Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  Wheatland, Wyoming, had sentimental Spanish haciendas out in the windswept tank farm at the edge of the sage. A somber and detached-looking herd of buffalo stared out at the highway across five strands of barbed wire. Tonight was going to be Olde Southe Gumbo Night at the restaurant in Douglas where Joe released the Haliburton truck and stopped for breakfast. There was an array of condiments that suggested people ate at all hours here. Joe examined the salad dressing. It looked like the styling gel in a beauty parlor. Buddy Holly sang “True Love Waits” from a red and chrome speaker at the end of his booth. While he ate, the sun burst out like a hostile and metallic stunt. Beyond the window, the land of the jackalope shone under a burnishing wind.

  Back on the highway, a sheriff’s car shot past with a little gray-haired prisoner in the back. Joe drove until he reached Kaycee, not much more than a small depression in the ground east of the highway: gas station, quonset buildings, a few houses. He stopped and bought some homemade elk sausage from a man he knew there. He was getting close.

  The Tongue River was green and low and clear. It was the last thing he noticed until he crossed into Montana. At Crow Agency a sign said, “Jesus Is Lord on the Crow Reservation.” Loose horses were also Lord on the Crow reservation. An ambulance tore off down a dirt road, its red light throbbing like a severed artery.

  Three hours later he drove through his old hometown, Deadrock. He took a left by the switching yard and took the dirt road south toward the ranch. He followed the river bottom back to his house. Before long, the cottonwoods would make a cloudy tunnel for the racing stream but they were just now beginning to leaf out; and where the stream broadened out and flowed in flat pastures, its every turn was marked by an even growth of willows. The light flashed on the shallow streams that fed the river where they emerged from their grassy tunnels; and in the marshy stands of cattail, blackbirds jumped up and showered down once again. A rancher went alongside the road, a great fat man on a small motorcycle. He had his shovel and fabric dams lashed behind him and his felt hat pulled down so firmly against the wind that it bowed his ears out. A small collie lay across his lap as he sputtered along. Some of the fields had great splashes of pasture ruining yellow spurge. The ditch bank along the road was a garden of early spring wild flowers, shooting stars, forget-me-nots, lupine. Snow still lay collected in the shade. You couldn’t really tell you had left one ranch and gone onto another. A cattle guard marked the actual boundary but the rolling country was the same in every direction. The house sat down in some trees, old trees that were splotched with dead branches. There was a seasonal creek underneath the trees but it had dried up now into nothing but a wash. A half-acre had been fenced to enclose the place but the cattle had beaten the ground down right to the boundaries.

  The door was unlocked. Joe went in and looked around. There wasn’t much for furnishings but there was enough. There was a woodstove, an old Frigidaire, and two army blankets on the bunk. The toilet bowl was stained with iron but it worked. Someone had fixed the well. There was a table in the kitchen. And the phone worked. Not owning or even caring about any of it made this seem blissful. His nights wouldn’t be interrupted by bad dreams. It was going to be all right.

  10

  When Joe’s father began leasing the pasture to the Overstreets, the ranch began to go downhill. The house started toward its present moldering state; the fences were kept in what minimal condition would hold cattle but where the property adjoined the lessors, the fences were allowed to fall and be walked into the ground by herds of cows. The pastures were eaten down year after year until the buck brush, wild currants and sage had begun to advance across their surfaces, with the result that the carrying capacity dropped and with it, the grazing fees. Evaporation from the stripped ground reduced the discharge of the good springs to trickles; the marginal springs had long since been milled to mud by cattle and finally the mud itself had dried up and sealed the springs. But the worst problems of the ranch existed at the level of paper, where liens and assumptions clouded its title.

  At first, it hadn’t mattered. Joe had had a good enough career painting; he had found handy equivalents with Ivan Slater and others, all somewhat in anticipation of his desire to resume his work.

  Joe had sometimes felt that it would be a great relief to give up on recovering his talent; and now he was facing, in the confines of approaching maturity, the fact that he was broke and there was nothing new, nothing at the edge of things, nothing around the corner that would save him. He hoped he wouldn’t soon be known as the man who evicted his own kin-folk from their ancestral pasturage.

