I stood up and went to the door. “I’m going to walk around the block,” I said, then went outside and did it.
The Dynaflow sailed past me once again. A dog thought about accosting me but decided not to. From the house behind Curt’s came the threats of a radio preacher who was picking the pockets of his audience. By the time I got back to Curt’s house Matt’s big car was sitting like a beached whale in the center of the driveway.
I went inside. There were two or three other guests as well, neighbors expressing condolences and bringing food. Their somber words echoed through the house like the chants of monks.
Matt and Pilar stood in the center of the room, displaying themselves. Pilar wore some kind of fur on her back and some kind of feathers on her head and some kind of leather on her legs and feet that had to move when she did. For an instant I found myself alone with her. “Anxious to get back to the big city?” I asked, making conversation as well as I can make it.
“Aren’t you?” Her voice was bored and bloodless.
“Not completely.”
“You actually like it here?”
“In some ways.”
“Like what?”
“I like the land. The way it rolls on and on, with room enough for everything. The way you can watch the weather come toward you like a train.”
“But the people.”
“What about them?”
“There’s no style, no flash.”
“If that’s your thing, then you’re definitely in the wrong place. But to me it’s kind of nice to be in a room for twenty minutes without hearing about real estate or wine.”
Pilar shook her head at my hapless naiveté. A feather flew off her head and attached itself to my sleeve. I plucked it off and pocketed it. “And it’s a hell of a lot quieter than Telegraph Hill,” I said, wrapping it up or so I thought.
“Telegraph Hill,” Pilar mused absently. “Isn’t that where they have that giant penis sticking up off the ground?”
“Coit Tower. Right.”
“How bizarre.”
Pilar left me where I was, which pleased us both. I began to think of how I could leave. Then Gail came up to me and with one look knew what I was planning and took hold of an arm to stop me. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re not leaving, Marsh. Not yet.”
“I’m trying.”
“We have to talk about the farm.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
“What have you decided, Marsh?” Gail asked in a whisper. “You’re not going to make us sell, are you?”
“I don’t know, Gail. I really don’t. I see some merit on all sides.”
“It’s our heritage, Marsh. With Mom and Dad dead it’s about the only thing that binds us Tanners all together. The only thing we have in common. We shouldn’t throw that away. We just shouldn’t.”
“I realize that, Gail. But Matt needs money and the town needs help and Curt just wants to be rid of it all, apparently.”
“Matt will always need money, Marsh. And the town will always need help. Now that Billy’s dead I doubt that Curt cares one way or the other what we do.”
“And you will always want to help your kids, Gail, and pretend that the Tanners are all for one and one for all.”
“Is there something wrong with that? We are a family, after all.”
“We just barely qualify, Gail. Don’t pretend we’re something we’re not.”
“Don’t say that, Marsh.”
“Okay. But it’s true.”
“Karen and Paul will be here soon, Marsh. Will you stay and meet them? So you can see how much they …”
“Deserve our help?”
“I guess so. Yes. Promise you’ll stay?”
I promised.
Gail went back toward the kitchen as despairing as I had ever seen her. When he saw her leave, Matt came over to me and slapped an arm across my shoulder. “Bet you’re anxious to get back to Frisco, huh, little brother?”
“I guess so.”
“Hell of a town. Full of queers now, though, huh?”
“Some.”
“Takes all kinds, I guess.” Matt paused, then squeezed my shoulder. “You’re not light on your feet, are you, Marsh? I mean, you never got married; makes a man think.”
“I’m okay, Matt. How about you?”
“Me? With a broad like Pilar? Are you kidding?”
“Could be compensation, Matt. Old man with a young woman? Makes you think, you know?”
Matt’s face clouded and he took away his arm. “Let’s hunker down here, Marsh,” he said, his voice suddenly husky and conspiratorial. “I been asking around, and the way to go is with the oil boys. No question about it.”
