The Montanans (v1.0), page 13
No-Fights yawned ostentatiously and shut his eyes. He would have liked to show Buffalo Calf Woman his gratitude by even a fleeting glance, but not to wholly ignore her would be very bad form. Even a different one could observe some traditions comfortably.
A Montanan in spirit as well as by long residence, A. B. Guthrie, Jr. began writing fiction during World War II, after thirty years as a journalist. His second novel, The Big Sky (1947), established him as one of the giants of Western literature; it has been called “a monument of a book,” earned its author a Pulitzer Prize, and is or should be on everyone’s list of the ten best Western historical novels. It and its sequels, The Way West (1949), These Thousand Hills (1956), Arfive (1971), The Last Valley (1975), and Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), form a multivolume fictionalized account of the development of the West from 1830 to 1946. Among Guthrie’s other writings are his autobiography, The Blue Hen’s Chick (1965); a series of mysteries that vividly portray the contemporary Montana scene; and the screenplay for the now-classic film adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s Shane. Guthrie’s short stories number relatively few, most having been collected in 1960 under the title The Big It and Other Stories. “Bargain,” the ironic tale of the outcome of conflict between a mild-mannered immigrant storekeeper and a tough, thieving freighter, is one of half a dozen set in the mythical Montana frontier town of Moon Dance.
Bargain
A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
Mr. Baumer and I had closed the Moon Dance Mercantile Company and were walking to the post office, and he had a bunch of bills in his hand ready to mail. There wasn’t anyone or anything much on the street because it was suppertime. A buckboard and a saddle horse were tied at Hirsches’ rack, and a rancher in a wagon rattled for home ahead of us, the sound of his going fading out as he prodded his team. Freighter Slade stood alone in front of the Moon Dance Saloon, maybe wondering whether to have one more before going to supper. People said he could hold a lot without showing it except in being omerier even than usual.
Mr. Baumer didn’t see him until he was almost on him, and then he stopped and fingered through the bills until he found the right one. He stepped up to Slade and held it out.
Slade said, “What’s this, Dutchie?”
Mr. Baumer had to tilt his head up to talk to him. “You know vat it is.”
Slade just said, “Yeah?” You never could tell from his face what went on inside his skull. He had dark skin and shallow cheeks and a thick-growing mustache that fell over the comers of his mouth.
“It is a bill,” Mr. Baumer said. “I tell you before it is a bill. For twenty-vun dollars and fifty cents.”
“You know what I do with bills, don’t you, Dutchie?” Slade asked.
Mr. Baumer didn’t answer the question. He said, “For merchandise.”
Slade took the envelope from Mr. Baumer’s hand and squeezed it up in his fist and let it drop on the plank sidewalk. Not saying anything, he reached down and took Mr. Baumer’s nose between the knuckles of his fingers and twisted it up into his eyes. That was all. That was all at the time. Slade half turned and slouched to the door of the bar and let himself in. Some men were laughing in there.
Mr. Baumer stooped and picked up the bill and put it on top of the rest and smoothed it out for mailing. When he straightened up I could see tears in his eyes from having his nose screwed around.
He didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him, being so much younger and feeling embarrassed for him. He went into the post office and slipped the bills in the slot, and we walked on home together. At the last, at the crossing where I had to leave him, he remembered to say, “Better study, Al. Is good to know to read and write and figure.” I guess he felt he had to push me a little, my father being dead.
I said, “Sure. See you after school tomorrow”—which he knew I would anyway. I had been working in the store for him during the summer and after classes ever since pneumonia took my dad off.
Three of us worked there regularly, Mr. Baumer, of course, and me and Colly Coleman, who knew enough to drive the delivery wagon but wasn’t much help around the store except for carrying orders out to the rigs at the hitch post and handling heavy things like the whisky barrel at the back of the store which Mr. Baumer sold quarts and gallons out of.
