“My knees?” he said.
“Or perhaps you’d prefer higher ground,” she said.
“Possibly.” Now he was working on a straight face. “Over the years I’ve been pretty partial to the higher elevations.” He paused. “So, would you like to come along?”
Sally told herself to ease up. No need to feel like screaming at the thought of going back up there. It’s wasn’t like she was planning a trip to the scene of the crime to look for bloodstains or lipstick messages or something. “Maybe,” she heard herself say. “When do you want to go?”
Hawk thought about it. “Too late this afternoon— you still want to go to the rodeo tonight, right? Tomorrow’s a possibility. After the memorial service.”
“Let’s see what happens there,” said Sally. “There could be things to do for the parade on Saturday. I might have to go buy a case of crepe paper or something.” Or see if old Dickie, or, er, old Scotty had time for lunch. But she wasn’t mentioning that. How many ways could she actually be a chickenshit at once? This was really terrible.
She decided not to brood on it, so to speak. They had to get Molly Wood’s things unloaded. Delice had persuaded the fire department (more precisely, the fire chief, a sometime boyfriend) to donate some garage space for the white elephants, so they stopped off, unpacked the goods, and went on home.
Where, just to screw things up a little more, Sheldon Stover was sitting on their front stoop.
Sally leaped out of Hawk’s truck and showed Stover why some people believed that in Wyoming, there was some confusion between “hospitality” and “hostility.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I don’t recall giving you my address.”
“Edna’s Rolodex,” he said cheerfully. “You said to get in touch if there were any problems. I called and left a bunch of messages on your machine, but after a while I decided to go out and figured I’d just stop by here and wait until you got home. There seems to be some trouble with the plumbing.”
“What kind of trouble?” Hawk asked, coming up behind. “Who the hell is this?”
“This is Sheldon Stover,” said Sally. “The one who’s over at Edna and Tom’s. He’s the experimental ethnographer.”
“That does sound like trouble,” Hawk observed.
Stover chuckled. “You’d be surprised,” he said, cheerfully oblivious to the insult. “But the problem is that the drains at the house have backed up. It’s getting yucky. I figured you’d want to come over and clean up and call a plumber.”
“Sheldon,” Sally was really trying to be patient, “I thought we’d cleared up the misunderstanding about me being the cleaning lady.”
“Oh. Oh yeah,” he said. “But I thought you were kind of in charge of the place. And really, somebody ought to do something about the mess, and get the pipes cleared out. It’s not very pleasant.”
Sally could easily imagine. “Here’s a crazy idea,” she said. “What if you got out a mop and a bucket, and took a stab at it?”
“Me?” Stover inquired. “Why?”
“Well, Sheldon, while you’re waiting for that check in the mail, you’re supposed to be house-sitting, aren’t you? And it’s just barely possible you had something to do with clogging up Edna’s plumbing, isn’t it?”
Stover thought it over. “I guess you could see it that way. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
Could this guy possibly be this clueless? Sally was ready to put him to the test by blasting his ass to Nebraska, but Hawk evidently decided the conversation wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll come take a look at it,” he said. He went in the house and before Sally knew it, returned with a plunger, a bottle of Drano, and a plumber’s snake. “Let’s go,” he said.
The kitchen sink spilled over with dirty dishes and slimy water. In the downstairs bathroom, the toilet had overflowed, and there were two inches of definitely yucky liquid in the tub. While Sheldon Stover stood staring (now Sally knew where the word “dumbfounded” had come from), Sally found some towels to soak up the water on the floors. Hawk went to work emptying the dishes out of the sink, sending the snake down the drain, and finally pouring in the Drano. As the water began to bubble, and at last to recede, he looked around and saw the scummy frying pan, sitting on the stove. “So . . . what’d you do, Stover? Put bacon grease down the sink and bung up the whole house?”
Stover had disappeared. They found him in the backyard, seated at Edna’s picnic table, eating pâté de foie gras straight out of a tin Edna had brought back from Zabar’s, last time she was in New York, and had been saving, Sally knew, for a special occasion. Happy Plumbing Day.
