Keep the Change

30

It was just starting to get cold. The local weather forecasts were revised twice a day as the weathermen of three different channels strove against one another in explaining the Rorschach shapes of storms in the Gulf of Alaska. Joe concentrated on the fates of these storms as they threw themselves on the mountains of Washington and Idaho, and expired. One of these days soon, they were going to slide down through Alberta, catch the east side of the Rockies, and turn Joe’s world upside down.

He took this time to cut firewood and spent days on end in the cottonwood groves taking out the standing dead and transporting the wood to a pile next to the house. The growth of this pile fascinated him. He sensed it was in his power to make a pile bigger than the house. He moved along the creek and cut up the trees the beavers had felled. While he worked, he could see trout on the redds, swirling after one another and fanning nests into the gravel. The eagles had started coming in from the north and were standing high in the bare trees along the stream. Their rapine, white-tailed, dark and monkish shapes showed from a quarter of a mile away.

He sat down in the autumn forest, an old woodchopper with his hot orange chain saw. I am posing for eternity, he thought. He was desperate. He was desperate because the constant companionship of unanswered questions was affecting his nerves and suggesting that it was the absolute final and daily condition of living. He was no longer interested in remaining in the space program.

The irrigation water stopped running and the springs were down to a bare minimum. He moved the yearlings every few days, an activity that took him to remote pastures on horseback. He enjoyed his horse’s sure-footedness. He could travel on breathtaking sidehills you could barely negotiate on your own feet in a kind of skywalking perfection as the cattle flew forward in coveys. In this motion and vastness, he could actually think about life, beginning and end, with equanimity, with cheer. Joe thought he was vaguely bigger than everything he saw and therefore it would be tragic and for all nations to weep over, if anything happened to him. But here in the hills, he would feed the prettiest birds. As promised by all religions, he would go up into the sky where his folks were.

Joe felt the return of love and remorse, like a bubble of gas rising through crankcase residue. The slowness of the bubble’s traverse seemed to express the utter gallonage of his desire as well as the regret that made it something of a rich dish and gave this emotion its peculiar morning-after quality.

“I think we’re missing something,” he said.

After a moment, Astrid said, “I know what you mean.”

She bit her thumbnail in thought and looked off. Joe examined some carpet. The white hills, the departing dream, the impending embarkation for Hawaii only illumined the plight. He had heard nothing from Ellen and felt she didn’t want him to see Clara. When you’re young and think you’ll live forever, it’s easy to think life means nothing.

Astrid stood up and stretched, then stopped all motion to smile at Joe. She went to the door and opened it, letting in the clear, balsamic breath of foothills, of sage and juniper and prairie grass. She stood on tiptoes to stretch and inhale.

“Joe,” she said deliberately, “this isn’t for me.”

Joe didn’t hear her. He turned on the radio. First he got a semi-intellectual cornball on FM and then a wonderful song from 1944—what could that have been like! — about a cowboy going East to see the girl he loves best. “Graceful faceful” went the chorus, “such lovely hair! Oh, little choo-choo, please get me there!” It was sung in the kind of voice you’d use to call a dog in the dark when you really didn’t expect the dog to come. It disturbed Joe because it suggested that the Americans of the recent past were insane foreigners. Then an ad for a local car dealer filled with apparently living objects: “Cold weather is coming and your car doesn’t want to face it. You need a new one but your wallet says ‘No’!” Joe thought, Is anyone following this? Astrid was still in the doorway. What was it she’d said?

There was no great problem in getting the criminal charges against Smitty dropped. Once Joe relieved the insurance company’s fears of damage claims, once those assurances were documented and in place, the ripple of society’s desire for retribution expired on the bench of the small, local courthouse. Nevertheless, a few motions had to be gone through. Joe drove Smitty to the hearing as though he were his child and had been involved in a minor scrape. There was only the judge, dressed in the plaid wool shirt in which he had been raking leaves, and his secretary. Smitty appeared in his uniform and stood at attention throughout the questioning. So great was the judge’s pity for this foolish person that he concluded his inquiry with the question “Can I count on you to avoid this kind of thing in the future, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir! You can, sir!”

