Keep the Change (21 page)

He took this time to cut firewood and spent days on end in the cottonwood groves taking out the standing dead and transporting the wood to a pile next to the house. The growth of this pile fascinated him. He sensed it was in his power to make a pile bigger than the house. He moved along the creek and cut up the trees the beavers had felled. While he worked, he could see trout on the redds, swirling after one another and fanning nests into the gravel. The eagles had started coming in from the north and were standing high in the bare trees
along the stream. Their rapine, white-tailed, dark and monkish shapes showed from a quarter of a mile away.

He sat down in the autumn forest, an old woodchopper with his hot orange chain saw. I am posing for eternity, he thought. He was desperate. He was desperate because the constant companionship of unanswered questions was affecting his nerves and suggesting that it was the absolute final and daily condition of living. He was no longer interested in remaining in the space program.

The irrigation water stopped running and the springs were down to a bare minimum. He moved the yearlings every few days, an activity that took him to remote pastures on horseback. He enjoyed his horse’s sure-footedness. He could travel on breathtaking sidehills you could barely negotiate on your own feet in a kind of skywalking perfection as the cattle flew forward in coveys. In this motion and vastness, he could actually think about life, beginning and end, with equanimity, with cheer. Joe thought he was vaguely bigger than everything he saw and therefore it would be tragic and for all nations to weep over, if anything happened to him. But here in the hills, he would feed the prettiest birds. As promised by all religions, he would go up into the sky where his folks were.

Joe felt the return of love and remorse, like a bubble of gas rising through crankcase residue. The slowness of the bubble’s traverse seemed to express the utter gallonage of his desire as well as the regret that made it something of a rich dish and gave this emotion its peculiar morning-after quality.

“I think we’re missing something,” he said.

After a moment, Astrid said, “I know what you mean.”

She bit her thumbnail in thought and looked off. Joe examined some carpet. The white hills, the departing dream, the impending embarkation for Hawaii only illumined the plight. He had heard nothing from Ellen and felt she didn’t want him to see Clara. When you’re young and think you’ll live forever, it’s easy to think life means nothing.

Astrid stood up and stretched, then stopped all motion to smile at Joe. She went to the door and opened it, letting in the clear, balsamic breath of foothills, of sage and juniper and prairie grass. She stood on tiptoes to stretch and inhale.

“Joe,” she said deliberately, “this isn’t for me.”

Joe didn’t hear her. He turned on the radio. First he got a semi-intellectual cornball on FM and then a wonderful song from 1944—what could that have been like!—about a cowboy going East to see the girl he loves best. “Graceful faceful” went the chorus, “such lovely hair! Oh, little choo-choo, please get me there!” It was sung in the kind of voice you’d use to call a dog in the dark when you really didn’t expect the dog to come. It disturbed Joe because it suggested that the Americans of the recent past were insane foreigners. Then an ad for a local car dealer filled with apparently living objects: “Cold weather is coming and your car doesn’t want to face it. You need a new one but your wallet says ‘No’!” Joe thought, Is anyone following this? Astrid was still in the doorway. What was it she’d said?

There was no great problem in getting the criminal charges against Smitty dropped. Once Joe relieved the insurance company’s fears of damage claims, once those assurances were documented and in place, the ripple of society’s desire for
retribution expired on the bench of the small, local courthouse. Nevertheless, a few motions had to be gone through. Joe drove Smitty to the hearing as though he were his child and had been involved in a minor scrape. There was only the judge, dressed in the plaid wool shirt in which he had been raking leaves, and his secretary. Smitty appeared in his uniform and stood at attention throughout the questioning. So great was the judge’s pity for this foolish person that he concluded his inquiry with the question “Can I count on you to avoid this kind of thing in the future, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir! You can, sir!”

The judge gazed down at Smitty with a melancholy smile. “Smitty, Smitty, Smitty,” he said. “You’re kind of dumb like a fox, aren’t you?”

“Possibly so, yes, sir.”

“Thank your lucky stars, Smitty, that you live in a small town where we know you for what you are. Adjourned.”

