7
“There!” Sheriff Avery said when sais Dearborn and Heath were gone. “It’s as ye said—just slow is all they are; just creeping careful.” He held the meticulously printed list up, studied it a moment, then cackled happily. “And look at this! What a beauty! Har! We can move anything we don’t want em to see days in advance, so
we can.”
“They’re fools,” Reynolds said . . . but he pined for another chance at them, just the same. If Dearborn really thought bygones were bygones over that little business in the Travellers’ Rest, he was way past foolishness and dwelling in the land of idiocy.
Deputy Dave said nothing. He was looking disconsolately through his monocle at the Castles board, where his white army had been laid waste in six quick moves.
Jonas’s forces had poured around Red Hillock like water, and Dave’s hopes had been swept away in the flood.
“I’m tempted to wrap myself up dry and go over to Seafront with this,” Avery said.
He was still gloating over the paper, with its neat list of farms and ranches and proposed dates of inspection. Up to Year’s End and beyond it ran. Gods!
“Why don’t ye do that?” Jonas said, and got to his feet. Pain ran up his leg like bitter lightning.
“Another game, sai Jonas?” Dave asked, beginning to reset the pieces.
“I’d rather play a weed-eating dog,” Jonas said, and took malicious pleasure at the flush that crept up Dave’s neck and stained his guileless fool’s face. He limped across to the door, opened it, and went out on the porch. The drizzle had become a soft, steady rain. Hill Street was deserted, the cobbles gleaming wetly.
Reynolds had followed him out. “Eldred—”
“Get away,” Jonas said without turning.
Clay hesitated a moment, then went back inside and closed the door.
What the hell’s wrong with you? Jonas asked himself.
He should have been pleased at the two young pups and their list—as pleased as Avery was, as pleased as Rimer would be when he heard about this morning’s visit. After all, hadn’t he told Rimer not three days ago that the boys would soon be over on the Drop, counting their little hearts out? Yes. So why did he feel so unsettled? So fucking jittery? Because there
^Bt still hadn’t been any contact
from Parson’s man, Latigo? Because Reynolds came back empty from Hanging Rock on one day and Depape came back empty the next? Surely not. Latigo would come, along with a goodly troop of men, but it was still too soon for them, and Jonas knew it. Reaping was still almost a month away.
So is it just the bad weather working on your leg, stirring up that old wound and making you ugly?
No. The pain was bad, but it had been worse before. The trouble was his head.
Jonas leaned against a post beneath the overhang, listened to the rain plinking on the tiles, and thought how, sometimes in a game of Castles, a clever player would peek around his Hillock for just a moment, then duck back. That was what this felt like—it was so right it smelled wrong. Crazy idea, but somehow not crazy at all.
“Are you trying to play Castles with me, sprat?” Jonas murmured. “If so, you’ll soon wish you’d stayed home with your mommy. So you will.”
8
Roland and Cuthbert headed back to the Bar K along the Drop—there would be no counting done today. At first, in spite of the rain and the gray skies, Cuthbert’s good humor was almost entirely restored.
“Did you see them?” he asked with a laugh. “Did you see them, Roland . . . Will, I mean? They bought it, didn’t they? Swallowed that honey whole, they did!”
“Yes.”
“What do we do next? What’s our next move?”
Roland looked at him blankly for a moment, as if startled out of a doze. “The next move is theirs. We count. And we wait.”
Cuthbert’s good cheer collapsed in a puff, and he once more found himself having to restrain a flood of recrimination, all whirling around two basic ideas: that Roland was shirking his duty so he could continue to wallow in the undeniable charms of a certain young lady, and—more important—that Roland had lost his wits when all of Mid-World needed them the most.
Except what duty was Roland shirking? And what made him so sure Roland was wrong? Logic? Intuition? Or just shitty old catbox jealousy? Cuthbert found himself thinking of the effortless way Jonas had ripped up Deputy Dave’s army when Deputy Dave had moved too soon. But life was not like Castles … was it?
He didn’t know. But he thought he had at least one valid intuition: Roland was heading for disaster. And so they all were.
Wake up, Cuthbert thought. Please, Roland, wake up before it’s too late.
CHAPTER III
playing castles
1
There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch, take long naps, and wake feeling stupid and disoriented. It was far from flood-weather, but it made the final phase of the apple-picking dangerous (there were several broken legs, and in Seven-Mile Orchard a young woman fell from the top of her ladder, breaking her back), and the potato-fields became difficult to work; almost as much time was spent freeing wagons stuck in the gluey rows as was spent actually picking. In Green Heart, what decorations had been done for the Reaping Fair grew sodden and had to be pulled down. The work volunteers waited with increasing nervousness for the weather to break so they could begin again.
It was bad weather for young men whose job it was to take inventory, although they were at least able to begin visiting barns and counting stock. It was good weather for a young man and young woman who had discovered the joys of physical love, you would have said, but Roland and Susan met only twice during the run of gray weather. The danger of what they were doing was now almost palpable.
The first time was in an abandoned boathouse on the Seacoast Road. The second was in the far end of the crumbling building below and to the east of Citgo—they made love with furious intensity on one of Roland’s saddle-blankets, which was spread on the floor of what had once been the oil refinery’s cafeteria. As Susan climaxed, she shrieked his name over and over. Startled pigeons filled the old, shadowy rooms and crumbling hallways with their soft thunder.
2
Just as it seemed that the drizzle would never end and the grinding sound of the thinny in the still air would drive everyone in Hambry insane, a strong wind—almost a gale—blew in off the ocean and puffed the clouds away. The town awoke one day to a sky as bright as blue steel and a sun that turned the bay to gold in the morning and white fire in the afternoon. That sense of lethargy was gone. In the potato fields the carts rolled with new vigor. In Green Heart an army of women began once more to bedeck with flowers the podium where Jamie
McCann and Susan Delgado would he acclaimed this year’s Reaping Lad and Girl.
Out on the part of the Drop closest to Mayor’s House, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode with renewed purpose, counting the horses which ran with the Barony brand on their flanks. The bright skies and brisk winds filled them with energy and good cheer, and for a course of days—three, or perhaps four—they galloped together in a whooping, shouting, laughing line, their old good fellowship restored.
On one of these brisk and sunny days, Eldred Jonas stepped out of the Sheriff’s office and walked up Hill Street toward Green Heart. He was free of both Depape and Reynolds this morning—they had ridden out to Hanging Rock together, looking for Latigo’s outriders, who must come soon, now—and Jonas’s plan was simple: to have a glass of beer in the pavilion, and watch the preparations that were going on there: the digging of the roasting-pits, the laying of faggots for the bonfire, the arguments over how to set the mortars that would shoot off the fireworks, the ladies flowering the stage where this year’s Lad and Girl would be offered for the town’s adulation. Perhaps, Jonas thought, he might take a likely-looking flower-girl off for an hour or two of recreation. The maintenance of the saloon whores he left strictly to Roy and Clay, but a fresh young flower-girl of seventeen or so was a different matter.
The pain in his hip had faded with the damp weather; the painful, lurching stride with which he had moved for the last week or so had become a mere limp again.
Perhaps just a beer or two in the open air would be enough, but the thought of a girl wouldn’t quite leave his head. Young, clear-skinned, high-breasted. Fresh, sweet breath. Fresh, sweet lips—