Keep the Change (3 page)

“Yeah, I know Billy.”

“Well, he plans to go quick as he can get shut of school.”

“That’d be about right for Billy.”

“Did you know he was top five saddlebronc rider in the Northern Rodeo Association two years in a row?”

“Nope.”

“He’s about as pretty a hand with rough stock ever come out of these parts.”

“That should just chill the Vietcong,” said Joe.

Joe wasn’t really paying close attention. Almost the only thing he and Ellen had in common was that they were both being dunned by the Columbia Record Club. He was trying to see what she had in the way of breasts. If she hadn’t wanted that noticed, she could have bought the right shirt size.

“Otis said you really know how to work.”

“He did?” Joe practically sang.

“That seems to mean quite a little to you.”

“Not really.”

She scrutinized him. He was at a loss for words. The very sound of air seemed to increase. She took a deep breath. “What bands do you like?” she asked.

“The Stones. What about you?”

“The Byrds.” On the word “Byrds” he sensed his opportunity and reached to take her hand. It felt small to him, though it was hard to notice anything more than the nervous energy pouring back and forth between them. He would have liked to announce that he was going to kiss her or that he was attracted to her, which he was. But anything which contained much meaning would have subjected him to overexposure. Nevertheless, for things to continue, it was necessary that he express something about the moment. He said, “Oh, wow.” To his immense relief, “Oh, wow” was very acceptable. Ellen Overstreet seemed to melt very slightly at these less than eloquent words. “I mean it,” Joe added and took the other hand.

“What are you taking?” she breathed, her face angled down at the ground between them.

“Algebra, History, Spanish, English. What about you?”

“Soc. Home Ec. Comm Skills. Phys Ed.” Joe wasn’t thinking so much about her courses. He could tell that she was
looking to him for leadership. That he knew next to nothing, probably no more than she, didn’t matter because he had arrived from out of state and his real background was lost behind this ripped T-shirt, these new muscles, and this tan. He drew Ellen to him and kissed her. Feeling the hard line of her clamped lips, he realized that Ellen was ready to be kissed but didn’t know much more than to lean face forward. It might take all summer to get those lips open.

They went on kissing. A couple of times, she had “thoughts” as she called them that made laughter burst through her nose. Joe waited grimly for these “thoughts” to pass and went back to the awkward business of kissing and hugging. He had numb spots from the rough ground, and any attempt to get “more comfortable” as he explained it, that is, to lever Ellen into a reclining posture, failed miserably. Finally, she detached herself and got up.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Joe. We’ll have to do something one of these days.”

“That’d be great,” he said, quite certain he knew what she meant by “something.”

“Like maybe we could ride on Saturday.”

“Oh, wow.”

When she started to leave, he gave her the peace sign. His best friend back at school, Ivan Slater, said day in and day out you could get familiar with strange girls faster by using the peace sign as a greeting than any other way.

But Ellen, seeing his raised fingers, said, “Two what?”

Joe just shook his head.

“The two of us?” she said. “Oh, you’re sweet!”

Joe and Otis crossed paths as two professionals, and Otis had taken to questioning Joe about little things he was noticing, the levels of springs, the appearance of yearlings that had had diphtheria, pink eye, cancer eye, bag problems, warbles. Joe renewed the fly rubs up in the pasture and ran the chute when Rosewell had cattle in to doctor. He had gotten so he knew all the levers of the headcatch, the catch itself, the gate, the squeeze. He knew which bars to flip out on the cattle they had missed branding so that they could get old man Overstreet’s 9-Bar on the left hip. At first, it disturbed Joe to watch the irons smoke into flesh, and the tongue-slung bawling of the cattle as pain drove manure down their back legs. In the end, he turned the irons over in the fire himself to get the right pitch of heat, to make sure the brands went on bright and clean. He quit noticing when the burning smell drifted on the summer air. And to make up for it, he doctored the ones that had eye ulcers from burdocks in the hay they had been eating.

