Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  “This is a book,” Smitty intoned, then seemed to lose his train of thought. “This, sir, is a book,” he began again.

  “I see that it is,” Joe said.

  Smitty delivered a weary sigh, Lord Smitty peering from a dizzying aerie.

  “It is Roget’s”—what satisfaction it seemed to give him to intone the two voluptuous vowels of “Roget’s”!—“Thesaurus.” This last was said with such abrupt concussion it was like a sneeze. “And it is a gift from me … to you.”

  “Thank you,” said Joe.

  “Here is how Roget’s Thesaurus is to be employed. First look up the key words you wish to use. They will all be big ones. But this book will tell you the little plain words that little plain people like your aunt and I know and in this way you will be able to make yourself understood to us. Neither of us is in the space program.”

  “I expect it will come in very handy,” said Joe. He reached out and accepted the book from Smitty’s hands. Smitty gazed at him with what looked like all the world to be hatred, then made another of his formal departures, raising a forefinger to level one of Lureen’s watercolors.

  “I wonder what brought that on,” said Joe. A sharp tinkling sound was heard repeatedly from the direction of the kitchen, almost the sound of Christmas decorations falling from the tree. Joe looked at his aunt; she looked back. They headed for the kitchen. There they found Smitty with a tray poised over one shoulder like a waiter. It held a quantity of crystal stemware that had belonged to Joe’s mother. With his free hand Smitty took up each glass by its base and hurled it to the floor, where it burst. His auburn hair was flung out in every direction and it reminded Joe of some old picture of the devil.

  With a pixieish expression, Smitty’s gaze moved from Joe to Lureen and then back. He held a glass by its stem. He paused. He turned his eyes to the glass. In slow motion, the glass inverted and began its descent to the floor. Joe watched. It seemed to take a very long time and then it became a silver star to the memory of Joe’s mother. It disappeared in the debris of its predecessors. Smitty sent the remainder of the glasses to the floor with a motion like a shot-putter, even tipping up on one slippered toe. Then he relaxed. Nothing had happened really, had it? All for the best, somehow. Still, thought Joe, it makes for a rather long evening.

  “Why don’t I show you your room,” said Lureen, “and we can get caught up on our rest.” Because it had become ridiculous to let this pass without remark, she lowered her voice to say that “everyone,” meaning Smitty, had problems which Joe couldn’t be expected to understand because he hadn’t been around. Smitty stood right there and listened blithely.

  “Taking this all in?” Joe asked Smitty quietly.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “You know,” Lureen mused desperately, “Duffy’s Fourth of July at Flathead Lake was a hundred years ago.” Joe had no idea what to do with that one other than take it as an obscure family reference intended to restore the intimacy she had withdrawn. Duffy’s Fourth of July at Flathead Lake. What was that?

  “Joe doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” sang Smitty. Then he turned to Joe. “You are among friends,” he said gravely. “Think of it: your own flesh and blood.” He leaned his weight in the pockets of his robe like an old trainer watching his racehorses at daybreak. All his gestures seemed similarly detached from his surroundings. Smitty walked up to the barometer and gave the glass a tap. This seemed to give him his next idea. “I think I’ll head for my quarters now,” he said. “The artillery has begun to subside. Another day tomorrow. One more colorful than the other.”

  When Smitty left the room, humming “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” a queer tension set in. Joe knew now his arrival was an invasion, his presence abusive. He thought of making up alarming lies about the space program, ones he could deliver tearfully, accounts of loyal Americans shredded by titanium and lasers. If some sort of guilt based on an unimpeachable national purpose could be held over Lureen, possibly this miserable tone could be altered. “I delivered the little things to the space shuttle that made it a home, the nail clippers, the moisturizers, the paperbacks, the tampons …”

  But the tension didn’t last. He went back into the kitchen and helped her clean up the broken glass. Lureen held the dustpan. Joe tried to sweep carefully without letting the straws of the broom spring and scatter bits of crystal. He wanted to ask Lureen why she stood for it, but he didn’t. They swept all around the great gas stove. As Joe knelt to hold the dustpan, he saw that its pipes had been disconnected. It was a dummy, a front for the mean little microwave next to the toaster.

