Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  He left the truck and walked. The pasture lay in three broadly defined planes that tilted separately and disappeared into the sky. He walked toward a tall rock formation that had once figured in a dream of his boyhood, a dream he had never quite figured out as to all its sources and details and implied perils. But this dream had left him with a high degree of respect for the operations of the subconscious.

  In his twenties, many years after the rock episode, he had eaten peyote and had the pleasure of a long conversation with thousands of irises, tulips, and roses at a commercial flower garden. He could still remember their nodding concern at each of his questions, their earnest weaving around on the ends of their stalks. As ridiculous as this experience came to seem, it enlarged his respect for flowers; and he sometimes found himself entering someone’s property with a sidelong and deferential nod to the garden.

  When he reached the great banded rock chimney, something went through him with a signifying interior chime as powerful as looking at an empty bed where a parent once died. A cloud of birds set forth into the wind. Joe sat down and let himself go back.

  Joe’s nearest neighbor of his own age had been Billy Kelton, already a great big strong boy who was, in those days long before the family moved to Minnesota, Joe’s best friend. Billy’s father owned the Hawkwood Store. The two boys both had part-time jobs during the school year and ranch jobs in the summer. One day, when they were both thirteen, Billy had come to visit Joe and they got into an argument pitching horseshoes. Joe’s father came out and said, “You’d better settle this like men.” Joe didn’t think he had a chance, and while he stalled Billy sensed not only the opportunity but the peculiar energy coming to him from Joe’s father. He landed a roundhouse blow in Joe’s face that bloodied him and brought him to his knees. Joe’s father ordered Joe to his feet, but when he stood Billy flattened him with a blow to his right ear that sent pain and shame scalding across his vision. A roaring noise seemed to come up around him. Through it all, he could hear his father cheering Billy on. He looked up and saw his father’s incredible animation as he shoved the suddenly reluctant Billy toward his son’s collapsed form. Even now the memory was terrible.

  Joe’s father had said, “You’ll think about this for a long time. You’ll think about what people are really like. That wasn’t your enemy that did that to you. That was supposed to be your friend. You think about that just as hard as you can.”

  Joe ran away that day just long enough to climb to this pasture. He came straight to the banded rock chimney where he sat down and wept for his defeat, wept for his father’s collusion in his defeat, wept for the loss of a friend, and the feeling which he never quite ever again escaped that life had as one of its constant characteristics a strain of unbearable loneliness.

  As far as he was from the house, he still felt too exposed to the world that day. He touched the altered shapes of his face with his fingertips. Beneath the striped rock was a deep fissure, like a small cave, and Joe crawled into it and lay down in the cool dark. Peace came over him and, as he began to sleep, he plummeted into a dreamy abyss.

  Indians poured out of the base of the rock and Joe was one of them. They were anonymous in paint and dyed porcupine quills and trade bead chokers, behind shields illuminated with the shapes of eternity. They moved like a school of fish and swarmed up on their horses. Concentric red circles of ochre were painted around the eyes of Joe’s horse and its body was covered by the outlines of human hands. He rested his lance against the horse’s neck. The raven feather tied at the base of its point fluttered against the shaft as they galloped over the rims to the small valley below where the white people had built their cabins. Though it was his family’s home, Joe could not even remember it in the dream. A man and a woman ran out to meet them, to try to talk; they were blurred unrecognizably by the direct glare of the sun. It was too late for talk. The Indians rode right over the white people in a sudden tension of bows and sailing of arrows and lances. The dust from the horses settled slowly on their absence. The buildings burned as sudden as phosphorus, sparkled and were gone. Everything was gone. Even the stony white of foundations and bones was gone. The wild grass resumed its old cadence.

  Joe’s mother watched closely over the days it took for the swelling to subside in his face. She let this concern speak for itself and carefully avoided any discussion of the event. Joe said nothing either, though whatever was in the air seemed strong enough. Finally, when only the greenish shadow of a bruise at his temple remained, she asked without seeming to expect an answer, “Your father has made a pretty big mistake with you, hasn’t he?”