Not long after Joe and Ellen had started to see each other,
he was asked up to the Overstreet house. It was an old two-story ranch house with a dirt path beaten from the driveway to the entry. With ill-concealed distaste, small, fat Mrs. Overstreet led Joe to her husband’s office, a room off the bedroom where water rights filings, escrow receipts, bills, brand inspections, road permits, cattle registries, breeding and veterinary records, defunct phone books, memorandum pads, and calendars were heaped up on a rolltop desk. Mr. Overstreet sat on a kind of spring-loaded stool that permitted him to swivel around, tilt back, and regard Joe all in one movement. He was nearly as small as his wife and in every gesture he radiated a lifetime of sharp trading. Like many old-time ranchers, there was nothing “Western” about him. A topographical map on the wall illustrated the boundaries of the ranch. He went to it and pointed to the large missing piece on the south side. “See that?” His eyes burned at Joe. They seemed to consume the papery little face that curved up under a halo of thin iron-gray hair.

“Yes, sir.”

“That belongs,” said Overstreet, “to you people.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It spoils the shape of this other, don’t you think?”

Joe said nothing.

“Besides that, I’d like to hear how you’re getting along. In your own words.”

“I’m getting along fine.”

“Your salary comes out of my lease arrangement with your daddy. So I’m not out there wringing the last penny from your hide. I do that mainly with Otis. But he says we’re getting our money’s worth.” He removed his glasses and worked his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets as he spoke. He
turned his gaze to the map of the ranch and restored his glasses.

“Joe,” he said, “you come from the big wide wonderful world out there. Ellen comes from right here on this little bitty patch of ground. Now no more than I’d try to sell you a pasture without water, don’t you sell Ellen something she really isn’t in a big way of needing. You catch my meaning?”

“I guess I do.”

“You do, Joe. Take it from me. You catch my meaning. Now go on out and keep doing the good job you’ve been doing. Your dad will be proud of you. You’re doing a man’s job. If he ever fires you, you come and see me. I’ll take you to Billings and teach you to trade fat cattle. I’ll teach you to wear out two Cadillacs a year packing cattle receipts. Why, if I had your youth and my brains, I could walk on the backs of my cattle to Omaha. Go on out there, Joe, and
bow your damn back
.”

But Joe didn’t get the message exactly. He was stirred instead by the romance of landholding that the old man radiated from his cluttered office. And when he and Ellen returned to their little wickiup in the willows alongside Tie Creek, he was less accepting of the plateau that they had reached weeks before. The wickiup was just a place where they had artfully bent the willows into an igloo shape and lashed them down. Ellen had read somewhere that it was the way the Indians had once sheltered themselves. The wickiup was an easy walk from the house and perfectly camouflaged. They were so secure in this shelter that they calmly went on with their activities even when Otis Rosewell rode past a few yards away. They lapped their tongues while the backs of their heads moved in vague figure-eights. They repeated “I love you” and
tried to key their utterances to blissful peaks or reflective sighs. A long silence, a sigh, and an “I love you” indicated they had foreseen an extensive future with all its familiar appurtenances and had taken the phrase “I love you” as a kind of shorthand. Joe ached with meaning. Ellen undid the metal snap in back of her brassiere and her breasts were revealed. Either he would sweep his hand slowly up her rib cage and encompass them, or he would unpack them carefully. They were full handfuls with graceful small nipples. And once when Ellen was doing a handstand, Joe made out the faint blue veins underneath. No matter what position Ellen was in, they stuck straight out. If he mashed them gently, they resumed their perfect shape upon release. If he pushed them to one side and let go, they sprang back. They were practically brand new and the feeling Ellen insisted upon was that they were so wonderful they canceled any further expectations.

Joe overflowed with feeling for the girl in his arms. He had never felt such strong emotions. Everything meant something bigger. He could look at her for hours from only a couple of inches away.

Together Joe and Ellen began to adopt the mopey love-struck postures, the innocent paralysis of young lovers in small towns. On Saturdays, they took one of the ranch trucks and drove into Deadrock for a swim at the city pool. Instead of yanking at each other and yelling by the poolside, they demonstrated the depth of their feeling by quietly working on their tans in fingertip proximity, or eating quietly by themselves at a shady snow-cone franchise. Joe could accept this because he knew the necessary crisis was coming. Gliding along on these parallel paths, feeling vaguely upset in this atmospheric filigree, watching the others thunder past barefoot at poolside, hot on the heels of screeching females, or crammed in fleshy heaps within sun-scorched automobiles, was almost acceptable to Joe because he was being swept along by something thrilling that he had no interest in understanding.

