Keep the Change

9

The next day, before he was fully awake, before he had had any opportunity for banishing thoughts, he was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where the wind blew so hard the shadows flew on the roadway and where, stopping on the edge of a plowed field, he had to lean backward into the wind to take a leak and even then it just sprayed from his dick like sleet. The radio said that Kansas steer prices were down because several of the packing plants had been closed by blizzards. Joe drove on. Near the horizon, there was the most overcrowded feedlot of Black Angus cattle Joe had ever seen. He stared at it until he overtook what turned out to be a vast depot of worn-out automobile tires, extending over many acres.

He began to see mountains and his spirit rose with the accumulating altitude, kept climbing until it sank again around Monument Hill and new snow and population; finally he was in the Denver rush hour, which caused him to sink into complete apathy as he took his place in the teeming lanes.

He cleared out of north Denver, traffic thinning about the time he passed a vast illuminated dog track, amazing against the darkening Front Range. It was dark and wild and cold after that, after the St. Vrain River and the Wyoming line. A genuine ground blizzard was falling by the time he got to Cheyenne, so he stopped at a place called Little America, the home of fifty-five gas pumps, and slept like a baby, knowing all that gasoline was out there. There was enough gasoline for a homesick person to drive home millions of times. Joe was hugely annoyed to have had this thought.

He was gone before daybreak, following a Haliburton drilling equipment truck with a sign on its rear that said it braked for jackalope. Joe’s sense of mission had reached a burning pitch and he tailgated the big rig over sections of road varnished by the manure that ran out of the cattle trucks. The two vehicles went down through Wyoming in a treacherous eighty mile an hour syncopation.

Wheatland, Wyoming, had sentimental Spanish haciendas out in the windswept tank farm at the edge of the sage. A somber and detached-looking herd of buffalo stared out at the highway across five strands of barbed wire. Tonight was going to be Olde Southe Gumbo Night at the restaurant in Douglas where Joe released the Haliburton truck and stopped for breakfast. There was an array of condiments that suggested people ate at all hours here. Joe examined the salad dressing. It looked like the styling gel in a beauty parlor. Buddy Holly sang “True Love Waits” from a red and chrome speaker at the end of his booth. While he ate, the sun burst out like a hostile and metallic stunt. Beyond the window, the land of the jackalope shone under a burnishing wind.

Back on the highway, a sheriff’s car shot past with a little gray-haired prisoner in the back. Joe drove until he reached Kaycee, not much more than a small depression in the ground east of the highway: gas station, quonset buildings, a few houses. He stopped and bought some homemade elk sausage from a man he knew there. He was getting close.

The Tongue River was green and low and clear. It was the last thing he noticed until he crossed into Montana. At Crow Agency a sign said, “Jesus Is Lord on the Crow Reservation.” Loose horses were also Lord on the Crow reservation. An ambulance tore off down a dirt road, its red light throbbing like a severed artery.

Three hours later he drove through his old hometown, Deadrock. He took a left by the switching yard and took the dirt road south toward the ranch. He followed the river bottom back to his house. Before long, the cottonwoods would make a cloudy tunnel for the racing stream but they were just now beginning to leaf out; and where the stream broadened out and flowed in flat pastures, its every turn was marked by an even growth of willows. The light flashed on the shallow streams that fed the river where they emerged from their grassy tunnels; and in the marshy stands of cattail, blackbirds jumped up and showered down once again. A rancher went alongside the road, a great fat man on a small motorcycle. He had his shovel and fabric dams lashed behind him and his felt hat pulled down so firmly against the wind that it bowed his ears out. A small collie lay across his lap as he sputtered along. Some of the fields had great splashes of pasture ruining yellow spurge. The ditch bank along the road was a garden of early spring wild flowers, shooting stars, forget-me-nots, lupine. Snow still lay collected in the shade. You couldn’t really tell you had left one ranch and gone onto another. A cattle guard marked the actual boundary but the rolling country was the same in every direction. The house sat down in some trees, old trees that were splotched with dead branches. There was a seasonal creek underneath the trees but it had dried up now into nothing but a wash. A half-acre had been fenced to enclose the place but the cattle had beaten the ground down right to the boundaries.

The door was unlocked. Joe went in and looked around. There wasn’t much for furnishings but there was enough. There was a woodstove, an old Frigidaire, and two army blankets on the bunk. The toilet bowl was stained with iron but it worked. Someone had fixed the well. There was a table in the kitchen. And the phone worked. Not owning or even caring about any of it made this seem blissful. His nights wouldn’t be interrupted by bad dreams. It was going to be all right.