Keep the Change

5

Together Joe and Ellen began to adopt the mopey love-struck postures, the innocent paralysis of young lovers in small towns. On Saturdays, they took one of the ranch trucks and drove into Deadrock for a swim at the city pool. Instead of yanking at each other and yelling by the poolside, they demonstrated the depth of their feeling by quietly working on their tans in fingertip proximity, or eating quietly by themselves at a shady snow-cone franchise. Joe could accept this because he knew the necessary crisis was coming. Gliding along on these parallel paths, feeling vaguely upset in this atmospheric filigree, watching the others thunder past barefoot at poolside, hot on the heels of screeching females, or crammed in fleshy heaps within sun-scorched automobiles, was almost acceptable to Joe because he was being swept along by something thrilling that he had no interest in understanding.

But when Saturday night came around, Joe watched in astonishment as Ellen rolled out the ranch road in Billy Kelton’s flatbed truck. Billy and Joe had been best friends until that day ten years ago when Billy beat Joe senseless. Joe was still not over the sense of injury. For his date with Ellen, Billy hadn’t even removed the stock rack or taken his saddle out of the bed. His filthy old chaps, lashed to the crosspiece behind the cab, flapped away carelessly. “That sumbitch must be harder than hell to steer,” Joe shouted as they went past waving, “the two of you having to sit under the wheel like that!”

But the truck came back up the road at ten. Joe saw them through the bunkhouse window. He had been pacing around, expecting to be up half the night. He dove to extinguish his light. In a short time, Ellen tapped at his door.

“Who is it?” Joe called.

“Ellen. Can I come in?”

Joe conquered the wish to let her in. “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Joe, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Tell it to the Marines. Tell it to Billy Kelton. I think you two should be very happy together.”

She cried outside the door for a while. Finally, she said, “Good night,” and Joe fell asleep.

Otis Rosewell generally stayed in town with his wife, but when things ran late, he bunked with Joe. He and Joe had a nice, easygoing relationship based on Joe’s looking up to Otis, and admiringly asking for advice. One night when they were musing about cows and horses and smoking cigarettes, Otis tossed an old screwdriver in his hand as he told about an older cowboy he knew who had worked for the Padlock and for Kendricks’ in Wyoming; this man, Otis claimed, would go out by himself for weeks at a time with his bedroll and a lariat and would single-handedly rope, brand, vaccinate, and castrate hundreds of calves. “It took a hell of a horse to keep that rope tight, naturally,” Otis went on. “But this old boy slept on the ground with his head on his saddle and hobbled his pony and went from one end of the herd to the other! He was born in a damn hurricane, this feller was—” On the far side of the bunkhouse, a rat ran up out of the woodpile about three feet up the wall. Otis threw the screwdriver toward the woodpile and it turned over in the air and speared the rat to the wall. The rat expired. Joe stared. Otis retrieved his screwdriver, threw the rat out the door and sat down.

“Let me see you do that again,” Joe said.

“Run up another rat,” Otis said.

When the time came, it came quickly. Joe went, hat in hand, to Mr. Overstreet in his office and, conscious that he was triggering the fall of his daughter’s virginity, said, “Mr. Overstreet, I’ll be going back to school soon. I think I’ll finish up and head out.” Word of his imminent departure would speed through the ranch. Awful Mrs. Overstreet would rub her daughter’s nose in it. Joe was getting ready to run up another rat.

Overstreet stood in the door of his office, which was dim except where the old gooseneck lamp lit the desk, holding a fountain pen poised in front of his chest, and said, “We’ll send your dad a good report. You’ve been a great deal of use to him and to us. I hope we haven’t seen the last of you.”

“In case I don’t bump into Ellen or Mrs. Overstreet, please tell them how much I have enjoyed the opportunity of being here this summer.”

“Well, you’ll have to tell Ellen yourself,” said Mr. Overstreet. “She’s soft on you. Even an old-timer like me can see that. Do this family a favor and let Ellen hear from you once in a while.” Joe savored the peculiarity of this departure, the old man contemplating the free labor, himself laying the fuse to carnal dynamite.