  Joe had come to believe from reading books that in many landholding families, there existed perfect communication between the generations about the land itself. He noticed how many Southerners believed this. Even if they were in New York there was always a warmhearted old daddy holding out for their possession and occupancy an ancient farm—viewed as a sacred tenure on earth rather than agriculture—whenever they should choose to take it up. Price of admission? Take a few minutes, after the soul-stirring train ride down yonder, to make friends with the resident darkies. Where had people gone wrong in the West? In the latest joke, leaving a ranch to one’s children was called child abuse. But Joe couldn’t really take that view. He had to go see Lureen and straighten things out.

  It had gotten too quiet in the neighborhood. There used to be a roar of roller skates on the sidewalk. The small garage next to the house was empty. It had once held his Uncle Smitty’s Ford, a car he called his “foreign car.” “It’s foreign to me,” Smitty explained. Many years ago, Smitty came home from the war. He never left after that.

  Joe walked around to the side entrance of the house, the only one anyone had ever used. The front door opened onto a hallway and then into a large sitting room that was reserved for the high ceremonies of the day. He remembered how the furniture was kept covered, dreadful shapes, the drapes drawn until life could resume on a special occasion. Children, who were allowed every liberty in the other rooms, including the right to bay down the laundry chute, build matchstick rockets, and even play in the avalanche of coal in the cellar, were frightened in this room. Joe’s grandmother sat for weeks here after her husband died as though the dream of respectability they had shared was alive in its sad furnishings, its curio cabinet, its damask-covered love seat and its solitary volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When the silence of his grandmother’s mourning overpowered the rest of the family, Joe was sent to see her. She sat with her hands in her lap and her feet crossed under her chair. He moved to her side and she didn’t respond. He knew he had to say something but he could smell new rain on the sidewalk and know that already things were going on that consigned his grandfather to the past. His mind moved to that miracle. “I was wondering,” he mused, in his little-old-man style, “if Grandpa happened to leave me any gold.” Joe’s grandmother stared, and began to laugh. She laughed for minutes while he examined the postcards, fossils and pressed flowers in the curio cabinet, ignoring her laugh and thinking about the curiosities and the miracle of rain, of opportunities beyond the funereal door. There was a ring of keys fused together by fire that he held in awe. His grandmother got up and looked around as though recovering from a spell. She walked straight back into her life, revitalized by the cold musing of a child.

  Joe knocked. In a moment the door opened and there stood his Aunt Lureen in a blue flowered dress and white coat sweater. She held her face, compressed her cheeks, and cried, “He’s back!” A cloud crossed her face. The sight of Joe seemed to produce a hundred contradictory thoughts.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “I’m back, all right!” For some reason, he whistled. A maladroit quality of enthusiasm seemed to penetrate the air and the sharp whistling brought it up to pitch.

  Joe hugged Lureen—she was small and strong—and followed her self-effacing step into the house with its wooden smells, its smells of generations of work clothes and vagaries of weather, of sporting uniforms and overcoats, straight into the
vast kitchen which more than anything recalled the thriving days when they had watched game shows from behind TV trays. Joe’s oldest memory was of his Uncle Smitty standing up in his army uniform and announcing, “I for one am proud to be an American.” Joe had a photograph of Smitty from his army days, a hard young face that seemed to belong to the ’40s, the collar of his officer’s tunic sunk into his neck, Joe’s grandparents beaming at him. There was nothing in that picture to hint that little would go right for Smitty.

  Aunt Lureen carried the tea tray into the dining room. You could see the drop of the street to the trestle for a train that used to cancel talk in its roaring traverse. She had never married, never even had a beau. She had radiated duty from the beginning, a duty which lay basically elsewhere, a broad, sexless commitment to vagary, that is, to others.

