Amber had left a note on the dining room table. “Hey there, Dr. Stover. Thanks for filling in for us.” (Us? Of course, the boyfriend had been living there too. Why not?) “We didn’t have time to clean up much, so we hope it’s okay. We adopted a kitty—please feed him. His name is Mr. Skittles and he doesn’t need any kind of special cat food. There are some cornflakes in the pantry, and he’ll eat them with water or anything. Kitties love home-cooked meals!”
A sodden saucer of cornflakes was slowly turning to cement in the corner of the kitchen floor. Poor Mr. Skittles. Sally was, to put it mildly, not a cat person, but she’d be damned if the sad little fur ball at her feet would go another hour without something decent to eat. She couldn’t leave the cat there, either—Edna was very allergic to cats. The whole house would have to be detoxed.
Amber’s note continued. “We’ll be back in two weeks. Please water the yard if you think of it. When you leave, just put the key back in the mailbox. Have fun!” The last exclamation point was dotted with a happy face.
Sally went into the kitchen, looking, without surprise, at the sink piled high with crusted dishes, the overflowing garbage can, dirty counters, dirty table. She decided she’d better see if there was something for Mr. Skittles to eat. She found a small can of imported, oil-packed Italian tuna, opened it, dumped it out on a plate, and set it outside by the back door, next to a bowl of water. As Mr. Skittles set to devouring what must be his first reasonable meal in days, Sally caught a glimpse of the shriveled wreckage of Edna McCaffrey’s vegetable garden. Members of the University of Wyoming College of Arts and Sciences would be paying for that, one way or another, all year long.
Then she returned to the kitchen, hauled the garbage out to the alley, came back in and tackled the mess. It wasn’t that bad—inside half an hour, she’d done the dishes and scrubbed the place down. She shared a silent thought with the benighted Bone Bandy: Kids these days.
Now Sally remembered the crash that had first alerted her to Mr. Skittles’s presence. With a gallows feeling in her heart, she went into Edna’s office. It was a pleasant, well-organized space, full of afternoon sunlight from a great, tall window sectioned off with wooden shelves that held Edna’s Pueblo pottery collection. One shelf must also have recently held Mr. Skittles, nestled among the pots for a sunny snooze. And when he’d been startled awake and come to investigate, he’d knocked off a black-glazed pot. Sally knew that Edna had one small, glossy black pot made by the Michelangelo of Pueblo pottery, María Martínez of San Ildefonso. Heaven help them all if that was the one.
Sally stooped down to pick up the fragments of the pot, lying desolate on the wood floor next to an Oriental rug that might have cushioned the impact if Mr. Skittles and Sally had been luckier. Praise Jesus, it was signed by some potter from Santa Clara (probably the Botticelli of the Pueblos, but still). She squatted there, picking up pieces, and wondered if she should give it to Hawk to get him to glue it back together. He was a genius with superglue.
“Hello!” came a voice from the doorway of the office. “Are you a housebreaker or a cleaning lady?”
She looked up at the man who’d asked the question: a long, thin face with a brushy mustache, wavy brown hair, a T-shirt and fishing vest above cargo shorts that hung straight down in back, as if God had forgotten to equip him behind. Black socks and walking shoes, skinny white legs. And he was staring at her like she must be retarded.
“Does a cleaning service come with the house?” he asked.
Cleaning service? Sally looked down at her Italian sandals, her Ann Taylor trousers, her black silk T-shirt. The gold jewelry she’d put on to dress up a bit more, out of respect for the morning’s somber errand.
This moron went to Princeton?
She rose slowly, holding in her hands the obsidian shards of what had once been art, and was now archaeology. “No. I’m not the cleaning woman. I’m Sally Alder, a friend of Edna’s from the university.”
“The university?” he asked.
“Of Wyoming,” she said. “I run the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History.”
“Of Wyoming,” he repeated, as if trying to place the name. “Mmm. Well.”
Obviously the Dunwoodie Center and UW were too low-flying to register on the man’s Ivy League radar. Time to give this guy a clue whose turf he was on. “You must be Sheldon Stover. Edna and Tom’s house-sitter told me you were coming. I understand you’re a friend of Edna’s from back East?”
“Yes,” said Stover, “we were at the institute together.” Like there was only one institute in the world.