The judge gazed down at Smitty with a melancholy smile. “Smitty, Smitty, Smitty,” he said. “You’re kind of dumb like a fox, aren’t you?”

“Possibly so, yes, sir.”

“Thank your lucky stars, Smitty, that you live in a small town where we know you for what you are. Adjourned.”

Driving along to his meeting at the bank, Joe remembered his happiest period as a painter. One summer, he had gone on the road to do portraits of Little Leaguers. He set up a table at ballgames all over Montana and saw the rise and ripening of the great mountain summer from a hundred smalltown diamonds. Instead of pumping gas or choking on dust behind a bale wagon, Joe turned out bright portraits of children in baseball uniforms. It was an opulent spell that Joe remembered now with a kind of agony.

Darryl Burke, Joe’s banker, leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. He wore a great blousy pin-striped blue and white shirt. “How’s life on the haunted ranch?”

“Great for me. I’m a ghost myself.”

“Bankers don’t believe in ghosts. Bankers believe in the enforceability of contracts.”

Joe didn’t think this was the time to depict his dream of letting it all go back to the Indians by way of atoning for a century of abuses; nor to unleash his misogyny on family matters.

Darryl, his chair tilted back on two legs, pitched forward on four. “Do you know why Lureen lost her lease with Overstreet?”

“Not really. I figured everybody had all the grass they wanted.”

“They lost their lease because Overstreet heard you were coming back.”

“I’m not following this. What’s that have to do with it?”

“Well, old Smitty had a double deal going there with old man Overstreet. When he couldn’t get that ranch off your dad, he tried to get it off Lureen. Smitty wanted to make a deal but all he could control was the lease. As long as you weren’t around. A lease for Smitty and a lease for Lureen. His was bigger.”

Joe thought for a long moment before saying, “That’s awful. I mean, I know it’s awful. But if you and I were to go dig into it, we’d find out that Lureen was just looking the other way, happy that Smitty was staying busy. Still, you don’t like to hear a thing like that.”

“Of course you don’t. And we’re talking property here, man. When are you going to ship the cattle?”

“Pretty soon. But I’m hesitant.”

“Hesitant? Now is the hour! This is the best the market is ever going to be.”

“I think they’re going to run off with the money.”

“Who?”

“Smitty and Lureen.”

“No, Joe, you don’t think that. You just think you think that. That’s crook time.”

“They already have Hawaiian costumes. I’ve seen them.”

“Come on. You mean that’s where you think they’re headed?”

Joe had his hands close to his chest and he pantomimed the playing of a ukulele. “Surf’s up,” he said grimly. Darryl stood and pulled down part of the venetian blinds so he could look out toward the drive-up tellers.

“Smitty will never run out of ideas,” he said. “He’s a fart in a skillet. But this is way past him. I don’t see him making such a big move.”

“He is concerned about falling on the ice. He wants to be warm.”

“But,” said Darryl, “when you get right down to it, if that’s what they want to do, they can do it. They can. It might be the end of the ranch. But they can do it. If that’s what they want. We covered our bet when we loaned money for the cattle. If Lureen wants to exchange those yearlings, and the money she borrowed for Smitty’s shrimp deal, for the ranch itself, she can do it. Don’t look at me, look at your father. I just keep score.”

Suddenly, it came to Joe. “It’s not fair!” he said. He decided he wouldn’t mention that the deed, together with all its liens and encumbrances and appurtenances thereto, was in his pocket, thick as a week’s worth of junk mail. In some opaque recess within Joe, a worm was turning. Property!

“I better get going,” he said. “Thanks for visiting with me about this.”

“Glad to, Joe. It’s pretty clear, anyway.”

“Try to come out and see us before it snows.”

“What happened to summer? It’s really hard to believe it could snow already.”

“Do you actually notice such things from in here?” Joe asked. Darryl stared.

“I get out once in a while,” he said.