Keep the Change (4 page)

Joe kissed Ellen through her tears and began to undress her. With a languorous and heartbroken air, she helped him until finally she slid her jeans down over her compact hips. She was nude and Joe thought his heart would burst. There was a baffling mutual tragedy in this nudity. He got undressed. He had never known air in such cool purity. The air around them and between them had a quality it could never have again. When he took Ellen in his arms, her absolute nakedness was such a powerful thing it frightened him. He had to return to familiar kissing, familiar strokes of her hair to bring things back to dimensions he could absorb and dispel the sense that he had hit some kind of thrilling but finally overpowering wall. He had to collect himself; but when he drew back, Ellen was once again full in view, no longer even sitting up to accommodate
his movement, but remaining supine while he cleared his head of voices.

He moved onto Ellen and simply lay atop her with his knees against hers. Gradually, the pressure of her knees gave way and one of his slid between them. She let her legs part so that his knees touched the blanket underneath them. Then he felt her spread her legs. He tried to lift up on his arms to see but she held him strongly and wouldn’t let him. He slid his hand between the points of their hips, held himself until he was started inside her, and pushed. He’d only entered a moment before he emptied himself in scalding shudders. He felt lost.

Otis took Joe to the train in Mr. Overstreet’s truck. When they got to the station and pulled up in front of the columns, Otis let his eyes follow a porter pushing an iron-wheeled wagon along the side of the tracks. “You take care, Joe,” he said over the roar of the wagon wheels. There was a bright September sun shining down on the world.

“I will, Otis. You too.”

“I think you done Mr. Overstreet a fine job.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’m sure they’d always be work for you if he was to get the place off your old daddy.”

“Is that what his plan is?”

“I’d say so, Joe. He don’t figure on you to fight for it.”

“I’d rather fight for it than come back and work for old man Overstreet.”

“He’s a cheap sonofabitch,” mused Otis. “Well, Joe, we’ll be seeing you. And good luck.”

No sooner had Otis pulled out and Joe had started dragging his duffel bag toward the passenger cars than Billy arrived in his flatbed with all the stuff still in back and climbed out. He
stopped on the gravel and gestured to Joe. He took off his hat and put it back inside his truck. There was a white band of forehead against his sunburned face.

“Come here, you,” he said, with his hands on his hips.

Joe didn’t want to walk over at all. He felt almost paralyzed with fear but knew he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t walk over. This was going to be a fight and Joe didn’t know how to fight. Billy had whipped him a decade earlier and it looked like it was going to happen again. He started to walk over, feeling he might turn and bolt at every step. He stared back at Billy, at first out of a doomed sense of duty and then with increasing isolation until all there was before him was the gradually enlarging figure of Billy amid the uproar of the railroad station and town streets. Billy dropped him with the first blow and Joe struggled to his feet. He wasn’t upright before Billy slugged him again and Joe himself could hear the fist pop against the bone of his face. As he struggled to his feet once more, he heard a passenger cry out that enough was enough, but now he had Billy by the front of his shirt and was hauling him toward himself. As Billy began to chop into his face with short, brutal punches, Joe saw Billy being pushed back at the end of a policeman’s nightstick. The policeman stepped between Joe and Billy. They stared at each other with the dismay of strangers meeting on the occasion of a car wreck. “Good luck in Vietnam,” Joe said bitterly. He looked at Billy, who was glassy eyed with hatred, and then Joe turned to head toward the train. When he bent to pick up his duffel, he fainted.

It seemed Joe would always spend plenty of time unraveling misunderstandings with women. The following summer, when he was eighteen, he’d hitchhiked to Mexico and wound up in a small town in Sonora. He remembered cattle trucks going between the adobe walls on the edge of the town and kind of careening around the fountain too fast, like in the movies. He remembered the constant murmuring of mourning doves and the First Communion girls in white clouds in front of the church. He remembered the century plants and ocotillos with their orange blossoms and gaunt cattle that seemed to walk so hopelessly. He remembered a shirtless man standing next to a hanging side of beef, cutting and weighing pieces of meat for passing customers and rolling the pesos nervously around his forefinger. Joe remembered the town being a dusty grid, poor animals carrying things for the poor people, insignificant things to our eyes like bundles of sticks. It made him ashamed to have anything.

