The Beetle Leg: Novel Read online

  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  THE SHERIFF

  aquarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a Barren Sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.

  He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

  It is a lawless country.

  For fourteen years I’ve watched it with my boys, and not one year has passed without a thieving or a disturbance caught up like some bad notion by our townsmen. Man and woman, out here at least, don’t learn to keep to their own houses of a night. I’ve found them, plenty of them, faces that I knew, some I didn’t know, in the most unlikely lots or ditches or clear under a porch. If I didn’t find them first there were others did. I slept light, waiting for those to come and tell me.

  There was one death.

  But a man gets used to a pair of handcuffs on his hip. The string our tank key is hung from—we only got the one cell—has been around my neck the entire fourteen years. And there’s not one shirt I own but what it’s got badge holes through the pocket. Some men don’t commit crimes, but they’re ready to. I’ve had two ranchers come to me in the middle of the night with a horse between them, and they trusted me to know whose horse it was. A man gets used to staying around a jail. I did. And there’s one thing sure; it’ll never have to hold no woman. There are other rooms in town for that.

  I used to follow the tracks of a single horse for miles in my pickup truck and that man I trailed—there were only a few prints in the sand like someone stirred it with a stick—had committed a violation, was running all the time I drove. Or I was called to pay a visit to some woman who discovered a man on her place. I wore my cartridge belt summer or winter and my sleeves rolled up.

  It was the men or women who didn’t have no place to hide that gave me trouble. Them people too easy found doing things a man can’t talk about, things that happened or not depending on whether you arrived five minutes early or five late. They broke the law all right, directly they couldn’t quiet down and talk when I was near enough to see. It almost depended on how much white showed from the side of the road before my torch was even lit. I took them in. I’ve got no time to waste with men like that.

  But I never caught them Lampson brothers at it. Others I have. There’s families in this country, where there’s a daughter or son and daughter—or perhaps even a young mother without children, or a widow—and they’re the ones that have forced my hand. I ain’t keen on nodding at the father or husband when it’s over, either. I don’t like to see a man who’s got to count heads all night—or who takes to going out himself.

  But not the Lampson boys. No one ever even thought they had done one thing to shame us, at least not before the older married. And the younger’s record is still clear.

  I used to know the younger well.

  It’s not easy holding reins on people, keeping watch. There’s something about a single street, some houses and four or five hundred square miles of ground that seems to make them worse. A hand comes in off a ranch, yellowed, with his mouth still closed, and there’s no way of telling what he’s done. It takes hours to find out. I didn’t even meet the younger Lampson until the day his brother married. I went to that wedding.

  But two years before, I saw the older.

  In my job a man’s teeth start to grind, his jaws don’t seem to set well when he’s got to write up warrants and serve them too. It’s a day’s work to stop cars, take strangers by the elbow, and see public places closed on time. And I had to identify them. A man’s eyes burn, he ain’t too comfortable when he has got to stand in front of his own cell door, to stare at the one who is now inside and won’t even look you in the face. Or worse, wants to talk. Why, when a person has a visitor in town, harmless enough for some, perhaps, I’ve got to ask around if I hear about it. You never really know if they’re relatives or even friends. A different window burning in a house at night —anything could happen. You take to drinking coffee and know how full or empty the local courtroom is going to be before you even get there. And it’s often. A man gets kind of sick at the law when he don’t know who has come into town or left it.

  But the day I saw him I was feeling good. Nothing could have bothered me when I first saw the older Lampson. I was just Deputy at the time. Just barely hanging onto and still learning about the harm that is done right in a kitchen or in an open field.

  I took the call. And that cheered the day for me because it was only the voice of a little girl, and I suppose I thought to hear of a killing or of a man with his hand pierced on a fork. “Honey,” I told her, “I’ll come over.” If she had been grown, I would have considered more. It wasn’t far to drive. I think though of how far that little girl must have walked, in a bathing suit, and I don’t know as I could stand it now. Whoever owned that telephone didn’t even help her or else she just wanted to make the call herself.

  It was twenty mile but I had my truck.

  I remember a day like that. There was nothing really wrong; I found her at the roadside, standing bareheaded and with thin hair, in a sun as heavy as I ever saw. She wore one of them square bathing suits, pinched high like she had it awhile, with straight wide straps pulled across her shoulders. As soon as I parked the car and locked it, and without moving, she spoke:

  “I got a friend. She’s holding him.”

  That’s all. She turned and led the way toward the nearby river.

  In those days, before they choked her off, that river widened or narrowed as it pleased, one day going fast, the next slow. But no matter how it flowed and until it dried, it carried its own high load of mud and a body lost upstream or down would have been hid for good. I knew children shouldn’t play around it.

  But they run loose out here like their parents. And you can’t tell what children see or what they find. They’re skinned up and bandaged from climbing around where people big enough to do wrong have done it, or tried to, since sometimes me and my boys can stop them before they’re through. Right in the middle of the desert where there is hardly sign of bird or animal you are liable to find some scrap or garment that once belonged personally to a woman. That’s evidence. A man is wise if he keeps to town. But even there he comes across it.