The store carried quiet a bit of stuff—sugar and flour and dried fruits and canned goods and such on one side and yard goods and coats and caps and aprons and the like of that on the other, besides kerosene and bran and buckets and linoleum and pitchforks in the storehouse at the rear—but it wasn’t a big store like Hirsch Brothers up the street. Never would be, people guessed, going on to say, with a sort of slow respect, that it would have gone under long ago if Mr. Baumer hadn’t been half mule and half beaver. He had started the store just two years before and, the way things were, worked himself close to death.
He was at the high desk at the end of the grocery counter when I came in the next afternoon. He had an eyeshade on and black sateen protectors on his forearms, and his pencil was in his hand instead of behind his ear and his glasses were roosted on the nose that Slade had twisted. He didn’t hear me open and close the door or hear my feet as I walked back to him, and I saw he wasn’t doing anything with the pencil but holding it over paper. I stood and studied him for a minute, seeing a small, stooped man with a little paunch bulging through his unbuttoned vest. He was a man you wouldn’t remember from meeting once. There was nothing in his looks to set itself in your mind unless maybe it was his chin, which was a small, pink hill in the gentle plain of his face.
While I watched him, he lifted his hand and felt carefully of his nose. Then he saw me. His eyes had that kind of mistiness that seems to go with age or illness, though he wasn’t really old or sick, either. He brought his hand down quickly and picked up the pencil, but he saw I still was looking at the nose, and finally he sighed and said, “That Slade.”
Just the sound of the name brought Slade to my eye. I saw him slouched in front of the bar, and I saw him and his string coming down the grade from the buttes, the wheel horses held snug and the rest lined out pretty, and then the string leveling off and Slade’s whip lifting hair from a horse that wasn’t up in the collar. I had heard it said that Slade could make a horse scream with that whip. Slade’s name wasn’t Freighter, of course. Our town had nicknamed him that because that was what he was.
“I don’t think it’s any good to send him a bill, Mr. Baumer,” I said. “He can’t even read.”
“He could pay yet.”
“He don’t pay anybody,” I said.
“I think he hate me,” Mr. Baumer went on. “That is the thing. He hate me for coming not from this country. I come here, sixteen years old, and learn to read and write, and I make a business, and so I think he hate me.”
“He hates everybody.”
Mr. Baumer shook his head. “But not to pinch the nose. Not to call Dutchie.”
The side door squeaked open, but it was only Colly Coleman coming in from a trip so I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Baumer, but you shouldn’t have trusted him in the first place.”
“I know,” he answered, looking at me with his misty eyes. “A man make mistakes. I think some do not trust him, so he will pay me because I do. And I do not know him well then. He only came back to town three-four months ago, from being away since before I go into business.”
“People who knew him before could have told you,” I said.
“A man make mistakes,” he explained again.
“It’s not my business, Mr. Baumer, but I would forget the bill.”
His eyes rested on my face for a long minute, as if they didn’t see me but the problem itself. He said, “It is not twenty-vun dollars and fifty cents now, Al. It is not that anymore.”
“What is it?”
He took a little time to answer. Then he brought his two hands up as if to help him shape the words. “It is the thing. You see, it is the thing.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
He took his pencil from behind the ear where he had put it and studied the point of it. “That Slade. He steal whisky and call it evaporation. He sneak things from his load. A thief, he is. And too big for me.”
I said, “I got no time for him, Mr. Baumer, but I guess there never was a freighter didn’t steal whisky. That’s what I hear.”
It was true, too. From the railroad to Moon Dance was fifty miles and a little better—a two-day haul in good weather, heck knew how long in bad. Any freight string bound home with a load had to lie out at least one night. When a freighter had his stock tended to and maybe a little fire going against the dark, he’d tackle a barrel of whisky or of grain alcohol if he had one aboard, consigned to Hirsch Brothers or Mr. Baumer’s or the Moon Dance Saloon or the Gold Leaf Bar. He’d drive a hoop out of place, bore a little hole with a nail or bit, and draw off what he wanted. Then he’d plug the hole with a whittled peg and pound the hoop back. That was evaporation. Nobody complained much. With freighters you generally took what they gave you, within reason.