He was led by two boys into a cantina and up to a prostitute, a nice-looking girl who was very tall for a Mexican. He went
upstairs. She gave herself to him and Joe responded by falling in love with her and spending every effort to think how she could be reformed and taught English so that he could make her his wife. Joe sat all night in the cantina, a shrunken presence, entertaining her and allowing her to peel his roll of pesos like an artichoke. They danced. They arranged to be photographed at their table. When Joe left for the States, he had the picture, the shirt on his back, and a stricken heart.

In the fall, when he was back in school, Joe’s mother found the photograph. She was holding it between her two hands, staring at it, when she called him to her room.

“Joe,” she said, “I’m
so
ashamed of you.” Joe didn’t know what to say. Nothing was appropriate. She lifted her eyes until she had him. “Here you are”—she returned her gaze to the photograph—“with this lovely young woman”—she looked up at him in penetrating disappointment—“and
your shirt is out
!”

Joe’s mother taught everyone to play bridge, and about this she had a sense of mission. There was some kind of opiated cough medicine available with which she had dosed Joe, aged four, so that his antics would not disrupt the games taking place in front of the big sixteen-pane window that looked out on the low bluffs that still had the bones of buffalo exposed by spring rains. And Joe daydreamed the bridge afternoons away in apparent bliss. His mother played bridge every week, deeply bored by her companions, the lumpish locals. She thought of her fellow Montanans as humped figures limited by the remote flickers of undeveloped consciousness. She had hoped against hope that her son Joseph Starling, Junior would set out and find culture somewhere, uplifting companionship, make a name for himself, and more or less stay out of town.

As an only child, Joe had been most divided by the contrasting claims of his parents. His father still had the Westerner’s ability to look into pure space and see possibilities. His mother saw traditional education as a tool for escape, an escape she couldn’t think of making but one which her son could somehow make for her.

Joe graduated from the Kentucky Military Institute and to his father’s great satisfaction was accepted by Yale. That happiness quickly disappeared at Joe’s decision to study art. When Joe’s father visited him at Yale and saw displays of student work and, worse, the crazy-looking building where art was taught, he told Joe they would have nothing to say to each other if this kept up. Joe painted landscapes but they were so austere that they approached not being there at all. They deepened his father’s suspicion that this was, despite the endorsement of major institutions, a complete swindle.

His conviction was not altered when Joe got out of school, moved to New York, and became a successful painter. Though it was a career, it was apparently not enough of a career. From Joe’s point of view, something wasn’t sinking in. The next thing was he couldn’t paint. It didn’t seem all that subtle psychologically; and he had a good grasp of it. He had always painted from memory and for some reason he couldn’t seem to remember much of late. He hoped it was temporary but at the moment, he didn’t have anything to offer anyone, even the gallery owners who were practical enough and who knew what was called for. He seemed to have folded his tent and that was that.

But before this, before his love of paint and painting deepened to a kind of dumb rapture, his relationship with his mother grew closer. She resumed a long-buried girlishness. Eventually, this closeness applied to more serious matters.
One summer after the family had moved to Minnesota, Joe was staying on the ranch, painting and doing most of the irrigating. His mother, having announced the seriousness of her mission, flew out from Minnesota for a visit.

Joe made iced tea and they went out and sat at a picnic table under half a dozen flowering apple trees; the trees hadn’t been pruned in years but sent forth flowers in drenching volume among the dead branches. There was a telephone pole in the middle, which took something away from the scene; and, just beyond, a wooden feed bunk for cattle with four tongue-worn salt blocks. A handful of pure white clouds floated overhead without moving. Joe and his mother had sat right here in the same spot when he was a child discussing sack races, nature, wild flowers, life, anything that came up. His mother still twirled her hair with her left forefinger when she was thinking, while Joe went on lacing his fingers and staring at them until a thought would come. They had always called the desired outcome of events “an amazing voyage,” as in “It would be an amazing voyage if you passed physics this term.”

