“Frankly, Keats,” Slim said, a little miffed, “I ain’t sure it’s even worth tellin’ these dumb bastards what we can do.”
“What in hell can we do?” Crab demanded. And by now the rest of us were all staring at them, curious and hopeful as we waited.
“Well?” Mushy half shouted. “F’r Christ’s sakes, what?”
“It’s just as simple as hell,” Keats explained. “All we have t’ do is build us an ark.”
While everyone else slowly reacted, staring with vacant disbelief at Keats, Slim now plunged ahead. “By God, Keats, ya’ got right t’ their simple hearts. Just look at all them grateful, water-soaked eyes.”
Big Yawn finally almost yelled, “Goddamn, sonofabitch!”
“See?” Slim said to Keats. “Big Yawn’s already gettin’ excited about it!”
“You dirty bastards!” Crab snarled, but for the first time in days he was holding back a grin rather than an inner anger.
“I take it that that’s our first negative vote,” Keats said to Slim.
“Hell, Crab,” Slim argued, “try t’ be reasonable f’r once. Ol’ Noah got two a’ every livin’ animal on his ark, so us gittin’ that Slash-D herd aboard ours ain’t gonna pose no problem at all.”
Rufe was shaking his head slowly. “You misleadin’ pricks!” he grumbled. But like everybody else, his whole outlook was changing for the better.
“Misleading?” Keats looked wounded. “We said right up front it’d be a little work.”
“That’s right.” Slim nodded gravely. “All we need for starts is one a’ you fellas t’ volunteer t’ run out an’ chop down a couple thousand trees.”
Crab stood up and poured the last drops of his coffee into the fire. “Just one nice thing ’bout you two bastards,” he muttered. “Y’r sense a’ humor’s the only dry thing f’r miles around.”
“Watch it,” Mushy told Crab. “Wouldn’t want t’ dampen their spirits.”
“Well, hell, Slim.” Old Keats shrugged his shoulders. “Small-minded men have always made fun of us geniuses.”
“Fuck ’em.” Slim grunted. “I wouldn’t build ’em no ark now if they begged me.”
“One blessin’ about all this goddamned rain,” Rufe put in. “Every one of us gits t’ have a wet dream every night.”
And that’s the good, relaxed way it now started to be.
A little later, when Shad rode up and said, “Time t’ move out,” there was a little easy horseplay among some of the men as they walked off. And Purse, looking at the untended fire quickly dying in the rain, called after them, “Hey! Somebody bring me some water t’ put this out!”
It wasn’t exactly that our whole greasy-sack outfit was miraculously and instantly overjoyed about everything in life. But the sullen resentment and anger that had been silently building up just wasn’t there anymore.
Keats and Slim were near me, and as I tossed away what was left of my coffee, Keats said, “Slim, we ought t’ go into that new thing they’re startin’ up, vaudeville.”
“Huh?” Slim said as he and I both frowned, not knowing the word.
“All ya’ do is make jokes that make people feel better, an’ damn if ya’ don’t get paid for it.”
“Christ,” Slim said as they started away, “I’m ready right now.”
A minute later, swinging up into Buck’s saddle, I was thinking that if anybody ever got paid for making somebody else feel better, Slim and Old Keats sure as hell deserved an extra month’s bonus salary. The men mounting around me were no longer grimly silent, but were just naturally cussing out their horses, the rain or each other, and sometimes all three at once. And now and then you could hear some equally natural, low laughter among them.
As I reined Buck out and away from the others, Shad rode up beside me. He spoke quietly, glancing keenly at the others. “Encouraging them gettin’ t’ like the rain s’ much.”
“With much more of it, boss, we figure we c’n build an ark.” He looked at me and I added, “Slim an’ Keats’s idea.”
“Sounds like.” Shad squinted briefly up against the rain and the sky. “If this was Montana, it’d quit t’day. In five, six hours.”
He rode away, and before spurring on to join Rostov I looked up where he’d been looking. The sky was a million ugly miles of gray-streaked, rain-swept blackness, and it hadn’t changed one damn little bit since yesterday or any of the days before.
Five or six hours later, the rain stopped.
Rostov and I had been mounting a low rise about two miles ahead of the herd, which was still out of our sight beyond some rounded hills behind us.
And then, as though an invisible giant had suddenly put a protective hand over us, the torrent of falling rain was instantly gone. It happened so fast I didn’t quite believe it, especially with water still dripping off the front of my hat, and tending to fool me.
But the noise and the darkness were gone. The abrupt silence was so complete that I thought for a moment I’d gone deaf. And the sudden light of the sun was blinding in its brightness. Rostov pointed off, and I turned, blinking, to see the damndest sight. There was an immense, solid wall of dark, almost impenetrable rain that stretched and roared as far as the eye could see, and it was rushing away from us more swiftly than any horse could ever gallop. One instant an entire plain would be drenched and nearly invisible and in the next moment, as that final, black curtain of rain swept over and beyond it, the plain would be a soggy, muddy field of grass that was now, suddenly, basking in the sun.
“An interesting phenomenon,” Rostov said.
All I could think of to add was “Jesus.”
And by then the great black wall of rain, with occasional bolts of lightning flashing briefly within it, was already a mile or so away as it receded swiftly in the distance.
The huge, burning sun went to work quickly in the now clear blue sky, and by nightfall most of the world around us was just about dry again. At supper our spirits were way up, and Old Keats and Slim had to take a lot of criticism about the idea they’d had that morning. Crab pretty much summed it up over a serving of beans that had stayed steaming hot in the plate for the first time in a week. “All right, you dumb bastards. If we’d gone ahead an’ built us that goddamned ark this mornin’, what the hell’d we do with it now?”
“Christ, that’s simple,” Slim said. “We’d make the world’s biggest outhouse outta it. At least a thousand-seater.”
Old Keats nodded. “Of course if we put in different levels, it’d be better to be sittin’ t’ward the top than t’ward the bottom.”
I turned in early, my bedroll warm and comfortable around me. For about two seconds I considered the beautiful difference between wet and dry, and then I was out.
Slim woke me for my turn on the herd, the late graveyard. I rode out to relieve Purse, and an hour or so later Shad suddenly appeared alongside me.
Out there in the wide, dark meadow stretching below us, even the cattle were now feeling a hundred percent better, and a few of them were grunting and lowing back and forth in quiet, contented cow talk.
“Couldn’t be more peaceful,” I said to Shad. “Why don’t you go back an’ grab forty winks?”
He was silent for a long moment. Then, leaning forward and rubbing Red between the ears, he said, “No—not yet.”
From the far side of the herd Big Yawn softly sang a couple of choruses of “I’m Leaving Ohio,” which would normally be enough to make anybody leave if they were free to.
But still Shad remained, watching and listening, and seeming to almost be damnere smelling at the clear, unmoving air.