1

    

    From the second-floor hotel veranda he could look down into the dusty street and see the women twirling their parasols and hurrying about in their bustles. These were town women with sweet Christian faces and sweet Christian souls. Carlyle, six years out of prison at Fort Madison, wanted such a woman. He imagined that their juices were tastier, their love by turns gentler and wilder, and their soft words in the darkness afterward balming like a cool breeze on a hot July afternoon. He would never know. Sweet Christian women had never taken to Carlyle. He had put his seed only in whores and long ago his seed had turned to poison.

    Right now, though, Carlyle wasn’t worrying about women, sweet or otherwise. He was looking at the two riders who were coming down the middle of the street, one astride a roan, one on a dun. A water wagon followed them, cutting the dust with sprays of silver water. Behind the wagon ran some noisy town kids waving and jumping and laughing and carrying on the way kids always did when they were three days out of school and just beginning summer vacation.

    The two riders didn’t seem to notice the kids. They didn’t seem to notice much, in fact. The small midwestern town was a showcase hereabouts, what with electricity, telephones, and a depot that President Harrison himself had once told the local Odd Fellows club was “most singularly impressive.” Anyone could tell, therefore, that the two riders came from a city. Country folks always gawked when they came to Myles. City folks, who’d seen it all already, were too cynical and spoiled to gawk.

    One of the riders was a boy, probably sixteen or so, tall and lanky, with a handsome rugged face. But it was on the other rider that Carlyle settled his attention. The man was short, somewhat chunky, packed into a dark vested suit far too hot for an afternoon like this. He wore a derby and carried a Winchester in his scabbard.

    Carlyle knew the man. Oh, didn’t know him in the sense that they’d spoken or anything, but knew him in the sense that the man was in some way familiar.

    Carlyle raised his beer mug and sipped from it just as, sprawled in a chair behind him, the whore yawned again. She was too wide and too white. It was for the latter reason that she liked to sit out on the veranda, so the sun would tan her arms and bare legs. In her petticoats she was damned near naked and it seemed she could care less. Her name was Jenna and she and Carlyle had been living in the same hotel room for the past eight months. Last night she’d started talking marriage again and Carlyle, just drunk enough and not impressed by her threats of leaving him if he ever slapped her again, doubled his fist and poked it once straight and hard into her eye. Her shiner this morning was a beauty. Of course, he’d had to offer her something in compensation. Not marriage, he said; but teeth. Store-bought teeth. Hers were little brown stubs that made her mouth smell so bad he had to down two buckets of beer before he could bring himself to kiss her.

    “What the hell you lookin’ at so hard?” Jenna wanted to know.

    “Man.”

    “What man?”

    “Man on a dun.”

    “You never saw a man on no dun before?”

    “Wonder why he came here.”

    “Came where?”

    “To town. Myles.”

    “Free country.”

    “Yeah, but he wants somethin’ special.”

    “How you know that?”

    “You can see by the way he rides. Like he’s just waitin’ for somethin’ to happen.”

    “That’s how I was last night,” Jenna laughed. “Waitin’ for somethin’ to happen.”

    He looked back at her. “You don’t like it, you whore, you can always move out.”

    “Just a joke, Henry. Jus’ teasin’. Too much beer affects most men that way.”

    But Carlyle was no longer listening. He had turned his attention back to the street and the two riders. Halfway down the block, and across the street, they were dismounting in front of the McAlester Hotel. Unlike the place where Carlyle and the whore lived, the McAlester didn’t have cockroaches and colored maids who went through your room trying to steal stuff.

    “Sonofabitch,” Carlyle said.

    “What?”

    “I just recognized who he is.”

    “Who is he?”

    "Sonofabitch,” Carlyle said again.

    He went back to the whore and tried to hand her his beer mug.

    “I don’t want that thing. I ain’t your maid,” she said. She could get real bitchy, this one.

    Carlyle threw the beer in her face.

    “You ain’t got no right to do that,” she said, spitting out suds.

    “Hell if I don’t,” Carlyle said. “Long as I pay the rent on that room, I got a right to do any god damn thing I please.”

    Then he was gone, inside to his room and then into the hallway and then down the stairs to the lobby. He took two steps at a time.

    He had suddenly remembered, from all the pictures in the newspapers right after it happened, who the man was.

    He did not stop hurrying until he was two blocks from the downtown area, and running down a side street so fast people stopped to look at him.