“Moore steals it, too,” I told Mr. Baumer. Moore was Mr. Baumer’s freighter.
“Yah,” he said, and that was all, but I stood there for a minute, thinking there might be something more. I could see thought swimming in his eyes, above that little hill of chin. Then a customer came in, and I had to go wait on him.
Nothing happened for a month, nothing between Mr.
Baumer and Slade, that is, but fall drew on toward winter and the first flight of ducks headed south and Mr. Baumer hired Miss Lizzie Webb to help with the just-beginning Christmas trade, and here it was, the first week in October, and he and I walked up the street again with the monthly bills. He always sent them out. I guess he had to. A bigger store, like Hirsches’, would wait on the ranchers until their beef or wool went to market.
Up to a point things looked and happened almost the same as they had before, so much the same that I had the crazy feeling I was going through that time again. There was a wagon and a rig tied up at Hirsches’ rack and a saddle horse standing hipshot in front of the harness shop. A few more people were on the street now, not many, and lamps had been lit against the shortened day.
It was dark enough that I didn’t make out Slade right away. He was just a figure that came out of the yellow wash of light from the Moon Dance Saloon and stood on the boardwalk and with his head made the little motion of spitting. Then I recognized the lean, raw shape of him and the muscles flowing down into the sloped shoulders, and in the settling darkness I filled the picture in—the dark skin and the flat cheeks and the peevish eyes and the mustache growing rank.
There was Slade and here was Mr. Baumer with his bills and here I was, just as before, just like in the second go-round of a bad dream. I felt like turning back, being embarrassed and half-scared by trouble even when it wasn’t mine. Please, I said to myself, don’t stop, Mr. Baumer! Don’t bite off anything! Please, short-sighted the way you are, don’t catch sight of him at all! I held up and stepped around behind Mr. Baumer and came up on the outside so as to be between him and Slade where maybe I’d cut off his view.
But it wasn’t any use. All along I think I knew it was no use, not the praying or the walking between or anything. The act had to play itself out.
Mr. Baumer looked across the front of me and saw Slade and hesitated in his step and came to a stop. Then in his slow, business way, his chin held firm against his mouth, he began fingering through the bills, squinting to make out the names. Slade had turned and was watching him, munching on a cud of tobacco like a bull Waiting.
“You look, Al,” Mr. Baumer said without lifting his face from the bills. “I cannot see so good.”
So I looked, and while I was looking Slade must have moved. The next I knew Mr. Baumer was staggering ahead, the envelopes spilling out of his hands. There had been a thump, the clap of a heavy hand swung hard on his back.
Slade said, “Haryu, Dutchie?”
Mr. Baumer caught his balance and turned around, the bills he had trampled shining white between them and, at Slade’s feet, the hat that Mr. Baumer had stumbled out from under.
Slade picked up the hat and scuffed through the bills and held it out. “Cold to be goin’ without a sky-piece,” he said.
Mr. Baumer hadn’t spoken a word. The lamp-shine from inside the bar caught his eyes, and in them it seemed to me a light came and went as anger and the uselessness of it took turns in his head.
Two men had come up on us and stood watching. One of them was Angus McDonald, who owned the Ranchers’ Bank, and the other was Dr. King. He had his bag in his hand.
Two others were drifting up, but I didn’t have time to tell who. The light came in Mr. Baumer’s eyes, and he took a step ahead and swung. I could have hit harder myself. The first landed on Slade’s cheek without hardly so much as jogging his head, but it let hell loose in the man. I didn’t know he could move so fast. He slid in like a practiced fighter and let Mr. Baumer have it full in the face.
Mr. Baumer slammed over on his back, but he wasn’t out. He started lifting himself. Slade leaped ahead and brought a boot heel down on the hand he was lifting himself by. I heard meat and bone under that heel and saw Mr. Baumer fall back and try to roll away.
Things had happened so fast that not until then did anyone have a chance to get between them. Now Mr.