  “A service for twenty,” Lureen said, referring to the broken crystal. “Who in this day and age needs a service for twenty?” A laugh of astonishment. Who indeed! My mother needed it, Joe thought. From each window of the kitchen, each except the one that opened on the tiny yard, could be seen the clapboard walls of the neighboring houses, the shadows of clotheslines just out of sight above, duplexes that used to be family homes. A service for twenty! They laughed desperately. How totally out of date! And finally, how removed from the space program! I don’t feel so good, he thought.

  “Joe, Smitty and I have made not such a bad life for ourselves here,” Lureen said after they finished cleaning up. “We never have gotten used to the winters. And you know what we talk about? Hawaii. It’s funny how those things start. Arthur Godfrey used to have a broadcast from Honolulu. He had a Hawaiian gal named Holly Loki on the show. Smitty and I used to listen. We kind of formed a picture. Someday, we thought … Hawaii! Well, Joe, let’s really do call it a day.” Lureen led him up the narrow wood stairs to the second floor. Joe tried to think of surf, a ukulele calling to him from the night-shrouded side of a sacred volcano, of outrigger canoes. He tried to put Smitty and Lureen in this scene and he just couldn’t. Nothing could uproot them from their unhappy home. Not even a no-holds-barred luau.

  Joe’s old room looked onto a narrow rolling street. Lureen wanted him to spend the night before going back to the ranch in the morning. You could make out the railroad bridge and the big rapid river beyond. There was a stand next to his door with a pitcher of water on it. Joe’s bed had been turned back. The room was sparely furnished with a small desk where Lureen stored her things: paper clips, Chapsticks, pencils. Joe pulled open the drawer as he’d loved to do thirty years before to smell the camphor from the Chapsticks. The pencils were in hard yellow bundles, the paper clips in small green cardboard boxes. The train went over the bridge like a comet, the little faces in the lighted windows racing through their lives. Joe’s father had been raised here; his uncles had gone to two world wars from here; educations and paper routes and bar examinations had been prepared for in the kitchen here. Everyone rushing for the end like the people on the train. Smitty came home from the war after a booby trap had killed his best friend and stayed drunk for two years in the very room he occupied now. Joe’s father used to say, “I went over too.” And Smitty would say, “You didn’t go over where I went over.”

  “Good night,” said Lureen. Family business had worn her out. Instead of acknowledging her exhaustion, she had nominated Hawaii, whose blue-green seas would wash her all clean.

  “Good night, Aunt Lureen,” Joe sang out with love.

  Joe stretched out in the dark, under the covers of the squeaking iron bed. He had slept here off and on his whole life. But now he felt like someone trying to hold a tarp down in the wind. He smoked in the dark. It was perfect. Smoking meant so much more now that he knew what it did to him. But in the dark it was perfect. He could see the cloud of his smoke rise like a ghost.

  He must have fallen asleep because when he heard Smitty’s voice, it was its emphasis that startled him; he had not heard what had gone on before. “For God’s sake, Lureen, we’re in a brownout! Keep the shade drawn.”

  Joe struck a match and looked at the dial of the loud clock ticking away beside him. It was after midnight. A husky laugh from Smitty rang through the upstairs, a man-of-action laugh. J
oe had to have a look.

  Lureen’s room at the end of the hall was well lighted. Smitty and Lureen stood in its doorway like figures on a bandstand. Smitty wore his lieutenant’s uniform and impatiently flipped his forage cap against his thigh. “We move at daybreak,” he said.

  “The bars closed an hour ago,” said Lureen wearily.

  “We pour right in behind the tanks and stay there until we get to Belgium,” he insisted.

  “Smitty,” said Lureen, “I heard the radio! Truman said it’s over!”

