Postcards

by Annie Proulx

  Late that night the idea came to him: look in the phone book. See what people did. He got up, ignoring Yarn’s strangled question from the other bed, and took the phone book into the bathroom to sit on the cool throne among the cockroaches, flipping the yellow pages and considering how far he’d get as an adoption agent, private investigator, septic tank cleaner, diamond merchant, sign painter, marina manager, nurseryman, towel supplier, tennis court maintenance man, smoke odor remover, rope maker, bookseller, traffic analyst, or tattoo artist. He looked under Real Estate. Son of a bitch, there were pages and pages of appraisers, developers, estate managers. He was all reared up. There were a couple of real estate schools. In Miami. He’d call one up in the morning. Just for the hell of it. But God, he was all reared up and could not sleep.

  Yarra drove him crazy. The guy wanted to take off for LA right away. He wanted cornflakes and bacon and pancakes for breakfast. He didn’t like Miami. He hated the sound of Spanish he said, there were too many niggers, it was too hot, he had a sunburn just from walking around, the car was crusted with bugs, the windshield all gummed up, he hated fruit, the shrines had the wrong saints, let’s get the hell out of here.

  Dub left Yarra at a diner pouring cane syrup on corn bread and went up the street for Cuban coffee and a couple of sugared churros. The quiet phone booth at the back of the marina a block from the diner. He talked to people at two of the real estate schools. The phone didn’t answer at the third. He liked the girl at the Southern Florida Real Estate Institute and called her back.

  ‘I sure do remember talking with you ten minutes ago. And I’m glad you called back?’ She made every statement into a question. ‘Because I thought of something else. We are a six-month school leading to the real estate license, just sellin’ the real estate, you know. But. There’s the real estate college, Miami Realty Junior College. Real good courses on every phase of the business if you’re real serious about advancing in the field? Not just selling. But. Investment, development, stocks? You can work in the daytime and take courses at night? I’m not suppose to tell you this, but you sounded like you wanted to know it all?’

  ‘I do want to know it all. I just decided that. And I want to know your name and what time you get done work. I’d like to buy you a drink for your help. And meet you.’

  ‘Mr. Blood, I have a surprise for you? You have been allured by a woman’s voice. I am a sixty-two-year-old grandmother and my husband wouldn’t like for me to run off to a gin mill with a stranger? But I know about the college because my daughter graduated there seven years ago. She went to Houston? She’s with a top development firm? So it can be done. But thank you for asking. Bye-bye, now and you have good luck?’

  Yarra was ugly. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the diner looking up and down the street. He was snapping one fist into the palm of the other hand, showing his muscled forearms. Ropy arms, Levis creased like metal. His fishing hat was pushed back. He looked at his watch. Figured I run out on him, thought Dub. For a minute he was tempted, he had the money, but walked up behind him and tapped Yarra on the shoulder.

  ‘Where the hell you been?’

  ‘Making phone calls. Making plans.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, the only plan I want to make is get out of here. There was a fuckin’ cockroach in the corn bread. I almost puked on the table. I just want to get out of here.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it. I like it here.’

  ‘Like it! What are you, spic-lover or something?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just feel good here. There’s something going on, there’s this feeling of taking a chance. It’s like going to the races every day.’

  ‘Miami stinks. It’s better in LA. The climate’s nice and even, not sweaty like here. I got contacts in LA. We’ll clean up. Get some fancy stationery for the letters. We’ll live good. Hey, Hollywood! A few more nice letters like yesterday we’ll be all set.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to LA. I don’t want to write any more letters. I’ll split the five hundred with you but I’m staying here. Gonna try to get in this real estate college. I got an appointment with the admissions this afternoon.’

  Yarra stopped chewing on the piece of gristle. ‘Oh oh oh I got a prince with me.’ He put the back of his right hand on his hip and fluffed his wiry hair with the other. ‘Why, pardon my bad manner, sir, I thought we was on the same fuckin’ trip but I see different. I didn’t know I was goin’ around with a prince. What the hell. You not much fun, anyway. Just a goddam farm boy, dazzled by the bright lights. Give my two-fifty and I’m gone.’

