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Gets Hit On the
Head With a Brick
All right, all right. If you stand her a swallow of Who-Shot-John, the girl will fess up.
Snow White lost one fight. Just one, but it was a fuss to be remembered.
The man in question was a no-account out of Laramie. He’d been a cattleman before a flood took his flock and all his hopes came a-cropper. He’d seen his brother exalted for rustling and his wife dead of the lunger the winter after. It cripples a man in the morality to spend his days digging beauty out of dead rock for the pleasure of rich folk he’ll never meet, and this fella was right torqued up. Not that he’d been a stand-up aforehand. He wanted to punch down the hangman who took his kin and the angels who took his girl but they were not present. Snow White, contrariwise, had broken the fingers of a number of his friends and had to sleep sometime. A helpless man swings wide.
So this man followed Snow White back to her hollow with a determination for trouble hanging on his hips. He had once allowed to the boys that she was pretty enough for a godless mix-blood bitch. He’d never ridden Injun, but he’d never et dog before, neither. The world of experience is a broad and unpredictable country. The way the cattleman heard it told, squaws got wolf’s fur on their tits and a tail fit for a lizard tucked twixt their flanks. Snow White being only half-squaw he’d likely have to settle for one or t’other but you can’t have everything. He’d considered it a long while and figured God owed him some pleasure in this life and if she didn’t like it, well, a good pound-down puts anyone in an amenable mood.
Snow White lay asleep. Without thinking about it the cattleman took off his hat when he came into the hollow like he meant to call her ma’m and present flowers. She was awful nice-looking when she was asleep. No scowling or hissing or cursing. Why, if you squinted, she almost looked regular, like some rancher’s daughter who just needed a bath and she’d be respectable as a wedding. If she hadn’tve hacked her hair off he’d have judged her the second or third handsomest girl he’d had acquaintance of, and he’d been to Denver once. The cattleman felt a powerful need to kiss Snow White. Mayhap she liked being kissed. Mayhap she’d wake up and sh
ow her wolf-parts. In the storybooks, if you woke a girl up with a kiss she belonged to you. It was like a brand on a cow’s rump. A kiss round and black and permanent-like on the skin, telling the whole world who owned her. The idea of that big burning kiss made him hard enough to drill rubies.
The cattleman kneeled down and put out his lantern. He kissed Snow White real nice, like you kiss a lady. Her fist cocked his jaw good, but the cattleman had the upper position and she could not reach her gun. He slapped her open hand and yanked on her sawed-off hair.
“I weren’t gonna hurt you none,” he hissed in the dark, even though he would have if she hadn’t looked so damned daisy lying there. He’d kissed her just as sweet as his own wife but it weren’t enough for her, no sir. He popped her nose and that felt good. Blood sprayed on her mouth. Blood on her skin. Blood on the ground. Him sitting on her and watching her bleed. That felt good, too. Pretty soon she’d cry and that’d be just cherry.
Snow White got her thumb into the cattleman’s eye and he grunted, grabbed her fingers, fixing to break them to show this cow how it felt, but she rolled him off her onto the floor of the hollow. It was dark and she slugged him hard. He hit her back. They clenched up, fisting and gouging in the dark. The cattleman did not like it. The whiskey in his blood had been surging for a fight with a woman, and a fight with a woman ends in her crying and shaking and a fella hushing her all over. Her dress torn and a bit of tit peeking out and quivering. Simple, righteous pleasures. But Snow White just bit him and pounded him and it was no better than fighting a dude in a barrel-house. Just ugly and bruising and the main thing was not to let anyone get to a gun or else it’d be over on the quick. She didn’t even put up her hands to defend herself. She didn’t even care if he cut her face. Must be the wolf in her, or the lizard.
Snow White took her licks. Nothing she hadn’t done before. Bones creaking and wet blood on her hands, the dark all round and no one coming to help her. Point of fact, that was Snow White’s home country. That bloody punishing ground in the dark was real familiar. At least this time she hit back. At least this time she got hers. When you’ve been hit as often as she has, you don’t hardly feel it. You go to another place in your head until it’s over. Make yourself small and send the part of you that still feels anything to some tiny corner to wait it out. A corner full of tin ducks and red foxes and old bears, where the slots spin up summer every time. It’s just a body. Snow White doesn’t care about her body. A body is just a tool you use for walking around. Make sure it holds together and whatever else someone does to it matters less than spitting.
The cattleman had his fill of Snow White. He staggered out of her hollow looking like hamburger. Never did find out if she had a tail. Wasn’t worth it. When an animal don’t even care if it lives or dies, kicking it holds all the fun of kicking a rock.
