go ahead and play, man.”
“Naw, I’d better knock off and get some sleep. Besides, I ain’t held a decent hand for the last two hours.”
He got up and I sat back down and started winning again.
The second day the paper money started to show. The pots got bigger, and I kept winning. I wondered how much longer my streak could go on. All the laws of probability were stacked against me by now. Nobody could keep winning forever. When I quit that night, I was better than two hundred ahead. I stood up and stretched. The cargo hold was full of guys, all sitting and watching, very quietly. Word gets around fast on a troopship.
On the morning of the third day, Benson finally went broke. He’d been giving up his place at the table for maybe two-hour stretches, and he’d grab quick catnaps back in one of the corners. He looked like the wrath of God, his blond, blankly young face stubbled and grimy-looking. The cards had gone sour for him late the night before—not completely sour, just sour enough so that he was pretty consistently holding the second-best hand at the table. That can get awfully damned expensive.
It was on the sixth card of a game that he tossed in his last three one-dollar bills. He had three cards to an ace-high straight showing. A fat guy at the end of the table was dealing, and he flipped out the down-cards to Benson, the Spec-4, and himself. The rest of us had folded. I could tell from Benson’s face that he’d filled the straight. He might as well have had a billboard on the front of his head.
The Spec-4 folded.
“You’re high,” the fat dealer said, pointing at Benson’s ace.
“I ain’t got no money to bet,” Benson answered.
“Tough titty.”
“Come on, man. I got it, but I can’t bet it.”
“Bet, check, or fold, fella,” the dealer said with a fat smirk.
Benson looked around desperately. There was a sort of house rule against borrowing at the table. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How about this watch?” He held out his arm.
“I got a watch,” the dealer said, but he looked interested.
“Come on, man. I got that watch when I graduated from high school. My folks give a hundred and a half for it. It’ll sure as hell cover any bet in this chickenshit little poker game.”
The fat guy held out his hand. Benson gave him the watch.
“Give you five bucks.”
“Bullshit! That watch is worth a hundred and a half, I told you.”
“Not to me, it ain’t. Five bucks.”
“Fuck you, Buster. You ain’t gittin’ my watch for no lousy five bucks.”
“I guess you better throw in your hand then, huh?”
“Christ, man, gimme a break.”
“Come on, fella,” the fat guy said, “you’re holdin’ up the game. Five bucks. Take it or leave it.”
I could see the agony of indecision in Benson’s face. Five dollars was the current bet limit. “All right,” he said finally.
He bet two. The dealer raised him three. Benson called and rolled over his hole cards. He had his straight. His face was jubilant. He looked more like a kid than ever.
The fat guy had a flush.
Benson watched numbly, rubbing his bare left wrist, as the chortling fat man raked in the money. Finally he got up and went quickly out of the cargo hold.
“Hey, man,” the fat dealer called after him, “I’ll give you a buck apiece for your boots.” He howled with laughter.
Another player took Benson’s place.
“That was kinda hard,” a master sergeant named Riker drawled mildly from the other end of the table.
“That’s how we play the game where I come from, Sarge,” the fat man said.
It took me two days to get him, but I finally nailed him right to the wall. The pots were occasionally getting up to forty or fifty dollars by then, and the fat man was on a losing streak.
He had two low pair showing, and he was betting hard, hoping to get even. It was pretty obvious that he had a full house, seven and threes. I had two queens, a nine and the joker showing. My hand looked like a pat straight, but I had two aces in the hole. My aces and queens would stomp hell out of his sevens and threes.
Except that on the last round I picked up another ace.
He bet ten dollars. I raised him twenty-five.
“I ain’t got that much,” he said.
“Tough titty.”
“I got you beat.”
“You better call the bet then.”
“You can’t just buy the fuckin’ pot!”
“Call or fold, friend.” I was enjoying it.
“Come on, man. You can’t just buy the fuckin’ pot!”
“You already said that. How much you got?”
“I got twelve bucks.” He thought I was going to reduce my bet so he could call me. His face relaxed a little.
“You got a watch?” I asked him quietly.
He caught on then. “You bastard!” He glared at me. He sure wanted to keep Benson’s watch. “You ain’t gettin’ this watch that way, fella.”
I shrugged and reached for the pot.
“What the hell you doin’?” he squawked.
“If you’re not gonna call—”
“All right, all right, you bastard!” He peeled off Benson’s watch and threw it in the pot. “There, you’re called.”
“That makes seventeen,” I said. “You’re still eight bucks light.”
“Fuck you, fella! That goddamn watch is worth a hundred and fifty bucks!”
“I saw you buy it, friend. The price was five. That’s what you paid for it, so I guess that’s what it’s worth. You got another watch?”
“You ain’t gettin’ my watch.”
I reached for the pot again.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” He pulled off his own watch.
“That’s twenty-two,” I said. “You’re still light.”
“Come on, man. My watch is worth more than five bucks.”
“A Timex? Don’t be stupid. I’m giving you a break letting you have five on it.” I reached for the pot again.