  He didn’t answer. He just stared in silence and let her work her way through her changed allegiance.

  14

  His first free afternoon, Joe stopped by the Clarendon Creek school. Ellen stood on the edge of the small clearing that served as a playground, her sweater tied around her waist and wearing a pair of tennis shoes so that she could double as a physical education instructor. She was urging four tiny children in running laps out around a two-story boulder and back. Their books and papers were weighted with stones next to the lilacs.

  “Hi there,” Ellen said with an enormous smile.

  “What do you know about this?”

  “It’s pretty wild,” she said.

  “I couldn’t wait.”

  “You’re looking well, Joe.”

  “Thanks. And you.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “I do.”

  “How’s your painting?”

  “I’m in the space program actually.”

  “What a shame. You used to write to me from school, remember? About your painting. You were going to be a new Charlie Russell. I saw one of your paintings finally. I really couldn’t understand it, Joe. It looked kind of like custard. Next to a house, sort of.”

  “That happens to belong to one of the Rockefellers,” Joe said defensively, but the name, he saw, didn’t ring a bell.

  “Let me make it quick. I’ve got to go back inside. Clara is with her dad this month.”

  “On the same old Kelton place?” Joe asked, feeling awkward.

  “Yes, but don’t go there. I’ll try to work something out. And look, please be discreet. Billy is a wonderful father and I don’t want to disturb that.”

  “How about dinner?”

  “You what?”

  “Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.

  “Your face is red!”

  “Nevertheless, the invitation stands.”

  “Yes!” The four children completed their lap and Ellen drifted toward the schoolhouse with them. “Call!” she said. “For directions. We can have a scandal!”

  He recognized that there was an unworthy basis to his extreme present happiness. His life was taking a turn that would help push Astrid out once and for all. He already felt the freshness and the simplicity of Ellen as an antidote, though he semi-admitted to himself that that was not what people were for.

  He picked Ellen up at six, at her apartment. The length of day had advanced so that it seemed the middle of the afternoon. She came down the outside stairway, skittering to the ground level, looking as fresh as though it were first thing in the morning, in a dark blue summer dress with minute white stars. She had braided her mahogany-colored hair and pinned it up.

  “I’m starving,” she said, inside the car. “I got so wound up talking to the children about Lewis and Clark I must have burned a lot of calories. I had fun trying to make them see the part of the expedition that went up the Missouri. I tried to make them realize that for Lewis and Clark it was like going into space. I told them the Missouri was the great highway for the Indians and all the tributaries were neighborhoods with different languages and different histories. The little turkeys would really rather hear about war but the unknown gives them a shiver too. Or what they all call ‘the olden days.’ I’m going to split the difference with them. I’ll show them Clark’s camp on the Yellowstone and then take them over near Greyclif
f to the graves where the Blackfeet massacred Reverend Thomas and his nephew. By the way, I’m learning to play golf. I’m going through a difficult time and about a hundred people have recommended golf. I’m glad they did. By the second lesson, I preferred golf to marriage!”

  Joe looked at her as long as he thought he could. What a feeling this was giving him! He was driving through a nice neighborhood. In one yard, a man shot around his lawn on a riding mower in high gear. At the next house, an old gent stood in the opening of a well-kept garage with its carefully hung collection of lawn tools on the wall behind him. On most lawns, a tiny white newspaper lay like a seed. American flags cracked from the porches. On the last lawn before Main Street, a rabbit sat between two solemn children.

  They walked into the lobby of the old Bellwood Hotel. The bar off to the left was full of after-work customers. Two cowboys came out with their drinks to have a look at Ellen while they waited for their table. “Yes?” she said in her best schoolteacher’s manner. They shot back inside.

