Doc had lighted a small fire, suspending a can of water over it, ready to brew up some coffee sub. Judas was eating quietly in the background.
The old man had given the woman a drastically edited version of his own life, omitting all mention of time-trawling and Emily and the children, not quite sure why he’d done that. He simply told the woman that he lived with Jak and some friends, describing the ranch, but not going into much detail. He explained that he’d felt he needed some time on his own and was intending to return in another couple of days.
“When you got your head together, Doc?”
“My head together? I fear that I am not familiar with that saying, Sukie.”
“Heard it from my grandpa. Grandpa Polissar that is, on my mother’s side. He was real old. Remembered predark. Used to talk about it.” She laughed, wincing a little as the makeshift bandage tugged at the cut. “Fact is, he didn’t talk about much else. Specially in his late days. Memory went walking about a lot. Nice old guy, though.”
“The coffee will soon be ready. Do you wish to tell me something about yourself? Other than coming from Wisconsin and being attacked by your stunted guide.”
“We got all day?”
“Indeed we do. Company is welcome, ma’am. We have all day and” He hesitated.
“All night, you were going to say, weren’t you?”
He felt his cheeks grow warm. “Now you make me blush, dear lady.”
“Listen, you sort of saved my life, Doc. Now, we’re both a little past the first flush I’m forty-three if you want to know. So we don’t want to go rushing our fences, do we?”
“No.”
SUKIE SMITH’S LIFE STORY wasn’t particularly interesting, and was fairly typical of what it was like to struggle for a living in Deathlands.
She’d been born and raised near the ville of Rice Falls, Wisconsin, and married at thirteen to the oldest son of the local baron. “He was fifty-one years old, Doc. One leg, one hand and no dick. The man was dickless. I was widowed at fourteen. Best you don’t even ask, Doc. Can’t say he died happy.”
She married again at seventeen. “Lasted a short while longer. Wheelwright. Got to wear my widow’s black at nineteen. Husband was a nice enough guy, but he had a gross rad cancer. Got me pregnant. Miscarried. Sort of lost some of my plumbing to a butcher doctor. Couldn’t have any more kids after that. They hacked a tumor the size of a grapefruit out of my man’s jaw.”
The day was passing, but Doc felt no urgency to cut Sukie short. There was no need to move on, nowhere special that he really had to be.
Sukie married again at twenty-two, but by then Sukie had moved into Kansas, to a sodbuster’s shack with their nearest neighbor more than thirty miles away, and a wind that blew for three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
“He was kind enough, Harry was. We lived there for six years. God knows how! Every single hour was an eternity. Boredom became a kind of art form, all on its own. Piece of tumbleweed blowing by was a real event. Weeks might go by and we’d never say a word to each other.”
Harry had gone out early one summer morning and hanged himself in their barn, using his own belt.
She smiled at the memory. “Truth is, Doc, I didn’t miss him for two weeks. I could smell him, but I kind of ignored it. Know how it is?”
Her last marriage had been six months later, in the pesthole ville of Mason, Iowa. Truman Shelley was a widower with six children, the oldest of them just turned nine. Their mother had been crushed by an overturning wag in the spring rains.
“Truman had a dream of heading west. Heard about the orchards of California. Oranges and lemons.”
Their odyssey had ended in the mud of Deadwood, at the heart of a raging cholera epidemic.
“You ever been there, Doc?”
“Once. Rained.”
“It was a beautiful morning when I buried Truman and all the little ones.”
“All?”