Chapter Thirty
George Waller caught me early in the morning.
“That little punk stole three licorice sticks. You owe me three cents, you or Rusty. I shook the brat until his teeth rattled, but it won’t do any good. That orphan train, all it did was haul the punks out of the cities and spread them around here.”
“You’re talking about Riley?”
“Who else?”
“Has he done this before?”
“How’m I supposed to know? I got a store to tend, and customers to look after, and I can’t be studying every little rug rat that comes sneaking in to swipe something.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him he was no good, he’d never be good, and he’d spend his life behind prison walls. He starting crying, and I told him he wasn’t man enough to take his medicine.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Yesterday afternoon, and maybe a hundred times before that.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“I know a rotten little crook when I see one.”
“You ever swipe anything when you were a boy, George?”
“Not ever. I grew up straight and true, and well bred. Unlike that little turd.”
“I dipped my fingers into the cookie jars a few times,” I said. “Got caught, too. And got my knuckles rapped. I mean rapped, with a ruler. It didn’t do any good.”
“If you don’t have the breeding, nothing does any good.”
I dug into my britches. “Here’s a nickel for the licorice. I’ll talk to Riley, and also to Rusty and Belle. Maybe we can do something.”
“It won’t do a bit of good. Bad blood, it’s going to show in that boy. And you got him in your sheriff office. I don’t know how you ever got in, Pickens. You’ve got all the town’s half-wits in there.”
I’d heard all that before—bad blood, bad breeding, all of that. I sure didn’t have any good blood or good breeding, but I wasn’t sure what that stuff was. Mostly it was people who looked down their noses at everyone else.
I left word for Rusty that I was going to take the day off, and take Riley fishing. I supposed that would steam up everyone. But Rusty wouldn’t need me. He’d cover the Wild West grounds in the afternoon, and deal with any trouble there. Those rodeo cowboys and all sometimes got a little unruly, especially in the saloons after the show.
I collected the boy; he was at Belle’s getting some lessons. He’d had no schooling, running on the streets back East, so Belle was teaching him at home during the day, and maybe when Riley got caught up, he’d get put in the grade school in Doubtful.
I found Belle teaching him arithmetic. They were doing addition. I never could figure it out myself, but I got good enough to add things up. But I always had trouble with eight and seven. It seemed like thirteen to me, not fifteen. Belle eyed me standing there, but finished up her lesson.
“I thought I’d take Riley fishing, Belle,” I said.
“But . . . he needs school.”
“I’m taking some time off.”
She eyed me. “There’s something here I am being kept out of.”
“For a few hours maybe.”
She sighed. “It’s a man’s world. All right. Take him.” Riley peered up at me. “Fishing? There’s fish around here?”
“There’s a couple of holes in the creek, and maybe there’s something in them.”
“There’s not a fish closer than fifty miles from here,” Belle said.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
Belle just stared at me. She always knew when something was up.
I had some line and fishhooks. We’d have to hunt for worms or bugs or grubs for bait, and cut some sticks for fishing poles. Maybe we’d catch something. I didn’t much care one way or the other.
“What kind of fish?” asked Riley.
“Maybe some whoppers, boy. Big as liars can make them.”
Riley grinned. “We’re really going to fish? I never been fishing.”
“You sure are a pain in the butt, Pickens,” Belle said. That was as tough as she ever got with me. She made a sour face when I kidnapped the kid.
It was a fine August day, too dry, but that was August in Wyoming for you. We headed for the creek, and then walked its banks upstream. It was slow and lazy in August. It got cold and swift in the spring, carrying off snowmelt from the Medicine Bow Mountains. In Doubtful, there were a lot of outhouses along its banks, so if a feller wanted to fish, he’d be well advised to head upstream.
We got to the big swimming hole a way upstream. A lot of stuff happened there that I carefully didn’t look into very hard. Most of it happened at night. But now on a sleepy, sunny morning it was empty. The mountains in the distance looked somber and tired.
“Let’s try here,” I said. “Maybe there’s some monsters in there.”
“You mean real fish?”
I cut off some willow branches with my knife, and sliced off the little shoots until I had a couple of long sticks for fishing poles.
“Scrape around for bait, Riley. Bugs or worms.”
He had a talent for that, and by the time I’d gotten the lines and hooks all tied to the poles, he had a mess of caterpillars, a few beetles, and some bugs I had no notion of. I made a couple of little floats from sticks, and tied them in, so the baited hook wouldn’t just drop to the bottom. And then we were set.
