Keep the Change

11

This sale yard was a place ranchers took batches of cattle too small to haul to the public yard in Billings. You didn’t go here in a cattle truck; you went in the short-range stock truck in all the clothes you owned because the cab heater went out ten years ago. Some went pulling a gooseneck trailer behind the pickup. You could unload either at one of the elevated chutes or at the ground-level Powder River Gate, which opened straight into a holding pen where the yard men, usually older ranchers who had gone broke or were semiretired, sorted and classed the cattle for that day’s sale. Joe stopped and looked back out into the pens to get an idea of the flow of cattle. It looked pretty thin and there was a cold rain blowing over everything. The yard men leaned on their long prods and stared out across the pens into nowhere.

Joe went inside. A secretary typed away, filling out forms, and Bob Knowles, the yard owner, manned the counter. Through a pane of glass behind his head, the sale ring could be seen as well as the small wood podium from which the auctioneer called the sale and directed his stewards to the buyers. Bob Knowles had been here since the years Joe and his family were still on the ranch. He peered at Joe with a smile.

“How long you back for this time?” he asked.

“Damned if I know. But Lureen lost her lease. I told her I’d watch some yearlings for her this summer. She had a grass deal with Overstreet and he dropped her. How’s it look for today?”

“Dribs and drabs,” said Bob, lifting his feed-store cap to smooth back his sandy hair. “All day long. What are you looking for?”

“Grass cattle, but everyone’s got so much hay left over.”

“That’s it. We just don’t have the numbers,” Bob said. Joe completely trusted Bob and moreover, he didn’t want to hang around here all day every Tuesday buying cattle ten at a time.

“Bob, you want to sort up some cattle for me and just buy me what you can? Then just lot them till we get a couple of semiloads.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“Big-frame fives and sixes for under sixty-five bucks a hundredweight. Sort them up so they look like a herd.”

“That’s a tall order. Maybe too tall. How many do you want?”

“Two hundred and fifty head and I’d take some spayed heifers in there if it had to be.”

“I can’t do it in one day,” Bob said decisively.

“Can you do it over four weeks?”

“I can get pretty close.”

“Let’s do ’er then. I’ll get my banking done. And don’t hesitate to make me some good buys.” By this point, Joe was enjoying himself so much he was just hollering at Bob and Bob was hollering back.

Imagine, thought Joe, a world in which you could trust a man to buy you a hundred fifty thousand pounds of beef with your checkbook when he is getting a commission. A particular instance of the free enterprise system running with a Stradivarian hum.

Darryl Burke, the banker, had known Joe so long and liked Joe so well and was so glad he was back in town that he would have liked to see him skip this business with the cows and, as he said, “orient his antenna to the twentieth century.” Joe sat in his bright vice-president’s cubicle surrounded by tremendous kodachromes of the surrounding countryside.

“Cut the shit and give me the money,” Joe said. He enjoyed viewing Darryl in his suit because it gave him the curious ticklish surprise of time passing to see an old pal of the mountain streams and baseball diamonds actually beginning to blur into “the real world.” Joe was without contempt for “the real world”; it merely astonished him that any of his old friends had actually succeeded in arriving there. Joe leaned over and said in a loud whisper, “Does your secretary actually believe this act of yours?”

Darryl grimaced and waved his hands around. He knew of course that life was a trick. But it wouldn’t do to have the secretary find it out. Joe hated having to sit somewhat outside and spot the gambits. But he sustained a slight fear that whatever carried people into cubicles and suits would deprive him of his friends. There did seem to be a narrowing as life went on. An old fishing companion who threw the longest and most perfect loop of line had become a master of the backhoe. He dug foundations and sewer lines more exactly than the architects drew them on paper. He had become his backhoe. He either rode the backhoe or he drank beer and thought about perfecting his hands on the levers. He suffered from carpal tunneling. He was never out of work. His family had everything they needed as the beer helped him swell toward perfect conjunction with the yellow machine. Was this the same as the cowboy who was said to be part of his horse?

“I’m sure you know that we are not in good times for these ranches.”

“Yes, I do,” called Joe.

“Nationally, we’re looking at a foreclosure every seven minutes. If your dad was here, God bless him, he’d tell you all about this.”

“You know the old saying, it can’t happen to me. Besides, it’s Lureen’s. I’m just the hired man.”

Darryl groaned. “Some of these fellows slip off into the night with the machinery. I can’t say that I blame them. The FHA is topsy-turvy. We’re no different. We’re having to go after some of our best operators. Incidentally, I know about Lureen’s arrangement. I know all about this ranch. And anything you do, she’s going to have to sign.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’m going to be doing so little. One Four-H kid can do more than I’m going to do with the place. I’ll scatter these yearlings and ship in the fall. It’s not even really ranching. Anyway, like I say, I just work for Lureen.”

