Gunman's Rhapsody

There was a little more color in Josie’s face, he thought, and maybe she was breathing a little quicker, but it was hard to see because it was nearly dark out and Josie had not lit a lamp. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she stood and picked up the two cups and saucers and put them on the tray and carried them without a word into the kitchen. He heard her put the tray on the kitchen table. Then she came back into the room, walking quite briskly. He stood, afraid she was going to show him the door, but she didn’t. She walked right up to him and put her body against his and raised her face and said in the softest voice imaginable, “I’ll go peacefully.”

In the bedroom it was a blur of discarded clothing and tangled bedclothes, the smell of soap and perfume, the feel of her mouth, her body arching, hair, hands, thighs, the sound of her breathing, the sound of her voice, urgency, tension, strength, submission. Wyatt had been with women everywhere he went. He had never been with a woman like this. When it was over he lay as if stunned beside her on the bed in the now-dark room. Her head leaned against his chest.

“Mother of God,” he said.

She moved her head on his chest and said nothing. He lay without thinking, still in the high wash of emotion slow to recede. A team went past on Third Street. He heard the creak of harness and the sound of the horses. He felt as if he had walked through a passage into a country he’d never seen, and from which he could never return.

“It is all different now,” he said.

She moved her head again, only a little, on his chest. Slowly thought came back. Would it always be like this? Probably not. But it could always be good. Was it like this with Behan? No. What about Mattie?

“So what do we do, Josie?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have to be together.”

“Yes.”

And there it was. His life, which had been one thing this morning, was another thing tonight. She had to do something about Behan. He had to do something about Mattie. Mattie would be hurt. Behan would be angry. Maybe there’d be trouble. But that was only incidental. The shape of his future was now set; he knew in ways he could never articulate, could never understand or even think about, that the possibility which had begun to assemble when he’d first seen her face in Pinafore on Wheels, perhaps the only insubstantial possibility that he had ever allowed himself to entertain, had coalesced in this moment of frantic unification, and become no longer possibility, but the singular determinant of the rest of his life.

“It’ll stir up a lot of trouble,” Wyatt said.

“I don’t care,” Josie said.

“No,” Wyatt said, “I don’t either.”

“So we might as well make the most of it,” Josie said and kissed him, and he rolled toward her and the future once again surged over them.

Twenty-three

“Allie’s pretty mad,” Virgil said. “Told me she didn’t want you coming to the house no more.”

“She knows about Josie,” Wyatt said.

Virgil drank some beer and put the glass down and wiped his mustache on his sleeve.

“Everybody in the damn town knows,” Virgil said.

Wyatt nodded slowly, looking into his coffee cup.

“Including Mattie,” he said.

“What you going to do about Mattie?” Virgil said.

“Damned if I know,” Wyatt said. “She won’t leave, and I can’t throw her out. She can’t take care of herself.”

“No,” Virgil said.

“Couple of days,” Wyatt said, “she’d be in a crib east of Sixth Street.”

“I know,” Virgil said. “Maybe you could move out on her.”

“She’d follow me,” Wyatt said.

Virgil nodded. He was drawing little circles with the bottom of his beer mug on the wet tabletop.

“Besides,” Wyatt said, “it’s my house.”

“Yep.”

“What you going to do about Allie?”

Virgil kept drawing his little circles while he looked across the room and out through the half-doors into Allen Street.

“I told her my brothers would always be welcome in my house.”

“How she like that?”

“She said to me that it was her house too, and she didn’t marry no goddamned brothers, she married me.”

Wyatt smiled.

“Tough, ain’t she,” he said.

“Yeah, and good-hearted. She feels bad for Mattie.”

“Hell, Virgil, I feel bad for Mattie, but there isn’t anything I can do about it.”

“You could give up Josie,” Virgil said carefully.

“No,” Wyatt said, “I couldn’t.”

Virgil continued to look out at Allen Street. It was not the kind of conversation he enjoyed.

“Guess maybe I understand that,” he said after a while. “Not so sure I could give up Allie either.”

“I don’t want to give you and Allie no trouble,” Wyatt said. “I can stay away from your house.”

Virgil shook his head, and looked, for the first time in the conversation, straight at his younger brother.

“No,” Virgil said, “ ’less you stop being my brother, or it stops being my house, you are welcome. Allie understands it. She don’t like it, but she will do what I say about this. You come over just like always. There won’t be no trouble.”

Wyatt nodded.

“What about Behan?” Virgil said.

“House belongs to Josie,” Wyatt said. “Her father paid for it.”