“I thought you needed big money up front.”
“Well, I do. But not so bad I can afford to toss away the long term. You realize what it would mean if they hit oil or gas out there, Marsh?”
“You don’t really think there’s oil out on that farm, do you, Matt?”
“Why not? Hell, they’ve hit in Illinois, and North Dakota. Kansas and Nebraska, too. Why not here?”
“How much money do you need up front, Matt? To keep your mobile home deal alive?”
“Ten grand. They’re calling my share at the end of the month. I don’t come up with the ten, I forfeit the ten I put up at the first offering.”
“Any more commitments after that?”
“Not if the cash flow runs the way its supposed to.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“If it doesn’t we’re all in the bankruptcy courts anyway. Take a bath and start again. But no way that’s going to happen. You thinking about coming in with me after all, Marsh?”
I didn’t answer his question.
“What made you change your mind on the oil thing, Matt?”
“Nothing special. I just been talking to people.”
“What people?”
“Some English guy. Field rep for Cosmos. Stopped me on the street and ran some data by me. Pretty damned convincing.” Matt slapped my shoulder again. “So, you’re in, Marsh? We go with the oil boys?”
“Not yet, I’m not.”
“What the hell’s holding you back? Shit, what you need is to grow up, Marsh. This is business, not a fucking ball game. You take the best deal you can get and go.” Matt squeezed my arm again, and this time there was nothing comradely about it. This time he was the older brother, passing on advice that approached a threat.
“I’m leaving town in the morning,” Matt went on. “I got some other deals to look after and Pilar’s had all of this cornbread stuff she can take. You better let me know by then which way you’re going to jump. If you’re not with me, though, I’ll find some way to beat you. Believe me, I will. This ain’t a game, young brother. This is life.” And Matt stomped off, as estranged from me as he had ever been, following a path I didn’t know or want to. The clomp of his heels on the stiff linoleum was finally muffled by the doorbell’s chime.
The pair that entered were as young as puppies and as bursting with life. As they twitched with energy and flushed with embarrassment through the introductions, Gail passed them through the room like hors d’oeuvres, showing them off. They were Karen and Paul, and they wore designer jeans and ski sweaters that matched and they clasped hands and bumped smiles and bodies the way kids do when they’re young and love every single thing about each other. To Gail’s chagrin they’d left the baby behind. But it was the cutest thing there ever was, we could take Gail’s word for that.
When my turn came they both said they were pleased to see me and I said likewise. Then Gail steered us all off to a private corner, which was heated by an iron radiator that reminded me of jail. “Paul’s farming half his daddy’s place, Marsh,” Gail said, after the preliminaries were behind us. “It’s down by Exline, not too far from ours. He’s been working it for a couple of years now. But they need to take on more land to make a go of it, right, Paul?”
Paul nodded on cue and rubbed his flaming skin where th
e razor had scraped him closer than it was meant to. I felt sorry for him. He’d been prepped and he was ready to play according to Gail’s plan, but his heart wasn’t in it because he sensed there was a bit of snake oil about it. For her part, Karen looked wiser and more capable than any of us, the way Midwestern girls can look after they live twenty years and never encounter anything they don’t understand. “You have any college, Paul?” I asked, so he’d have something to do besides fidget.
“Two years ag school at Ames. Then Dad got sick and I had to come home.”
“How many acres you think you need to make a living?”
“Well, I work close to a hundred now. Three hundred would do if prices get back up to where they were. If they don’t it won’t matter how much land we got.”
“Could you make it with two hundred?”
Paul smiled. “If we get luckier.”
“You plan on sticking to grain?”
“Mostly. A few hogs, maybe; chickens. Maybe some sheep, depending on how much grass we got. No cattle, I don’t guess. No money in cattle.”
“What’ll you do if you don’t get the Tanner farm?”
