Keep the Change

14

His first free afternoon, Joe stopped by the Clarendon Creek school. Ellen stood on the edge of the small clearing that served as a playground, her sweater tied around her waist and wearing a pair of tennis shoes so that she could double as a physical education instructor. She was urging four tiny children in running laps out around a two-story boulder and back. Their books and papers were weighted with stones next to the lilacs.

“Hi there,” Ellen said with an enormous smile.

“What do you know about this?”

“It’s pretty wild,” she said.

“I couldn’t wait.”

“You’re looking well, Joe.”

“Thanks. And you.”

“Do you mean it?”

“I do.”

“How’s your painting?”

“I’m in the space program actually.”

“What a shame. You used to write to me from school, remember? About your painting. You were going to be a new Charlie Russell. I saw one of your paintings finally. I really couldn’t understand it, Joe. It looked kind of like custard. Next to a house, sort of.”

“That happens to belong to one of the Rockefellers,” Joe said defensively, but the name, he saw, didn’t ring a bell.

“Let me make it quick. I’ve got to go back inside. Clara is with her dad this month.”

“On the same old Kelton place?” Joe asked, feeling awkward.

“Yes, but don’t go there. I’ll try to work something out. And look, please be discreet. Billy is a wonderful father and I don’t want to disturb that.”

“How about dinner?”

“You what?”

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.

“Your face is red!”

“Nevertheless, the invitation stands.”

“Yes!” The four children completed their lap and Ellen drifted toward the schoolhouse with them. “Call!” she said. “For directions. We can have a scandal!”

He recognized that there was an unworthy basis to his extreme present happiness. His life was taking a turn that would help push Astrid out once and for all. He already felt the freshness and the simplicity of Ellen as an antidote, though he semi-admitted to himself that that was not what people were for.

He picked Ellen up at six, at her apartment. The length of day had advanced so that it seemed the middle of the afternoon. She came down the outside stairway, skittering to the ground level, looking as fresh as though it were first thing in the morning, in a dark blue summer dress with minute white stars. She had braided her mahogany-colored hair and pinned it up.

“I’m starving,” she said, inside the car. “I got so wound up talking to the children about Lewis and Clark I must have burned a lot of calories. I had fun trying to make them see the part of the expedition that went up the Missouri. I tried to make them realize that for Lewis and Clark it was like going into space. I told them the Missouri was the great highway for the Indians and all the tributaries were neighborhoods with different languages and different histories. The little turkeys would really rather hear about war but the unknown gives them a shiver too. Or what they all call ‘the olden days.’ I’m going to split the difference with them. I’ll show them Clark’s camp on the Yellowstone and then take them over near Greycliff to the graves where the Blackfeet massacred Reverend Thomas and his nephew. By the way, I’m learning to play golf. I’m going through a difficult time and about a hundred people have recommended golf. I’m glad they did. By the second lesson, I preferred golf to marriage!”

Joe looked at her as long as he thought he could. What a feeling this was giving him! He was driving through a nice neighborhood. In one yard, a man shot around his lawn on a riding mower in high gear. At the next house, an old gent stood in the opening of a well-kept garage with its carefully hung collection of lawn tools on the wall behind him. On most lawns, a tiny white newspaper lay like a seed. American flags cracked from the porches. On the last lawn before Main Street, a rabbit sat between two solemn children.

They walked into the lobby of the old Bellwood Hotel. The bar off to the left was full of after-work customers. Two cowboys came out with their drinks to have a look at Ellen while they waited for their table. “Yes?” she said in her best schoolteacher’s manner. They shot back inside.

“I’ll have the sixteen-ounce rib-eye,” said Ellen before she’d had a look at the menu. The waitress came and took their drink orders: a draft beer for Joe, Jim Beam on the rocks for Ellen. Joe decided on some pan-fried chicken and ordered for both of them. The dining room was half full. A schoolteacher was kind of a celebrity in a small town like this, so they got a few glances. It was too soon for anyone to have put much else together.

Joe was trying hard to relate the present confident Ellen to the early version he had known. He felt he had to do it quickly because the present Ellen would soon eradicate the one he remembered.