“Was Edna expecting a visit from you?” Sally inquired.
Stover gave her a look that asked what business it was of hers. “As a matter of fact, no. I don’t have a fixed itinerary, so I can’t commit to being anyplace in particular at any given time. But as it happened, a California colleague I’ve been planning to hook up with is here this week, so I thought I’d drop in. Edna told me in Princeton that I should look her up if I ever got out West. When I called and the girl asked if I’d be willing to fill in as house-sitter, it just seemed like it was meant to be.”
Weird. “So it doesn’t matter to you whether Edna’s here or not?”
“Naturally,” said Stover, “I’d like to see her. I was hoping to talk with her about my current project.”
Now Sally was supposed to ask him about his work. “Your project?” she inquired obligingly.
“I’m an experimental ethnographer,” he said, as if he were saying, “I’m a farmer.”
“I’m part of the Insurgency.”
First an institute; now an insurgency. “Yes?” Sally prodded.
“Surely you’ve heard of the Insurgency?”
“Something to do with Central American revolutions?” Sally tried.
Stover chuckled maddeningly. “Only as intellectual fellow traveling,” he said, illuminating nothing and obviously talking for his own benefit. He looked as if he didn’t think she understood a word he said, and cared not a bit whether she did. “This summer I’m developing a concept that will destroy, once and for all, the confining canons of ethnographic fieldwork.”
“Destroying the canons?” Sally asked. With guys like Sheldon Stover, you could appear to make conversation simply by repeating combinations of words they’d just said, but phrasing them as questions. The tactic had gotten her through more academic cocktail parties than she cared to remember. Edna too was a master of getting through cocktail parties, but she wasn’t known for her easy sufferance of blockheads. Sheldon Stover could not actually be a friend of hers.
“Exactly,” said Stover, shifting into lecture mode. “Consider the phrase ‘ethnographic fieldwork.’ ‘Ethno’— having to do with a folk or tribe or culture, all terms we’ve come to hold in disrepute. ‘Graphic’—asking questions and writing down answers and observations about folk life or culture. But as postmodernists have proven, nobody ever gives answers to questions that the questioner can really understand. And writing down oral traditions, or trying to describe visual or material symbols or objects, simply deadens living things. ‘Field’—it implies that there’s something ‘out there,’ as opposed to the observer’s perspective. A highly suspect notion. And, of course, ‘work.’ Here in the modern, industrialized world, we’ve divided the undifferentiated flux of experience into artificial categories—‘work’ and ‘play’ for example.”
“Or day and night,” Sally offered.
“Yes, that’s right,” Stover nodded indulgently. “Stark dichotomies. Utterly Western and arbitrary. My summer project is to reveal the subjectivities at work in all these canonical notions.”
Was he knave as well as fool? “So, if I get this straight, this summer you’re just rambling around wherever and whenever you please, not observing, not asking questions, not writing, and above all, not working. Very insurgent.”
“Why yes,” said Stover. “Have you read Roland Barthes?”
Sally’d had enough. “How long are you planning
to stay?” she asked, knowing and dreading the answer.
Stover looked skyward, his patience taxed. “I guess you don’t really get it.”
“Get this,” said Sally. “I am hereby asserting my authority as Wyoming agent for Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood, who own what we literal-minded souls would refer to as ‘this house.’ I could kick you out. In fact, I probably should kick you out. But by now every motel between Cheyenne and Rawlins is probably booked solid. Maybe you should just ease on down the road, huh?”
“Actually,” said Stover, “I need to be in town a few more days. It’s not just that I want to see this colleague. I’m having my last fellowship check forwarded to general delivery in Laramie.”
“You’re broke?” Sally asked, unnecessarily.
“Just a little cash flow problem,” Stover explained cheerfully. “I’m sure it’ll be solved shortly.”
Uh-huh. Sally sighed. “All right. You can stay, for the moment. I’ll email Edna and let her know you’re here, but if I don’t hear from her by this weekend indicating otherwise, I’ll expect you to leave. And you stay only on the conditions that you keep the place clean, water the yard, and don’t have any guests of your own.”
