Keep the Change (22 page)

He got on the telephone and began calling truckers to haul his yearlings to the sale yard. He got a mileage rate, a loaded rate, and a deadhead surcharge. He arranged a dawn departure. The only thing to slow this cattle drive down was going to be the speed limit.

He spent the next day on horseback. Overstreet’s nephews came up from their ranch as they had done for the branding and helped him gather his pastures. A small herd formed, then grew as he traveled forward, downhill and toward the corrals. The horses loved this and tossed their heads, strained at their bits, ran quartering forward, and generally hurled themselves into the work of sweeping the land of beef. Every now and again, a herd-quitter gave the men the excuse of
a wild ride to restore the yearling to the mass of its fellows. By nightfall, the dust-caked nephews with the thin crooked mouths of their grandfather had started down the road home on lathered horses, and the cattle were quiet in the corrals. Overstreet himself was there to count the yearlings, mouthing the numbers and dropping his arm decisively every ten head. Looking at the backs and heads of the crowded cattle, the myriad muzzles and ears, the surge of energy, Joe was reminded of the ocean when it was choppy. He thought he knew why Overstreet was being so helpful.

Joe put his hot horse in a stall out of the wind and gave him a healthy ration of oats, which roared out of the bucket into the tin-lined trough. The little gelding always looked like he was falling asleep while he ate, and Joe watched him a moment before going out to check his gates.

Joe had become so preoccupied with getting the cattle shipped that his communications with Astrid almost came to a stop. She seemed to sense something and they rather politely stayed out of each other’s way.

They loaded the cattle in the morning by the yard light. The metal loading chute rocked and crashed under their running weight. Joe went inside the trailer to help swing the partitions against the crowded animals. Their bawling deafened him. At the end of each load, the rope was released from the pulley and the sliding aluminum door flew down to a silent stop in the manure.

The first truck pulled off while the second one loaded. There were three frozen-footed steers that were crippled and hard to load. They went up last and the two trucks pulled out, their engines straining in low gear at the vast contents of living flesh going down the ranch road in bawling confusion. From beneath the bottom slats, the further green evidence of their
terror went on flowing. Joe watched the back of the trailers rocking from side to side with the mass and motion of big trawlers in a seaway. In a moment, the red taillights had curved down past the cottonwoods and disappeared.

By three that afternoon, the cattle went through the sale at seventy-one and a half dollars a hundredweight and the money was sent to Lureen’s account in Deadrock. And of course the ranch was Joe’s. Mainly, it filled in the blanks in the painting of the white hills. A homeowner, a man of property. He sat in the living room with the deed in his lap. He showed it to Astrid. He fanned himself with it. He tried to make it a joke, but she didn’t laugh and neither did he. He wondered what Smitty would do with the money.

Sometime after midnight, Joe was awakened from sleep by someone knocking on the door. Once he saw the clock and knew how late it was, he was filled with sharp panic. He got up without turning on the lights and eased into the kitchen. In the window of the door, he could see the shape of someone standing. He thought first of not answering the door and then wondered if it might not be a traveler, someone with car trouble, or a sick neighbor. And so he went into the kitchen and turned the light on. The minute he did that, the figure outside the door was lost. He opened the door on the darkness and said, “What is it?”

There was no reply. Joe had made out the shape of the figure. It looked like his father. The glow from the yard light, so recently cloudy with insects, was sharply drawn on the cold night. Joe wanted to say, “It’s a clean slate.” Surely this was a dream. It must have been a traveler.

Joe closed the door as quietly as he could but left it unlocked. There was no sound anywhere. He went back to bed
and lay awake. He felt the cold from the blackened window over the bed. He had begun to suspect that by coming here at all, he had taken back his name. He remembered the sense of paralysis having a particular name had given him in the first place. He had loved moving into a world of other people’s names. He had even tried other names and had felt a thrill like that of unfamiliar air terminals and railway stations, places where he could abandon himself to discreet crowd control. Finally, this took such vigilance it was wearying. He wanted his own name. And yet, the ride home through spring storms, through unfamiliar districts, had a quality that was independent of where he was coming from and where he was going. He had a brief thrill in thinking that all of life was about two things: either move or resume the full use of your name. But the idea slipped away when he tried to grasp it.