“You’re unclogged,” Hawk said. “Now go clean up.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Stover, globs of goose liver sticking in the crevices between his teeth.
“Here’s your equipment,” said Sally, brandishing a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Mr. Clean. “I’ll explain the procedure. You squirt some Mr. Clean in the bucket, then you fill it with hot water. You scrub out the bathtub, and then you mop the kitchen and bathroom floors. I did the dishes in the kitchen and put the dirty towels in the washing machine. When the washer’s done, you put them in the dryer and turn it on.” She thought a minute. Back in the distant past, she’d lived in communal houses with men so ignorant of housekeeping that they sat in their bedrooms and threw their beer cans in the hallway, believing that the beer can fairy would make them disappear. Best to be explicit. “That is to say, push the button that says ‘dry.’ ”
“Dry,” he repeated carefully.
Hawk squinted at him. “Do you have a nanny or something?”
“I’m not really into domesticity,” Stover said. “My needs are simple. I like to live lightly on the earth. Never stay in one place too long.”
Sally imagined a string of eviction notices bumping along behind Sheldon Stover like the cans and streamers on a “Just Married” car. “Where do you live?”
Stover stuck a finger in the pâté tin, pulled out a big fingerful, licked it off. Mr. Light Living. “I’ve moved around. Been mostly on soft money since I finished up at Harvard. Last year I was in Stuttgart studying consumerism and folk syncretism among immigrant Pakistani punk rockers. This fall I’ll be out in California on a fellowship at the Center for Postdisciplinarity.”
“That sounds right up your alley, Shel,” said Sally. “You wouldn’t want anybody to mistake you for a person who had retrograde attachments to discipline.”
“Exactly,” nodded Stover. “Discipline is over.”
Hawk couldn’t help asking, “What is it that you fellows do out there at that center?”
Stover blinked. “Look at the big picture,” he answered. “Engage in collective problem-solving process, although, of course, I’m skeptical that any problem could ever actually be, well, solved. But some of the fellows remain committed to certain forms of empiricism and pragmatism. The environmental consultants are especially task-oriented, I’d say. My colleague Marsh Carhart, for example, the guy I’m getting together with while I’m here. He was one of the founders. A very holistic dude.”
Holistic? Maybe if you thought of the word in terms of “hole.” Sally contained her surprise. “You’re connected to Marsh Carhart?”
Stover scooped up the last of the pâté, licking his lips.
“Sure. We’ve talked about the idea of me being hired as a consultant to his firm, on ethnographic issues.”
Sally had a hard time imagining that Marsh would pay good spot cash money for Sheldon Stover’s multisyllabic horseshit. Then again, a little horseshit here, a little horseshit there, and pretty soon you were looking at enough fertilizer to start a green revolution, of one kind or another. “Gosh, wouldn’t that mean you’d have to, like, do some actual work?” Sally inquired.
He thought it over. “I’d prefer to think of it in terms of offering my impressions of particular predicaments,” he said. “Which he could choose to take, or maybe not. Either way.”
“Either way,”
Hawk echoed faintly, and then realized what Stover was saying. “Do you happen to be sharing impressions with Carhart on a particular parcel of land in the Laramie Range?”
“Not precisely as such,” said Stover.
Sally waited, vainly, for explanation. “Well, then, as what?”
Carhart thought it over some more. “As part of a more complex exchange, involving a traditional, or neo-traditional cultural grouping at a crossroads, with its customs, rituals, and subsistence practices buffeted by the forces of postmodern multinational capital.”
Hawk nodded slowly. “You mean, you’re here to see how ranchers handle it when somebody from out of town offers them a pile of money for their land.”
“In a reductive sense, I suppose so. But as I’ve tried to explain,” he continued with elaborate patience, “I try to operate at a greater level of both detail and abstraction, knowing that my presence modifies what goes on around me, but trying to minimize that effect as far as possible.”
“No point in falling victim to the curse of task orientation,” Hawk allowed.
“Actually, I do try to avoid that. It may strike you as— what shall we say—effete, but I’ve seen enough situations where scholars succumb to the temptation to influence the outcomes of their research. Bad things can happen, man.” Stover shook his head.