“As long as you understand that every move drives you deeper. Lureen’s going to have to come in.” It surprised Joe that everyone seemed to know the arrangement. They considered it Joe’s place. Maybe more than he did.

Joe bent over the papers, making a show of studying them. “Your nose is whistling,” he said to Darryl. “Control your greed.” Darryl sighed. When Joe finished, he looked up and said, “Let ’er buck. I’m back in the cattle business.”

“But you’re happy,” said Darryl with a kind of crazy smile. “That’s it, you’re happy.”

Joe knew he was going to have to buy a horse. So, he skimmed a few hundred from the cattle pool and went way out north of town to see Bill Smithwick, who broke ranch horses and used to work for Joe’s father. He lived down along a seasonal creek, a place just scratched into the mainly treeless, dun-colored and endless space. Red willows grew down the trifling watercourse; and alongside them, as though they were a grove of ancient oaks, Bill had placed his home. It was an old, old travel trailer shaped like a cough drop and swathed in black plastic sheeting to keep the wind out. A black iron pipe brought water by gravity down to the half of a propane tank that served as the water trough; it was primitive, but a bright stream of clean water ran continuously. He had a big pen for loose horses and a round breaking corral. It was the bare minimum but it was fairly neat with the hay stacked right, the lariats hung up, the saddles in a shed and the old Dodge Powerwagon actually parked rather than left. There was a born-again bumper sticker on the truck’s bumper that said: “The game is fixed. The lamb will win. Be there.”

Bill Smithwick stepped out of the trailer. He wore suspenders over a white V-necked T-shirt and had a beat-up Stetson way on the back of his head like an old-timer. He was a tough-looking forty with white arms and sun-blackened hands.

“Well, God damn you anyway, you no-good sonofabitch,” he barked in a penetrating hog-calling tenor.

“I’m back.”

“To stay?”

“I’m just back.”

“You want to come in?”

“It’s not big enough in there.”

Smithwick reached behind him and got a shirt. He pulled it on and came into the yard. He shook Joe’s hand like he was pumping up a tire. “Hey, what’s the deal on your old place? Them neighbors been rippin’ your aunty off something awful.”

“We took it back. I’m going to run some yearlings there, till I see what’s what.”

“You and your aunt?”

“No, me.”

“Come on, Joe!” shouted Smithwick in the hog-calling voice.

“Really,” said Joe, sincerely.

“You’re running yearlings and you need a horse.”

“Yup.”

“What are you going to do with that no-good, low-bred, yellow-livered, whey-faced, faint-hearted Smitty?” Bill shouted.

“He’s part of the cost of doing business on that particular ranch.”

“I foller you now.”

“What you got around here in the way of a broke horse?” Joe asked.

“Well, all grade horses. And no appaloosas! Know why the Indians liked appaloosas?”

“Why?”

“They was the only horses they could catch on foot. And by the time they rode their appaloosas to battle they was so mad it made them great warriors.”

“I have four hundred dollars I will give for a gelding seven years of age or less that you say is a good horse.”

“Done.”

Joe looked off at the pen of loose horses. “What did I buy?”

“Your purchase is a five-year-old bay gelding with black points named Plumb Rude, a finished horse. He’s as gentle as the burro Christ rode into Jerusalem. How about a dog?”

“Have one, a dilly.”

“I got two I could let go. One’s fifteen and one’s sixteen. The sixteen’s the mother of the fifteen. The fifteen’s got a undescended testicle but not so’s a man’d notice.”

Joe gave him the four hundred, which he had already rolled up in his shirt pocket with an elastic around it. Smithwick stuck it in his back pocket next to his snoose can.

“Let’s go look at him,” said Smithwick. He pulled his lariat down and they walked to the bronc pen. Plumb Rude was in a bunch of eight horses, easily spotted by the way he was marked, and by his habit of walking sideways and pushing other horses out of his way. He wasn’t very big.

Smithwick made a loop and pitched his houlihan. The rope seemed to drop out of the sky over the head of Plumb Rude. Smithwick drew the horse up to him with the rope. The horse must have been caught this way regularly; he didn’t seem to mind. “Appear all right to you?” The gelding looked like a horse in a Mathew Brady photograph, long-headed, rawboned, with sloped, hairy pasterns.

“Looks fine.”

“He’s a little cold backed but that ain’t gonna bother you. Saddle him and let him stand for a few minutes and he’ll never pitch with you. And he’s hard mouthed ’cause I got hard hands! Haw!”

“Bill, I don’t have a trailer. Can you drop him by when you get a minute?”

“Where’ll I leave him, in your dad’s old corrals there?”

“That’d be fine.”

Smithwick turned around and put his hands on his hips and gazed at the pen of broncs. He was the very picture of what Joe took to be happiness. “Lemme see,” Joe heard him say, “who am I gonna mug today?”