“Such as?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Why not now?”
“Tomorrow,” Dacy said. “What we both need right now is the rest of Sunday.”
19
He couldn’t sleep.
He was tired enough and his still-sore body needed the rest. But unlike the other nights he’d been here, there was a restlessness in him tonight that kept his eyes wide open. The prospect of confronting Billy Draper and Pete Teal tomorrow evening, probably. That, and the fact that the solution to the murders might be just that close.
After an hour or so he switched on the lamp beside the rollaway and got up to hunt for something to read. No books in the trailer; he hadn’t thought to buy a paperback or two in Beulah, and neither Jaime Orozco nor any of the trailer’s part-time occupants had left reading matter behind. There wasn’t even a mail-order catalog or phone book to page through. Books in the house, but he couldn’t go wandering in there without permission. Not at this hour, almost midnight by his watch. Unless Dacy was still up...
But she wasn’t. The house, he saw when he opened the trailer door, was completely dark. He stood for a time, looking out and around. Warm, windless night, bright with more stars than he’d ever seen before, so many and so small-seeming they were like scatters of iridescent dust. No moon yet. Nothing stirring anywhere that he could see. Another hologram: Desert Night with Ranch Buildings.
On impulse he turned back inside, pulled on jeans and a shirt, leaving the shirt unbuttoned, and went outside. The air had a subtle fragrance compounded of earth, rock, sage, greasewood, horses, traces of woodsmoke. He sniffed it slowly several times, savoring it, thinking how much better the air quality was out here than in the city. Thinking how quiet it was.
Thinking, then, how lonesome it was.
Lonesome in the city, lonesome in the wide-open spaces. You couldn’t get away from it no matter where you went, not the old Jim Messenger and not the new one. A more tolerable form of loneliness here, but loneliness just the same. He felt it like a dull ache deep inside him, a bruise on the skin of his soul.
The ache, or his awareness of the ache, intensified the restlessness, drove him away from the trailer, over past the stable and holding pens into open desert along one of the low hills. Above him the sky was immense. He walked at a retarded pace, peering up, occupying his mind by trying to pick out star clusters and individual stars. Milky Way, Orion’s Belt, Big Dipper, Little Dipper. Rigel, Betelgeuse, Arcturus. Sirius, the dog star—
A distant ululating howl broke the silence. Coyote’s hunting song. The coincidence of the coyote starting up just as he located the dog star made him smile. But the smile didn’t linger. The predator’s song only added to the night’s loneliness and deepened his own.
He walked on a short way. Other coyotes joined the first one in a yapping, trilling chorus that woke Buster and started him barking inside the house. Dacy had taken to keeping the rottweiler inside at night — not for protection, she’d told Messenger, smiling, but because he tended to go off into barking and chain-rattling fits when he was left out at night.
The coyote chorus tapered off and finally ceased; so did Buster’s responses. The new quiet had an oppressive edge. Messenger turned and started back in longer strides. He’d sit in the car for a while, listen to one of the tapes with the volume turned down low. Jazz, the soft, soothing variety — Teagarden, maybe, or the King Cole Trio — sometimes helped him get to sleep at home.
As he passed the stable he could hear the horses stirring around. Coyotes must have woken them, too. He wondered if Buster had disturbed Dacy’s sleep; if so, she hadn’t put on a light. He went around the side of the trailer, over toward where the Subaru was parked.
He smelled cigarette smoke just before Dacy’s voice said his name.
He swung around. She was sitting on the trailer’s steps, a blob of white in the silvery darkness. The glowing end of her Marlboro made a red slash pattern as she moved it down from her mouth.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“Few minutes. Saw you out prowling.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Restless for some reason.”
“It’s that kind of night.”
He didn’t have to ask her what she meant. “Feel like talking a while? Or do you just want to sit?”
“Both.”
He sat down next to her. His hip touched hers; she didn’t move away, and he was conscious of the taut warmth of her body under the cotton nightdress and loose wrapper she wore. She smelt of soap and toothpaste, bed and cigarette smoke. He felt a stirring in his loins, the first since the episode with Molene in San Francisco. Don’t get ideas. Boss and hired hand, remember? But he didn’t shift his leg. And she didn’t move hers, either.
When she finished her cigarette and dropped the butt into the dirt, he said, “Dacy, I’d like to know something. But if it’s too personal, just say so.”
“Go ahead.”
“What happened with your husband?”
She didn’t answer. She sat hunched forward, forearms on her drawn-up knees.
“None of my business, right?”
“Probably not. But what the hell, it’s all water under the bridge anyhow. I don’t know where Howard is these days or what he’s doing. Don’t much care. Last I heard he was working on a ranch over near Ely, but that was four years ago.”
“I meant what happened to the marriage. What broke the two of you up.”
“I did. Like Popeye says, you can stands so much and you can’t stands no more.”
“No more of what?”
Dacy lit another cigarette. “Howard’s a good old cowboy. You know what that means?”
“Not exactly.”
“Two things he likes to do best is drink and fight. Work his ass off all week, ten-, twelve-hour days, and come the weekend — off to the nearest bar to get shitfaced with his buddies and raise some hell. At least once a month I’d get a call from the sheriffs office to come bail him out of the drunk tank.”
“And you got tired of it.”
“I got real tired of it after nine years. Tired of bailing him out, tired of nursing his hangovers and his cuts and bruises. Tired of being left alone with Lonnie. Tired of sleeping with a man who had nothing much to say to me except, ‘Well, how about a little tonight, woman?’”
Messenger said, “That’s a pretty sad story.”
“Living it was a lot sadder than telling it.”
“Was he always like that? Even in the beginning?”
“Not so bad at first. Just kept getting worse until it killed all the love either of us ever had.”
“What did he say when you asked him for a divorce?”
“Didn’t ask him, I told him.”
“And?”
“Hardly a word. Drove off to town and got drunk and got in a fight that busted three of his ribs and ended up in jail. I bailed him out for the last time. Next day he loaded all his belongings into his pickup and left without saying good-bye to me or Lonnie. He stopped in town long enough to clean out our bank account — eight hundred dollars. I never saw or heard from him again.”
“He didn’t contest the divorce?”
“Didn’t contest it, didn’t hire a lawyer — nothing. I guess he figured the eight hundred was enough of a buyout. Judge gave Lonnie and me the ranch free and clear.”
“When did all of that happen?”
“Seven years ago.”
“There must’ve been someone else for you since then.”
Dacy made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “You trying to find out if I’ve been celibate for seven years, Jim?”
“I didn’t mean it that way—”
“Oh, hell, I know you didn’t.” She drew deeply on her cigarette; in the glow of the burning tobacco, her face had a masklike allure. The unruly topknot that always seemed to spring up when her hair was tousled made her even more attractive. “I’ve had relationships. One was with a doctor in Tonopah — the one who told me about catathymic crisis — that lasted a year and could’ve been permanent. He offered me a ring; I turned him down. That ended it between us.”