  ‘Two-twenty-five – I gave you twenty-five yesterday after we cashed it.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Wouldn’t want to forget that now, would we? But I want to ask you, who was it give you the idea of the letters? Me. Who was it showed you the scam? Me. Who was it got you that list of addresses? Me. Who was it picks the letter up when it comes? Me. And NOW, who is it gets kicked in the balls and dumped? Me. And I’ll tell you something, you won’t ever make it. You’re not the type that makes it.’

  ‘Your ass. But if it makes you feel better I’ll give you the two-fifty.’ He only wanted to get rid of Yarra. Minute by minute he was getting into Florida, feeling the charged-up rhythm.

  ‘And what about the VW? Who gets the VW?’ The stream of people parted on both sides, a woman, red toenails jutting out of peek-a-boo shoes, a black woman in a dress printed with violet orchids, a black woman in a uniform carrying a Woolworth’s bag. A pair of short Cubans, bellies swelling their guayaberas, hair springing up at their throats, the rich cigar smoke trailing after them, ran into him as they stared at two blondies in pedal pushers and ballet slippers. A tourist hauled a child holding a rabbit balloon by the ears. The dwarf with a red vest, three hard hats without shirts, belly hair rising out of blue jeans, a man with red glass rings on every finger, a hard-eyed Mikasuki wearing saddle oxfords and a yellow shirt rolled past, the traffic, buses drowned their voices, left them spitting into each other’s faces.

  ‘O.k., let’s take it around to a couple of used-car dealers, see what they offer. Strike an average. You want the car? You pay me for my half. We went halfies on the car. We can sell it, split the dough. Both be better off that way, I think. You could take a bus to LA.’

  They got two hundred for the black VW and Yarra left on the noon bus for Mobile, New Orleans and west.

  ‘Good riddance, meatball!’ he shouted, leaning out the bus window, giving Dub the finger.

  Mr. Bent came through the classroom door like a tiger. He stood in front of the class, stared at them for a long minute. His face was tanned a deep red-orange. A ridge of muscle around his mouth whitened the rim of his upper lip and gave him the look of a shrewd simian. The bags under his eyes were dusky blues. His hair, parted on the left, leaped up in a great quiff over his left eye. He wore a white linen suit with a nylon knit shirt of pale yellow. The collar flared over the suit lapels, and when he leaned out, Dub, sitting in the front row, could see the crown emblem stitched over his left nipple. He bent toward them and, in a coaxing voice, said, ‘I am a millionaire. How many of you want to be millionaires?’

  The Cuban-looking woman beside Dub shot her hand into the air and held it there. Other hands went up. Dub hesitated, then thought why the hell shouldn’t I be a millionaire and raised his hand. Only a heavyset man with a sad expression let his hands lie on the desk top.

  ‘What is your name sir?’

  ‘John Corcoris.’

  ‘Well, John, if you don’t want to be a millionaire why are you in this class?’ In the laughter the hands slid down again.

  ‘Well, I was in sponge diving, my family done this for generations, Key West, Tarpon Springs, but the sponges is thin out, there’s the synthetics. I thought maybe a good idea get into real estate. Never thought about being a millionaire. I just want enough to raise my family, live comfortable.’

  ‘Mr. Corcoris. I will invite you to step out into the hall and reflect a moment. If, at the end of five minutes you do no
t want to be a millionaire, kindly point yourself in another direction. This class WILL be animated by each student’s desire to make a million dollars. And I will personally be insulted if every person in this room does not go for that goal with everything he or she has got. You CAN DO IT. You come from all walks of life, from every background, you are different ages – how old are you—?’ pointing at an acned boy, then at an older woman whose hair was streaked with yellow white – ‘there you are, twenty-two and sixty-three. Some of you may have had sorry pasts, others may have fallen from earlier glory or riches. Yet you are all here in this room, united by a single motive – the motive to be a success, to make a fortune, to make a million dollars. And I am here to show you how. The motto of this class is “I refuse to accept the fate life handed me. I will MAKE my OWN fate.” In other classes you’ll learn about deeds and conveyances, contracts, title searches, brokerage and mortgages, but with Maurice Sheridan Bent you will learn how to be a millionaire.’