  Smitty scrutinized his sister’s features. “Can you trust a man who never earned the job? Harry The Haberdasher never-earned-the-job.”

  “You can trust the radio!” Lureen cried. Smitty stared back.

  “I should have listened, Lureen. I should have listened to you. The nation has probably taken to the streets. Am I still welcome?” Their figures wavered in the sprawling light.

  “The most welcome thing in the world,” said Lureen in a voice that astonished Joe with its feeling. Smitty gave her a hug. Joe watched and tried to understand and was choked by the beauty of their embrace. He wondered why he was so moved by something he couldn’t understand.

  11

  This sale yard was a place ranchers took batches of cattle too small to haul to the public yard in Billings. You didn’t go here in a cattle truck; you went in the short-range stock truck in all the clothes you owned because the cab heater went out ten years ago. Some went pulling a gooseneck trailer behind the pickup. You could unload either at one of the elevated chutes or at the ground-level Powder River Gate, which opened straight into a holding pen where the yard men, usually older ranchers who had gone broke or were semiretired, sorted and classed the cattle for that day’s sale. Joe stopped and looked back out into the pens to get an idea of the flow of cattle. It looked pretty thin and there was a cold rain blowing over everything. The yard men leaned on their long prods and stared out across the pens into nowhere.

  Joe went inside. A secretary typed away, filling out forms, and Bob Knowles, the yard owner, manned the counter. Through a pane of glass behind his head, the sale ring could be seen as well as the small wood podium from which the auctioneer called the sale and directed his stewards to the buyers. Bob Knowles had been here since the years Joe and his family were still on the ranch. He peered at Joe with a smile.

  “How long you back for this time?” he asked.

  “Damned if I know. But Lureen lost her lease. I told her I’d watch some yearlings for her this summer. She had a grass deal with Overstreet and he dropped her. How’s it look for today?”

  “Dribs and drabs,” said Bob, lifting his feed-store cap to smooth back his sandy hair. “All day long. What are you looking for?”

  “Grass cattle, but everyone’s got so much hay left over.”

  “That’s it. We just don’t have the numbers,” Bob said. Joe completely trusted Bob and moreover, he didn’t want to hang around here all day every Tuesday buying cattle ten at a time.

  “Bob, you want to sort up some cattle for me and just buy me what you can? Then just lot them till we get a couple of semiloads.”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “Big-frame fives and sixes for under sixty-five bucks a hundredweight. Sort them up so they look like a herd.”

  “That’s a tall order. Maybe too tall. How many do you want?”

  “Two hundred and fifty head and I’d take some spayed heifers in there if it had to be.”

  “I can’t do it in one day,” Bob said decisively.

  “Can you do it over four weeks?”

  “I can get pretty close.”

  “Let’s do ’er then. I’ll get my banking done. And don’t hesitate to make me some good buys.” By this point, Joe was enjoying himself so much he was just hollering at Bob and Bob was hollering back.

  Imagine, thought Joe, a world in which you could trust a man to buy you a hundred fifty thousand pounds of beef with your checkbook when he is getting a commission. A particular instance of the free enterprise system running with a Stradivarian hum.

  Darryl Burke, the banker, had known Joe so long and liked Joe so well and was so glad he was back in town that he would have liked to see him skip this business with the cows and, as he said, “orient his antenna to the twentieth century.” Joe sat in his bright vice-president’s cubicle surrounded by tremendous kodachromes of the surrounding countryside.

  “Cut the shit and give me the money,” Joe said. He enjoyed viewing Darryl in his suit because it gave him the curious ticklish surprise of time passing to see an old pal of the mountain streams and baseball diamonds actually beginning to blur into “the real world.” Joe was without contempt for “the real world”; it merely astonished him that any of his old friends had actually succeeded in arriving there. Joe leaned over and said in a loud whisper, “Does your secretary actually believe this act of yours?”