Paul looked at Karen. She shrugged. “Keep on like we have, I reckon,” he said. “Karen’ll keep her job in town and I’ll keep humping out on Dad’s place, maybe get me some night work.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Delivering pizza is about all there is since the box factory closed down. That or pumping gas.”
“We’ll make a go somehow,” Karen chimed in.
“What job do you have, Karen?”
“I keep the books for Rascal Newsome. He’s an auctioneer.”
“You mean antiques or you mean pigs and cows?”
“Both. Fridays and Saturdays we work the sale barns and the rest of the week we do estate sales, farm auctions, like that.”
“You like the job?”
She shrugged. “You meet a lot of people. And sometimes you can buy some nice things real cheap, though not as much since the dealers came to town. But Rascal can’t pay much, especially lately, what with prices being so bad. And he gets frisky if you let him. But what’s worse is that now we’re mostly selling people out to pay their debts. That’s no fun at all.”
Paul frowned and Gail gazed sadly at her daughter, then looked at me. “Anything more you want to know, Marsh?”
“One thing. Are you two willing to pay rent for our land?”
Paul glanced at Karen. She nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Shares.”
“How does that work?” I asked.
“Half the costs, half the income, usually.”
“What kinds of costs we talking about?”
“Seed. Fertilizer. Herbicide. Fence, maybe.”
“Labor?”
Paul laughed. “Just me and Karen. We work cheap.”
“Equipment?”
“Sure. We could figure something out. Amortize it, or whatever you call it.”
“Who sells the crop?”
“We do. Sell it right along with what we harvest off Dad’s place, I reckon.”
“But who decides the timing? I mean, prices are better at some times than others, aren’t they?”
“Sure. They drop at harvest time, but if you haven’t got anyplace to store the grain it don’t matter. Cost you more to rent storage than you’ll get in higher prices anyway. Or can. Gets kind of tricky, sometimes.”
“But you’ll take care of that yourselves?”
“If you want. Whatever’s right, Mr. Tanner.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”
Gail smiled. “Nice-looking kids, aren’t they?”
“Sure are,” I said.
“Mom,” Karen warned, stretching the word.
“Well, we got to go,” Paul interjected. “Promised to help Slick Hartwell get his corn in. Slick’s always the last in the county to pick. Once he left it in the field all winter. Birds ate half his yield.”
“Heck of a place to hunt quail, though,” Karen said. “See you, Mom. Uncle … Mr. Tanner. Sorry about Billy.”
“Did you know him very well, Karen?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Saw him around, is all. Never really talked to him since he came back.”
“How about you, Paul?”
“Naw. Seemed kind of goofy to me. I gave him a wide berth. Most people did the same, seems like. He and Bruce were kind of tight for a while there, before Bruce left for the navy.”
I looked at Gail for a comment but got only a puzzled shrug. Whatever Bruce found to like in Billy was not shared by his mother.
Paul and Karen sidled off, nodding their way out of the room. Gail and I waved good-bye. “They seem happy,” I said.
“They are, I think,” Gail answered. “You never know, though. Karen doesn’t say much. Never did. But in this town you usually hear something if a marriage starts to go bad. Folks smell it, somehow, a bad marriage.”
Gail paused for a moment and glanced over at her husband. Tom was talking to Pilar, making her laugh. I wondered what people smelled about Gail and Tom. “Well,” Gail said, “what do you think?”
“About the farm? I still don’t know. It seems there should be some way to compromise.”
“Karen and Paul, Marsh. They’re, I mean, with Billy gone and you and Matt not having kids, well, they’re the only ones left to keep the family line going. We should help them.”
“You’re forgetting Starbright’s baby.”
“Oh. That, too, I guess. But still …”
“But still. I’ll let you know by tomorrow night.”