  “Weren’t you an angel to come see us,” said Lureen, staring with admiration. Joe poured the tea, thinking, That’s just a pleasant formality and of course there is no need for me to reply specifically. Around them the halls and rooms seemed to express a detailed emptiness. “What have you been doing, Joe?” The words of these questions fell like stones dropped into a deep well. Joe thought if he could just get some conversational rhythm going, this wouldn’t be such a strain. He had long since lost his nerve to ask about the lease.

  “I’ve been on the road. That’s about all I’ve got to say for myself.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Little deal going there with the space program.” What a childish lie! The space program was all he could think of about Florida. That and coconuts. If he had been doing anything there, he wouldn’t be here. He had struck a void but he could scarcely tell her he no longer knew what he was doing.

  “How did you enjoy working in the space program?”

  “Well, I got out in one piece,” said Joe. He thought this peculiar reference to himself in an atmosphere which included the explosion of a space shuttle would add solemnity to this occasion. In the world of coconuts, there would be no real parallel. But Lureen missed the gravity of his remark. She bent over in laughter. It was as if he had picked coconuts after all. How painful it was!

  Everything was magnified. Lureen’s chaste little paintings were on the wall. It had been her escape during decades of school teaching; the bouquets, the curled-up kittens, the worn-out slippers next to the pipe and pouch, the waterfall, all made a kind of calendar of her days. Her pictures reflected her tidy view of a family life she hadn’t had.

  Smitty could be heard coming in through the kitchen, a lurching, arhythmic tread on the old wooden floor, whistling “Peg o’ My Heart.” Then he roared; but this was from afar, a great and bitterly insincere braying. His appearance was anticlimactic, his carefully combed auburn hair, his ironic face, his handsomely tailored but not so clean blue suit, making one wonder as he appeared in the parlor, who did roar in the next room, surely not this person whose face swam with indecision. Smitty had spent many years now in what he called “study” and his shabby-genteel presence was entirely invented. What had become of the hard-faced soldier of the ’40s?

  “Joe, my God it’s you.”

  “Home at last.”

  “A good tan, I see.”

  “Pretty hot.”

  “Your late lamented father could have used a trip or two to the Sun Belt. He might have lived longer.”

  Joe didn’t say anything in reply.

  “But when you’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, palm trees seem to be thin stuff. Will you join me for a drink?”

  “Not right now. Lureen and I are having a visit.”

  “Ah,” said Smitty. “Then this must be my stop.”

  Smitty suggested by sheer choreography that an appointment awaited him. When he’d gone, Joe said, “Smitty hasn’t changed.”

  “No, we can count on Smitty.”

  “Has he gone out for a drink?”

  “It won’t amount to much. No money.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Joe, making the remark as minimal as possible. A quick look of annoyance crossed Lureen’s face. There was something here Joe couldn’t quite follow. He felt like a parasite. He might as well have said, “Smitty is drinking the lease.”

  Lureen said, “We’ve done the best we could.”

  Smitty stuck his red face in the doorway. “Joe, may I see you a moment?” The face hung there until it was confirmed Joe would come.

  Joe got up and followed him into the parlor. There was a small desk with a leather panel in its top and a chair behind it. Smitty pulled an armchair up for Joe and seated himself opposite, at the desk. He was agitated as he drew some old forms out of the drawer and placed them on the desk top. Joe could hear children bouncing a rubber ball off the side of the house. Lureen would attend to them shortly. She viewed children as other people view horseflies. Her gentleness disappeared in their presence. They feared her instinctively. Joe heard the shout and the ball bouncing stopped.

  “Joe,” Smitty said, “I’m right in the middle of a deal that will produce my fortune. We make our own luck, don’t you agree? It’s funny that after years in the insurance business I should have come up with this! But to my own astonishment I find myself getting into seafood, which is all the rage in this diet-conscious time, shrimp to be exact, Gulf Coast shrimp which I am going to import into Montana! Et cetera, et cetera, but anyway, do you have life insurance?” Smitty clasped his hands on top of the papers in the manner of a concerned benefactor. “I know it’s a far cry from shrimp!”

  “No.”

  “Can you appreciate that I am an agent for American Mutual? That is, until that mountain of crustaceans begins rolling North!”

