Moving On (8 page)

Patsy sighed and started to eat the bite of egg and then decided not to eat any egg. She felt too good to stuff herself with things she didn’t want, duty or no duty. Perhaps there were pigs that the eggs could be fed to, though she had not noticed any.

“He doesn’t like being able to afford so much, you see,” she said gravely. Jim’s wealth was one of their big problems. Her people were new rich, his not so new, and far richer. She did not think it would be polite to talk about the problem of having too much money to a person who had the problem of having too little.

“Just leave them eggs, honey,” Roger said kindly. “I’ve seen strong men who couldn’t choke down my cooking. Why would anyone not like being able to afford things? I’ve wished I was able to afford things all my life.”

“You’re a nice man,” she said smiling, but she felt almost tearful. Small gracious things, like about the eggs, sometimes flooded her with feelings of gratitude. A shadow came under her eyes and the old man saw it. “He doesn’t really know how to do any one thing,” she said. “But he can afford not to, of course. He just hates it. It’s such a silly problem to have when there are so many people, you know, like the poor, who have real problems.”

Uncle Roger looked at her and she saw in his lined, firm face and the twist of his smile that she had touched him, that even though they had only known each other three days he was fond of her, perhaps had just become fond of her as they sat at the breakfast table. Her throat closed and she was choked with feeling and began to scrape with her toenail at the white paint on the thin table legs.

“I’m so emotional,” she said with a quaver.

He chuckled and reached across the napkin full of orange seeds and patted her hand. “Well, what you and him need to do is buy my ranch,” he said. “Then pretty soon you’d be as broke as me and you wouldn’t have no problems like that.”

He stood up, neatly arranged his plate, knife, fork, cup, and saucer, and carried them to the sink. “Wish you’d clean up these dishes for me,” he said. “I’ve got about three days’ work to do today and I better get started.”

He reached into the cabinet, got a toothpick out of a box, and stood looking at her thoughtfully while he picked his teeth.

“Only drawback to that is that you might not be no better at ranchin’ than I am,” he said. “I been at it fifty years and get worse at it ever year. Least that’s the way it looks in the bankbook.”

Patsy looked up in disbelief. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I can’t imagine you not being good at things. You just look like you’d be good at things.”

“Oh, well, that’s just my noble bearing,” he said, smiling and pleased. “You seen yourself how I cooked them eggs. One nice thing about a wife, she keeps a man reminded of how good for nothin’ he is. Mary used to let me know her low opinion of me every morning and I worked like a dog all day hoping I could change it. Never did. She bawled me out the morning she went and had the car wreck.”

He went out to the back porch and got his straw hat and then came back to the door of the kitchen. Patsy sat at the table, her feet drawn up to the top rung of her chair.

“I will wash the dishes,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

“I won’t. Hope you-all can find enough to eat to keep you from starving.”

She was expecting some advice, some country platitude about life and its problems, but Roger just tipped his faded straw hat to her and turned and left.

When she heard the pickup start she got up and did the few dishes, leisurely, not liking the heavy soap but unable to find any detergent. She did like standing at the sink by the open window, smelling the cool morning and the trees and weeds of the north yard. It surprised her that such dry country could have so many nice smells when it was dampened a little.

Once finished, she put the dishes away where she hoped they belonged and, since Roger was not there to be nervous, poked around in the cabinet a bit to see what was there. The knives and forks and most of the utensils were old, so old that most of them had wooden handles, very smooth from many washings and with a faint woody smell of their own. She liked them, they seemed better to the touch than her own stainless and sterling, and it occurred to her that if she and Jim ever did do anthying crazy like buy a ranch she would certainly have all sorts of wood in her kitchen—wooden spoons and wooden bowls and perhaps a huge wooden block for cutting meat on. With a bright woody good-smelling kitchen with a window that looked out on a slope and a deep sky, her cooking might even improve, though probably not. She would stand and look out too long.

