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Started reading
June 9, 2019
Pierce-Arrow, say, but he desired no car. His brother George had once expressed a wish to buy a Pierce, and Phil had said, ‘Want to look like some Jew?’ And that was the end of it. No, Phil didn’t drive. His saddle,
adze
back to the time of the last stinking Indians before the government got onto itself for a change and shipped them off to the reservation. Phil recalled to this day the swaybacked old horses the Indians rode away on, the rickety old buggies the old Indians piled themselves into. All one week the Indians had straggled
sorrel
levis,
Phil made a harsh chuckle. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said aloud. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’
Now, some people can get along with them, just as some can get along with Jews and shines, and that’s their business. But Phil couldn’t abide them.
‘Yeah,’ and Phil leaned back in his chair so the front legs were off the floor. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’ George sat there like the Great Stone Face.
‘Well, you miserable bastards,’ the ass-ass-in said. One by one he tossed the young ’pies into the air. Their strange chance to escape gave them a brief skill and they soared, and leveled off, and then one by one they exploded up there; a few feathers drifted down like ash. Well, it was a quick death, quicker than shooting them or wringing their necks, and not a purposeless death either, like most, for it had afforded a little fun on a Sunday, Phil thought. ‘To be perfectly frank,’ he nodded to himself, moving his lips. Alone, Phil often talked or laughed to himself, aware that he did so,
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they were like a single twin, and it irritated Phil when he couldn’t be frank; he felt lost and angry. Now he removed his foot from the block nailed to the
windlass
looking at you right now, and a-shaking his old mean head.’ It’d make George wet the bed in his sleep, and Phil would tease about that, too. The Old Lady had had to get George a rubber sheet. He bet he could make George blush about that sheet right now.
him. The animals looked down. It had got so dark Phil had
She! She could mean the end of the world, as Phil knew it.
little dolly that remembered. Then figure, if you will, why George who might have had some of the finest ass on the East coast could get himself mixed up with a floozy with a suicide husband and who used to play, used to tickle the ivories, in some honky-tonk. The Old Lady would croak. Get out those smelling salts
‘The Old Lady would feel,’ said George, ‘what one Mrs Burbank would feel for another Mrs Burbank.’
dipsomania,
Victrola,
The Old Gent turned to her. The question he was about to ask had often been on his mind. A hundred times he had phrased the question, opened his lips to speak it. Meeting her eyes, he had until now kept silent, wondering if she might not sense in the question some criticism of herself. ‘Do you think …?’ Shocked, he suddenly realized the same question had been on her mind. It was she, then, who expressed it. ‘Do I think there might be something — something wrong — something wrong with Phil?’
‘My wife,’ George said.
He had her figured, had her figured from the first time he sighted her, knowing her as one who doubted herself too much to dare put a wedge between him and George by repeating what he’d said about not being her brother. She’d be pretty careful not to test George, risk his anger, tamper with his feeling for family because George was her meal ticket. And suppose by some chance she did whine, what good would that do her? The house was his as much as George’s, the money as much as George’s, and the ranch so set up you couldn’t split it without causing financial troubles, water rights, grazing
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Phil lay there, rigid in the dark, thinking how the woman would go lie down with George and let him work away over her, and maybe get her with child.
Except for their money, would they have been summoned to share with the Governor his peas and creamed chicken and the Neapolitan ice? They would not. Indeed, they would not! Their leader, the richest man in
Then in the new silence she would hear Phil’s snuffling and coughing, the snuffling and coughing of one who has long been awake and waiting.
Some found the Dixie Rooms, where they got two dollars a trick, and ten for all night — an interesting bit of economics.
He got a kick out of hearing her play at the new pananno, making one howler after another, dropping notes like crumbs, and then when she’d finished, he’d play the thing correctly.
Easy to get her goat. How her hands shook, pouring the coffee! Phil had no use for people who felt sorry for themselves.
Lysistrata.