  So I walked quiet as I could when I first smelled that brown water and caught sight of the shadows from shrub and cactus that grew more heavy in those days, when the crime rate was high around the river and the daylight offenders were the worst. I knew this little girl had found one of the spots where water, meant just to liven up men half dead or draw together cattle, drives men and women to undress and swim and maybe kill themselves. That water towed under many.

  I’ve dragged it. That was part of my job, as well as bringing out liquor to a horse with heaves or holding a basin under a man’s wrists that was slashed in jail. He lived. I hate the sight of a dragging iron with all them rusty points that you lower from the end of a slippery rope. We never caught much with it anyway. I don’t like boats.

  This time we didn’t need an iron. And I didn’t figure to have to use my gun, not with this child safe enough to come and get me, leaving her friend to wait. But I had it ready.

  The shrubbery didn’t cover us at all. I think he saw us from the first. I didn’t care if he did; the thing to do was to crouch down as we was and watch before jumping up to scare him or chase him away. I took my time. There are other times when you have to step right in, when you are Sheriff or even Deputy, and catch hold of a bare shoulder or head of hair, keeping your face turn
ed back so as it don’t get bruised, and drag them off. Maybe you get splashed with a glass of beer or your hand gets bit, but they have to be broke apart. Fast. I would rather help a woman have a baby than fight with them that don’t or that don’t care. But sometimes it’s better not to move.

  We watched.

  We sat there in the sun like we had fish poles and all day to wait for what would happen, like that little girl and me would have supper when we got back and it could keep, with no trouble at home, until we did.

  But the one we watched—he must have had his fish already. He looked fit. Fit enough to swim the river at least instead of squatting on the other bank. I think that girl knew it too. He might not have bolted either had I got right up and hollared at him. He liked it where he was. The girl pointed to her friend who sat alone on the sand about half way out a spit that stuck into the river but didn’t join the other side. It was the spot he would make for. If he decided to try.

  “She’s afraid.”

  “And you ain’t?” I whispered back. The towhead girl—plenty of our children out here have white hair, usually not cut too even—was drawing in the sand. Now and then she kind of pulled at her bathing suit or twisted her head and back like she might if she was older or like she wanted to get up and run.

  As far as I could see, he didn’t care. He seemed to be staring at the water. I might have had him in the jail house, there was nothing about him said I couldn’t. On the other hand, there was nothing stamped him bad. I know when to bide my temper and just size up the stride of a man or the way he hangs back when you ask him what he is at. I tried to make out what his hands were doing, but he had them hid. I didn’t suspect him much, though I’d like to have seen if they were small and kind of pink with short tapering fingers.

  He wasn’t suspecting either. He didn’t know how close I watch a man. I lit my pipe, seeing he wouldn’t go no matter what. I’ve seen all kinds, men I had to drive out and below town myself, set them down and make sure they headed south out of sight; others I caught before they entered. And if I stop a couple, I may let them go, I may not. You got to watch them if they are in pair.

  But I have never seen one just squatting in the desert. He’s not sick, more like he’s healthier than most around here. Most men stop at a river bank to drink, cool their feet, and get across and be done with it. Here’s a man, I thought, is snarled with this river. He’ll have more trouble with it yet, I figured.

  There wasn’t any tree to give him shade. You might see a man like him on an island—him and that opposite bank started to look that way to me—someone who had been left there or thrown ashore and you wouldn’t know whether to go up to him or not. It was too late to hail him now. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  But I wasn’t going to leave him there to do what he pleased. And he was set for something, because his pants were off, already rolled up and slung over his shoulder when we got there. My pipe went out and I found I was watching him so hard I sat chewing on it dry. He still wore his suspenders—bright yellow like a shirt I owned but which no Deputy could ever wear—and they just hung down, unfastened.

  If there had been any kind of house around, I might have understood. But there he was, casting a small patch of shadow on water so dark it hardly showed, a man who didn’t look ready to cause trouble and didn’t seem to be got up for any kind of work. He was only half dressed and certainly alone, and yet he didn’t look to need no bothering. The towhead wasn’t minding him, I could see that.

  I’m quick to feel out a stranger. In my job you find that other men ain’t like yourself, not when they open their mouths and you see they got no teeth or pull out a billfold filled with too much money or none at all. Most men is soft and childish or else they got to tell you something behind the house. For all I knew he was only looking at his picture in the water. It finally came to me I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for him.

  “Honey,” I said, “I can’t arrest that man.” She didn’t answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain’t happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. “He ain’t hurt,” I said. “He ain’t drunk. I don’t think he’s got a gun. That’s enough.” But he was something to stare at for an hour or two.

