Everyone, as she later told it, was as drunk as sixteen thousand dollars: Darly, the miner, and the miner’s girl.
Darly was limping as he locked the door of the bar. A year before, a kick from one of Pace’s mares had broken his ribs as he was loading her into the trailer, and he hadn’t recovered from it. He was too old. But he dissembled the pain. The high-heeled narrow boots helped, and his painful bending looked like the ordinary stooping posture of a cowboy. However, Darly was not a genuine cowboy, like Pace who had grown up in the saddle. He was a latecomer from the East and until the age of forty had never been on horseback. In this respect he and Hattie were alike. They were not genuine Westerners.
Hattie hurried after him through the ranch yard.
“Damn you!” he said to her. “I got thirty bucks out of that sucker and I would have skinned him out of his whole paycheck if you minded your business. Pace is going to be sore as hell.”
“You’ve got to help me. We’re neighbors,” said Hattie.
“You’re not fit to be living out here. You can’t do it anymore. Besides, you’re swacked all the time.”
Hattie couldn’t afford to talk back. The thought of her car on the tracks made her frantic. If a freight came now and smashed it, her life at Sego Desert Lake would be finished. And where would she go then? She was not fit to live in this place. She had never made the grade at all, only seemed to have made it. And Darly—why did he say such hurtful things to her? Because he himself was sixty-eight years old, and he had no other place to go, either; he took bad treatment from Pace besides. Darly stayed because his only alternative was to go to the soldiers’ home. Moreover, the dude women would still crawl into his sack. They wanted a cowboy and they thought he was one. Why, he couldn’t even raise himself out of his bunk in the morning. And where else would he get women? “After the dude season,” she wanted to say to him, “you always have to go to the Veterans’ Hospital to get fixed up again.” But she didn’t dare offend him now.
The moon was due to rise. It appeared as they drove over the ungraded dirt road toward the crossing where Hattie’s turret-shaped car was sitting on the rails. Driving very fast, Darly wheeled the pickup around, spraying dirt on the miner and his girl, who had followed in their car.
“You get behind the wheel and steer,” Darly told Hattie.
She climbed into the seat. Waiting at the wheel, she lifted up her face and said, “Please God, I didn’t bend the axle or crack the oil pan.”
When Darly crawled under the bumper of Hattie’s car the pain in his ribs suddenly cut off his breath, so instead of doubling the tow chain he fastened it at full length. He rose and trotted back to the truck on the tight boots. Motion seemed the only remedy for the pain; not even booze did the trick anymore. He put the pickup into towing gear and began to pull. One side of Hattie’s car dropped into the roadbed with a heave of springs. She sat with a stormy, frightened, conscience-stricken face, racing the motor until she flooded it.
The tungsten miner yelled, “Your chain’s too long.”
Hattie was raised high in the air by the pitch of the wheels. She had to roll down the window to let herself out because the door handle had been jammed from inside for years. Hattie struggled out on the uplifted side crying, “I better call the Swede. I better have him signal. There’s a train due.”
“Go on, then,” said Darly. “You’re no good here.”
“Darly, be careful with my car. Be careful.”
The ancient sea bed at this place was flat and low, and the lights of her car and of the truck and of the tungsten miner’s Chevrolet were bright and big at twenty miles. Hattie was too frightened to think of this. All she could think was that she was a procrastinating old woman; she had lived by delays; she had meant to stop drinking; she had put off the time, and now she had smashed her car—a terrible end, a terrible judgment on her. She got to the ground and, drawing up her skirt, she started to get over the tow chain. To prove that the chain didn’t have to be shortened, and to get the whole thing over with, Darly threw the pickup forward again. The chain jerked up and struck Hattie in the knee and she fell forward and broke her arm.
She cried, “Darly, Darly, I’m hurt. I fell.”
“The old lady tripped on the chain,” said the miner. “Back up here and I’ll double it for you. You’re getting nowheres.”