  “I’ll have the sixteen-ounce rib-eye,” said Ellen before she’d had a look at the menu. The waitress came and took their drink orders: a draft beer for Joe, Jim Beam on the rocks for Ellen. Joe decided on some pan-fried chicken and ordered for both of them. The dining room was half full. A schoolteacher was kind of a celebrity in a small town like this, so they got a few glances. It was too soon for anyone to have put much else together.

  Joe was trying hard to relate the present confident Ellen to the early version he had known. He felt he had to do it quickly because the present Ellen would soon eradicate the one he remembered.

  “Someone told me you people were getting ready to lose the place,” said Ellen. “Dad keeps trying to figure out how to get it. He’s only been doing that for forty years.”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Although I don’t know what good a ranch is anymore. My dad has been getting jailbirds to help put up hay because they’re the only people desperate enough to work. To get somebody to fence you have to find an alky who wants to be in the hills to dry out. Plus the grasshoppers and Mormon crickets are about half ridiculous. I think my dad might just go to town. I don’t blame him.”

  Joe listened intently. It gave him a chance to stare at her without having to talk. He knew Overstreet would never go to town.

  “By the way,” she said, “let me ask you this, okay? Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  “I did.”

  “Well?”

  “She died in a fern bar stampede.”

  A look of tolerance crossed Ellen’s face. Joe tried to remember Astrid charitably but all that came up was her pushiness, her health fetishes, her fascination with cosmetics. Astrid had taught him the field strategy for the aptly named war of the sexes. She had also taught him the charm and drama of picnics on the battlefield. It was a provisional life with this Astrid.

  Ellen was as good as her word. When the meals came, she made short work of her big steak. Once when her mouth was too full, she grinned straight at Joe, and shrugged cheerily. This appetite amazed him. And when she was done, she flung herself back in her seat and said, “Ah!”

  “Now what?” said Joe, putting down his own utensils. He was thinking about a cigarette. The tension of not mentioning the child was getting sharper.

  “Would you like a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to go out to Nitevue and hit a bucket of balls.”

  “I’d rather talk about Clara.”

  “I’d rather hit a bucket of balls.”

  They were the only two people on the range. It was a green band in the middle of prairie, glowing under floodlights. Nitevue was situated just off the highway east. It was an open shed with places to sit, three soft drink machines, a golf cart, and a small counter where one arranged for the clubs and balls. Ellen asked for a number-four wood and Joe asked for anything that was handy, which turned out to be a thing called a “sand iron.” The concessionaire looked just like a local farmer in a John Deere cap and overalls. He made it clear in every movement that his class background had taught him to despise all sport and waste such as this. He handed over balls, clubs, and tees with an air of ancient loathing.

  Ellen stood up on a kind of rubber mat and began firing the balls out through the bug-filled flood of light, almost to the darkness beyond. At first Joe just watched her. There were gophers speeding around, running, stopping, looking, whistling, trying to fathom life on a driving range.

  Joe took three whiffs for every time he hit the ball. But even when he did connect, it just went up at a high angle and landed a short distance away. He took a somewhat mightier grip and swung hard; this time the ball almost towered out of sight, yet fell just in front of them. Quickly absorbing the spirit of this unusual game, he shouted, “Sonofabitch!” and examined the end of his club for manufacturing deficiencies. He went back and demanded another club; this one was a “two iron.” With it, he managed to scuff the ball along the ground in front of himself, while Ellen drove one long clean shot after another. What’s more, his arms ached from inadvertently fetching the ground itself blow after blow.

  When she had finished driving her last ball, Ellen walked over to where Joe was sitting on a bench. Her cheeks were flushed with high spirits. Joe thought that it would be a very strange individual who didn’t find her lovely.

  “You don’t seem to have much of a gift for this,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t. Actually, I tried it a few years back. I’m about the same. My dad took it up late in life. I always found something sad in that. Couldn’t put my finger on it.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t you drop me at my place. I’ve got papers to correct and I make an early start. Probably by the time you get out of bed, I’ve been hitting a lick for two hours.”