  Corcoris’s hand was up.

  26

  Bullet Wulff

  ROAMING OVER THE DUSTY Colorado Plateau, following the Morrison formation to Utah’s Uinta range, to Wyoming into the Great Divide basin and up to the Gas Hills, across the Rattlesnake Range and into the Powder River basin, Shirley Basin, Crook’s Gap, scanning the uplifts, the salt washes below the slickrock marker beds, rim walking the Shinarump levels, watching for the brilliant orange and yellow. He’d sorted out the subtleties of the Geiger counter’s endless chipping, chipping, knocked around in the gritty bars and saloons. The electric feeling of quick money was everywhere. Christ. It excited him.

  Crowded beside stinking desert rats to study the latest government anomaly maps. But wouldn’t you know, he was just in time for the federal cutback. The buying station shut down, the price guarantees dissolved. The smart guys were using helicopters and planes, skimming along the mesas with fifteen-hundred-dollar scintillometers. The scratch-dirt prospector had a hard time. What the hell, he kept moving.

  The prices picked up again, high enough so that this time the big outfits moved in on the low-grade ore. Yellowcake speculation. Talk was of production levels. The rock rats disappeared. It was all big business now, deep mines, acid leaching, chemical extraction, company prospectors, poison wastes and tailings, sand slurry choking the streams, big fish kids and mountains of dead and reeking tailings.

  He was finding a hell of a lot of bones, knowing you found what you looked for.

  The bones and seashells, stone trees drew him more than the idea of a big strike. Once he found three enormous weathered-out vertebrae at the bottom of a ravine. He’d thought they were stones. The Geiger counter threw up a storm of clicks. As he dug the first out he saw what it was. It was heavy, uranium rich. He drove around for weeks with the bones wrapped in newspaper in a box in the back, dunking about it before he went to bone-buying Donald at his South Dakota ranch-supply-bar-grocery store.

  Donald the Bone Man, gink with a ragged mustache hanging over his puffed mouth, chin sliding away into neck, hair over the ears, escorted Loyal into the back room with a sweep of his pearl-button cuff. Scar like a socket in his right cheek, the ten-gallon hat, brim curled and crown dented just right, the long, long torso in its western shirt disappearing into faded jeans cinched with a tooled leather belt and a buckle ornamented with the setting sun behind a sawtooth range, but he would pay decent money for bones and better money if you drew a map of where you found them. What Donald got nobody was sure, but he drove a mint pickup traded in every six months. Donald would not change the oil. He wore handmade western shirts. Donald’s back room was stacked with boxes of bones where the archeologists and paleontologists from museums and universities back east pawed through them in the summer, asking Donald in wheedling voices for guides to the places where the choice specimens had been found. Donald was a checkpoint, a starting place for beginners.

  Loyal saw the look come over Donald’s face; knew what he was planning; he’d sell these specimens for the uranium.

  ‘I want them to go to a expert at some kind of fossil museum. If I wanted to sell them for the uranium I could of done that myself.’

  ‘You could get more for them for the uranium.’

  ‘I want them to go to one of the guys that studies the fossils – so he can tell what wore these.’

  ‘Hell, I can tell you that. These here is from a duckbill dinosaur and I bet you found ’em over near Lance Creek. Plenty of duckbill skeletons over there. There and up in Canada in the Red Deer country, up in Alberta. Want to see what they looked like?’ Donald rummaged in a bookcase and found a grimy Life magazine with pink-faded color plates.

  ‘Look at this. There’s your goddamn duckbills.’ The illustration showed mud-brown beasts submerged to their chests. Dripping weeds hung from their muzzles. ‘That’s what you found. Crawled around in the swamps. Too heavy to walk around on the dry land so it had to float in water. Suckers were more than thirty feet long. Not real rare. You’d get more for the uranium in your samples. You bet.’

  ‘Mister, I come across a lot of bones out there. I don’t want these to go for fucking uranium. If that’s what I wanted to do, I’d do it. It’s the bones I’m interested in. I’m interested in these duckbill things.’

