Keep the Change

19

A few days later, he set up his drawing equipment in the kitchen, where the light was good and the coffee was close. But he knew it was a lie and he put it all away again. It was as if he was posing these materials. Astrid came in wearing her wrapper drawn close around her with one hand and carrying a cup and saucer in the other. She went to the sink and looked out the window. Joe felt that there was something brewing: the set of her mouth, her silence, something. He managed to watch her without being intrusive. As she looked through the kitchen window, her expression began to fill, to bloom, and he knew an emotion was cresting, an exclamation was at hand.

“Get a load of that ghastly dog!” she screeched. Joe jumped.

“Is he out there?” Joe got up and went to the window. The dog, lightly blurred with new fur, sidled over the lawn, glancing at the house, his corkscrew tail shifting metronomically over his back.

“I never saw one quite like that,” said Astrid.

“I can’t believe he’s just out walking around.”

“He’s like something from outer space,” she said. “I want to go see him.”

“He’ll be back under the house the second he sees you.”

Joe watched from the kitchen window. He saw the dog react to the motion of the inside kitchen door. His tail sagged to the horizontal. His lower jaw dropped slightly and his ears clenched into a suspicious knot on top of his head. Then Astrid appeared in the picture. She said something to the dog. She patted the tops of her knees. The crown of the dog’s head smoothed as his ears dropped adorably. He bounced back and forth, then bounded to Astrid and licked her face. She found a stick for him to fetch; but when she reared back to throw it, he yelped and ran under the house. Astrid went over and lay on her stomach to plead with the dog. Joe wound open the kitchen window and hauling himself forward over the sink and faucets was able to look straight down on the lower half of Astrid’s torso; the rest of her was under the house. She had let the wrapper slip up so that the hard shape of her buttocks was visible up to where they were sliced from view by the clapboard siding. “Aw, come on,” she was saying, “whaddya say?” Joe’s face was only a matter of feet from her bare loins and he could feel himself swelling abruptly against the sink. Astrid began to back out from under the house. He was terrified that she would discover him hanging out of the kitchen window, and he grappled his way inside, managing to hit one of the faucets in his rush, and soaking the front of his pants. By the time he was standing flatfooted on the kitchen floor once more, Astrid walked back in, stared at his wet bulging crotch, and said, “What have you been doing” in an uninflected voice. It was not a question. She sighed deeply and went into her room.

“Let me see if we can’t just drop the rental car right in town,” he said into the bedroom doorway.

“Give her my regards,” said Astrid, in a kind of trill.

“You can reach me at my aunt and uncle’s,” he called back. “The number’s by the phone.” He paused in the doorway, soundless, in case anything could be heard from her direction, any little thing. But it was quiet.

He shot into Smitty and Lureen’s. He didn’t really want to stop, hadn’t intended to. As soon as he got there, he called the ranch. “It occurred to me,” he said to Astrid, “that the number might actually not be there—”

“It is.”

“Okay,” he sang, “that’s all I had in mind.”

“Bye.”

Smitty was alone. Lureen had gone to do something at the rectory. Smitty sat at the kitchen table, his hands clasped on its top. He wore the familiar suit pants and his shirt was buttoned right up to his throat. He seemed to stand before some final and invisible inquisition as he wailed, “Here I am living on leftover chicken salad and baked beans! While Lureen dusts for that double-chinned preacher!”

It might have been his present mood or his recollection of his gingerly first night here, but Joe said, “Then why don’t you get up off your ass and cook something?”

After a long moment, Smitty said, “I have decided that I didn’t hear you. You have still got, by special dispensation, an unblemished record in this house.”

“I just wanted to check in and see if you and Lureen are getting along okay.”

“We are, if you think so. We’re not complaining. The Overstreets are not happy about you running those cattle. I don’t know what we, or at least Lureen, are going to live on.”

“I think you’re going to be fine,” said Joe and went out.

“You forgot your thesaurus!” Smitty called from the stoop.

“I’ll be back!” Standing in front of the two-story blue expanse of clapboard in the perfectly centered doorway, Smitty reminded Joe of a cuckoo clock. Smitty used to be a man about town, but there were only one or two apertures in the building in which he appeared now: the front door and his bedroom window.

Joe drove down Benteen Street and turned on Fifth, went a couple of blocks in an old neighborhood whose telephone wires came through heavy foliage and slumped low over the street. Plastic three-wheelers were parked on the sidewalk. A woman smoked and seriously watched her dachshund move along the band of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Another woman stood in the street and waved her husband on as he backed his Buick slowly from an old garage. At a certain point, she flattened her palms in his direction, the car stopped, she got in, and they drove off. There was a five-cent lemonade sign but no stand. Finally, with a flourish, Joe arced Astrid’s rental car into Ellen’s driveway. As soon as he had stopped, the engine still running, the passenger door opened and Billy Kelton climbed in.

“Hi, Billy.”

“Let’s take a ride,” he said.

Joe put the car in reverse. “Any spot in particular?”

“You pick.”

Joe crossed the neighborhood the way he had come. He made a point of greeting people with a small neighborly wave. Most responded as from long acquaintanceship except the lady with the dachshund, who was sufficiently possessed to remove her cigarette and squint after him with irritation. Billy exhibited a lazy athletic grace. He was dressed more conventionally now in a pair of Wranglers and a blue work shirt. He had a hardbitten, thin-lipped, fairly handsome face, and a husky voice.

“I don’t know what to do about the fact you’ve been seeing Ellen …”

Joe looked out to the oncoming street. He set his head to one side as though about to speak. Then nothing came.

“I fought for a country I’m not sure I care to live in. But while I’m here I can find a few ways to make it my own. If you follow me.”

“Not completely. And I thought your marriage was on the rocks. Weren’t you seeing someone just the other day? But yes, Billy, I missed the war in Vietnam.”

“Well, there you go. That’s about it, isn’t it.”

Joe could nearly feel the heat of his stare. They drove on down past the wool docks alongside the railroad tracks and then curved on up toward the courthouse.

“I don’t want to just go to spelling things out here, pardner, but there’s this little country of my own where I make all the laws. Do you believe me?”

Joe pulled up in front of the glass doors of the sheriff’s office. They could look through the windshield, through the door, and see law officers. It would be an easy thing to honk on the horn. Joe tapped it lightly; two officers glanced out and he waved them off as though he had bumped the horn accidentally.

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?” Joe said bitterly. “If you’ll admit being in that war you’ve got nothing to hide. Now, do you want to walk, or shall I? I don’t care, this is a rental car anyway.”

“I’ll walk, thanks. But just take me pretty serious here. It’s important. Ellen and I haven’t given up. And we have a sweet little girl that’s worth any sacrifice we might make.”