Snow White
Plays a Trick
on Porcupine
The dude is flummoxed. It’ll pass.
Easiest track he ever laid his nose to, that’s the Dog’s honest truth. This girl is not sly. She does not know how to come to town and leave it so quiet the hooch-man don’t even remember how his bottle got so low. She does not know how to go so soft and fast her name never hits the ground. That’s okay. The dude knows. That kid has punched out some curly wolf in every shithole from home to the high country. Not a single town left unpunched. She even beefed that short-horn back in Haul-Off—right through the eyes, too. Lucky shot. Every soul gets one. The dude is not troubled by his little angelica blowing smoke through a man. Good for her.
But the trail goes cold as a fish in January on the Nevada side of the Sierra range and the dude cannot re-acquire it. Either she’s had her temper surgeried on or been ascended bodily to heaven and he’ll be damned if he can say which. Nobody’s seen a girl with a ridiculous gun and a powerful eagerness to fight. Nobody’s got whisker or whisper of her. He’d been close enough to cut for sign—the hairs of her pony’s tail, the shed fuzz of her angoras, the shells of her parlor pistol. But nothing. The whole world clean of her. Now the dude’s got nothing but his dick in his hands. Chicago office is not happy. Who’s happy in this world? Maybe a mountain cat with a bead on an open sheep-pen. That’s about it.
The dude is disappointed but his patience is vast. He has not been euchered, no sir. He just revises his notions on the girl. Most rich babies would have brotheled up or bucked out by now, but not her. She’s game. She’s in it for real play. She is heeled and she is sour as a new grape. It’s a different situation, that’s all. His employer did not give him the whole hoyle.
When the dude was a boy his mother told him a story about a girl in a red dress that blew town, humping through the high country on foot. Even back then the dude thought that girl was done crazy. Somebody better help her, mama, or she’s gonna get et. Somebody’s gotta track her down and get her back home to her daddy. Well, sure enough this big old wolf pricks her up and starts after, and he’s got a shine on this girl more like a man’s than a wolf’s. It don’t go well in the end—girls and wolfs, they got nothing to talk about. But the dude felt a kinship with that wolf. A profundity, even. That wolf would follow red-dress all the way around the world once he got her in his nose. You could admire that. You could aspire.
And when the dude asks the Great Dog in Heaven to show him the way, it’s the wolf he’s thinking of. Like God’s this powerful big cay-ote up there and the world’s his bone. In chapel with his mama he tries to think of a man up on a cross but it just don’t fix. No, it’s the tricky-clever lolly-tongued red-loving Dog for the dude, amen and all’s well.
The dude prays on it a spell.
It comes up in his head like a bubble in a lake. When a dog’s hurting, when a dog’s hounded and hard-up, what’s he do?
A dog goes to ground.
Snow White
Cheats At Cards
Snow White comes out of the earth. She blinks a lot; her eyes forgot how to suck up so much light. She don’t present much of a woman anymore: filthy with sweat-grime and ruby-dust, white scar on her cheek like a star, clothes hard done by and none too ladylike to begin with, being goatskins, buck trousers, linen shirt, a fish-slicker coat and her daddy’s hat like a creased-up crown. Her hair did grow out some. The sun hits her and Snow White feels like her whole body is baking up sweet and good, like she’d never been born before and is trying alive on for the first time. Charming sees her in the corral and starts hopping fit to stampede the mares, calling out her name in his horsey patois.
The dude is waiting for her. Once he had the picture of it, weren’t no work in figuring which softheart company daddy would let a woman dig shine. Weren’t no sport in it. Easy as sleeping. Nevada is good to the dude, always has been. He’s itchy, waiting on her to pop up mole-like from the grass. He’s thought about just popping her on the head with the butt of his hog-leg gun, but he figures he deserves himself the treat of a sit-down with this calico. She’s given him a good run, best he’s had since the war, and that earns her a few more hours in her mortal coil. Besides, she’s been down underground so long. It’s a right human deed to let her look on the sun awhile before he sends her there on the permanent.
He squares Snow White’s debts to the company man. It’s no skin off him. The dude is flush and he’ll be full fine when he hands over his proofs back in California. The abandon does not like it; she’s cagey and looking to bolt but no man on this earth ever declined to have his accounts cleared and she won’t neither. She asks his name; he won’t give over. Gets her horse geared and the dude enjoys letting her think of him as a black-chapped angel sent by the Dog to secure her. That’s just what he is.
