From “Till One or the Other Gits Back,” which is collected in The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories, out this month from New Directions.

She stood now at the door of the house looking out, her lean, saturnine face outlined against the blue dusk. It was nearly winter, and dry leaves swept in the door around her and rattled across the bare pine floor. She slammed the door shut and pushed her hands down her sides, and looked into nothing for a moment or two. Then she opened her thin lips and called, “Git ready, Bill! Long ’bout this time he mought be startin’ back!”

“Bring down your gun,” she yelled more sharply. “I’ll fetch them lanterns frum the barn.”

The man came lumbering heavily down the stairs. He wore high boots. His big form moved woodenly and the butt of his double-barreled gun trailed along the steps with a clanking that made the woman stiffen.

“Cain’t you tote thet gun?” she hissed.

The man’s eyes looked uncommonly large and pale in his narrow brown face and his yellow hair hung over his forehead. With a startled movement he hoisted the gun to his shoulder and then stood waiting as though unable to stir without her command.

“Don’t stand there like a stick!” she yelled. “Git moving!”

She stood bristling a moment, then darted toward the rear of the house. The man glanced around him like a frightened animal, as though he were seeking some less perilous means of egress than the dark doorway that the woman had taken. But there was apparently no other way out.

Shortly afterward, the man and the woman climbed onto the high front seat of an old Ford parked behind the house. The woman carried two lanterns and a can of coal oil. The man carried his gun.

They drove a piece down the Missouri state highway and then they stopped. Before them was that sharp turn in the road that was known locally as Dead Man’s Curve.

The woman scrambled immediately out of the car and stood at the side of the road.

“Git the car outer sight!” she commanded. “We ain’t got nary a moment ter lose!”

“Aw, hell!” the man growled weakly. “He’ll be too all-fired drunk t’see Kingdom Come!”

“Maybe you kin take chances!” the woman muttered. She retreated among the brush that grew along the field’s edge and groped around till she found an old stump directly above the low embankment. She seated herself upon it, but found it too rough. She got up and spread over it her man’s leather jacket, which was much too large for her own slender shoulders. She seated herself again, removed some cartridges from the pocket of her raveled brown sweater and started loading the gun with thoughtless precision.

In a few minutes the man joined her there. He seemed uncertain of what to do with his big wooden body.

“Set down!” she commanded.

She nodded her head and turned sharply away from him. She stared down the embankment toward the highway and Dead Man’s Curve.

“He mought be ’long most any time naow.”

The man shifted uneasily on his haunches. “We should’ve brung two guns.”

“Two guns!” the woman sniffed. “What fer? I’ll drap him awright!”

They glanced at each other for a second, the woman’s lips slightly sneering, the man’s trying nervously to smile. He looked away first, and started to draw a pint bottle from the hip of his corduroy breeches.

“Naw you doan’!” the woman snarled quickly.

She snatched the bottle from his hands and flung it into the highway.

“Aw, Mary,” the man complained. It was like the whine of a punished dog.

The man and the woman settled down for their wait. About an hour later the snow started falling in big soft flakes. The woman never changed her position on the stump, but the man moved closer and leaned his shoulder tentatively against her knee. Instantly the woman’s tense figure relaxed. She bent over to kiss him. The man made a gurgling sound in his throat and reached up with long, snake-like fingers. The woman pushed him away.

“I seen you was skeered,” she mocked, “when you come a-trailin’ thet gun down the sta’r! When a man doan’ heft his gun to his shoulder. . . .”

“This ’eres my firs’ time fer killin’ a man,” he answered slowly, “an him . . . my twin brother!”

The woman laughed.

“You ought’ve thought o’ thet firs’ time you laid hold of me down in the field. A woman cain’t live in one house with two men. Least-wise, it ain’t safe!”

“Sometimes,” said the man, “I think that you hates Clyde ’cause he loves you a little less’n you loves him.”

The woman laughed.

“Doan you try figgerin’ me out naow, Billy! Only Gawd kin do that!”

“Gawd or the devil!” he said, embracing her legs with his arm until they hurt. The woman suddenly clasped his shoulders with both hands and bent down to his ear.

“Good sight frum here?” he asked, setting himself down awkwardly at her feet.

“I’d ruther it was you,” she whispered, “that kept me warm in bed t’night!”

They waited another hour.

“Must’ve found ’im a woman up thar,” she said bitterly, “but he’ll be back before sun up.”

The man’s fingers raised up again, like the heads of snakes from a charmer’s basket when the music is played. They groped blindly up toward the woman’s body.

“Yore fingers’re cold!” she muttered without moving.

The man caught hold of her thighs.

“What made you cry when you seen him in town with Jess Turner that time?”

The woman stiffened.

“How come you cry all the way home?” he persisted.

“You tawk too much ’bout things that doan’ consarn you!” hissed the woman. “Effen you doan’ shet up ’bout Jess I’ll brain you, Billy!”