Late that afternoon, Ellen flung herself onto the floor of the wickiup and began to weep quietly. Joe hung his head. He wasn’t really cynical. He loved Ellen. He’d had the best summer of his life with her. She was like a merry shadow to him, superb with horses, incapable of worry, able to freely get around the back country that surrounded the ranch. She knew all the wild grasses as well as she knew the flowers, and could tell before they rode over a rise if that was the day they would come upon newly bloomed shooting stars or fields of alpine asters that weren’t there the previous week. She could spot a cow humped up with illness from literally a mile off, or a horse with a ring of old wire around its foot from even farther. Every walk or ride they’d taken, every middle of the night trip to town made under the noses of her tedious parents, led to this moment.

Joe kissed Ellen through her tears and began to undress her. With a languorous and heartbroken air, she helped him until finally she slid her jeans down over her compact hips. She was nude and Joe thought his heart would burst. There was a baffling mutual tragedy in this nudity. He got undressed. He had never known air in such cool purity. The air around them and between them had a quality it could never have again. When he took Ellen in his arms, her absolute nakedness was such a powerful thing it frightened him. He had to return to familiar kissing, familiar strokes of her hair to bring things back to dimensions he could absorb and dispel the sense that he had hit some kind of thrilling but finally overpowering wall. He had to collect himself; but when he drew back, Ellen was once again full in view, no longer even sitting up to accommodate his movement, but remaining supine while he cleared his head of voices.

He moved onto Ellen and simply lay atop her with his knees against hers. Gradually, the pressure of her knees gave way and one of his slid between them. She let her legs part so that his knees touched the blanket underneath them. Then he felt her spread her legs. He tried to lift up on his arms to see but she held him strongly and wouldn’t let him. He slid his hand between the points of their hips, held himself until he was started inside her, and pushed. He’d only entered a moment before he emptied himself in scalding shudders. He felt lost.

Otis took Joe to the train in Mr. Overstreet’s truck. When they got to the station and pulled up in front of the columns, Otis let his eyes follow a porter pushing an iron-wheeled wagon along the side of the tracks. “You take care, Joe,” he said over the roar of the wagon wheels. There was a bright September sun shining down on the world.

“I will, Otis. You too.”

“I think you done Mr. Overstreet a fine job.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’m sure they’d always be work for you if he was to get the place off your old daddy.”

“Is that what his plan is?”

“I’d say so, Joe. He don’t figure on you to fight for it.”

“I’d rather fight for it than come back and work for old man Overstreet.”

“He’s a cheap sonofabitch,” mused Otis. “Well, Joe, we’ll be seeing you. And good luck.”

No sooner had Otis pulled out and Joe had started dragging his duffel bag toward the passenger cars than Billy arrived in his flatbed with all the stuff still in back and climbed out. He stopped on the gravel and gestured to Joe. He took off his hat and put it back inside his truck. There was a white band of forehead against his sunburned face.

“Come here, you,” he said, with his hands on his hips.

Joe didn’t want to walk over at all. He felt almost paralyzed with fear but knew he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t walk over. This was going to be a fight and Joe didn’t know how to fight. Billy had whipped him a decade earlier and it looked like it was going to happen again. He started to walk over, feeling he might turn and bolt at every step. He stared back at Billy, at first out of a doomed sense of duty and then with increasing isolation until all there was before him was the gradually enlarging figure of Billy amid the uproar of the railroad station and town streets. Billy dropped him with the first blow and Joe struggled to his feet. He wasn’t upright before Billy slugged him again and Joe himself could hear the fist pop against the bone of his face. As he struggled to his feet once more, he heard a passenger cry out that enough was enough, but now he had Billy by the front of his shirt and was hauling him toward himself. As Billy began to chop into his face with short, brutal punches, Joe saw Billy being pushed back at the end of a policeman’s nightstick. The policeman stepped between Joe and Billy. They stared at each other with the dismay of strangers meeting on the occasion of a car wreck. “Good luck in Vietnam,” Joe said bitterly. He looked at Billy, who was glassy eyed with hatred, and then Joe turned to head toward the train. When he bent to pick up his duffel, he fainted.