“What about Carhart?” Hawk pursued the matter. “Does he try to affect outcomes?”
Stover wagged his head from side to side, evidently moving thoughts around inside. “I don’t really know how to answer that. Marsh takes a different approach. As a sociobiologist, he’s not much concerned with action at the scale of most individual interventions. He’s more interested in the long-term, large-scale processes that determine human activity.”
“In other words,” said Sally, “no matter what he or anybody else does at any given moment, it’s not a question of choice, or even consciousness, or certainly not conscience. It’s all part of a larger process of natural selection.”
Stover did the head-wagging thing again, frowning. “I guess, on the highest plane. Not very appealing in some regards, huh?”
“Makes me not sorry to be down here on earth,” Sally said, thrusting the mop at him. “Offering you the choice of cleaning up Edna’s bathroom.”
On the way back home, Hawk started to laugh, and kept it up until the tears rolled down his face. “Soft money!” and “Postdisciplinarity!” and “T-t-t-t-t-task-oriented!” he exclaimed between gasps and guffaws. “Boy, whoever bankrolls that guy really gets what they pay for. On the other hand, why Carhart? He’s a jerk, but not a fool. He must have some use for that little twit. I’m damned if I can figure out what it is.” And now he was laughing again. “If it weren’t for academia,” he finally managed to say, “Sheldon Stover would have been dead years ago. It makes you wonder why we ever abandoned the survival of the fittest. The war of all against all. Nature red in tooth and claw . . .”
“It makes me wonder how I’m going to replace Edna’s foie gras,” Sally moaned.
Hawk, still trying to get himself under control, giggled once, inhaled deeply, exhaled with a “whew.” “Go online,” he said, “www.gooseguts.”
“But of course,” said Sally. “The Internet.”
“In this world of consumerism and folk syncretism,” Hawk declared, “you can get anything you want.”
Chapter 11
Go Rodeo!
By the time Sally got done deleting all the messages from Sheldon Stover, Hawk had contracted a case of hiccups from repeated fits of giggling, and Sally was ready to throw the answering machine against a wall. But the last message on the machine was from Brit, saying that her cousin Jerry Jeff was entered in the calf roping that night. That summer Jerry Jeff had started winning decent prize money roping, and everybody thought he’d qualify for the National High School Rodeo. In honor of Jerry Jeff, Uncle Dwayne had invited everybody to be his guests that night at the rodeo. Alice’s Restaurant would have to wait.
Dwayne, as Sally knew, was a member of the Jubilee Days Committee, a bunch of beef-eating boosters who made sure there were plenty of posters around town, an abundance of ads in the program, lots of free publicity on local radio, and most importantly, big prize money for the PRCA circuit cowboys and cowgirls who came to compete. It was good that amateur ranch hands and local kids like Jerry Jeff came out to try their luck in a non-PRCA event, but the crowds came to see bull riders and barrel racers who had made (and broken) their bones touring, riding, and roping for a living.
To Sally, Dwayne had always been something of an enigma. Where Dickie wore his heart like an open wound, and Delice masked hers with a cynical toughness that didn’t fool her friends for a minute, as long as Sally had known him, Dwayne had never displayed a whisper of passion for anything, except music. Everyone in town knew that his wife fooled around on him, but Sally had never heard him say a jealous word, or show the least bit of concern. As a couple, Nattie and Dwayne kept a busy social schedule, and Dwayne was unfailingly pleasant and polite and even sweet to Nattie, praising her business skills, and even her fashion sense (not all that surprising in a man whose idea of sharp dressing ran to brown suits). Nattie liked big baubles, and Dwayne had, in the years since he’d gotten her out of the Gallery bar and into the Escalade, given her plenty of what Hawk called “hog jewelry”—bracelets big as bagels, necklaces that resembled horse collars, earrings so pendulous her head looked like a chandelier, all studded with gem-stones in every color of the rainbow. But as devoted as Dwayne appeared, Sally had to wonder about that marriage. Fleetingly she considered their sex life, and quickly squelched a mental image of Nattie with a whip in her hand.
