Well, McDonald said, "you had your hunt."
"Yes sir."
"And you lost your tail just like I said you would."
Andrews did not speak.
"That was what you wanted wasn't it?"
McDonald asked.
"Maybe it was in the beginning," Andrew
said, "part of it at least."
"Young people," McDonald said, "always wanting
to start from scratch.
I know you never figured that someone else knew what
he was trying to do, did you?"
"I never thought about it," Andrew said.
"Maybe because I didn't know what
I was trying to do myself."
"Do you know now?"
Andrew moved restlessly.
"Young people," McDonald said contemptuously,
"you always think there's something to find out."
"Yes sir," Andrew said.
"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said.
"You get born, and you nurse on lies,
and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies
in school.
You live all your life on lies.
And then maybe when you're ready to die,
It comes to you that there's nothing, nothing but yourself,
and what you could have done.
Only you ain't done it because the lies told
you there was something else.
Then you know you could have had the world because you're
the only one that knows that secret.
Only then it's too late, you're too old."
"No," Andrew said.
A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them
and tightened his voice.
"That's not the way it is."
"You ain't learned then," McDonald
said, "you ain't learned yet.
Look, you spend nearly a year of your life in sweat
because you have the faith and the dream of a fool,
and what have you got?
Nothing.
You kill 3 to 4,000 buffalo and stack their skins neat
and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them,
and the rats will nest in the skins.
And what have you got to show?
A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon with it,
a beaver might use to make a damn with,
some calluses on your hand, and the memory of a dead man."
"No," Andrew said, "that's not all, that's not all I have."
What does he have?
In an effort to obliterate the memory of this bitter winter
and probably in an effort to reaffirm
his sense of his own existence, young Andrews
has taken up with a dancehall lady named Francine.
He encounters Charlie Hogue on the street
and discovers to another of his horrors,
that Charlie Hogue, a fundamentalist drunkard
has gone mad.
"Miller is looking for you," Charlie Hogue
went on in a high monotonous voice.
"Miller says we're all going somewhere to kill the buffalo.
He knows a place in Colorado.
I think he wants to see you."
"Charlie," Andrews said.
His voice trembled and he clutched his hands hard
around the glass to keep from them shaking.
"Charlie, get hold of yourself."
"We're going on a hunt," Charlie Hogue
continued in his singsong voice.
"You and me and Miller.
Miller knows a skinner we can get an Ellsworth,
it'll be all right.
I'm not afraid to go up there anymore, the Lord will provide.
He smiled and nodded and continued
nodding toward Andrews though his eyes had turned downward
to his glass of whiskey.
"Don't you remember Charlie?"
Andrews voice was hollow.
"Don't you remember anything about it?"
"Remember?"
Charlie Hogan asked.
"The mountains, the hunt, Schneider."
"That's his name," Charlie Hogue said.
"Schneider, that's the skinner in Ellsworth
that Miller's going to get."
"Don't you remember?"
Andrews voice cracked, "Schneider's dead."
Charlie Hogue looked at Andrews, shook his head, and smiled.
A drop of spittle gathered on his lower lip
swelled and coursed into the gray stubble around his chin.
"Nobody dies," he said softly, "the Lord will provide."
For another moment, Andrews looked deep
into Charlie Hogue's eyes--
dull and blue, they were like bits
of empty sky reflected in a dirty pool,
there was nothing behind them.
Nothing to stop Andrews gaze from going on and on.
With almost a sense of horror, Andrews drew back and shook
his head with a sharp movement, he got up from the table
and backed away.
Charlie Hogue did not change his empty stare
or give any sign that he saw Andrews movement.
Andrews turned and walked swiftly out of the bar.
On the sidewalk, in the bright sunlight, the sense lingered.
His legs were weak and his hands were trembling.
Swiftly, unsteadily, he went up the street,
turned and took the stairs that led up the side of Jackson's
saloon to Francine's room.
He opened his eyes wide to the dimness of the room,
he was still breathing heavily.
Francine lying on the bed raised herself on an elbow
and looked at him.
With that movement, her loose greater wrapper parted
and one breast drooped toward her forearm
pale against the gray material.