It was still dark when he got in the truck and filled it up at the fuel tank next to the barn. Then he began to drive. He drove to White Sulphur Springs, Checkerboard, Twodot, Judith Gap, Moccasin, Grassrange, Roundup, and home, four hundred miles without stopping.

By the time Joe pulled up in front of the house, he was exhausted. The lights shone domestically in the dark, illuminating parts of trees and the white stones of the driveway. It seemed that a placid, sunshot existence must be passing within.

Joe opened the door and Ivan Slater rose inelegantly from the deep, slumped couch while Astrid, standing a certain distance from one undecorated wall, tried to hang the moon with a smile that was both radiant and realistic.

“What are you doing here?” Joe demanded. “Where did you come from?” He smelled a rat. Ivan had been called in as Astrid’s chief adviser before.

“Joe.” She may have said something before that but Joe didn’t hear it. Then she said, “I need to talk to you.”

“I know,” Joe said, noticing that whatever was in the air suspended Ivan’s promotional bearing so that he stood exactly where he had arisen, taking up room. It was exactly the moment one would ordinarily say, “Stay out of this.”

“Joe, let me run this by you,” said Ivan. “Astrid isn’t suited for this, somehow. She has asked me to help her get resituated. I’m Astrid’s friend and this is what friends are for. P.S. We’re not fucking.”

“That’s fine, I hate her,” said Joe experimentally.

“Now Joe,” Ivan said, “you’ve had a long drive.”

“You knew I wouldn’t stay,” Astrid said. “What’s this about, anyway? I don’t know. But I do know I’m getting out of here. And it’s a joke to claim you hate me.”

“The fucking Cuban geek,” Joe offered.

“Punch him in the nose, Ivan,” said Astrid.

“That will do,” Ivan said to Joe without emphasis.

“Take the dog with you,” said Joe to Astrid. “That’s the worst dog I ever saw. It’ll be perfect for your new home.”

“Okay, but don’t generalize about me. And what is this about a new home?”

“I used to like dogs,” Joe explained maladroitly.

“I had a lot to offer. I still do. Not for you, obviously. But who does? All I need to know is that it’s not me. And I loved you. So, good luck. Good luck with the place. All the luck in the world with the cows. Enjoy yourself with the land. Happy horses, Joe.”

“
I used to like women!
”

“I’m not like that dog, Joe,” Astrid said.

“Don’t jump to conclusions. I want you both out of here right away. I need a quiet place to sleep.”

“Joe, it’s late,” Ivan said. “You’re not in your right mind. As if you ever were, in fact.”

“This advisory role you cultivate, Ivan, is unwelcome just now. I dislike having my time wasted.”

“
You’re not that busy,
” sang Ivan. Joe sighed and looked at the floor. He wanted to collect his thoughts and he feared a false tone entering the proceedings. He wanted to leave off on a burnishing fury and empty out the house. It was hard to see that he’d had the intended effect; Ivan was scratching his back against the doorjamb. Astrid was smiling at a spot in midair. She was a fine girl. They had feared all along that they couldn’t survive a real test. It had been lovely, anyway. It was a provisional life.

While they packed Astrid’s things, Joe watched TV. As luck would have it, it was a feature on farm and ranch failures with music by Willie Nelson and John “Cougar” Mellencamp. He remembered leaving the deed in the truck. He might have left the windows open. Pack rats could get in and eat the deed. The wind could get the deed.

They came into the living room with their suitcases.

“This is pretty interesting. It’s about farm and ranch failure,” Joe said. “Can you go during the commercial?”

“No,” said Astrid, “we’re going now. Were you serious about that dog?”

“What next!” said Joe without taking his eyes off the screen.

“May I see you a moment, Joe?” Astrid stood in the doorway to their bedroom. Ivan studied the backs of his fingernails in the open front door, buffing them occasionally on his left coat-sleeve. Joe met Astrid in the bedroom and she shoved the door shut. She gave him a long look and took a deep breath.

“Let me tell you something, sport,” she began, “you don’t fool me with this tasteless display we’ve just witnessed.”

“I don’t.”