  “No, actually, Uncle Smitty, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I am. And while I disapprove of nepotism, the smoke-filled room and scratching one another’s backs, I am in a position to enhance the advantages you already possess by virtue of your youth.” He began to write on one of the forms. “I think I can spell your name,” he chuckled. “Don’t worry, lad! You’re not buying life insurance! And I can find out from Lureen what you’re using for an address these days!” Joe began to relax again. “This is just a request to quote you some rates, which will be mailed to your home, sometime … hence.” He folded up the papers decisively and placed them back in the drawer.

  “Thank you,” said Joe in a wave of relief.

  “You, sir, are welcome.”

  “I look forward to going over those rates.”

  “At your leisure, at your leisure. I’m certainly in no rush, what with an avalanche of pink headed my way from the Texas coast!”

  Joe clapped his hands on his knees preparatory to rising.

  “Shall we?”

  “One small matter,” Smitty said. Joe froze. “The rather small matter, of the filing fee.”

  Joe slapped at his pants pockets. “I’m not sure I—”

  “Have your wallet? I can help there. You do have it. And the filing fee, which is nominal by any civilized standards and which does not begin to recompense me for the time I will have to put in, comes to twenty dollars.”

  Joe got his wallet out. He peered at the bills like a timid card player.

  “There’s one!” said Smitty, plucking a twenty into midair. He was immediately on his feet, an expression not of triumph but of horrible relief on his face. “With any luck, and assuming you pass the physical, you will be able to direct a windfall to an heir of your choice. In your generation, where the act of procreation has been reduced to a carnival, you might have your hands full picking a favorite! And now I excuse myself.” He shot out the door.

  When Joe returned to his aunt, she said, “Did you give him any money?”

  “I’m afraid I did.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sure he needed it for something important.”

  It was a formality with Lureen, when short of other topics or in any way embarrassed, to deplore Montana’s failing industries. She started in today on the collapse of the cattle
industry, the ill effects of the Texas and Midwestern feedlots, the evils of hedging and the betrayal of the agricultural family unit by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. She attacked the usurious practices of the Burlington Northern Railroad, the victimization of the Golden Triangle wheat man and the sabotage of the unions by neo-fascist strawmen posing as shop stewards. It took her out of herself, out of her meekness; and it made Joe extraordinarily uncomfortable to watch her form a timid oratory behind this array of facts. When she was through, she folded her hands like a child who has just finished playing a piece on the piano.

  Joe tried to look out the window, anywhere.

  “Joe, right after you got back, Mr. Overstreet announced that he was dropping his lease with us,” Lureen said.

  “I wondered where it went. My check hasn’t come in a long time.”

  “Even before that, we, Smitty and I, had got into some, uh, some projects. Which we expect will do just fine. I don’t know what came over Mr. Overstreet. We’ve had that arrangement for so long.”

  “Well, who else can you get?”

  “I really don’t know. Overstreets have us surrounded. I really don’t know who else would want it. It’s kind of unhandy. And the grass is good this year. I’d even buy the yearlings if someone would run them for me.” Joe was paralyzed by sudden excitement.

  “You mean, you’d need someone to just run the place for a while?” Joe asked.

  “Now that Overstreets have let it go, I really don’t know anyone out there I could ask. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I’ll do it!” Joe said. “Let me do that.”

  “Would you really?”

  Smitty banged through the kitchen and entered the room once again but with an air of tremendous renewal. Joe was frustrated. Smitty had donned what seemed to Joe to be a fairly astounding outfit: two-tone leather evening slippers and a jacket of English cut, a kind of round-shouldered smoking jacket in pearl gray wool, tied with a royal red sash. He had a drink in his hand and a large book, which he reached over to Joe. He sat down in a Windsor chair next to Lureen, lacing his fingers around the drink and resting his chin on his chest while his eyes burned in Joe’s direction. In this cheap house, in a modest town, he had achieved a tone of specious artifice usually available only to the very successful. Joe felt the excitement, the need to be wary.