It was morning. A chinook a week earlier had melted everything, then the wind had shifted and frozen it up again, so Shelby was encased in ice. More snow and wind were on the way. People were about, picking their way on the ice in the cold.
A woman, some kind of entertainer with the band at the King Tut, stood at the door smoking a cigarette, wrapped in a big man’s coat. Somebody pounded a fender with a hammer, and the sound was bright and jarring.
Jerry hadn’t sold anything in a month, but he was smiling now because he would go to Great Falls in the morning, clear up the title, and buy the property. Lease the mineral rights, reserving at least fifteen percent for himself.
He had a strong hunch about this land; his strongest hunch yet.
You play your cards right. You act when the time is right. Bingo.
Skiff Norgaard looked like a farmer even when he was in town. Overalls and that big padded coat. Old-fashioned high-topped shoes. Flat cheekbones and white-lashed eyes. A slow, rocking walk. Thick fingers, thin lips.
He greeted Jerry with a stolid clap on the upper arm, unsmiling, the way he always did. He leaned against the King Tut and rolled a cigarette with his thick fingers and listened to Jerry tell him what a splendid day it was. He nodded his head slowly, the way he always did.
He listened to Jerry talk about the morning’s oil gossip: who’s going to do what, and where, and when. “Ya,” Skiff said. “That Gladys Belle well, it sounds like a big one. Ya, it’s a heck of a field—so big, so shallow. What’s it gonna shape up to be, a guy has to wonder.”
He listened to Jerry tell him he would be on No. 43 to Great Falls in the morning. “Business at the land office, Skiff. Business that can’t wait.
“Why can’t it wait?”
“Sorry, pal,” Jerry said. “Mum’s the word.”
But a secret is a heavy thing to carry.
“The land office,” he repeated.
They smoked for a while. Jerry turned to his friend. “This is it, Skiff,” he said fervently. “This is really it. This is the big one. The goods.”
He unrolled the map under his arm and held it up on the wall.
“I ain’t been following the play,” Skiff said. “What are you seeing here?”
Carefully, Jerry traced the previous version of the structure. Then he ran his finger around the new edges.
“Farther east,” Skiff said. “They’re guessing farther east.”
“A matter of days,” Jerry said. “They’ll be leasing, and they’ll be leasing for big money.”
Skiff’s heavy index finger went to a small red x on the eastern edge of the big oval. “Seems like a guy with some extra cash might want to put it here,” he said.
“Hmmm,” Jerry said, his voice full of happy mockery. “By gosh, you might be right.”
Skiff Norgaard’s big mittened hands on the wheel of his Ford, not two hours later. He squints through the flurrying snow. A rutted, hazardous seven hours on the road. Off it once, near Brady, but two fellows get him going again. The snow stays light enough. He makes it.
Skiff Norgaard drives straight to the land office and pounds with his big mittens on the door at 4:55. Flexes his big fingers slowly. The clerk scowls, casts elaborate glances at the tocking Elgin on the wall.
A quick title search and a conclusion. Skiff’s fingers around the pen. A check. The big rigorous signature.
A meal at the hotel, where he will stay the night, driving away in the morning, just a few minutes before the arrival of the next train from Shelby, with his friend Jerry Malone aboard. His hands rest on either side of his plate.
He has the quiet look of someone who has just delivered bad news.
Norgaard’s signature, its up-and-down rigor, the ink thick and for all time on the page. Below it, the clerk’s time stamp—11 January 1923—and above it the legal description of the property.
The Great Falls land office dim and only frailly heated by the big potbellied stove. Wind battering the walls, pushing small rivers of frigid air beneath the frosted glass door, to trickle around the feet.
Jerry is stiff with the cold, the trip. But his excitement, until this moment, has kept the icy air at bay He has, since rising in the night, felt fueled. His fingers have quivered slightly. His heart has thumped against the wallet that is going to buy him the highest kind of luck.
Now it all stops. His heart, the heat. He stares at the paper anchored with the signature of his friend, Skiff Norgaard. The paper that says Skiff Norgaard has, since yesterday afternoon, owned the best hunch of Jerry’s life.