She put the potsherds down on Edna’s desk, found a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote down her phone number. “Call me if you need anything, and be sure to let me know before you take off. I’ll drop by from time to time, just to make sure things are going okay. And you leave absolutely no later than Sunday, unless Edna writes and tells me to let you stay. Understand, Mr. Stover?”
“It’s Dr. Stover, but you can call me Sheldon, Susie,” he said. “I don’t believe in hierarchical designations of rank.”
“It’s Sally, but you can call me Dr. Alder,” she said. “I do.”
Chapter 7
Busted Breaks and Bad Rhythm
Sally left Edna and Tom’s and stopped by the house to pick up her guitar, leaving Mr. Skittles to explore the inside of her Mustang and assuring herself that he wouldn’t pee on the floor. Then she headed over to Delice’s in the hope that Jerry Jeff would be there. JJ was in some regards a typically feckless teenage boy, but he was known to be a sucker for animals. Sally figured that by the time Delice got home from work, Mr. Skittles would be fully installed as JJ’s buddy. She found Jerry Jeff out front with his lariat, roping the mailbox, and as she’d predicted, he was happy to help out a cat in need. She said she’d return with some food for the critter.
Then she’d gone downtown to a florist, where she’d spent more than an hour trying to figure out what kind of flowers to send Mary. Nearly brainless by now, she went to Albertson’s (couldn’t face the Lifeway, not so soon again), spent several minutes baffled by the array of choices in animal feed, and settled, finally, on Little Friskies. When she caught herself thinking that the tunaflavored kibble sounded pretty good, it dawned on her that all she’d had to eat that day was four pieces of fruit. She might be a little smarter if she ingested some calories, but she couldn’t handle cooking for herself. Hawk wasn’t due home until nine or ten, so she decided that she’d just grab dinner somewhere. She took the cat food back to Jerry Jeff, and after vacillating over which of Laramie’s fine dining establishments she would patronize, driving all over town, and deciding she didn’t feel like sitting in some restaurant and eating by herself, she’d ended up, uninspired, grabbing a burrito at Taco John’s.
By now self-pity was kicking in hard. Nobody should have to cope with Nattie Langham, Bone Bandy, Sheldon Stover, and fast food in a single Tuesday.
The burrito did seem to wake up a few brain cells. With some hope of improving her spirits, she’d gone by the Wrangler and spent another hour drinking iced tea and listening to a happy hour act called “Horse Sense” (a fiddler and guitarist who sang and played old-time cowboy songs), watching the place fill up with cowboys and tourists and local folks. Delice was rushing around, bossing the employees, caught up in the frenzy. The fiddler had a sweet tenor voice and an even sweeter face, but the party mood still eluded Sally.
By the time she got to Dwayne and Nattie’s huge, hideous house in a fifteen-year-old, windswept suburb of similar outsize, ostentatious domiciles, Sally was in the kind of foul humor that had once inspired Delice to ask, “So who shot your dog, hagbody?” She figured she was entitled to her shitty mood, and the pretentious setting wasn’t helping. In a mammoth “great room” faced with flagstone on one wall, nothing but glass on another, and a couple dozen badly executed cowboy-and-Indian paintings on the other two, the band and all its gear, including drums and amps, took up scarcely a corner.
The drummer, fiddler, and guitarist-bass player gave her a wave and went back to talking about some disaster movie Sally hadn’t and would never see. Dwayne Lang-ham, seated behind his pedal steel guitar, was tuning the instrument. Wearing hiking shorts, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Teva sandals, he’d made the transition from pillar of the community to vehicle of musical divinity. In her life, Sally had known many adequate, and several very good, but only a few terrific musicians. Dwayne was one. Though he was as bland as Pillsbury dough in his banker life, angels and demons seemed to swirl around him when he stepped onto a stage. He could play pretty much anything, but in the Millionaires, he alternated between bass and steel.
Sam Branch, the Realtor, a man with whom Sally had played a lot of music and been unwise several times, years ago, was tuning up his electric guitar, chatting with Dwayne. Sam nodded, heavy-lidded, as he saw her come in. They weren’t pals, exactly, and that bothered her. Sally liked to think she was the kind of higher life form who knew how to stay friendly with old lovers. In some cases, often involving men of the guitar-playing persuasion, the best she’d been able to do was turn sex into music.
