And Not to Yield and Bowie by Randy Lee Eickhoff

Author:Randy Lee Eickhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765393883
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER 44

THE HOUSE seemed empty when I came down two hours later from Zoë’s room. I felt strangely nervous, on edge, although there was no reason for me to feel that way. The whiskey had worn off, and although I was tired, everything appeared bright and lucid. The piano player was gone; the whores were gone. I breathed deeply through my nose, smelling the cheap perfume, whiskey, other strange scents that were not strange in that house. I glanced into the mirror between the antlered hat rack on the wall beside the door to check my dress. A tired old man looked back, and briefly, for a scant moment that burned itself into my mind, I saw the face of my father in mine.

“Cuckolded by fate, aren’t we, Father?” I murmured. Then the image changed and I saw myself with fine lines criss-crossing my forehead like a scout’s rudely drawn map. Suddenly I felt old, as old as the hills, and the weight of time burying itself upon my shoulders like the stone of Sisyphus. And, like Sisyphus, I felt as if all I was trying to do kept rolling back down on top of me, burying me. Briefly I saw hills studded with dark pines, a gulch with a small stream running like a snake through it, tents and quick buildings tossed up to serve the citizens slogging through muddy streets, and dimly I heard strained-string twanging of banjos playing “Buffalo Gals” and an out-of-tune piano or two rattling out jangling noise that only the player could appreciate.

“Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight…”

merged with

“Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall

When on the world the mists began to fall.”

I crossed to the window and looked out again at the lilac bushes, half-expecting to see the cowboy I had lain there still there, although I knew he had been long gone. A strange premonition came over me. I felt empty, brooding, as if something vital had been taken from me.

I sensed someone beside me and looked down at the Indian woman I had seen earlier on the couch with Zoë and the cowboy. She looked tired, with bruised half moons under her eyes. A tiny red mark appeared on the side of her neck. I glanced around the room, but we were alone.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked, her full lips smiling slightly, ironically.

I studied her carefully—her skin shone like burnished copper, her breasts full, aureoles large and nearly purple, legs short and muscular but finely shaped. There was something familiar about her. But what? Slowly I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” I said regretfully. “Should I?”

“Annie was my sister,” she said softly, her lips curling back from white teeth.

Indian Annie. Annie Liffey.

Ellsworth, 1867. Smoky fall had draped itself upon us and I breathed deeply as I rode on Black into Ellsworth, a quarter of an antelope tied behind my saddle. I rose early that morning and saddled Black, riding out mainly to clean the sour saloon taste from my mouth and the cigar smoke fog from my lungs.

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