“Let’s sit here in the shade, so the fish don’t see us,” I said, sounding like I knew something. Actually, I didn’t know nothing.
So we pitched the hooks in, each hook laden with some fish grub on it, and nothing much happened. The floats just drifted downstream until our lines checked them.
“Why don’t they bite?” Riley asked.
“Beats me, boy. Tell me how you like it around here.”
“Am I supposed to like it?”
“Well, there’s a man, Rusty, who’s spending some of his hard-earned salary as a deputy of mine, keeping you fed and clothed and all. And my landlady, Belle, who’s trying to give you a good start on life.”
“The fish ain’t biting.”
“You remember your ma?”
“I don’t want to remember her.”
“Miss her?”
He eyed me. “What is this? How come we’re doing this? You taking me fishing or is this something else?”
He was one street-smart kid, I thought. “We’re doing a lot of things here, Riley.”
“This is because Waller caught me. He pretty near twisted my ear off, until I bit him.”
“That’s one of the things, yes.”
“I knew it. My ass is in trouble. So give me the lecture.”
“Well, I could, if you want it, but lectures don’t do much good. If you want to dip into George Waller’s licorice jar, you’ll keep right on, no matter what I say, or Rusty says.”
“You got that right, copper. You’re gonna tell me I’m not a deputy anymore; deputies got to obey all the laws and all that, so you’re kicking me out, is that it?”
“Well, you got me there, boy. I was thinking along those lines.”
“Well, ship me off to somewhere else. I don’t measure up.”
Riley was staring straight ahead, and I knew he would land on anything I said.
“We’ll fish, boy. You’re still my deputy sheriff. You still get to wear the badge. You just keep that badge shiny for me, make it shine.”
“You mean don’t steal.”
“Oh, let me put it this way. Give more than you take.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, here’s an example. You could go to George Waller, who owns that store, and you could say, sir, I’ll sweep your floor for you. If you’ll show me where the sawdust and the push broom are, I’d do it for you.”
“You’re just trying to turn me into a slave. That’s what all the orphans end up as. They get us off the orphan train, and they got a slave.”
“No, Riley, not a slave. Just someone who gives back.”
“I don’t feel like giving back. For what?”
I was tempted to say for the food and shelter and clothes and attention he got, but I didn’t. Children had a right to those things, whether or not they gave anything back. A child needs those things, no matter who or what he is.
“For me, it’s being a man,” I said. “I get my pay in a brown envelope once a month. And I try to give the county and town some safety. If I took the money and didn’t give the people around here some safety, I wouldn’t feel very good.”
Riley was watching the stick float bob a little in the creek.
“Someone worked real hard to harvest the plants that give that candy its flavor. And other people worked hard to cut sugarcane or harvest beets for the sugar. And someone made the sticks in the jar, and someone transported the licorice sticks to here, and George Waller hoped to sell them for more than he paid, so he could make something, too, putting them in front of the public. So a lot of folks did work that paid them back, and the licorice sticks got to here, and everyone put some labor and skill into it, and took some pay out of it.”
“Yeah, and now they don’t get paid.”
“No, they got paid. All except George Waller.”
“I’m gonna resign as deputy. I’ll give you my badge when we get back. I’m tired of fishing.”
I was tired of it, too. I thought maybe we could talk it out, but I didn’t have whatever it took to do that.
Riley’s bobber dipped. Then it began making a circle.
“I think you got a fish, Riley.”
“Yeah? What do I do?”
“We haven’t got a net, so we’ll need to draw it in slow, and then beach it, over there where you can reach into the water.”
The boy suddenly came alive. He tugged and pulled, and worked the fish to shore, and we saw its silvery body thrash as he drew it close. But then it spit out the hook, or maybe Riley tugged too hard, and it was gone.
“Got away,” Riley said. “That’s me for you. I haven’t got anything.”
I got ahold of the boy and sat him down on the riverbank, and we just sat there for a while. There was some sort of big, hollow ache in him, an ache no one could ever banish.
“We know there’s a big lunker in there, and you’re going to catch it,” I said.
Riley just shook his head. Catching a fish was too much for him to hope for.
“I’ll get us a proper rod with a reel and a net, and you’ll catch him,” I said.
“How’m I gonna pay for that?”
“It’ll be something I’ll give you. But if you’d like to earn it, I think I can find a few people who’d pay you to sweep their stores.”
“More of your crap,” he said, and clammed up.
But he was thinking about it. And that was as much as I could hope for. We headed back to Doubtful, and somehow I thought the time had not been wasted.