He and Francis haul water on a sled in the moonlight to the new house with the blankets on the windows. Jerry is quiet these days since the discovery of Norgaard’s treachery. He hopes he won’t hear that someone wants to drill there. He hopes nobody will care, ever, about that property.
As he and Francis pull the sled together, he listens to his breath leaking a little on the edges.
Francis sold a marble that day for fifty cents that he had bought for a quarter. Then an oilman paid him a dollar to stand in line for his mail. He is flush, Francis is.
There is a buoyancy to the family yet. Things always slow down in the deep winter, Jerry heard Vivian tell a friend. They’ll really boom the field in the spring, she said.
Maudie rode with a little friend in the friend’s father’s car, out to the oil field. They returned after dark. The little friend stayed over and they chattered long into the evening, fired by the lights out there on the prairie, the lonely industrial whine of the big pumps.
Vivian has not mentioned Seattle in months.
Skiff Norgaard leased Jerry’s hunch to Standard Oil of California for $5,000 and a big bonus and a fifteen percent cut. In the early spring of 1923, they hit oil, a gusher, and Skiff gathered in his money and bought a few wheat farms north of town.
Skiff would have a long run of luck after that. He would escape the hailstorms, weather the Depression, keep his son out there working, acquire more land and more machinery. By the 1960s, he would be a millionaire a few times over and still farming.
They never spoke again after the winter of 1923, Jerry and Skiff, though they belonged for the next half century to the same Lions Club and ate lunch in the same cafés and took their families to the same Fourth of July picnics and sat in the same auditorium at their children’s school graduations and piano recitals.
The Norgaards always had the biggest, newest automobile in the county, even during the dirty thirties.
The land business was slow, mysteriously slow, that winter of ’23. Jerry had holdings, every cent in land or leases, and no one was buying. Why? He couldn’t fathom it. Everything about the field seemed promising, worth a risk, a try. All my ships out to sea. But it was as if the field had somehow become a blind spot in the public eye.
It was so far away, so crusty and blank, that country. Like Canada. The rest of America just didn’t see it. And his best hunch had been yanked out from under him.
The sudden stillness of that winter, the sense of an arm with a hammer raised in the air and then frozen. The feeling that the place was going to stop, become a frozen scene of a boom town, applauded by all.
The way men like Jerry felt themselves become aimless. It was like going every day to a movie that never started. Taking a seat, folding the overcoat, clearing the throat, and then nothing.
The feeling that the course of the river has shifted. You are the frozen part, but you can hear the channel running. It’s not far away. People like Norgaard, the ones who made the last big deals, were in the channel, moving. Pole-rafting; hair back in the wind.
Twenty-four below, and Shelby huddles into itself, glitter-iced, smoking. A hard white sun. Gleaming naked buildings.
Puffed up, empty oil news in the Tribune. Getting ready, getting ready. Anytime. Nervousness. Too much time to think.
Jerry sits alone in his freezing cement-walled office. He just wrote a rent check for it and is furious. Seventy-five dollars. It’s about what he’
s got left to his name. Gouged, he feels. And then he has just heard a rumor that Norgaard bought another place and sold it the next day for a pile. Doesn’t have the heart to check.
He spends the day indexing oil and gas journals. Seventy-five dollars. Shivering under his overcoat in a stupid, drafty box of an office, his maps spread out before him, the one he showed Norgaard with the red x on it. He shivers with fury and the cold. He feels caught in a poker game he can’t leave.
A big party was going on in the rest of the country. Swells were waving their dough around and having a big time while little Shelby stood outside the tall windows like a waif, yelling about some black stuff that was spouting up through the lawn.
A shudder of wind hits the building. He is in a basement room with a high window well. He sees only the feet of people walking past. The blowing snow above his head like racing clouds. He is freezing and stiff. Joints won’t move. Can’t go home, because he would have to say there was nothing doing, except that a deal just fell through that he’d been counting on to pay his office rent. That they were almost out of money. That the office was useless because no one stopped in; there was no reason.