McDonald pushed at Slade’s chest, saying, “That’s enough, Freighter. That’s enough now,” and Dr. King lined up, too, and another man I didn’t know, and I took a place, and we formed a kind of screen between them. Dr. King turned and bent to look at Mr. Baumer.
“Damn fool hit me first,” Slade said.
“That’s enough,” Mr. McDonald told him again while Slade looked at all of us as if he’d spit on us for a nickel. Mr. McDonald went on, using a half-friendly tone, and I knew it was because he didn’t want to take Slade on any more than the rest of us did. “You go on home and sleep it off, Freighter. That’s the ticket.”
Slade just snorted.
From behind us Dr. King said, “I think you’ve broken this man’s hand.”
“Lucky for him I didn’t kill him,” Slade answered. “Damn Dutch penny-pincher!” He fingered the chew out of his mouth. “Maybe he’ll know enough to leave me alone now.”
Dr. King had Mr. Baumer on his feet. “I’ll take him to the office,” he said.
Blood was draining from Mr. Baumer’s nose and rounding the curve of his lip and dripping from the sides of his chin. He held his hurt right hand in the other. But the thing was that he didn’t look beaten even then, not the way a man who has given up looks beaten. Maybe that was why Slade said, with a show of that fierce anger, “You stay away from me! Hear? Stay clear away, or you’ll get more of the same!”
Dr. King led Mr. Baumer away, Slade went back into the bar, and the other men walked off, talking about the fight. I got down and picked up the bills, because I knew Mr. Baumer would want me to, and mailed them at the post office, dirty as they were. It made me sorer, someway, that Slade’s bill was one of the few that wasn’t marked up. The cleanness of it seemed to say that there was no getting the best of him.
Mr. Baumer had his hand in a sling the next day and wasn’t much good at waiting on the trade. I had to hustle all afternoon and so didn’t have a chance to talk to him even if he had wanted to talk. Mostly he stood at his desk, and once, passing it, I saw he was practicing writing with his left hand. His nose and the edges of the cheeks around it were swollen some.
At closing time I said, “Look, Mr. Baumer, I can lay out of school a few days until you kind of get straightened out here.”
“No,” he answered as if to wave the subject away. “I get somebody else. You go to school. Is good to learn.”
I had a half notion to say that learning hadn’t helped him with Slade. Instead, I blurted out that I would have the law on Slade.
“The law?” he asked.
“The sheriff or somebody.”
“No, Al,” he said. “You would not.”
I asked why.
“The law, it is not for plain fights,” he said. “Shooting? Robbing? Yes, the law come quick. The plain fights, they are too many. They not count enough.”
He was right. I said, “Well, I’d do something anyhow.”
“Yes,” he answered with a slow nod of his head. “Something you vould do, Al.” He didn’t tell me what.
Within a couple of days he got another man to clerk for him—it was Ed Hempel, who was always finding and losing jobs—and we made out. Mr. Baumer took his hand from the sling in a couple or three weeks, but with the tape on it it still wasn’t any use to him. From what you could see of the fingers below the tape it looked as if it never would be.
He spent most of his time at the high desk, sending me or Ed out on the errands he used to run, like posting and getting the mail. Sometimes I wondered if that was because he was afraid of meeting Slade. He could just as well have gone himself. He wasted a lot of hours just looking at nothing, though I will have to say he worked hard at learning to write left-handed.
Then, a month and a half before Christmas, he hired Slade to haul his freight for him.
Ed Hempel told me about the deal when I showed up for work. “Yessir,” he said, resting his foot on a crate in the storeroom where we were supposed to be working. “I tell you he’s throwed in with Slade. Told me this morning to go out and locate him if I could and bring him in. Slade was at the saloon, o’ course, and says to hell with Dutchie, but I told him this was honest-to-God business, like Baumer had told me to, and there was a quart of whisky right there in the store for him if he’d come and get it. He was out of money, I reckon, because the quart fetched him.” “What’d they say?” I asked him.
“Search me. There was two or three people in the store and Baumer told me to wait on ’em, and he and Slade palavered back by the desk.”