“No, you don’t.”

“What sort of display would have struck you as less tasteless?”

“A sincere remark or two about your plight. A word of hope that you’ll come to life soon. Your life.”

“All whoppers!”

“I’m just gonna step back, and let you choose.”

She went out the door. Joe followed her. Ivan was still in the same spot. When Joe went over, Ivan deployed his hand as a kind of handshake option, Joe’s choice. Joe shook.

Ivan and Astrid went into the night. He heard them call the dog and when he saw the lights wheel and go out, and he knew the dog was gone, he at last realized how blithely things were being taken away from him. He went to bed and contained himself as well as he could, but the pillowcase grew wet around his face.

His sleep produced the need for sleep, for rest, for deep restoration from this masquerade of sleep in which all the tainted follies had opportunity for festivity and parade. He had Astrid in his arms and his inability to distinguish love and hate no longer mattered because she wasn’t there in the light of day.

The cool spell passed and it was hot again. Joe was going to take a good long look at the white hills. He was going to start at the beginning. He got in the truck and drove toward the drought-ravaged expanses east of town where the road looked like a long rippled strip of gray taffy; on the farthest reaches of the road, looking as small as occasional flies, were the very few vehicles out today. Dust followed a tractor as an unsuccessful crop was plowed into the ground. Joe could picture the cavalry crossing here, following the Indians and their ghost dogs. Sheep were drifted off into the corners of pastures waiting for the cool of evening to feed. Ribbed cattle circled the tractor tires that held the salt. Old stock ponds looked like meteor craters and the weeds that came in with the highway gravel had blossomed to devour the pastures. It was neither summer nor fall. The sky was blue and the mountains lay on the horizon like a black saw. A white cloud stood off to one end of the mountains. In a small pasture, a solitary bull threw dust up under himself beneath the crooked arm of a defunct
sprinkler. The thin green belt beneath the irrigation ditches contrasted immediately with the prickly pear desert that began inches above. The radio played “Black roses, white rhythm and blues.” Astrid used to say, “I thought Montana was so unlucky for you. I can’t understand why you want to go back.” And he had said with what seemed like prescience and laudable mental health, “Yes, but I’m not superstitious!” And she’d said, “Wait a minute. You were pretty clear on this. You said it was unlucky for you and it was unlucky for everybody else.”

Joe said, “That’s my home!”

He stopped the truck at the bottom of a long, open draw and walked for almost an hour. At the end of that walk, he reached the gloomy, ruined, enormous house that he had long ago visited with his father, the mansion of the Silver King, a piece of discarded property no longer even attached to a remembered name. It was a heap out in a pasture and if you had never been inside it the way Joe had and felt in the design of its chambers the anger and assertion of the Silver King himself, the mansion didn’t look good enough to shelter slaughter cattle until sale day. Grackles jumped and showered in the lee of its discolored walls and the palisade of poplars that led from the remains of the gate seemed like the work of a comedian.

Joe walked to the far side of the building and sat down close to the wall out of the wind. The mud swallows had built their nests solidly up under the eaves and wild roses were banked and tangled wherever corruption of the wall’s surface gave them a grip. Concentric circles in the stucco surrounded black dots where stray gunfire had intercepted the building, adding to the impression that it was a fortress. Joe thought about how
his father’s bank had repossessed the property. His father was gone—even the bank was gone! He was going to go in.

A piece of car spring in the yard made a good pry bar, and Joe used it to get the plywood off one of the windows, leaving a black violated gap in the wall. He made a leap to the sill, teetering sorely on his stomach, then poured himself inside. He raised his eyes to the painting of the white hills.

Joe walked across the ringing flags to get a view of the picture. He could feel the stride the room induced and imagined the demands of spirit the Silver King made on everything. Such people, he thought, attacked death headlong with their insistence on comfort and social leverage. It was absolutely fascinating that it didn’t work.

But the painting was still mysterious; it had not changed. “The only painting I’ve ever understood,” said Joe’s father after he had showed it to his son. “Too bad it’s fading.” The delicacy of shading in the overlapping white hills, rescued from vagueness by the cheap pine frame, seemed beyond the studied coarseness Joe’s father leveled at everything else.