  The splinter was a freak thing. There’d been an old wooden box in the back of the pickup for years. He’d tossed ore samples and rock hammers into it until the sides broke and the ends fell out. Collapsed on the truck bed it was only the echo of a box. The rocks, bones, tools and pipe rolling around in the truck could be heard a mile out on the plains.

  ‘Damn noise drive you nuts.’ He swerved up into a setback shaded by cottonwoods. He’d make camp early, straighten out the mess in the back of the truck. He laid into the mangled box with the heel of the trail axe.

  ‘Good enough to make coffee even if you ain’t good for much else.’ As if stung, the box shot out a two-inch splinter that pierced his right eyelid at the outer corner, pinning the lid to the eye itself. The pain was extraordinary, a rod of agony. He stumbled to the driver’s seat and looked in the rearview mirror with his good eye. He didn’t think it was in too deep. There was a pair of vise grips on the dashboard. He would have to pull it out. He would have to drive the sixty-something miles to Tongue Bolt where there was some kind of a clinic.

  He didn’t let himself think about it, but set the vise grips, held the lid with the trembling fingers of his left hand and clamped onto the protruding splinter in awkward pain. He smelled the metal of the vise grips, felt the fast beat of his blood. He gauged the angle of the splinter’s entrance flight then jerked. The hot tears streamed down his face. He hoped it was tears. He’d seen a dog hit in the eye once and the fluid drain from the collapsed ball. The pain was bad but bearable. He leaned his head back and waited. He couldn’t see a damn thing from that eye. Maybe never would.

  In a while he opened the glove compartment and got out the box of gauze. The box was dog-cornered and dirty from kicking around for years with spark plugs and matchboxes, but inside the bandage was still coiled in the blue paper. He covered his eye, wrapped the bandage around his head, looping behind his right ear to hold it in place. He started the truck and drove out toward the highway. Through blurred, monocular vision he was conscious of driving through a reddish haze. The dust the truck had raised on the way in had not yet settled.

  At the clinic, glass door, stick-on letters. The waiting room was full of old men with hands folded over sticks, looking him over expectantly. A girl behind a glass wall with a sliding panel. She opened the panel. Curly hair, eyes shaped like squash seeds.

  ‘Nature of your problem?’

  ‘Got a splinter in my eye. Pulled it out. Hurts like a bastard.’

  ‘You just sit down. Dr. Goleman will get to you pretty quick. ’Nother emergency in there right now. Every time on Men’s Clinic day it goes haywire. You’re our third emergency today. First we had a woman opened the door of her station wagon and broke off both her front teeth
and broke her nose, young woman, we had to get the dental surgeon over, now we got a man that one of his workers cut his fingers off with a shovel digging dinosaur bones, and you, and we’ve still got the afternoon. This is a doozy of a day. And some of the regulars for the Men’s Clinic been sitting here for over two hours. Can you fill out this form, or do you want me to read it to you and you give me the answers?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  But he wrote only his name, then sat with his head back counting the hard painful beats of his heart behind his closed eyes until the old man next to him shook his wrist.

  ‘I was raised in this country,’ he whispered. ‘My old dad was a surveyor. Come out in the old days. Twelve children and I was the third. I’m the only one left. Want to hear something funny? Tell you something very funny, and that was the way my old dad died. We was walking home in the dark to the cabin, me and my old dad and my sister Rosalee. I don’t know where the rest of them was. Rosalee she says to him, “Dad, how come we don’t see no lions or tigers around here?” Dad says, “There ain’t none around here. Lions and tigers they all lives in Africa,” and we goes in the cabin. Well, the next day my old dad goes out to survey a line somewheres way up in the mountains and he don’t come home when he’s supposed to. After a few days his wife, that’s his second wife who I never liked, says, “He ought to be back by now but he ain’t. I got a feeling something’s got him.” Well, she didn’t know how true she spoke. They found him up there with his transit and his flags and all layin’ on the ground. There was claw marks on his chest and the prints of a big cat all around. And Rosalee said, “It was tigers,” and you couldn’t never persuade her otherwise. What do you think of that?’