Andrews went quickly to the bed almost roughly,
he pulled the wrapper away from her body
and let his hands run swiftly, desperately over her.
A small smile came upon Francine's face,
her lids dropped, her hands came to Andrews
fumbled with his clothing, and pulled him down upon her.
Later, as he lay beside her, the tumult within him quieted.
He tried to tell her of his meeting with Charlie Hogue
and of that sense of horror that the meeting had
released in him.
It was not, he tried to make her understand,
so much a result of his recognition
that what Charlie Hogue showed him
in a blind and enveloping stare was something
that each of them, Miller, Charlie Hogue, Schneider,
and even himself.
That each of them had had inside them all along.
It was something, he tried to tell her,
that McDonald had spoken of by the flickering
light of the lantern in the great empty sleeping house
the night they had returned to butcher's crossing.
It was something that he had seen in Schneider's face
as he stood stiff and upright in the middle of the river
just after the horse's hoof had split his skull.
It was something.
The faint after lift of a smile hung
on Francine's full pale lips.
She nodded, her hand moved softly, soothingly
over his bare chest.
It was something he continued speaking in broken phrases that
did not say what he intended.
It was something that he had felt even in himself
from moment to moment during the long trek across the plains
and in the kill of the buffalo at the instant
the great animal shuddered and crashed to the ground,
and in the hot smothering stench that came with the skinning
and in the vision of whiteness during the snowstorm
and in the trackless view of the aftermath of the storm.
Was it in everyone?
He asked without using the words.
Did it lurk hidden in everyone waiting to spring out
waiting to devour and rend until there
was left only the blankness he had seen in the blue stare
that Charlie Hogue now had to give the world?
Or did it wait without crowds like a timber wolf
behind a rock to spring suddenly and without reason upon anyone
who passed it by?
Or beyond one's knowledge did it seek it out the shape of terror
and pass it by in an obscure perverse hope
that it might spring?
At that swift moment in the river,
did the splintered log seek the belly of Schneider's horse
and the hoof Schneider's skull, or was it
the other way around Schneider passing
by a precisely in search of the gray shape and finding it?
What did it mean?
He wanted to know.
Where had he been?
He turned on the bed.
Beside him Francine dropped into a light sleep.
Her breath came gently from her parted lips
and her hands lay loosely curled at her sides.
He got up quietly, went across the room,
turned the wick of the lamp down and blew into the chimney
extinguishing the light.
Through the single curtain window across from him,
a last gray light flickered.
Outside it was growing dark.
He returned to the bed and lay carefully next to Francine
on his side looking at her.
What did it mean?
He asked himself again.
Even this his-- he hesitated to call it love.
His hunger after Francine, what did it mean?
He thought again of Schneider and suddenly he
imagined Schneider in his place alive lying beside Francine.
Without anger or resentment, he saw him lying there
and saw him reach across and fondle Francine's breast.
He smiled for he knew that Schneider would not
have questioned as he was questioning,
would not have wondered, would not
have let a look from Charlie Hogue loose within him
these doubts and these fears.
With a kind of rough and sour friendliness,
he would have taken his pleasure from Francine
and would have gone his way and would
not in any particular manner have
thought of her again as Francine would not
have thought of him again.
And he added suddenly as Francine probably
would not think again of him, Will Andrews, who
now lay beside her.
In her sleep, in a whisper, Francine mouthed a word
that he could not understand.
She smiled, her breath caught, she breathed deeply
and moved a little beside him.
Though he did not want the thought to come to him,
he knew that he too like Schneider, would leave her,
would go his own way.
Though unlike Schneider, he would think of her,
remember her in a way that he could not yet predict.
He would leave her and he would not know her.
He would never know her.
Now the darkness was nearly complete in the room.
He could barely see her face.
With his eyes open in the darkness,
he slid his hand down her arm until he found her hand
and lay quietly beside her.
He thought of the men who had known her appetite
and flesh, as he had known them and had known nothing else.
He thought of those men without resentment.
In the dark, they were faceless and they did not speak,
and they lay in their breathing like himself.
After a long while, his hands still loosely clasping
Francine's hand, he slept.