He thought of the warm treasurer’s office in Cut Bank. How, this time of day, the two girls would be making tea, pulling the blinds against the cold. How the new treasurer would have things to do, another hour’s worth of things to do, and then the Closed sign and another day with pay.
The Silver Grill smells like cigars and fried meat. Smoke from the stove, smoke from the pipes and the Little Queen cigars. The smoke of people waiting, heating up. And nowhere for it to go, because the small oily windows are sealed against the cold. The smell of men who haven’t had baths in many days. The smell of sleeplessness and bootleg and no luck.
He closes his burning eyes for a moment. He can hear the almost-imperceptible wheeze at the edge of his breath. He moves nearer a poker game in the corner, jostling shoulders, holding his breath against the low stench.
Five men, all out-of-towners, slap down their cards, tip back their chairs. Whiskey fumes float from their coffee. Chas. Thomas, the doodlebug man. The man with the leather spats, the geologist. Two real estate birds from Canada. A stranger in a long driving coat.
As he watches them, Jerry feels again the envy he carries for certain kinds of men—the jaunty and reckless; the loud and wild and womanless. Slapping cards down. Pushing in large bets on weak hands, bluffing like kids. There was a kind of grace in it, a kind of decisive recklessness that was similar to the way the best stockmen worked a herd of wild horses.
Maybe it was simply their momentum. The way they seemed to expect good and bad and triumph and reverse, and always a crisis, a crisis created if it wasn’t there, the pure forward movement making each setback smaller because there were so many of them.
They were wild men but they weren’t passionate men, because they could not die of hope as he was beginning to feel he could. Hope deferred.
They did not get sick hearts, these men. They were buoyant, elastic, hearty, alive, without conscience or scruple. They made burghers out of the men who were already here, who had weathered it, stuck it out, made a life, made children. They made cautious burghers of men like Jerry Malone, who felt every penny he had just put down for a bad cup of coffee.
He intends to stay a half hour, then go home. Have a cup of coffee and listen to the talk and maybe ask Olson if he wants to reconsider on that lot option. But he stays because it feels like a hub, as if something is going on. He orders a piece of pie.
The Monroe kid is there with his newspapers, and Jerry asks him to tell Vivian he will be home in an hour or two. She will think it is business. That he is making a deal. And she might be right. He should just stay, see what comes up. A dozen loud men in a café, and now someone has brought out some hooch, and another card table has been set up. It is dark. The wind has increased, and the thought of going out in it is awful. Something has torn loose on the roof, a wire for the sign maybe, and it is smacking the side of the building.
The first group of poker players disbands. One of them mimes a gun to another one’s head, then scoops up a pile of change, and they all move in a pack to the door, headed to wherever the women are.
And now the people left in the room are, with the exception of two men eating silently in the corner, all from Shelby. They have known each other since that first Round Lake picnic, that first summer when their hopes were so simple and extravagant.
They glance around at each other with the bored, familiar expressions of siblings around a dinner table.
They talk long into the night. Shout some. Drink a little. Seven of them. Five are in real estate and doing nothing. The one with a newspaper reads a small item aloud.
Montreal offers to hold Dempsey fight.
They talk about publicity stunts, getting the attention of the boys with the money. The place turns quiet for a moment. You can hear the hiss of a steam kettle back in the kitchen, slop tossed out the back door into the kind of night that nearly freezes it before it hits the ground.
Laughter. A pencil and some doodling. Another roar of laughter and another round of drinks.
A slammed door and 3:00 a.m. and two men walking through the breath-grabbing night, its stars like speckles of glass.
The depot, the telegraph operator.
The men laughing one last big laugh, tired, the stunt done—and the bleeps begin to run along the country’s wires toward the windowless office of Mr. Doc Kearns in New York City. It is addressed to Kearns’s fighter, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
“We are prepared to offer you purse of $200,000 to be paid $50,000 upon signing of contract and balance when you enter ring for fifteen round championship fight against Tommy Gibbons July 4 in Shelby Montana Stop. Please wire acceptance.”
