Keep the Change

27

Joe arranged to meet Smitty at the dining room of the Bellwood Hotel and got a table off to themselves. From the lobby, Joe had watched Smitty drive up in a Cadillac. The car was so astonishing and had such power to undermine any subsequent conversation that Joe hurried into the dining room to prevent Smitty’s knowing he had seen it. In this small town, a new Cadillac was an item of almost exaggerated splendor and dimension and had the effect of a cruise liner on remote native populations. Joe feared that Smitty had been unable to live up to this new vehicle, and under Joe’s gaze would slink from its interior in defeat.

But Joe was wrong. Smitty appeared in the doorway to the dining room, chucked the waitress under the chin, and waved the leather tab of his car keys at Joe. “Joe boy,” he called, waltzing toward him. “Am I late?”

“Oh no, Smitty, you’re not late. You’re on time.”

Smitty hung his coat over the back of his chair and sat down with a bounce. “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” he inquired, letting his eyes drift to the royal elk over the entryway to the kitchen. A waitress emerged and Smitty arrested her with a grin. “My nephew and I would like a sarsaparilla.” The waitress took their orders and when she was gone, Smitty said, “There’s a side to my drinking, I admit it’s small, that I really enjoy. Isn’t that surprising? After all these years? A side to this disease that I’d hate to see changed.” This moment all but took the wind from Joe’s sails. When the drinks arrived, Smitty held his glass of sour mash to the light and said, “You have no idea what this looks like to me. I do not see an instrument of torture. I see something more golden than any casket in the Theban tombs. Knowing that it will kill me in the end, I see the purest, most priceless ambergris of the Arctic cetaceans, the jewel in the crown, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Does it bother me that I will die in abject misery, shaking myself to death in delirium? I have to be honest: not right now it doesn’t. It’s a strong man’s weakness.”

“I’ve been to the insurance people,” Joe said. “We’re going to have to settle with them.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll go to jail if they press charges. The insurance company still won’t pay. Lureen would be miserable without you. And it is not customary to serve cocktails in jail.”

“What do you think, Joe?”

“I think you’re guilty. Lureen’s your ace in the hole.”

“Yours too, Joe.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you? Whose ranch is that?”

“Mine.”

“Really?” said Smitty. “Say, I knew your father very well and I don’t really buy all this. He didn’t like you much, my friend.” Smitty’s incredibly wrinkled, almost Eurasian face split into laughter. Joe thought of the word “dynamite” as it was used a few years ago. He thought that Smitty had a dynamite laugh, except that it made Joe want to dynamite Smitty. He was weary of trying to understand Smitty. He had just seen a child abusers’ support group on television. It seemed society didn’t understand their need to beat children. It was getting harder and harder to be understanding. It had always been a problem but now the problem was almost out of sight. Smitty was capable of love, he’d heard; but Smitty’s great drive was to get out of the rain. It was hard to understand Smitty completely and not hope his dynamite laugh blew up in his face.

“Let me ask you something, Smitty. Did you borrow the money for the shrimp against the ranch?”

“Yes I did,” he said smartly.

“And is there any left?”

“Not much!”

“I see.” It was going to have to be a great year for cattle. A century record.

“And I presume you’d just as soon concede that the insurance company has a point.”

“That’d be fine.”

Of course, thought Joe, let’s be honest. Smitty had challenged Joe’s claims to the ranch. He didn’t know whether or not he cared; but at least he knew he should care. Moreover, he’d be damned if it was Smitty’s to decide. On the other hand, as the booze hit Smitty and began its honeyed rush through his bloodstream, he slumped into vacancy and into the great mellow distances past judgment. Joe had been around alcoholism all his life but didn’t really understand it. Liquor was just a pleasant thing to him, possessed of no urgency; he would never have resisted Prohibition. It just didn’t matter to him as it did to his parents or to Smitty, who was bound for glory.

When Smitty resumed speech it was in a mellifluous tone. “I knew with the loss of the lease,” he said, “something had to be done. And you were the one to do it. I also knew that it was not necessary, technically, for you and Lureen to consult with me—”

“You were much occupied with the seafood business—”

“—but I am family, and I would like to be kept abreast of things.”

“You will be.”

“Our vital interests are now tied together, at least emotionally, and when you buy cattle with the ranch as collateral, I should be told.”

“Hereafter, you will be.”

“And when you sell those cattle—”

“Yes.”

“Just tell me.”

“We will.”

“I would like to accompany those cattle to the auction yard.”

“You may conduct the sale yourself,” Joe said feelingly at the sight of Smitty’s twitching face, the watery blue eyes seeming to plead for a stay of execution. “Once we bring those cattle down off that grass, I will have done all I could.”

Smitty rested the nail of his right forefinger on the rim of his glass. “Along about when?” It was only then that Joe suspected Smitty’s intentions exactly.

“October fifteenth,” said Joe. There was now no one else in the restaurant; the two sat in its streaming vacancy as though they were in a great train station on the edge of empty country. “Lureen and me,” said Smitty, musing. “I don’t know. Our mother was a saint, an uncrowned saint. And our father. Um. A short-fused man with a little white mark in his eye. Kind of blind in that one, he was. He used to whup your dad till he was black and blue. Supposed to have made a man out of him. What’s that mean, anyway?” Joe didn’t know. He wasn’t thinking of the question, really. He had just had a presentiment of disaster.