‘Matter of fact,’ Phil says, ‘if I was you, I’d drop out the end of the year. You better face up to the fact you ain’t got the equipment for this so-called higher education. No good battering your bean against a stone wall, kid.’
he anticipated Phil’s reaction to such a thing and it struck him as intolerable that this innocent bit of handiwork would certainly bring down on her Phil’s hooting laughter — if not to her face, then in the bunkhouse, the sort of tearing, hooting laughter Phil had turned on him one Christmas not so long ago when he, to please his mother, had put on over his clothes a dressing gown of blue silk and funny slippers to match — her Christmas gift to him.
and then Phil rising from the table and going into the bedroom and closing the door while the presents were opened, and the Old Lady pretending. She had never learned — they had never learned — to accept Phil as he was
How does one man, how does one man get the power to make the rest see in themselves what he sees in them? Where does he get the authority? But from somewhere he does get it. It wouldn’t have hurt Phil to come in that one night and pretend, even
Phil’s eyes were lazy on the Old Gent. ‘Sure you have. But this is the world we live in. It was you who left the other world. I never figured out why.’ Phil paused. ‘Did you?’
So much out of so little; and he said to himself something about a silk purse, and a sow’s ear.
the gardener and the maid and again they’d repair to a fair-to-middling house, her husband to his fair-to-middling law practice, awaiting a change of heart in The People. And this small woman beside her had been born to nothing. She had inquired of her husband as to who Mrs Burbank was, and he had inquired, and found she had run some kind of rooming house. Rooming house or not, it was she who
The Governor’s lady could not but feel a little jealous of her who pretended to be born into this room. ‘Imagine finding such elegance — on a ranch!’ She had paused to admire the two Dresden figures that flanked
When Phil drew on the cigarette the glow briefly flooded his face. He said, ‘You two can keep your apologies to yourself.’
voiced. ‘… last very long,’ she was saying. An automobile that suddenly slowed in front gave him a chance to
The hides they bought here and there for that price they sold for twice, and made fortunes, some of them. Jews, all of them Jews after hides, Jews after junk, Jews with the eye for the quick buck, bargaining for rusty iron, mowing machine frames, rake frames, lengths of pipe and so forth that collects on a ranch; but rather than sell to these shysters, Phil let the junk collect and the hides dry and shrink on the fence until he got around to the burning. Phil had nothing against the right kind of Jews, Jews of intellect and talent, so long as he didn’t have to mix with them. But Lord, these
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It was often said of Phil that he never lost a certain boyish air; you saw it in his eyes, in the step of his high-arched foot. He was forty, yet his face was innocent of lines except
timothy
The boy wanted to become him, to merge with him as Phil had only once before wanted to become one with someone, and that one was gone, trampled to death while Phil, twenty years old, watched from the top rail of the bronc corral. Ah, God, but Phil had almost forgot what the touch of a hand will do, and his heart counted the seconds that Peter’s was on him and rejoiced at the quality of the pressure. It told him what his heart required to know.
Please, was it not Fate (because a man must believe in something), was it not Fate that the boy had looked on him in his nakedness in that hidden place known only to George and to himself — and to Bronco Henry? Just so, he had looked on the boy’s nakedness in that eternity when the boy had walked proud and unprotected past the open tents, jeered at, scorned — a pariah. But Phil knew, God knows he knew, what it was to be a pariah, and he had loathed the world, should it loath him first. His voice was husky, ‘That’s damned kind of you, Pete,’ and he slid his long arm about the boy’s shoulders.
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George took a breath and did the unheard-of thing — he opened his brother’s door without an invitation. ‘I’ll run you into Herndon,’ George said. ‘All right,’ said Phil. He had got himself arranged into his
She sipped her coffee; she had so frightened herself two days before in collapsing drunk on the bed that she had drunk nothing since,
She was crushed by the irrational notion that whatever was going on that morning was her fault. Thus does guilt smother and sicken.
Because the funeral was at two (the usual time in that country) they planned so they could have a nice lunch either at the Sugar Bowl or in the hotel and a nice little visit afterwards, for many never saw each other except on such pointed occasions.
Not many words, he thought, to celebrate oblivion. Reading it slowly as
of tradition and habit. On the ranch Phil is responsible for haying, roundups, ranch labor, trailing herds to the railroad, the daily work of a big spread, while George oversees the business affairs and finances, meets with bankers and the governor, and winds the clock on Sunday afternoon. In the rural division of labor, ranch work is man’s work.fn14 Phil spends much
major key to Phil’s complex personality is, perhaps, that in wanting to touch and have Bronco Henry, he was forced to recognize and confront the enormous fact of his own homosexuality. His