Well, what could you do with Sam Branch? There had been a time when Sam and Dickie Langham, between them, conducted most of the traffic in smokable and snortable substances in the town, but like Dickie, Sam had gotten into a putatively straight racket. Unlike Dickie, there was something permanently reprobate about Sam. Sometimes Sally enjoyed that. Sometimes she didn’t.
Sam leaned down and reached into the cooler at his feet, and pulled out a cold can of Budweiser, handing it to Sally. She popped the top, took a swig, set the can on top of an amplifier, and then got out her guitar and electronic tuner. As she tuned her instrument, she couldn’t help listening to Sam and Dwayne.
“So is the old lady getting cold feet?” Sam asked.
“No,” Dwayne answered. “I wouldn’t say that. She’s concerned that this be the right kind of deal for her. She’s a conservationist. We’re pretty sure we can avoid having to do a full-scale environmental impact statement, but we’ve had a consultant in here the last few days, looking things over, and he’ll write up a report for her, if that’s the hitch. Nattie thinks we should have the guy give it to her in person. Seems he’s the kind who can charm little old ladies out of big ranches.”
“Does that really happen anymore?” Sally didn’t really want them to know she’d been eavesdropping (and it wasn’t, she thought guiltily, the first time that day). But on the other hand, this was obviously a conversation about the Wood’s Hole land swap. The way they were going on about Mrs. Wood chapped her butt. “Little old ladies have big old lawyers these days.”
Dwayne chuckled. “’Course they do. But human nature’s human nature. This guy looks like Robert Redford’s younger brother. He’s got a killer résumé—he’s done ecological consulting for everybody from agribiz multinationals to the Vernal, Utah, Friends of Dinosaur Bones. I was at a Sierra Club picnic with him in Boulder last month, and by the time they were handing out the ice cream cones, he had half the people writing big checks to save the grizzly bear, and just about everybody palming his business card and promising to give him a call.”
“What’s this paragon’s name?” Sally asked, frowning at a high E string that had gone flatter than it ought have, cranking the tuning peg.
“Marsh Carhart,” said Dwayne, and the
string snapped.
“Dwayne,” said Sally, digging in her case for a new E string, but not pausing to consider her words, “are you aware that this guy is one of the biggest pigs in the universe?”
Sam grinned. “I thought you only said that about me, darlin’,” he told her. “What’d he do—tell you that you give a lousy—”
“He wouldn’t have had any way of knowing,” Sally interrupted. “I knew him back when I was in grad school in Berkeley. He was getting a Ph.D. in biology and writing for Evolved Earth Quarterly. Leching after every little coed from San Jose to Santa Rosa. And half the high school girls. And claiming it was his duty to the species, as an ‘alpha male,’ to get his genes around as widely as possible.”
“Now there’s a line I’ve never thought of,” said Sam. “Why do I sense that it didn’t work on you?”
“Because I considered it my duty to the species to pray, every night, that his sperm motility was lower than worm squeezin’s,” Sally said. “He got a little bit famous recently—wrote a book called Man, the Rapist, made quite a stir. He was on Larry King Live and Rush Limbaugh, explaining how men are biologically programmed to rape, and women are designed to incite them to rape. Very scientific. What a shithead.”
“I don’t pay attention to controversy,” Dwayne said. “From what I hear, when it comes to ecological consulting, he’s good at his job.” As if that settled that.
“Dwayne,” she said, “this is a real big deal for you and Nattie, huh?”
“Could be,” Dwayne allowed, his face expressionless. “Let’s play some tunes.”
Sally had to admit, it wasn’t the Millionaires’ best practice. Frankly, it sucked. The drummer had clearly spent much of the afternoon down at the Buckhorn bar, celebrating Jubilee Days, and he was at the point where he couldn’t tell a twelve-bar shuffle from a Texas two-step. Sam’s cell phone kept ringing, and he kept answering it. Dwayne, whose performances ordinarily varied from rock-solid to brilliant, was on some other planet, and Sally’s own mind wasn’t on the music. Screwed-up solos, flat harmonies, busted breaks, and bad rhythm—a hell of a musical mess. If she’d been a rookie, she’d have thought they could never be ready for a Saturday night gig. But she’d done her time, and she knew that some nights, the gods of song were playing on the other side of town.
Bad Company Page 8
