Lewis finally met Dulcy’s eyes. “She killed herself, and that’s the beginning and the end of it,” he said. “But it does sound like its own long movie.”
They all walked to the range; he passed behind her, touching the small of her back, and said, “Keep your head up.”
So she did. The men shot first. Dulcy had used a gun once at a friend’s farm near Cold Spring, at a candidacy party. People had loved to have Walton at such events because of the way he worked his accent around the normal nasty American political vocabulary. What he said, if a person truly listened, was not in fact complimentary. Clara launched into a monologue on biting insects. Grover bellowed politics, his voice swelling in the air. Lewis, drunk as a skunk, shot very well—she heard people mutter Philippines—and claimed all the shards in his cheek heated up next to the warm barrel, and a Bozeman woman he seemed to know—had she known the last mistress?—touched his cheek to see if he was lying.
The idea of Priscilla the mistress worked its way through drinks and panic. It made Dulcy miserable in a new way, and misery made her surly. When Lewis finally met her eyes now, she looked away. She thought of walking down by the river but guessed she might be shot. Dulcy took a turn with the gun and only ticked one out of six disks that Bartle’s boys threw in the air. “Try again,” said Rex, beaming with his newly happy eyes over his newly bumpy nose.
“Did you remember your glasses?” called Lewis.
This time she obliterated three of the six.
More drinks; onward to the river, which was still huge and brown and deadly. While the guests politely admired the impressive riverboats, some locals tried to explain to the host that pulling them into the river while it was this high, and they were this drunk, was a bad idea. Dulcy wandered off into the cottonwood bottomland. It was green, high-grassed, orchard as a cathedral. It would be a wonderful place to live, if the river didn’t rinse you out every few years.
Birds flushed behind her, and she turned. Lewis was running toward her.
A few minutes later, down in the grass, she said, “You knew and you didn’t tell me. You let me feel safe.”
“You are safe. I’ll keep you safe. What the hell do you think happens in my head, when you look at me like that?” he asked.
“Did you know the woman who petted your face?”
“No.”
She could have said, did you know her friend, but she left it alone. “Why were you so sour earlier?”
“My sister telegrammed me. My father died.”
He went back out to the crowd first. From the voices she guessed Bartle was persisting in putting people in boats, if only to estimate how many would fit. She walked the other way for a few minutes, plucking at the bark and grass stuck in the pleats of her blouse, wanting to be away from these people. She cut back to the river path for easier walking but heard something and moved behind a tree. Through branches and wild clematis she could see Samuel standing ten yards away. He stared blindly at the river, then tilted his head back and closed his eyes. For a horrible moment she thought, he has a gun, and he’s going to kill himself, but then she saw that Grover was kneeling in front, and had Samuel in his mouth.
She slid back into the party. No one had noticed she’d been missing.
???
Lewis was not going to the funeral, because his stepmother wouldn’t have it. He’d just seen his father, and he’d known it would be soon, and they’d left each other on better terms than usual. Dulcy had to understand how different it had been: her father might have been difficult, but she’d loved him and been loved in return.
He explained this later, in bed. She told him what she’d seen in the woods, that Samuel had to be careful. “Leave it,” said Lewis. “Samuel’s lonely.” This had been going on for years, and it was hard on Samuel, because Grover would sleep with anything, male or female. Lewis said she shouldn’t waste her pity on Clara, who was willfully blind to all of it (Dulcy hadn’t actually thought of Clara), and Grover’s wayward affections were only part of the story: he made gentlemen’s movies. One was called Wild William Tell , but instead of Tell’s son and the apple, Grover filmed girls wearing only hats and cowboy chaps, wiggling body parts at Indian archers, who inevitably had to walk closer to check their aim. Sometimes the cowboys got there first.
She giggled until her face was wet. “He showed that?”
“He did,” said Lewis. “During filming the rubber-tipped arrows caused unhappiness, but he made piles of money, especially in England and Germany.”
The second film was called Take a Poke at Polly , and featured girls on a bingo board, with male winners who stepped forward to claim their prizes. “Maybe Grover will try chess for the up market,” said Lewis. “More costumes. Think how much fun he’ll have with the bishops.”
???
A week later, Independence Day: the state might not be twenty yet, but its citizens were serious about patriotism, and because of this boosterism and the town’s proximity to Yellowstone Park and the train line, the Livingston parade was the largest in the state. Miles Park was packed with milling bagpipers and Masons, Shriners, and tuba players. A Washington and Jefferson flanked a man in a cannon costume, who looked so much like something else that Vinca laughed hard enough to smear her green face paint. The Hunt Club horses were skittish, as were Mrs. Woolley’s pacers and a quartet of dapple-gray Arabians. The bicycle club members rode in circles, the grocers’ floats handed out candies and fruits early, and the bottling company doled out waxed paper cones of beer and fizzy drinks.