“Someone told me you people were getting ready to lose the place,” said Ellen. “Dad keeps trying to figure out how to get it. He’s only been doing that for forty years.”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Although I don’t know what good a ranch is anymore. My dad has been getting jailbirds to help put up hay because they’re the only people desperate enough to work. To get somebody to fence you have to find an alky who wants to be in the hills to dry out. Plus the grasshoppers and Mormon crickets are about half ridiculous. I think my dad might just go to town. I don’t blame him.”

Joe listened intently. It gave him a chance to stare at her without having to talk. He knew Overstreet would never go to town.

“By the way,” she said, “let me ask you this, okay? Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“I did.”

“Well?”

“She died in a fern bar stampede.”

A look of tolerance crossed Ellen’s face. Joe tried to remember Astrid charitably but all that came up was her pushiness, her health fetishes, her fascination with cosmetics. Astrid had taught him the field strategy for the aptly named war of the sexes. She had also taught him the charm and drama of picnics on the battlefield. It was a provisional life with this Astrid.

Ellen was as good as her word. When the meals came, she made short work of her big steak. Once when her mouth was too full, she grinned straight at Joe, and shrugged cheerily. This appetite amazed him. And when she was done, she flung herself back in her seat and said, “Ah!”

“Now what?” said Joe, putting down his own utensils. He was thinking about a cigarette. The tension of not mentioning the child was getting sharper.

“Would you like a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like to go out to Nitevue and hit a bucket of balls.”

“I’d rather talk about Clara.”

“I’d rather hit a bucket of balls.”

They were the only two people on the range. It was a green band in the middle of prairie, glowing under floodlights. Nitevue was situated just off the highway east. It was an open shed with places to sit, three soft drink machines, a golf cart, and a small counter where one arranged for the clubs and balls. Ellen asked for a number-four wood and Joe asked for anything that was handy, which turned out to be a thing called a “sand iron.” The concessionaire looked just like a local farmer in a John Deere cap and overalls. He made it clear in every movement that his class background had taught him to despise all sport and waste such as this. He handed over balls, clubs, and tees with an air of ancient loathing.

Ellen stood up on a kind of rubber mat and began firing the balls out through the bug-filled flood of light, almost to the darkness beyond. At first Joe just watched her. There were gophers speeding around, running, stopping, looking, whistling, trying to fathom life on a driving range.

Joe took three whiffs for every time he hit the ball. But even when he did connect, it just went up at a high angle and landed a short distance away. He took a somewhat mightier grip and swung hard; this time the ball almost towered out of sight, yet fell just in front of them. Quickly absorbing the spirit of this unusual game, he shouted, “Sonofabitch!” and examined the end of his club for manufacturing deficiencies. He went back and demanded another club; this one was a “two iron.” With it, he managed to scuff the ball along the ground in front of himself, while Ellen drove one long clean shot after another. What’s more, his arms ached from inadvertently fetching the ground itself blow after blow.

When she had finished driving her last ball, Ellen walked over to where Joe was sitting on a bench. Her cheeks were flushed with high spirits. Joe thought that it would be a very strange individual who didn’t find her lovely.

“You don’t seem to have much of a gift for this,” she said.

“I’m afraid I don’t. Actually, I tried it a few years back. I’m about the same. My dad took it up late in life. I always found something sad in that. Couldn’t put my finger on it.”

“Tell you what, why don’t you drop me at my place. I’ve got papers to correct and I make an early start. Probably by the time you get out of bed, I’ve been hitting a lick for two hours.”

Joe took a leisurely drive along the river and then turned up her street. There just didn’t seem to be any pressure anywhere. When they reached her house, he walked her to the bottom of the outside stairs to her apartment. She turned suddenly, reached to one of his hands, gave it a kind of rough squeeze, bounded up the stairs—“I enjoyed it!”—and was gone behind her door. He stood there vaguely happy, vaguely conscious that they had never made a real plan to see his daughter. He was ashamed to admit that it seemed too much. And the mention of Billy Kelton as a good father galled him.