Driving along to his meeting at the bank, Joe remembered his happiest period as a painter. One summer, he had gone on the road to do portraits of Little Leaguers. He set up a table at ballgames all over Montana and saw the rise and ripening of the great mountain summer from a hundred smalltown diamonds. Instead of pumping gas or choking on dust behind a bale wagon, Joe turned out bright portraits of children in baseball uniforms. It was an opulent spell that Joe remembered now with a kind of agony.

Darryl Burke, Joe’s banker, leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. He wore a great blousy pin-striped blue and white shirt. “How’s life on the haunted ranch?”

“Great for me. I’m a ghost myself.”

“Bankers don’t believe in ghosts. Bankers believe in the enforceability of contracts.”

Joe didn’t think this was the time to depict his dream of letting it all go back to the Indians by way of atoning for a century of abuses; nor to unleash his misogyny on family matters.

Darryl, his chair tilted back on two legs, pitched forward on four. “Do you know why Lureen lost her lease with Overstreet?”

“Not really. I figured everybody had all the grass they wanted.”

“They lost their lease because Overstreet heard you were coming back.”

“I’m not following this. What’s that have to do with it?”

“Well, old Smitty had a double deal going there with old man Overstreet. When he couldn’t get that ranch off your dad, he tried to get it off Lureen. Smitty wanted to make a deal but all he could control was the lease. As long as you weren’t around. A lease for Smitty and a lease for Lureen. His was bigger.”

Joe thought for a long moment before saying, “That’s awful. I mean, I know it’s awful. But if you and I were to go dig into it, we’d find out that Lureen was just looking the other way, happy that Smitty was staying busy. Still, you don’t like to hear a thing like that.”

“Of course you don’t. And we’re talking property here, man. When are you going to ship the cattle?”

“Pretty soon. But I’m hesitant.”

“Hesitant? Now is the hour! This is the best the market is ever going to be.”

“I think they’re going to run off with the money.”

“Who?”

“Smitty and Lureen.”

“No, Joe, you don’t think that. You just think you think that. That’s crook time.”

“They already have Hawaiian costumes. I’ve seen them.”

“Come on. You mean that’s where you think they’re headed?”

Joe had his hands close to his chest and he pantomimed the playing of a ukulele. “Surf’s up,” he said grimly. Darryl stood and pulled down part of the venetian blinds so he could look out toward the drive-up tellers.

“Smitty will never run out of ideas,” he said. “He’s a fart in a skillet. But this is way past him. I don’t see him making such a big move.”

“He is concerned about falling on the ice. He wants to be warm.”

“But,” said Darryl, “when you get right down to it, if that’s what they want to do, they can do it. They can. It might be the end of the ranch. But they can do it. If that’s what they want. We covered our bet when we loaned money for the cattle. If Lureen wants to exchange those yearlings, and the money she borrowed for Smitty’s shrimp deal, for the ranch itself, she can do it. Don’t look at me, look at your father. I just keep score.”

Suddenly, it came to Joe. “It’s not fair!” he said. He decided he wouldn’t mention that the deed, together with all its liens and encumbrances and appurtenances thereto, was in his pocket, thick as a week’s worth of junk mail. In some opaque recess within Joe, a worm was turning. Property!

“I better get going,” he said. “Thanks for visiting with me about this.”

“Glad to, Joe. It’s pretty clear, anyway.”

“Try to come out and see us before it snows.”

“What happened to summer? It’s really hard to believe it could snow already.”

“Do you actually notice such things from in here?” Joe asked. Darryl stared.

“I get out once in a while,” he said.

In the dream it was summer and when he awakened he remembered the lazy sound of a small airplane and the sight of a little girl too far away to see clearly, picking chokecherries on the side of a ravine. The prairie spread into the distance and its great emptiness was not cheerful. It woke him up with sharp and undefined sadness. He tipped his watch, lying on the table beside the bed, so he could see its dial against the vague light coming in the window. It wasn’t quite five yet. He lay back and felt the warmth of Astrid beside him. He knew he had to see Clara. He couldn’t wait. He had thought his situation with Ellen would sort itself out and an appropriate introduction would ensue. But it seemed now that might never happen. He couldn’t wait any longer.

He would go to the end of the Keltons’ road and watch Clara get on the school bus. He arose slowly and began to dress. His stealth awakened Astrid. “What is it, honey?”