Campbell’s big gusher hit the newspapers on the ides of March, 1922. A year later, on the ides, Jerry and the other promoters stand on the site of the huge boxing arena to be built just west of town. The last grand stunt. Does anyone feel a flicker of coming disaster? Does anyone wish it were another day?
The photo. Jerry stands on the end, a slight, suited man of thirty-five years, right arm cocked, cigarette. Unsmiling. Thirty-two of them. All in shirts and ties and city hats. All but the man in the puttees. The one with the little terrier and the silk pajamas. He stands next to Jerry. His hat has a higher crown than most. He is tall, rangy-looking. Dark shirt, dark ties, insolent stance. The jodhpurs. The boots and puttees. He is the only one who is not looking at the camera. His gaze is off to the side, over the tops of the other men’s heads.
Stepov, the Russian count, is not in the photograph. He has taken up farming and chess.
16
THE COSTUME is actually two American flags arranged over her everyday chemise. They were delivered in a large box with the spiked crown and the torch, both papier-mâché.
She folds one of the flags and pins it around her waist, adjusting the hemline so that it falls to mid-calf. The second flag must be draped over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. There is a pencil drawing in the box of the way the costume should look. This look will require slipping off one strap of the chemise and pinning it out of sight. She considers altering the style to a more modest one. She has never actually worn a dress with one shoulder bare, and she tries to think of it as a classical style, like that woman in the French Revolution painting whose nakedness in the midst of battle is high and pure.
She knows, however, that her audience this evening—the members of the Bonhomie Club—want “patriotic entertainment,” as the man put it. And that her bare shoulder falls in the entertainment part of it, not the patriotic part. Along with the knee-length hemline in the little drawing, but that is where she really must draw the line.
She completes the pinning, dons a star-spangled sash, and turns herself slowly in the mirror, left and right. Her bare shoulder, so white, looks like a chilly child’s. She touches it protectively. It’s a blustery April day.
She wonders how she is expected to cover herself against the raw little wind when they come to pick her up. Her coat flung like a cape around the drapes. That will have to do.
So there she is, standing in front of the mirror, dressed in a pair of American flags. She tries on the crown. She holds the flimsy torch aloft.
Lelia told her about the job. Less than two hours of work for ten dollars at a well-established club, and they will come to get her in a chauffeured automobile. She will hoist the torch, smile her heartiest, and nod graciously at the pianist. He will play a brief, stirring introduction and then she will sing “God Bless America” and take requests. They might sing along, the men. It will be an enthusiastic crowd and they will applaud her and perhaps thank her in a way that brings another round of applause. And then they will bring her home again in the car, ten dollars richer.
She has opened the window to air the flat. Lelia smokes all the time now, always with a cigarette holder, which she holds at ear level between puffs. One of the holders is crusted with small rhinestones. She calls that one her “after-five.”
She goes and comes and Daisy never really knows when to expect her, though Lelia does faithfully come up with her part of the rent.
Daisy and Lelia have not been speaking during the past few days, since their exchange about Mr. Higgenbotham, the Aeolian person who gave Daisy reason to believe she might soon have a record contract. Lelia laughed in the hardest way imaginable, and she said, pretending to be solicitous, her hands on Daisy’s shoulders, “Daisy Lou,” she said, “Mr. Higgenbotham is a fast-talking little cherub whose days at Aeolian are numbered, to put it nicely. You believe Mr. Higgenbotham, and you are putting your money on a lame horse. That test record was your one phonograph recording, my darling. Believe me.” She herself is giving up whistling for something she calls cabaret performance.
Daisy hears heels clicking on the sidewalk two stories below and recognizes them, or thinks she does. She jumps back from the window and peers carefully. Yes, it is Penelope Wexner. It is, of course, her distinctive brisk step. She seems to be out for a stroll with her new dog, a Welsh corgi Daisy thinks is grotesque. She can’t believe someone of Penelope’s taste and style would see beauty in an animal so squat and infelicitous. It shakes Daisy’s faith in her friend somehow that she—a spiritist, an aristocrat, an arbiter of taste—could proffer affection toward an animal named Marconi, who tended, when at rest, to drool on the toe of one’s shoe.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 19