  Darryl grimaced and waved his hands around. He knew of course that life was a trick. But it wouldn’t do to have the secretary find it out. Joe hated having to sit somewhat outside and spot the gambits. But he sustained a slight fear that whatever carried people into cubicles and suits would deprive him of his friends. There did seem to be a narrowing as life went on. An old fishing companion who threw the longest and most perfect loop of line had become a master of the backhoe. He dug foundations and sewer lines more exactly than the architects drew them on paper. He had become his backhoe. He either rode the backhoe or he drank beer and thought about perfecting his hands on the levers. He suffered from carpal tunneling. He was never out of work. His family had everything they needed as the beer helped him swell toward perfect conjunction with the yellow machine. Was this the same as the cowboy who was said to be part of his horse?

  “I’m sure you know that we are not in good times for these ranches.”

  “Yes, I do,” called Joe.

  “Nationally, we’re looking at a foreclosure every seven minutes. If your dad was here, God bless him, he’d tell you all about this.”

  “You know the old saying, it can’t happen to me. Besides, it’s Lureen’s. I’m just the hired man.”

  Darryl groaned. “Some of these fellows slip off into the night with the machinery. I can’t say that I blame them. The FHA is topsy-turvy. We’re no different. We’re having to go after some of our best operators. Incidentally, I know about Lureen’s arrangement. I know all about this ranch. And anything you do, she’s going to have to sign.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m going to be doing so little. One Four-H kid can do more than I’m going to do with the place. I’ll scatter these yearlings and ship in the fall. It’s not even really ranching. Anyway, like I say, I just work for Lureen.”

  “As long as you understand that every move drives you deeper. Lureen’s going to have to come in.” It surprised Joe that everyone seemed to know the arrangement. They considered it Joe’s place. Maybe more than he did.

  Joe bent over the papers, making a show of studying them. “Your nose is whistling,” he said to Darryl. “Control your greed.” Darryl sighed. When Joe finished, he looked up and said, “Let ’er buck. I’m back in the cattle business.”

  “But you’re happy,” said Darryl with a kind of crazy smile. “That’s it, you’re happy.”

  Joe knew he was going to have to buy a horse. So, he skimmed a few hundred from the cattle pool and went way out north of town to see Bill Smithwick, who broke ranch horses and used to work for Joe’s father. He lived down along a seasonal creek, a place just scratched into the mainly treeless, dun-colored and endless space. Red willows grew down the trifling watercourse; and alongside them, as though they were a grove of ancient oaks, Bill had placed his home. It was an old, old travel trailer shaped like a cough drop and swathed in black plastic sheeting to keep the wind out. A black iron pipe brought water by gravity down to the half of a propane tank that served as the water trough; it was primitive, but a bright stream of clean water ran continuously. He had a big pen for loose hor
ses and a round breaking corral. It was the bare minimum but it was fairly neat with the hay stacked right, the lariats hung up, the saddles in a shed and the old Dodge Powerwagon actually parked rather than left. There was a born-again bumper sticker on the truck’s bumper that said: “The game is fixed. The lamb will win. Be there.”

  Bill Smithwick stepped out of the trailer. He wore suspenders over a white V-necked T-shirt and had a beat-up Stetson way on the back of his head like an old-timer. He was a tough-looking forty with white arms and sun-blackened hands.

  “Well, God damn you anyway, you no-good sonofabitch,” he barked in a penetrating hog-calling tenor.

  “I’m back.”

  “To stay?”

  “I’m just back.”

  “You want to come in?”

  “It’s not big enough in there.”

  Smithwick reached behind him and got a shirt. He pulled it on and came into the yard. He shook Joe’s hand like he was pumping up a tire. “Hey, what’s the deal on your old place? Them neighbors been rippin’ your aunty off something awful.”

  “We took it back. I’m going to run some yearlings there, till I see what’s what.”

  “You and your aunt?”

  “No, me.”

  “Come on, Joe!” shouted Smithwick in the hog-calling voice.

  “Really,” said Joe, sincerely.

  “You’re running yearlings and you need a horse.”