  Either he’s a man escaped already from another prison, where he stayed in the fields or worked out on the roads—and that wasn’t likely—or else he comes naturally by his skin to stand the burn marks of such a sun. And that’s good. He had no hat. I can sit or even stand in it myself the whole day without my mind becoming clouded or even getting up a thirst. I could see that he could too. But there is a limit, when it seemed he didn’t want to talk.

  I whispered, “Ain’t it time to go?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Well, we are,” I said. Maybe he was looking at them little girls, the one hardly hid behind a thorn, the other sitting on her thin legs out there in the sand, maybe not. He must have felt as queer coming across two children that way as they did seeing a grown man perched down like he was on the edge of a river quiet. I don’t know what he thought when he saw me.

  I figured that maybe if I stood up he would. He didn’t. I made the girl get up and brush the sand off herself too. When I stretch out, as I did then, I’m tall enough for a man to see me. I looked right at him, at his shirt tails that was as good as pants to another, at the easy way he slouched as if, had there been some driftwood within reach, he might have built a fire. He was young.

  “I’ll drive you girls home,” I told them, “you’ll be missed.”

  I thought that when we turned and walked away he would stop playing at us and swim across. I would have taken him in my car that day. Men sometimes misjudge a route out here, they’re liable to stray miles. They’re lucky if they get a ride.

  He stayed.

  He probably had a car himself, I never learned. He might have had it parked back behind a dune where I thought the country was flat as it is most everywhere; he probably found a hollow and hid it there with all the things he carried and everything that made him what he was inside it.

  That’s where I should have looked for trouble.

  a man lay buried just below the water level of the dam. He was embedded in the earth and entangled with a caterpillar, pump engine and a hundred feet of hose, somewhere inside the mountain that was protected from the lake on one side by rock and gravel and kept from erosion on its southward slope by partially grown rows of yellow grass. This man—he was remembered in Mistletoe, Government City, and would be as long as the Great Slide came to mind with every ale case struck open—was the brother of one who still hung on, having a place in the fields southwest of the official lines of the town. Boundaries were still marked with transit stakes ten years old.

  In the sunset the survivor of the two, who had not taken part in the battle of the river and who had been on the range when the Slide occurred, drove his team of four horses across the sand of the southward slope, the machine under his seat spitting out seeds, grinding its unaligned rods. His voice carried all the way to the town on the bluff. He rode the boards holding the dry lines in one hand and a flattened cigarette pinched in the other, one knee cocked up and his hat pulled low over blackened cheeks and chin. Six days a week he nursed the animals across the sunward, dry side of the dam for twenty-five dollars a day, and the wind blew sand in his ears and blew the horses’ manes the wrong way. A few hundred yards above his head, from the sharp-rocked track across the top of the dam, the dark, rarely fished miles of water narrowed into a cone through the hills of the badlands. Below him, in the middle of the mosquito flat and at the edge of the man-made delta and surrounded by piles of iron pipe and small, corrugated iron huts, red lead painted sections of the half completed turbine tower rose among steel girders spiked with insulators and weighted with hundreds of high tension, lead-in wires.

  The day shift of the Metal and Lumber Company had stopped wor
k an hour ago, and now the cowboy drove his team without the firing of the riveters or torches blasting sand from the air. For a moment the sun touched the black mounds of earth behind the tower and drifted off, down the almost dry channel as far as he could see, where once the wide river would have lost its mud color and changed to orange, then purple, in the days before Mistletoe even existed and when the fishing was good any place he sat down to cast.

  When he heard a shrill faraway whistle in Clare, twenty miles away, he climbed down, unhitched the team, left the old machine for the night still dropping a few seeds, and let the horses tug him easily toward home on the end of the reins. For a whole day he had been sowing flowers, back and forth, on the mile long stretch of his brother’s grave, and now the horses were tired and he was thirsty. Man and animals cut down from the crest of the dam to the high weeded plateau, basined in the rear by the long gravel approach and fronting on the filled in section of the horseshoe town. Soon the crest would be topped with a macadam road and the street lamps, if ever wired and the last switches installed, would be lit against the horizon.

  The four brown dray horses chomped slowly across the dry track, swaying in the rear but shaking their round noses and twitching their ears in excitement, stumbling now and then in a hole by the road so heavily that it seemed they must fall. Passing one prong of the few hundred brown houses of Mistletoe, Luke Lampson waved to the Finn, a crippled ex-bronc rider hammering on a stoop with two white canes.

  Then, digging his long heels into the turf, he pulled the horses as a station wagon swung close, raising the dust. He waved again, this time at the tin helmeted Metal and Lumber night shift men, setting off to throw sparks from the tower until dawn. He followed the thin sticks hung from a string of barbed wire through the darkening fields, slapping at the mosquitoes that bit through his pants, until, after once more placing a few light logs across the gate, he could look down on the plank and tar paper buildings of his ranch. He turned the horses loose and they trotted downhill, for all their age like young dogs.