She went slowly back up the stairs and got her hand lotion off the bureau and sat again in the chair by the window, rubbing lotion into her hands. Jim was sleeping on his back. She felt a little lonely and would have liked him awake, but probably he would wake up either sulky or sexy and at the moment she felt as cool and unpassionate as if she had become a virgin again. More likely still, he would wake up professional; there were four days’ worth of pictures to be mailed. The next day they were to go to Phoenix, and as Jim was a fanatic marathon driver it would probably be a very long day. She took off her robe, got
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan
, and lay on the bed on her stomach reading and occasionally tickling her husband’s chest with the ends of her hair, until the warming day made her drowsy and she flopped the book open on the floor by the bed and went to sleep.

5

E
LEANOR BREAKFASTED
outside in the summertime, on the second-floor patio of her ranch house. She exercised early, on a yellow foam-rubber exercise pad on the patio, and then she showered and put on a slip and a white robe and went back outside, her heavy graying blond hair pulled back and held by an orange headband. The ranch house was a long two-story brown stucco that her mother had built in the twenties, when she was no longer able to abide the creaking three-story frame mansion that had been the Guthrie home for two generations. The patio was on the east side of the house, sunny in the mornings, shady in the afternoons, and was Eleanor’s favorite place on the whole ranch.

She sat at a tiled table at the edge of the patio looking down on the long green lawn that stretched south almost to the barns and corrals. Lucy brought her a grapefruit and some French toast and coffee, and she leafed through a
New Yorker
as she ate, mostly looking at the ads and the cartoons. Below her the Mexican gardeners were already at work, spading the flower beds and getting ready to water the hedges. To the south, in front of the barns, ten cowhands were saddling up, fiddling with their girths and rope and listening to the foreman outline the day’s work. To the north were her wheatfields, stretching halfway to Red River, and, beyond the barns, to the south and west, the rolling broken country of the ranch spread in a great circle. The ranch house was almost on its rim.

She ate the French toast and would have liked more but didn’t call Lucy. The sun was up, the air bright and still cool. Soon the air would be merely a shimmer of heat and she would be driven inside.

As she ate and turned pages and watched the cowboys mounting she saw a white elongating cloud of dust on the road that led from the highway to the ranch house. The highway was three miles away; the road that led to it ran between the wheatfields and the horse pasture. Long before the hearse swung into the circular driveway below her, Eleanor knew who was coming. Others drove as fast as Sonny, and raised as much dust, but seldom at that hour of the morning; and anyway, she always knew when Sonny was coming. In fifteen years she had learned to tell.

He parked the hearse just beneath her and got out but didn’t look up. In a few minutes she heard the click of his bootheels as he crossed the bedroom floor. All the floors in the house were dark wood, kept bare except for a few Mexican rugs.

She looked up at him just as his hand gave her shoulder a quick hard squeeze. “Why, hello,” she said.

Sonny bent and kissed her lightly and then went around the table. “I’m starved,” he said. His chin was dark with stubble, his black hair tousled and uncombed, and his shirttail out. Though he smiled at her arrogantly, he looked a little bushed.

“Sit down and have breakfast with me,” she said. “We can chat about old times.”

“How you fixed for steaks?”

“I’m sure we have some. Steaks are our reason for existing. Ask Lucy to fix you one.”

“I don’t think I ate yesterday,” he said. “Maybe I’ll ask her to fix me two.”

He did, and also fixed himself a drink, and came back and sat down across from her, swirling the ice in his glass.

“Beautiful as ever,” he said. “You dye them streaks in?”

“I’ve never dyed my hair,” she said. “As you well know.” Her eyes were still on
The New Yorker
.

Sonny stood up, smiled, took the magazine from her, whistled sharply at one of the Mexican gardeners, and cooly sailed
The New Yorker
over the patio railing. Its pages fluttered as it fell to the ground. The gardener was fat and slow and didn’t catch it, but he picked it up and without waiting for instructions took it into the house to Lucy, who understood all mysteries.

“You can be a bore,” Eleanor said, a little irritated. “I like to read while I eat.”

“If there was another woman like you around I’d marry her,” Sonny said pleasantly. He squished some bourbon around in his mouth as if it were mouthwash. “If I was to get married, then you could sit around out here and read magazines for the rest of your goddamn life.”

