Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [3]
“Sonny boy,” Mel said, “you just killed one of my cowboys. Nobody in this town is going to fix your damn motorcycle.”
The year was 1929 and the Depression had already been on two years in that part of eastern Oregon, so Mel wasn’t worried about getting another hand. But he was glad to have that boy there to blame the accident on, and once the idea caught fire with him he lost his temper and hit the young man in the face, knocking him back through the crowd, stumbling, until he came to rest right at an Indian’s feet. The young man wiped the dust and sweat off his face with the back of his hand and looked up, grinning, at the Indian. A handsome young man, his teeth made brighter by the sunburn on his face. “I’m damned,” he said, “a damn Indian.” Then he got up and attacked Mel Weatherwax, and pretty soon some of the other men had to drag him off. The girl stood back from it all, in the shade, and watched. She was slender, dirty, blue-eyed, and very young, and she looked tired, but she had a glitter in her eye as she watched the fight, as if she liked what she saw. After that, when anyone saw that look in her eye, he knew there was going to be some trouble.
With the fight over, things calmed down, and Mel, being defeated, offered to buy the young man a drink, and they all moved off toward the Wagon Wheel. With that job open none of the men out of work were going to let Mel out of their sight until he had made his pick. As it turned out, the young man got the job, and he and Mel and the other hand rode out of town in the pickup together, leaving the girl at the hotel by herself. On the way out to the ranch they picked up the motorcycle and put it in the back, and out at the ranch they tried to fix it, but some of the parts were broken, and the frame was bent. Harmon Wilder, the young man, told everybody he had stolen it in Oakland, California, and didn’t care what happened to it.
There wasn’t any funeral for the dead cowboy; he didn’t have any family and, since it was early summer, all the men on the ranches were too busy. His body was put into a wooden coffin and hauled out to the ranch and buried there.
The next time the Indians saw the girl she was waiting on tables in the hotel restaurant. None of them went inside the hotel; they saw her through the big window that looks out over Walnut Street. In those days they didn’t have jobs; they lived on checks they got at the post office from the Federal Government. The checks didn’t stop until late in the 1930s when the lumber business got so busy the mills started hiring Indians. So in 1929 some of the Indians would come to town almost every day, and stand around in front of the post office, talking and watching the town goings-on. If the chance came up they would get some whiskey and take it off somewhere and drink it. They got to know Harmon Wilder pretty well, because unlike a lot of the other cowboys he didn’t mind buying the Indians whiskey. He even went drinking with them once or twice. And once, when the two Federal agents from Portland came to town and closed the Wagon Wheel, Harmon and a couple of others drove up to Bend and bought a case of Canadian Club, and Harmon sold three quarts of it to the Indians. It seemed as if the whole town was drunk that night, although it was just millhands, cowboys, and five or six Indians. Those two Federal agents got into a fight trying to find out where the liquor came from, and one of them was hit over the head with an empty bottle and had to be driven forty miles to the hospital.
Not long after that the State police came and got the girl. Her name was Annemarie Levitt, and she had run away from her family in Portland, and she was only