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“About what?”
“With you. I made a mistake.”
He saw the vulnerability, the flicker of injury, in her face before he had stopped speaking, and he hated himself for it. He set his pen down on the blotter and replaced the cap on the inkwell. “What I mean is I’m too set in my habits, too worn around the edges.”
“You hear me complaining?” she said.
“When a woman loves a man, she knows it, and the man does, too. It’s not a reasonable state of mind. It’s kind of like having influenza.”
“You think too much,” she said.
“No, I don’t. That’s my problem. I don’t think about anything. I just do it. Just like my father.”
“Where are you going?”
“To bed. I love the rain and the lightning in the clouds. I chased cows all over Oklahoma Territory in storms like this. All that’s ending. No one can know what that means unless he was there for it. It was a special time.”
“What about Aint Ginny?”
“What about her?”
“Is she going to be all right in the tent?”
“I already moved her into the back room. You thought I’d leave her outside? Jesus Christ, Ruby, what do you think I am?”
He turned down the wick in the lamp until the flame died and a tiny ribbon of black smoke drifted through the glass chimney. He rose from his desk and went up the stairs and undressed and pulled back the covers on his bed and lay down and stared out the window at the flashes of electricity rippling through the heavens, not unlike ancient horsemen in pursuit of a golden bowl that somehow, millennium after millennium, eluded their grasp.
THE STORM HAD passed, and the thunder had rolled away and died in a diminishing echo among the hills, and the only sound in the house was the rain drumming on the roof when she undressed by his bedside and pulled back the covers and got in beside him. She laid her head on the pillow, her face pointed at his, her hair still up. “Do you want me to go?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t mean go from your room. From your house.”
“No, I don’t.”
Her arm lay across his bare chest. “You’re not interested in me?”
“How could I not be?”
“Then why do you stare at the ceiling?”
“I’m too old for you. I took advantage of your situation when you lost your job. You’re poor and I’m prosperous.”
“You get those notions out of your head.”
“That I’m older than you? That I didn’t make overtures to you when you were in a desperate situation?”
“That I’m a charity case.”
“I said no such thing.”
“There’s a revolver sticking out from under your pillow.”
“That’s where I keep it when I sleep.”
“What for?”
“My conscience bothers me. The men I’ve slain visit my bedside. Most of them are still in a bad mood.”