But when Saturday night came around, Joe watched in astonishment as Ellen rolled out the ranch road in Billy Kelton’s flatbed truck. Billy and Joe had been best friends until that
day ten years ago when Billy beat Joe senseless. Joe was still not over the sense of injury. For his date with Ellen, Billy hadn’t even removed the stock rack or taken his saddle out of the bed. His filthy old chaps, lashed to the crosspiece behind the cab, flapped away carelessly. “That sumbitch must be harder than hell to steer,” Joe shouted as they went past waving, “the two of you having to sit under the wheel like that!”

But the truck came back up the road at ten. Joe saw them through the bunkhouse window. He had been pacing around, expecting to be up half the night. He dove to extinguish his light. In a short time, Ellen tapped at his door.

“Who is it?” Joe called.

“Ellen. Can I come in?”

Joe conquered the wish to let her in. “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Joe, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Tell it to the Marines. Tell it to Billy Kelton. I think you two should be very happy together.”

She cried outside the door for a while. Finally, she said, “Good night,” and Joe fell asleep.

Otis Rosewell generally stayed in town with his wife, but when things ran late, he bunked with Joe. He and Joe had a nice, easygoing relationship based on Joe’s looking up to Otis, and admiringly asking for advice. One night when they were musing about cows and horses and smoking cigarettes, Otis tossed an old screwdriver in his hand as he told about an older cowboy he knew who had worked for the Padlock and for Kendricks’ in Wyoming; this man, Otis claimed, would go out by himself for weeks at a time with his bedroll and a lariat and would single-handedly rope, brand, vaccinate, and castrate hundreds
of calves. “It took a hell of a horse to keep that rope tight, naturally,” Otis went on. “But this old boy slept on the ground with his head on his saddle and hobbled his pony and went from one end of the herd to the other! He was born in a damn hurricane, this feller was—” On the far side of the bunkhouse, a rat ran up out of the woodpile about three feet up the wall. Otis threw the screwdriver toward the woodpile and it turned over in the air and speared the rat to the wall. The rat expired. Joe stared. Otis retrieved his screwdriver, threw the rat out the door and sat down.

“Let me see you do that again,” Joe said.

“Run up another rat,” Otis said.

When the time came, it came quickly. Joe went, hat in hand, to Mr. Overstreet in his office and, conscious that he was triggering the fall of his daughter’s virginity, said, “Mr. Overstreet, I’ll be going back to school soon. I think I’ll finish up and head out.” Word of his imminent departure would speed through the ranch. Awful Mrs. Overstreet would rub her daughter’s nose in it. Joe was getting ready to run up another rat.

Overstreet stood in the door of his office, which was dim except where the old gooseneck lamp lit the desk, holding a fountain pen poised in front of his chest, and said, “We’ll send your dad a good report. You’ve been a great deal of use to him and to us. I hope we haven’t seen the last of you.”

“In case I don’t bump into Ellen or Mrs. Overstreet, please tell them how much I have enjoyed the opportunity of being here this summer.”

“Well, you’ll have to tell Ellen yourself,” said Mr. Overstreet. “She’s soft on you. Even an old-timer like me can see that. Do this family a favor and let Ellen hear from you once
in a while.” Joe savored the peculiarity of this departure, the old man contemplating the free labor, himself laying the fuse to carnal dynamite.

Late that afternoon, Ellen flung herself onto the floor of the wickiup and began to weep quietly. Joe hung his head. He wasn’t really cynical. He loved Ellen. He’d had the best summer of his life with her. She was like a merry shadow to him, superb with horses, incapable of worry, able to freely get around the back country that surrounded the ranch. She knew all the wild grasses as well as she knew the flowers, and could tell before they rode over a rise if that was the day they would come upon newly bloomed shooting stars or fields of alpine asters that weren’t there the previous week. She could spot a cow humped up with illness from literally a mile off, or a horse with a ring of old wire around its foot from even farther. Every walk or ride they’d taken, every middle of the night trip to town made under the noses of her tedious parents, led to this moment.