“Do you know who’s been just swell?” she asked, propping herself up in bed. She looked like a pretty nun without makeup and with her hair pulled back.
“Who?”
“Smitty.”
“Smitty? How do you know Smitty?”
“He’s been by. And I mean swell.”
“That’s quite strange.”
“He seems so concerned! He’s concerned with everything. He just trains this concern on things. What concern is shown by Smitty!”
“What about Lureen? She been by?”
“She was here too. Now that one isn’t sure about me. But Smitty is so lovely. He thought he might be able to get me some insurance.”
“You didn’t go for it, did you?”
“No, but I gave him fifty bucks for some kind of filing fee.”
“I know that filing fee. It’s called Old Mr. Boston Dry Gin.”
“I couldn’t say. I went for his story. It charmed me. I’m already bored. I wish I was back in Florida, fucking and using drugs. It’s easy to grow nostalgic in a situation like this.”
“Oh, darling, just stop,” he said, annoyed by his own reaction. He thought of vigorous, robust Ellen, ranch girl, heartening the next generation with teaching. Difficult to imagine her saying in the middle of lovemaking, as Astrid once did, “Now I’d like it up my ass.” He had prevaricated, he recalled, then ultimately brooded about the prospects of a second chance.
“You know it’s funny,” said Joe, wondering why he didn’t appreciate Astrid any more than he did. “I’ve had such a thing for this schoolteacher.”
“Do I have to hear this?”
“I’m trying to keep you entertained. We’re beyond any little ill feelings along these lines anyway, aren’t we? Besides if I tell you this in a sarcastic way and make it good and trivial I can write ‘finis’ to the sonofabitch.” It wasn’t true. He wanted to hurt her. He was laying in stores to hate himself.
“Knock yourself out. I really don’t care.”
Joe believed her. There was malice in his continuation of the story. It was temporarily beyond him to take stock of the gravity of their situation. It was an awful moment.
“Anyway, I’ve been drawn to her innocence, whether or not it exists. It may not exist. But I took it as a working proposition that the innocence was real.”
“Did you stick it in?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
“She can’t be that innocent.”
“But we had these wonderful little skits. I knew her years ago. We hit golf balls together. We discussed her background on the ranch.”
“You stuck it in.”
“We stuck it in. We had meals together in an atmosphere that combined lightheartedness and high courtship. We went for a long drive.”
“This is to puke over,” said Astrid.
“Now, Astrid. There was something quite delicate. A picture had begun to form.” Joe felt like a vampire.
“I can see that picture.”
“But wait. I had decided to marry her. We would live together in the picture that had begun to form. I flew to New York and quit my job with Ivan. I was exhausted. When I was flying home, the country unfolded beneath the wings and it all came to me that—I don’t like that smile, Astrid—I would marry this lovely girl. And I must say, that is a very nasty smile, indeed.”
“I shouldn’t laugh,” said Astrid. “I am in the dreary mental situation in which sneezing, laughing, coughing, calling the dog, or ensemble singing are equally uncomfortable. Anyway, what happened is that you thought it over and upon consideration, upon the most serious consideration you—”
“No. Not this time. I called and before I had the chance to propose, her husband went for a ride with me and told me that they were working it out.”
“There’s a husband?”
“And a right odd one at that. He used to thrash me when I was a boy, beat me like a gong.”
“Well, if you’d had any conviction, you’d have argued with him. If you’d had the kind of conviction that it would take to go back to your painting, you’d have told that hubby off. Now what’ve you got? A trashy-mouth Cuban who doesn’t appreciate you.”
“Oh, darling,” said Joe in a flat and uninterested tone, “don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Astrid’s weeping was real. Joe could scarcely remonstrate with her. She had every right to this. His position had eroded and he could not say a thing. Instead, he gazed through the window at nothing and came to appreciate how wonderful much of the world could seem.
Collecting herself, she said, “Well, what am I to do?”
“I’m not good at this,” said Joe.
Astrid tried to shift her weight slightly. She sighed. “Given my desperation, I wonder if you’d have time to murmur some smut in my ear.”
“Astrid.”
“Something about the schoolteacher possibly. Anything. There was a fly in the room earlier. You can’t imagine my absorption in watching its confused circuit of my room.”
“I hope you’re resisting ideas like that.”
“What easy ideas have you resisted?”
“I hate you.”
“I hate you too.”
The sudden bitterness of these remarks was stunning. Literally, they were both stunned by what they had said. They had heard it before and it was still utterly stunning, as stunning to hear as to say.
He rose to go. “We don’t mean that.”
“We don’t?” said Astrid. She looked exhausted. He was horribly sorry that he hadn’t headed the moment off. But they had been in this intense snare for so long. It was hard to keep things from just running their course.
22
The next day Lureen was on the phone at seven.
“Joe, I don’t know if you realize this but Smitty has been bringing seafood up from Texas in a refrigerated truck. I mean, he’s brokering it, not physically doing it himself, and he has run into a hitch.”
“Which is?” Joe asked, knowing that he had just learned where the lease money had gone, some of it anyway.
“I hear your suspicion already. Now, I want you to give this a fair hearing.”