  Joe took a leisurely drive along the river and then turned up her street. There just didn’t seem to be any pressure anywhere. When they reached her house, he walked her to the bottom of the outside stairs to her apartment. She turned suddenly, reached to one of his hands, gave it a kind of rough squeeze, bounded up the stairs—“I enjoyed it!”—and was gone behind her door. He stood there vaguely happy, vaguely conscious that they had never made a real plan to see his daughter. He was ashamed to admit that it seemed too much. And the mention of Billy Kelton as a good father galled him.

  15

  The great window in the front room hung halfway open, the iron sash weights visible in their wooden channels. Cliff swallows ascended to their mud nests under the deep eaves of the old house. Joe thought, Man, I’m getting lonesome; let’s have a look at the young people. There were times when the views from his windows seemed full of undisclosed meaning, of tales waiting to unfold. But today their views were as flat as reproductions. He had a tubular glass bird feeder hung outside the sitting room window and the seeds it had scattered on the sill just seemed unkempt. The birds didn’t seem to care if they ate or not. He looked at the phone and it rested in its place as though its days as an instrument were finished. He felt there was nothing for him to do. Whatever was next, he hadn’t started. His old life smothered him.

  He took the highway east over the foothills, passing a spot where you could shoot a buffalo and put it on your credit card. When he stopped for gas, a boy cleaned his windshield and poured out his heart to Joe. He said that his mother had been married more than ten times and that he and his brother had lived in nineteen cities. The boy couldn’t remember the names of all the husbands but said, “We had to call every one of them sonsofbitches ‘Daddy.’ ” All Joe could think of was good solid ways of putting his old life to an end.

  While the youngster cleaned the windshield and checked under the hood, Joe used the pay phone. It was late in New York.

  “Ivan, hi, it’s Joe.”

  There was a long pause. Joe pictured Ivan in his bathrobe, his thick, effective shape like that of a veteran football lineman, characteristically pressing a thumb and forefinger into his e
ye sockets.

  “Why are you calling me in the middle of the night?”

  “Because I need to see you.”

  “I don’t like this, Joe.”

  “Will you see me?”

  “Of course I’ll see you. Where are you?”

  “Montana.”

  “Look Homeward, Angel.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Find what you expected?”

  “More.”

  “How did you leave off with Astrid?”

  “I just flew the coop, adiosed it. I don’t feel too good about that, actually.”

  “I’ll check in with her.”

  “So, if you tell me it’s okay, I’m coming.”

  “Sure it’s okay. Are you a cowboy again?”

  “You know, Ivan, I sort of am.”

  “It’s a riot,” said Ivan.

  •

  Joe slept all the way to La Guardia. After missing the whole night on the ranch, he watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.

  He took a cab into the city, his small duffel bag on the seat beside him. The skyline of New York, with his cab pointed straight at it, filled Joe with excitement. The unpronounceable name on the cabbie’s license, the criminal style photograph, the statement on the grill that separated him from his passengers about his having less than five dollars in change, the omnipresent signs of crowd control measures excited Joe beyond words. Protected by their cars, motorists boldly exchanged glances on the freeway.

  He checked into the Yale Club. The lobby was full of younger graduates and their dates. There was a wine tasting announced on a placard in the lobby and a Macanudo cigar sampling in the Tap Room. There were new regulations about jogging clothes in the lobby. There were serious conversationalists around the elevators and two harried bellhops with mountains of luggage on their carts. Four Southerners in their early thirties hooted and pounded one another. “Anybody catch the secretary of commerce doin’ his little numbah on the TV?” asked one lanky young man in a Delta drawl. When neither of his fellows answered him, a tight-faced man at the next elevator did. “I saw him,” he said, “and he was right on the money.” There weren’t usually this many young people around. It was a yuppie Brigadoon.