“I can, anyway,” Eleanor said. “As a matter of fact that’s what I’ve done most of my life. I love to sit out here and read magazines. I expect to do essentially that until I die.”

Sonny sagged in his chair, one foot on the railing of the balcony. He looked very tired and said nothing more. Eleanor filed her nails. The exercise, the shower, and the breakfast had left her feeling good, but slightly lethargic; it was pleasant not to have to move. In a few minutes Lucy came in with Sonny’s breakfast, two large covered trays. Under each cover was a platter with a rare steak on it. There was also a bowl of green onions, some hot bread and a plate of butter, his whiskey bottle and a bowl of cracked ice.

“You’re worth your wages, Lucy,” he said, pulling himself up to the table. Lucy was a heavy aging Negress who had done all her aging on the Guthrie ranch, most of it as Eleanor’s personal maid. She had three gold teeth, a house in town, and enough sense to get herself out of the way when her mistress was in certain moods. “Thank you, Mr. Sonny,” she said and left. In other moods, when Eleanor was gay, Lucy and Sonny enjoyed teasing each other. They were both expert at banter.

Sonny bent to his steaks and ate silently. Eleanor looked him over in quick glances. He had probably slept in the hearse, if he had slept. There were little flecks of lint in his black hair, and even a few stuck to the hairs at his wrists. He cut the steaks quickly and skillfully with a small steak knife and ate them without lifting his eyes from the plate, now and then crunching one of the garden onions in two bites, and now and then sopping a hunk of the hot French bread in the drippings from the steaks. The flash of his teeth as he bit into the green stem of an onion caused her to look away, back at her nails.

When he finished he poured some more bourbon into his glass, tilted back his chair, and put both boots on the railing. He grinned at her happily.

“Hardly anything beats a good meal,” he said. His voice was fresh again. He often seemed able to shrug off fatigue, to freshen himself by some internal movement, some twist within himself.

“Well, I’m glad we could oblige you,” she said, looking him in the eye. Sonny’s gray-blue eyes were burglers, always looking for a crack, a lock left unlocked, a tear in one’s screen. They had been lovers for fifteen years, but his look still made her feel stubborn. He crunched a piece of ice between his teeth and looked down idly at the three gardeners.

“I got to be gettin’ to Phoenix,” he said. “Thought you might want to ride along. We ain’t been nowhere together lately.”

For a second it was on the tip of her tongue to make a bitchy comeback, but she was suddenly touched with discouragement and instead straightened her legs beneath the table and looked down at her bare toes. She had tried to bitch him away on many occasions and had never succeeded, and anyway he was Sonny and she didn’t feel bitchy. She smiled a little wearily and raised an eyebrow.

“Where did we ever go together except to bed, old buddy?” she said.

Sonny squinted at the sky, then got up suddenly and went into the bedroom. He came back with a package of her cigarettes. He lit one and tossed the match onto his steak plate.

“I took you to some dances,” he said. “And a bullfight down in May-hi-co. Them dances wasn’t much, I admit. We must have gone somewhere, we been in the papers often enough.”

“That’s because I’m Eleanor Guthrie,” she said. “If a man so much as holds my coat we’re in the papers, at least in Texas. It’s one of the small disadvantages of being an heiress. Of course it usually flatters the man who holds my coat. Sometimes it even flatters me.”

“Yeah, that’s the way it is being a world’s champion cowboy too,” Sonny said, grinning. “You pat some cutie on the butt and the next morning the papers have got you engaged. Ain’t it awful what us heiresses and champions have to put up with? I guess that’s why you and me always worked out so well. We got the same kind of problems.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Sorry.”

He stood up and came around the table and bent to kiss her again but Eleanor jerked her head away. Sonny grinned. “Not feeling sweet?” he said.

“Not on your life, you arrogant bastard,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in two months. You haven’t even called in two weeks. You can’t just walk in here and con me into bed, not any more. Go away so I can read my magazines in peace.”

“Well, you knew the rodeo was in town,” Sonny said. He blew a puff of smoke her way disgruntled. “Got any pills? I ain’t been watching and I’m about out.”