The snow fell heavier and whirled in a keen wind. The woman lifted her reefer from the stump and wrapped it tight around her breasts, but still her teeth chattered.

“That’s right, Jess!” she muttered. “Keep him long as you kin this time! Hit’ll be another cold night ’fore you see him agin!”

“Git up!” the man suddenly commanded. The woman’s shivering and the broken tone of her voice seemed to have given him a new kind of strength. He grasped the woman’s elbows and jerked her up from the stump and sucked fiercely at her lips.

“Naow git on back to the house! I’ll finish this job!”

The woman glared at him a long time through the blurring snow.

Then she reached her hands up to his shoulders and pulled him down for another kiss.

“Git on back an’ keep the bed warm till I come!” the man said.

“Thar’s more’n one shot in that gun,” she said meaningly, “but thar’s room fer on’y one man in my house frum naow on.”

The woman started slowly down the embankment, clinging from tree to tree, with the black reefer whipping behind her.

At the bottom she spoke aloud once more, and without turning, as though she spoke to herself. “Hit’ll be purty cold in that bed . . . till one or the other gits back!” The man swore under his breath.

For two hours, lying in bed, she strained her ears for the sound of a gun down the road. But the wind blew so fiercely now that she couldn’t have heard. Once she crawled out of bed and opened the window she could see the two lanterns flickering faintly in the middle of the road at Dead Man’s Curve. Apparently nothing had happened, time seeming to have struck a snag that night. She slammed the window down hard and got back into bed. With every moment the cold seemed to grow more intense and her body shuddered uncontrollably between the coarse sheets.

A short while later, she heard the door thrown open below. Without pause, the man’s heavy footsteps went down the hall and started up the stairs. The footsteps were neither hurried nor slow. There was nothing about them, no individual accent, to distinguish the steps of one from the other. She would have to wait for the returning man’s voice to tell her which of the two had come back.

She lay with her eyes tight shut in the lightless room. She was mumbling a sort of formless prayer, and her fingers were clawing the sheets.

Without pause the steps came straight to the bedroom door. The door was pushed open. Then she knew. She knew by the sound of his breath and by the faint odor of alcohol blown into the room’s cold air which of the two brothers had come back. She bit her lips hard and waited. Her body seemed to shake the whole bed, and it was difficult to keep her breath from rasping in the aching cold void of her chest.

The steps moved deliberately over to the little table. A match was struck and a second later the lamp flared up.

Opening her eyes slowly, as if from sound sleep, she looked into her husband’s alert face.

“Howdy, Clyde,” she said sleepily. “Yore late.”

The man unbuckled his reefer and dropped it to the floor.

“Been waitin’ up long?” he said casually. But she saw him stand still for the answer with his head slightly cocked.

She waited a minute for her voice to settle down in her throat, and then she answered. “Naw. I jes’ this minute woke up.”

The man jerked into motion again, stripping off his flannel shirt and dropping it beside the reefer.

He leaned toward the woman.

“Didja hear anything a piece down the road?”

“When?”

“Few minutes ago.”

She put an irritable note to her voice. “I toleja, Clyde, I jes’ naow woke up!”

He turned slowly away from her, scratching his chest.

“Some feller tuck a shot at me down by Dead Man’s Curve. A double-barr’l gun! Went crack through the windshield an’ missed my head, I reckon, by half’n inch!”

Again the woman met his eyes without perceptibly flinching. The man’s eyes dropped first.

“Gawd-a-mighty!” the woman exclaimed at last, as though the full import of this news had just sunk in.

The man grunted, turned over the slop pail, and sat down to remove his boots.

“Two lanterns war a-settin’ out thar in the middle o’ th’ road. T’stop me, I reckon. But I druv right through.”

He grunted again, contemptuously. “Them that hunt squirrels best not cock their guns fer a man!”

He tore the rest of his clothes off swiftly and came over to the bed.

He sat down on the edge of it for a moment to rub his cold feet.

Before she could seal her lips against it, the question thrust itself out.

“On’y one shot?” she asked.

“Naw . . .” he answered slowly. “Funny thing. Come to think of it, seem lak I counted . . . two! I heerd the second . . . guess when?”

The woman was silent.

“Atter I turned the car inter th’ drive!”

He lowered his body toward her and buried his hands in the quilt, one on either side of her roundly outlined form.

“Ain’t seen Billy,” said the man. “Whar’s Billy?”

The woman’s eyes blinked ever so slightly.

“He mus’ be sleepin’ by naow,” she muttered. “He mus’ be sound asleep!”

They stared at each other for a long time and slowly they both began to smile. A faint flush crept into the woman’s face. Her limbs twitched under the coarse sheets and the gaudy patchwork quilt.

“Hit’s been cold in this bed,” she purred softly, “waitin’ fer you to git home!”