A burst of laughter from the Traveller's Welcome interrupted these musings. The bat-winged bar doors clattered open, and someone came hurtling out, arms flaying, and ended up sprawled in the dust. He got up slowly. Dusted himself off. Then calmly walked back in, as though he had just been passing by and had been attracted by the light and the laughter.
'Why don't you close up and go to bed, Ruth Lillian?'
'I can't. Every once in a while a drunk miner gets it into his head that he needs something from the store. Last week a man came crying and blubbering and saying he forgot his little girl's birthday and he just had to have a doll. And he wanted it right then! If we're not open, they'll break in and mess things up. So someone has to be in the shop day and night till the miners go back up to the Lode. Pa and me take turns.'
'So you're going to stay up all night?'
'Looks like.'
'You want me to stay with you?'
'No, thanks. I'll be all right.'
'You're sure?'
She nodded vaguely, her eyes still on the scattering of stars along the horizon.
Matthew looked at her profile, and his heart expanded with feelings for her. He wanted very much to touch her, to hold her hand, maybe even… He surreptitiously scrubbed his palm on his trousers to make sure it was dry. Just as he reached out to her, she turned and took his hand… and shook it firmly.
'Good night, Matthew.'
'Ah-h… well, good night, Ruth Lillian.'
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS later, they found themselves again on the wooden front steps of the Mercantile, watching lightning blossom then fade in the clouds on the distant horizon, while thunder growled grumpily from mountain to mountain. Sitting side by side, they spoke in quiet voices about things they used to do, and think about, and believe, when they were kids. Now and then, something they recalled was attached by hidden threads of memory to some other event or moment, and their talk would drift to that, like when Ruth Lillian said out of a deep silence, '… The giants are moving their furniture again.'
'Huh?'
'Thunder used to scare me something terrible when I was little. Then one stormy night Pa told me that thunder was giants in the sky moving their furniture. A real loud clap meant they'd dropped their piano. I was never afraid after that.'
Shortly before sundown, a brash of plump raindrops had plopped dark spots into the dust of the street, but no real rain had followed, only the cool winds that swirl at the edges of a storm. And now the night air still carried the exciting, nose-tingling smell of storm: that mixture of electricity and dust.
'You were lucky to have a pa that cared about you being scared,' Matthew said. Then he added quickly, 'Of course, my pa was like that, too. Always explaining things to me. He knew about everything. That's why everyone looked up to him and respected him.'
She hummed a vague note of agreement, but she wasn't really listening because mentioning the night she learned about thunder and the giants had somehow evoked the memory of her vanity mirror, the vanity mirror her mother had given her. Her father had broken it in a rage the night her mother ran off.
'I used to have this mirror,' she said quietly. 'I would sit in front of it for hours, staring deep into my eyes, until I got this funny feeling that the person in the glass was a stranger who happened to look like me. That was eerie enough, but then I'd start wondering: and who's the other person, the one inside my head, looking out through my eyes at the strange girl in the mirror? Then I'd say my name aloud over and over. Ruth Lillian, Ruth Lillian, Ruth Lil-li-an, until the sounds didn't make any sense, and pretty soon I'd get the feeling that I was right on the edge of finding out something that was too scary to know. You ever felt like that, Matthew?'
'No. Just the Cracker-Jacks box.'
She turned to him and blinked. 'Cracker-Jacks?'
'Cracker-Jacks is popcorn with caramel on it and a few peanuts. And there's a little toy in-'
'I know what Cracker-Jacks are, Matthew. But what do they have to do with anything?'
'Well, the box is something like your mirror. I mean, on a Cracker-Jacks box there's a sailor boy holding a smaller Cracker-Jacks box. And one day it suddenly came to me that there must be another, smaller sailor boy on that smaller box, and he must be holding another, even smaller box of Cracker-Jacks, and on that box, there must be a little teeny sailor boy holding a little teeny box of Cracker-Jacks, and on that box there must be… And it would go on forever! Everything getting littler and littler, forever. I felt dizzy thinking about it. And scared. Kind of like your mirror. See what I mean?'
Ruth Lillian did see what he meant… sort of.
'I once had this teacher that liked me? And when I told her about the Cracker-Jack sailor boys getting smaller and smaller, she said it was called infinity. And she made the sign of infinity on the blackboard. It looked like a Lazy-8 cattle brand.'
'What looked like a Lazy-8 cattle brand?' Mr. Kane asked from the doorway, startling them. He had padded down from his bedroom to see why Ruth Lillian had not come up to bed yet.
Matthew stood up quickly, but immediately wished he hadn't, because that made it look like they were doing something they shouldn't, which they weren't. 'Infinity, sir.'
'Infinity? You've been sitting out here all this time talking about infinity?'
'Yes,' Ruth Lillian said. 'And mirrors. And Cracker-Jack.'
Mr. Kane shook his head wearily. 'Go to bed. It's late.'
'All right. Good night, Matthew.'
'Good night, Ruth Lillian. Good night, sir.'
'Hm…? Oh, yes. Good night.'
DURING HIS FIRST WEEKS in Twenty-Mile, Matthew had seemed to be succeeding with the second phase of his technique for survival in new places: Once inside, be nice, and play by their rules. Everyone was impressed by his willingness to work hard for small wages. 'Look at that kid go, will you?' But after the shine wore off, people came to take his good-humored hard work for granted. 'That's just the way the kid is. He likes working hard. Guess it takes all kinds.'
He couldn't rid himself of the feeling that he wasn't really respected by any of them. And in some cases it was worse than just lack of respect. While he was having his weekly meal with Doc and the other miners at the boardinghouse, he'd sometimes look up and see Oskar Bjorkvist staring at him from the kitchen door, resentment seething in his eyes. Oskar's mother constantly berated him for letting a stranger come into town and snap up all the jobs that were rightfully his-money he could be earning if he weren't such a stupid!.. lazy!.. She punctuated her fury by slapping his ears so hard they were hot and red for hours.
Nor had Professor Murphy reacted in a friendly way when, after the two-week trial period was over, Matthew had asked that his seventy-five cents for half a day's hard labor be doubled to a dollar fifty. Twenty-Mile's Tonsorial Maestro had rankled at having to come up with an additional six-bits, and he accused Matthew of having 'roped him in' by offering to do the work for one price, then blackmailing him for more. Matthew admitted that the original arrangement was his way of letting the Professor see a sample of his work, but he didn't feel it was blackmail to ask for a buck fifty for a whole day's hard work when he got that much for doing odd jobs for B. J. Stone and Coots up at the Livery. Professor Murphy responded with a snort.
In the end, Murphy reluctantly compromised, offering a dollar and a quarter, but he warned Matthew that he'd be considering 'other arrangements.' And the following Sunday morning Matthew arrived at the barbershop to find Oskar Bjorkvist scrubbing out the bath barrels. But the viscous-minded boy used up two bars of Fels-Naphtha, broke the long-handled brush, and did such a poor job that Professor Murphy had to spend the next morning re- cleaning them, swearing and growling, his wig in constant danger as he grunted over the rims of the barrels that cut into his potbelly. So Matthew got his job back (at a dollar and a half), and Oskar Bjorkvist, who had received a proud maternal pat on the cheek only the day before, got such a slap on the ear that his head ached for hours.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER BEING irritable throughout supper because he'd had particularly sharp chest pains that afternoon, Mr. Kane went to bed early. After cleaning up the dishes, Matthew spent his customary half hour with Ruth Lillian out in the cool of the porch, she gazing out across to the foothills while he looked wistfully at her profile, just visible in the starglow of a moonless night.
'What you thinking about?' he asked.