Well, hell, you never knew about people. Maybe Dwayne was the one with the whip. Maybe he had a little whippersnapper on the side, and that was why he was so tolerant of Nattie’s shenanigans. For all Sally knew, he attended meetings of a group sex cult once a week, when everyone thought he was just having bowling night. He was a banker. A trained specialist in discretion.
Dwayne and Nattie had never had kids, and they never talked about it. But if Dwayne wasn’t anybody’s father, he and Dickie had long acted as surrogate daddies to Delice’s boy, Jerry Jeff. They took JJ trout fishing and duck hunting, showed up at his football and baseball games, watched him try his hand at calf roping and saddle broncs, did what they could to make up for his own father’s conspicuous absence. JJ’s love of sports and indifference to school was a constant source of frustration to Delice, but Dwayne had quietly let it be known that if the kid ever did shape up and manage to get himself into college somewhere, Dwayne would be happy to foot the bill. The way it was looking, JJ was pushing to go to UW on a rodeo scholarship. The rodeo part didn’t please Delice, but she figured that maybe he’d get an education by accident.
Dwayne had left guest passes for Hawk and Sally at the gate to the VIP parking area. They parked and went to the rodeo committee lounge to meet the Langhams. The lounge was in a low cinder-block building behind the arena, next to a big dusty lot where the contestants hung out before and between events, having a smoke, or communing with their horses, or flirting with the buckle bunnies who always managed to find their way into the restricted area. Sally spotted Dickie Langham, talking to Jerry Jeff and another cowboy.
The lounge itself was decorated in early chamber of commerce—linoleum floor, fake wood-grain Formica meeting table, beige folding metal chairs, and walls lined with photographs of the members of the rodeo committees for each year. Row after row of head shots of white men in gray Stetsons wearing business smiles. Dwayne was sitting in a chair, feet up on the table, sporting the Stetson and a brown and gold satin baseball jacket that had “Jubilee Days Committee” emblazoned on the back, and his name embroidered over the breast pocket. Brit was there too, slouching on a beat-up couch in faded jeans and well-worn cowboy boots. In honor of her cousin, she wore a Western shirt, black twill. She wouldn’t wear a hat, and that was probably unfair to the cowboys. Her shiny blond hair
was like a lust-triggering death ray that drew them close and laid them out, before they even knew what hit them. Marsh Carhart was there, resembling an ad out of the Sundance catalogue, standing in a corner talking quietly with Nattie. She was decked out in yellow this time, from hat to boots, looking a little like a character out of Curious George Meets Cat Ballou. If she really wanted men to pay attention to her, she’d better stay away from Brit.
Everybody was drinking out of plastic cups, making small talk. Dwayne asked Sally and Hawk if they felt like a beverage, and they said sure. He opened a refrigerator stocked with soda and beer and jugs of wine and booze, poured them each a big slug of Jim Beam, and added some Cuervo to his own cup. “We can’t take these out of here,” he said, “so drink up, Shriners.”
It had been a long time since Sally had tossed down four fingers of Beam in under two minutes, but she did her duty. A fireball slid down her throat and detonated in her gut, and little white sparks exploded behind her eyelids. Yee hah—go rodeo!
And not a moment too soon. Outside, dusk had fallen, the first stars were coming out, the moon was rising fast, big and bright as a searchlight. The rodeo announcer finished reading a list of sponsors, and now he was asking everyone to rise for the national anthem, to be played by the Casper Troopers Drum and Bugle Corps. The noisy waiting area, crowded now with chattering contestants, restless horses, fans, and officials, fell first to a murmur, and then to a hush as the contestants reined their mounts to a standstill, the dust settled, and everyone faced the flag. Some of the cowboys and cowgirls put their hands over their hearts. More than half the people sang along.
Maybe it was the bourbon. Sally felt tears come into her eyes and cursed herself for a sentimental idiot. For God’s sake, this was the country that had reduced Vietnam to a cinder, savaged its own black citizens, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. She didn’t believe in countries. She didn’t even believe in borders. Jim Beam and Laramie, Wyoming, had weakened her mind.
Bad Company Page 13