“Sock it to me, Lureen.”
“Well, a big load of it spoiled.”
“That’s a shame. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“But it was insured.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“How much was it insured for?”
“Thirty thousand.”
“Wow, that’s a powerful load of shrimp. Did he collect?”
“Not yet. But I’m sure he will.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that the insurance company has initiated an investigation. They want to actually view the spoiled shrimp. Smitty said, It’s a little late now, I buried it. And the investigators said, We want to see the spot. So, Smitty very graciously took them out to the place—”
“Wait a minute. Where?”
“There. You were in New York. And up by the burn pit, he showed them the empty boxes, but they wanted to see the shrimp. Smitty couldn’t believe his ears. The what? he said. And real rudelike, the chief investigator says, The shrimp, the shrimp, the shrimp! It’s been three weeks! Smitty told him. They have decomposed! You got it? But—and it’s a big ‘but’—this horrible man, this investigator said, Nope, there’d still be shells. I don’t know where this all leads but, Joe, for my own peace of mind, I know you’ve spent time down in the Florida—”
“Right, Lureen, I’ve seen a world of shrimp.”
“Would there still be, after all these weeks, any indication—I won’t say evidence—that there had been any shrimp?”
“Yes. Shells. Tens of thousands of them, by the sound of it.”
“Joe, we’ve tried so hard to be nice to you and make you feel to home …”
It was too late. She had already signed for the cattle. Joe put the receiver down slowly and carefully. At first, he was c
ontrite: he could have said something more reassuring. But, like what? He was entirely limited to exaggerating the speed at which shrimp shells decompose. How else could he explain Lureen’s belligerence? Surely she was not one hundred percent taken in by Smitty, the bounder. She must know he meant to glom the ranch, mustn’t she?
Joe actually saw Smitty drive up. Smitty wasn’t going very fast when he came in the driveway, but he stabbed the brakes so that the blue and white Ford skidded a little on the gravel. He sort of threw himself from the car, flinging the door shut behind him. At first, he seemed in a hurry but he lost a little speed by the time he actually got to the front door.
“Smitty,” said Joe, opening the door for him. He reached out his hand. Smitty gave it a glance before shaking it.
“Have you got a minute?”
“Sure I do, Smitty. Coffee?”
“No, I’m fine. Where can we sit?”
They went into the living room. Smitty glanced around at the books, the family pictures, the braided riata that hung on a hook by the door, the college diplomas, the brands burned into the wood, the chunks of quartz that old settler had mortared into the fireplace. They sat down.
“What’s the deal, Joe?”
“Sir?”
“The deal. What are you doing back here?”
“Well, I just wanted to come back.”
“You did.”
“And I thought, somewhere along the way, we might do more with the place. The spotted knapweed and spurge are kind of taking over. Russian thistle. The fellows who lease it don’t care about the old ranch. Fences falling. Springs gone.”
“Leasing is the only money there is left in these places.”
“The money? What money? So far as I can tell, the grazing fees aren’t even making it to Lureen.”
“We’re listing it as a receivable. We’ve had some problem collecting. If we can’t collect it, we can write it off. We all need that.”
“To write it off you’re going to have to sue the man that owes it to you. The government requires that.”
“Whatever.”
“Maybe the rancher you were dealing with needed to be examined more closely.”
“He’s over twenty-one. What can I say?”
Smitty put a cigarette in the exact center of his mouth and with a book of matches in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, looked off into space and thought. “Joe,” he said and lit the cigarette. “Why don’t you kiss my ass?”
“Because I have preserved my options, Smitty. One of them is to keep an eye on you.” Then he added, “I know the seafood business hasn’t treated you well. You must be under pressure.” Smitty’s eyes flicked off to the wall.
Well, thought Joe, at least it’s a beginning; we’ll gradually move old Smitty into position and then do the right thing. He watched Smitty and tried to get to the bottom of the combined helplessness and guile, without much luck. The signals of an old boozer like Smitty, thrown off by the cheesy deliquescence of the brain itself, were seldom instructive.
The glow of Astrid’s cigarette in the twilight of her room looked as cheerful as a Cub Scout campfire to Joe as he finished telling her the whole story. He leaned over from his straightback metal chair and lifted the cigarette from her lips. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost a month. He was tempted to take a drag and told Astrid so. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s so hard to quit.” He could feel her easy thought. “God,” she said, “that’s a wonderful story. But you must have such complicated feelings about all this.”
“I’m working on it.”
Astrid began laughing. She was really laughing too hard. He leaned over and gripped her shoulders to steady her. The laughter made him nervous and he took her cigarette. He had to stick her cigarette way out in the corner of his own mouth to keep the smoke out of his eyes. Then her face began to glisten with tears. Anyway, she wasn’t laughing anymore. Joe sat off to one side, holding her cigarette for her.
“One of these days,” he said, “it’s going to get cold. And that beautiful white snow is going to come floating down.”