“I’ve got to get receipts for those cattle. I’m meeting the brand inspector at the scale house.”

“When will you be back?”

“Before lunch.” He felt something sharp from the deceit.

Joe left the truck almost two miles away from the Keltons’ road just as the sun began to come up. He hurried along the oiled county road straight toward the lime and orange glow that in a matter of minutes would be the new day. When the sun finally did emerge, Joe was safely concealed in the scrub trees opposite Ellen and Billy’s mailbox. He had a feeling he couldn’t uncover. Waiting for his little girl to catch the school bus, he was as close to whole as he had felt in memory. It was several blissful moments before the absurdity of his situation, his concealment, his uncertain expectations, dissolved his well-being. The chill of morning crept in. Finally, the yellow school bus rose upon the crown of the hill and went right on through without stopping, as though it never stopped here. Did Ellen invent Clara? Joe thought of that first.

He crossed the county road and started up the ranch driveway, walking as quietly as he could so that he could hear if anyone approached. As he went along, presumably getting closer, his nervousness increased and he began to picture alert dogs bounding at him, a family bursting from the front door to confront a stranger.

By the time the house was visible, a modest white frame house, neatly tended, a few yards from its barns and outbuildings, Joe could see in a small grove of wild apple trees the perfect place to hide. A rooster crowed. And when he got inside the trees, his concealment was so perfect that he arranged his sweater against a tree trunk as a pillow and prepared to spend however long it took to watch every single human being who lived in that house, who used its front door, who walked in its yard, who did its chores.

The rooster crowed again and in the near distance a bull bellowed rhythmically. Past the house was a small corral. A
solitary paint horse rolled and made a dust cloud, then stood and shook. In the sky above the house, just now ignited by sunrise, were clouds which must have hung there in the windless air all night long. Joe felt himself drift into this serenity as though, not merely hidden, he was incorporeal and free as a spirit.

The door opened and a little girl ran out, pursued by Billy. He overtook her, turned her, and rebuttoned her cloth coat. He pulled her straw hat down close on her head and she tipped it back again. He pulled it down and she tipped it back. He swept her up. He held her at arm’s length where she hung like a rag doll with a grin on her face. She acted almost like a baby with Billy though she was far too old for that. Above all, she clearly resembled her father, Billy Kelton. Joe scarcely had time to track his astonishment. It was enough that Billy’s olive skin was there and the distinctive, inset brown eyes. But the minute Clara spoke, asking Billy to let out some chickens, Joe knew from her crooning voice that Clara was feebleminded. Billy planted her where she stood and went into a low shed. There was an immediate squawking from within and then four or five hens ran into the yard. Clara ran after them. Billy came out and deftly swept up a small speckled hen. Clara took it in her arms. Billy removed her hat, kissed the crown of her head, and replaced the hat. He went back into the shed while Clara stood bundling the hen and rubbing her cheek against it. The little chicken sank her head between the shoulders of her wings. Billy emerged with some eggs held against his stomach with his hand.

“Let’s eat, kid. Put your friend down.”

“I want take my hen!” Clara crooned.

“Mama won’t let us, angel,” said Billy, wincing sympathetically.

“My friend!” she pleaded.

“Okay, go on and take her in the house,” said Billy gently. “What d’you think Mama’s gonna say? I’ll tell you what Mama’s gonna say. Mama’s gonna say take that chicken on out of here.”

Clara shrugged and followed Billy toward the house, defiantly carrying her hen. Billy went in and Clara hesitated. When the coast was clear, she set the hen down and made a haughty entrance to the house. The speckled hen shot erratically back to the shed. Joe didn’t move. He felt compassion sweep over him, not for Clara, whom he did not know, but for Billy in all his isolated, violent ignorance. It was this Joe had waited for: something that would cross his mind like a change of weather and leave a different atmosphere behind.

The sun couldn’t quite penetrate the pale gray sky. It looked as if it might rain; if it did, it would be a cold rain, close to snow. Everything about the morning said the season was changing fast. When Joe awoke, he felt a lightness that approached giddiness, almost a gaiety. It seemed so beyond sense that he thought he must immediately put it to use.