Drunkenly the miner lay down on his back in the dark, soft red cinders of the roadbed. Darly had backed up to slacken the chain.
Darly hurt the miner, too. He tore some skin from his fingers by racing ahead before the chain was secure. Without complaining, the miner wrapped his hand in his shirttail saying, “She’ll do it now.” The old car came down from the tracks and stood on the shoulder of the road.
“There’s your goddamn car,” said Darly to Hattie.
“Is it all right?” she said. Her left side was covered with dirt, but she managed to pick herself up and stand, round-backed and heavy, on her stiff legs. “I’m hurt, Darly.” She tried to convince him of it.
‘Hell if you are,” he said. He believed she was putting on an act to escape blame. The pain in his ribs made him especially impatient with her. “Christ, if you can’t look after yourself anymore you’ve got no business out here.”
“You’re old yourself,” she said. “Look what you did to me. You can’t hold your liquor.”
This offended him greatly. He said, “I’ll take you to the Rolfes. They let you booze it up in the first place, so let them worry about you. I’m tired of your bunk, Hattie.”
He raced uphill. Chains, spade, and crowbar clashed on the sides of the pickup. She was frightened and held her arm and cried. Rolfe’s dogs jumped at her to lick her when she went through the gate. She shrank from them crying, “Down, down.’
“Darly,” she cried in the darkness, “take care of my car. Don’t leave it standing there on the road. Darly, take care of it, please.”
But Darly in his ten-gallon hat, his chin-bent face wrinkled, small and angry, a furious pain in his ribs, tore away at high speed.
“Oh, God, what will I do,” she said.
The Rolfes were having a last drink before dinner, sitting at their fire of pitchy railroad ties, when Hattie opened the door. Her knee was bleeding, her eyes were tiny with shock, her face gray with dust.
“I’m hurt,” she said desperately. “I had an accident. I sneezed and lost control of the wheel. Jerry, look after the car. It’s on the road.”
They bandaged her knee and took her home and put her to bed. Helen Rolfe wrapped a heating pad around her arm.
“I can’t have the pad,” Hattie complained. “The switch goes on and off, and every time it does it starts my generator and uses up the gas.”
“Ah, now, Hattie,” Rolfe said, “this is not the time to be stingy. We’ll take you to town in the morning and have you looked over. Helen will phone Dr. Stroud.”
Hattie wanted to say, “Stingy! Why you’re the stingy ones. I just haven’t got anything. You and Helen are ready to hit each other over two bits in canasta.” But the Rolfes were good to her; they were her only real friends here. Darly would have let her lie in the yard all night, and Pace would have sold her to the bone man. He’d give her to the knacker for a buck.
So she didn’t talk back to the Rolfes, but as soon as they left the yellow house and walked through the superclear moonlight under the great skirt of box-elder shadows to their new station wagon, Hattie turned off the switch, and the heavy swirling and battering of the generator stopped. Presently she became aware of real pain, deeper pain, in her arm, and she sat rigid, warming the injured place with her hand. It seemed to her that she could feel the bone sticking out. Before leaving, Helen Rolfe had thrown over her a comforter that had belonged to Hattie’s dead friend India, from whom she had inherited the small house and everything in it. Had the comforter lain on India’s bed the night she died? Hattie tried to remember, but her thoughts were mixed up. She was fairly sure the deathbed pillow was in the loft, and she believed she had put the death bedding in a trunk. Then how had this comforter got out? She couldn’t do anything about it now but draw it away from contact with her skin. It kept her legs warm. This she accepted, but she didn’t want it any nearer.
More and more Hattie saw her own life as though, from birth to the present, every moment had been filmed. Her fancy was that when she died she would see the film in the next world. Then she would know how she had appeared from the back, watering the plants, in the bathroom, asleep, playing the organ, embracing—everything, even tonight, in pain, almost the last pain, perhaps, for she couldn’t take much more. How many twists and angles