I went into the living room to look for Curt but he wasn’t there. I found him out back in the garage. He didn’t hear me coming, and when I got to him he was cradling a deflated basketball in his hands like a chalice. I put a hand on his shoulder and he turned to me. “I don’t know why I’m crying now,” he said. “The boy who bounced this silly ball died a long time ago.… It’s just that I couldn’t talk to him anymore. I couldn’t get through to him. He didn’t want me to. I don’t think. Because of what he’d done in the war. I think he was ashamed, more than anything. Ashamed of both of us.”
“You shouldn’t blame yourself, Curt. Sometimes things just happen. We always try to blame someone for what goes wrong, but sometimes there’s just no blame at all.”
“But I quit trying, Marsh. I gave up on him. That’s what I can’t live with.”
“There’s one thing I have to tell you, Curt.”
“What?”
“Billy was sick. I’m not positive, but I think he was poisoned by something called Agent Orange, a defoliant they used over in Vietnam.”
“I think I read about that. Is that what made him hang himself, do you think?” There was a note of hope in Curt’s voice, at the prospect of an easy explanation for what had happened.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with his death,” I said. “But it has something to do with his baby.”
“What?”
“It may be deformed. There have been several instances of that happening to Vietnam veterans with exposure to Agent Orange.”
“Do you know for sure?”
“No. Maybe there’s no way to know till the baby’s born, I’m not sure. But I thought you ought to know.”
Curt uttered his Lord’s name once again. “I’ll keep a lookout for the girl, Marsh. If she or the baby need anything, I’ll see they get it. You can tell her that.”
“Maybe you should tell her yourself.”
“I guess I should. Marsh?”
In the fading light Curt’s face took on a symbolic, tortured look.
“This still doesn’t mean I want to know why he died. I just feel it, somehow. It’s something I’d best not hear.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you don’t need to know. But someone around here should. Before I leave I’ll try to see to it that they do.” And then I watched my brother closely. “Who’s Rufus Pantley?”
Curt twitched like
startled game. The ball went splat on the floor beside him. “How did you know?” he asked with an urgent rasp.
“He told me.”
“Pantley?”
“Yes. He wants his money.”
“But now there’s no …” Curt paused, then a grim smile streaked slowly across his face. “He didn’t do it, then. Thank the Lord. It wasn’t him.”
“Didn’t do what?” I asked over Curt’s heavy sigh.
“Didn’t kill Billy. I was so afraid he had.”
It was my turn to be startled. “Why would he do that?”
“Because of what I hired him to do,” Curt said. “I was afraid he went too far, see? Oh, God, Marsh. You don’t know what it’s like to spend two days thinking you had your own boy killed.”
“Is that what you needed money for, Curt? To give to Pantley?”
Curt nodded.
“What for? What was he going to do?”
Curt squatted down and rocked back on his heels. I sat on the floor beside him to hear his tale. “Pantley’s one of those, what they call deprogrammers, Marsh. You heard of them?”
“You didn’t, Curt.”
“You’re damned right I did. I hired him to get Billy away from Zedda and that WILD outfit, and the girl, and the drugs, and everything. To bring him back to his senses. Pantley said he’d do it for ten thousand dollars, half in advance. So you see, if he still wants his money he can’t know Billy’s dead. So that means he didn’t do it.”
“I suppose not,” I said, less certain of that conclusion than Curt. The threat of hanging was just the sort of coercive device a deprogrammer might employ, and it was one that could easily go awry and result in death instead of intimidation. Still, when I left the garage I was thankful that I had finally brought something to my brother besides grief.
Eighteen
The Tall Corn Motel was new and surprisingly large for a town like Chaldea, which meant it must have catered to the only people in that part of the state who could afford such accommodations—the guys who spent four nights a week on the road, peddling wares and deducting the expenses. The thin young man behind the desk had already shoved a registration card and a room key my way before I had a chance to tell him I was just looking for one of his guests, a Mr. Rufus Pantley. After consulting his papers he told me Pantley was in room nineteen, first floor, new units in the rear. I bought a picture postcard of the Chaldea square, aerial view, then went on back.
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