Joe arranged to buy an old iron woodstove from a rancher up toward the Musselshell River. It was in one of the livestock papers and he bought it very inexpensively, but he had to haul it himself. He took the flatbed truck and drove up through a vast expanse of bluish sage-covered hills. He went through two isolated hamlets, huddled with their Snow Cats and hay sleds piled outside in the heat. One little town had a bar the size of a single-car garage and a log post office that seemed dwarfed by its wind-whipped flag. He drove up to the edge of a stand of lodgepole pines bordered by a big buffalo grass pasture. Someone was burning ditches and high above the column of smoke a blue heron soared, trailing its legs, looking for its accustomed lowlands. Old black automobile tires hung on the fenceposts, painted Keep Out as a small log house was approached. The house sat low and defensive behind a field of discarded machinery: old iron wheels, wooden spokes, and last year’s winter kill dragged out among the disarray—hides over skeletons, decomposing calves.
An old man answered the door, a glass of whiskey in one hand, his stomach hanging over the top of his pants and chew dribbling out the corners of his mouth. He had hairy nostrils and small, crinkled eyes. “Here for the stove?”
“Yeah, I am.” Joe got the money out of his shirt and reached it to him.
“Thank you much,” said the old man.
“There’s a Farmhand on the Minneapolis-Moline. You load that thing on your own?”
“You bet.”
The old man narrowed the doorway. He scrutinized Joe. “Sonny Starling wouldn’t be your daddy, would he?”
“Yes, sir, that he was,” Joe said. The old man nodded and thought.
“He was a hand, really what you’d call a pretty hand.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” said Joe.
“But the bank took all the pretty out of your old man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He come in and ruint me in ’fifty-six. I never made her back. That bank just took Sonny and made him into an entirely different feller.”
Joe had heard this sort of thing before.
“Well, let me get loaded out of here,” he said.
“That’s a hell of a way to get ahead in the world.”
“Maybe,” said Joe, “but anyway, he’s dead.”
“Good,” said the old man.
Joe threw himself into loading the stove. He lowered it onto the flatbed with the Farmhand and boomed it down with some chain he had brought along for the purpose. Evidently the old man didn’t need it anymore. He had a better one or he’d gone to electric or gas. Joe started back. When he was nearly home, he saw a pickup truck pulled off the interstate next to the barbed wire. A man stood next to a horse whose head hung close to the ground. The man looked quite helpless and Joe sensed the horse was at the end of the line. It was at this point that his eyes finally filled with tears.
23
Joe drove to Billings on Tuesday to meet with an attorney for the Continental Divide Insurance Company. He dressed in a coat and tie and parked the old flatbed far enough away to dissolve association with it by the time he reached the office. He was early.
He walked into the Hart-Albin store to use up a few minutes and collect his thoughts. He strolled through the toiletries section, admiring the beautiful young women who sold perfumes and intimate soaps, and who tried the delicate atomizers on one another. He sprayed some sample cologne on himself. The glass display cases revealed an Arabic world of indulgence. He tried more cologne. He invented biographies for the salesladies. Reared on hog farms or in the families of railroad mechanics, each greeted her discovery by the perfume manager with an effulgent blossoming. He politely tested one last cologne with a sweaty squeeze of the bulb. A musky, faraway penumbra engulfed him, quite startling in its power.
Time to go to the lawyer. He crossed the street, walked half a block north, and entered the offices. He announced himself to the secretary and imm
ediately the lawyer, Gene Bowen, appeared at his door and gestured Joe inside with a handful of papers. Bowen was a lean, harried-looking man, plainly bright and short of time.
Bowen moved around behind his desk. Joe sat in a comfortable chair in front of it. Bowen rested his chin on his hands and let Joe begin. “My Uncle Smitty, Smith Starling—”
“Yes,” said Bowen decisively, suddenly wrinkling his nose. Joe was astonished at the lawyer’s reaction to the mention of Smitty’s name. “Is that you? What is that?” Then Joe understood Bowen’s reaction.
“Canoe.”
“You what?”
“Canoe. It’s a cologne. And a couple of others. Musk was one.”
“Very well. Go ahead. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“My Uncle Smitty—”
“Would you be offended if I opened a window?”
“Not at all.”
Bowen got up and struggled with the window behind his desk without freeing it. “I’m gonna end up with a fucking hernia—”
“Here, let me help.”
They got on either side of the window and heaved upward as hard as they could. Bowen pulled his face to one side and wrinkled his nose fiercely. “It’s not as if it was some kind of animal droppings,” Joe said.
The bottom of the window casement tore free; wood fragments and dried putty flew across Bowen’s desk. His finger was bleeding. He walked around and opened his door. “Let that air out while I get a Band-Aid.”
The secretary poked her head in. “What’s going on in here?”
“We had a little trouble with the window.”
“I’d better ring up maintenance.” Turning to Joe, she asked, “May I ask what you’re wearing?”
Joe was getting angry. “I mixed a few scents, trying them out. But socially speaking, I’ve had better luck shitting my pants.”
Bowen returned and went straight to his desk. “Leave that open, Mildred,” he said to the secretary, pointing at the door. “Let’s try to bear down and get through this as fast as we can. Okay, ‘Smitty’ is your uncle. Smitty’s got his tail in a crack. You want to help Smitty. Why?”
“I have an aunt who I like very much. She depends on him. They are like a little couple.”
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