“Make a long story short,” said Joe.

“It’s inherently a long story.”

“Try your best.”

His mother drank some of her iced tea. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing her head back to look up in the sky. She made a single click on the picnic table with an enameled fingernail. “Dad is going to have to be dried out. He has had serious problems with his diverticulitis which surgery would cure, but surgery is out of the question because he will go into the DTs before he can recover.”

Joe thought for a moment. “Maybe he should just go through the DTs and deal with the rest of it afterwards.”

“At his age and in his state, I am assured that he will shake himself to death if he goes into the DTs unless he does it in a clinic.”

“Can he live with the diverticulitis?”

“No.”

Beyond the orchard, the beavers had dammed a small stream and the cattails had grown up. A dense flock of redwing blackbirds shot out, followed by a goshawk in tight pursuit. The goshawk flared off into a cottonwood and watched the blackbirds scatter back among the cattails. At a certain point, it would start again.

“I have a feeling you can make this story shorter than you’re letting on.”

“This part I can condense. You have the best chance of getting Dad into the clinic.”

Joe leaned one elbow on the table and rested his face on his hand. “Does he even like me, Mother?”

“Not particularly.”

“In that case, maybe I do have a chance,” he said, as though elated at a glimmer of light. In fact, he was quite wounded. And in the end it was to no purpose.

That summer, Joe’s father went bankrupt in Minnesota. But he saw it coming and signed his ranch over to his sister Lureen to protect it from receivers. Speaking directly to Lureen, confirming that conversation in a letter and sending a copy of the letter to Joe, he expressed his intention to one day take the ranch back and finally to leave it to his son Joe. But he never got the chance: He died driving his car to bankruptcy court, a black four-door Buick coasting through Northfield, Minnesota, with a corpse at the wheel. This ghastly scene dominated the local news for a month.

His father had played around with his wills so often that none of them was binding and for all practical purposes, he died intestate. The property in Minnesota went to Joe’s mother, and sufficient investments had withstood bankruptcy proceedings that she was able to live comfortably. Lureen never offered to give her the ranch back. She made it clear that she was holding it for Joe. She and Joe’s mother had known each other since the days in the two-room Clarendon Creek schoolhouse when they were both girls. They never liked each other. Joe’s mother said, “Lureen has been a wallflower and a cornball since kindergarten.” Lureen said Joe’s mother had “enjoyed all the benefits of prostitution without the health risks and the forced early retirement.” It was the sharpest statement Lureen made in a long, quiet life; and it had so tremendously amused Joe’s father that he had repeated it to Joe with delight. To this day, Joe didn’t know what to make of it, or know why it had delighted his father, the banker and former cowboy. A year after his father died, his mother died—connected events.

Joe and Lureen had never failed to communicate with perfect clarity on the matter of the ranch. Lease payments were made to her; she deposited them and sent a check on to Joe. A separate account was opened to compensate Lureen for her increased taxes as well as a management fee for discussing arrangements with the Overstreets once a year. Lureen lived on her teacher’s retirement money and on social security. She owned her home and lived in it simply and comfortably. Joe offered to help out with her needs. She didn’t seem to want that, and often remarked that she saw it as her mission to properly attend to the business which Joe’s father had placed in her hands. At some point, the matter of transferring it into
Joe’s name would be taken care of; and that would be that. Unfortunately, Smitty developed pride of ownership.

After a couple of years in New York, Joe moved to Florida where it was always warm, and soon he met Astrid, riding the front of a 1935 Rolls-Royce, wearing nothing but gold spray paint. She was going to a costume party as a hood ornament. When they danced, he got gold paint on his clothes. This much he could remember about their first kiss: the instant it was over, she said, “You’re driving me crazy.” He had been dating a girl he’d met when he delivered a specimen for his annual physical, a big-voiced Hoosier girl whose tidy apartment was decorated with Guatemalan molas and posters from gangster movies. She didn’t stand a chance against Astrid, who went everywhere with a train of dazed men who hated themselves for being so drawn to her. Astrid scalded them with her Cuban laugh or sent them on demeaning errands.