Nothing but Blue Skies

29

Summer was beginning and Crest would be available in a new dispenser that sucked unused toothpaste back into the container when the customer stopped squeezing. It really looked like it would be a beautiful summer. Queen Elizabeth II planned to attend her first baseball game and might try a hot dog, though it was made clear that she could distance herself from the hot dog, since in British tradition the queen cannot express private views.

Even though his doctors abandoned his building without warning and with a month’s rent unpaid, Frank at first avoided thinking about it at all. But when he drove past and found the lights off and a youngster practicing wheel stands on his bicycle in the sprinkler-softened ground, he felt that the clinic needed to be taken care of and carefully rerented and managed. He pined for video games with the blubber-thick crack addicts of the Far North. Those knife-wielding Eskimos would have made short work of these rent-dodging white boys. He was slow to face the implications of the emptying of his clinic. It was, as they say, a highly leveraged transaction in the first place.

If the prospects of failure had crept toward him from the day Gracie left, they were now at a full gallop. He quickly reckoned whether he could slow this down. He was conscious of a kind of force bearing against him. He drove toward home but then stopped in front of his office. He got out and looked around as though checking the address. The wind up the street frightened him. It seemed like the movie wind that blows away footprints.

Two cattle buyers from Nebraska were in his office, smelling of the lots and the diesel fuel of the outbound loads, with snap-button cotton shirts, Copenhagen lumps under their lower lips and Stetson Open Road hats pulled just over the tops of their eyes. The older of the two wore eyeglasses with colorless frames. He had buck teeth and looked like he never smiled in his life, not once. His counterpart had a round chipmunky face and eager brown eyes.

Frank started out by denying everything. He spoke with a booming voice he used only around cattle buyers. His mind quietly ran on in several directions, one of which was that the bank, noticing poor crop-growing conditions and consequent low feeder replacements, was desperately trying to keep themselves, and Frank, from taking a bad blow. The bank must have alerted these boys. Force him to take the loss now and suck it out of his other collateral. The wind was blowing away his footprints.

“What do you mean, I stole those cattle?” Frank boomed.

“I don’t mean literally stole,” said the older man.

“I paid about what their owners wanted for them,” shouted Frank in a voice that would have been unfamiliar to his own mother. “But I sure picked my time and I bought them right. If you want yearlings, that’s one thing. But I don’t allow folks to discuss valuation with me at that level. Now I know where these are going and I know what feed is. I can background them till hell freezes over, you know that. But I have told you like a white man what I’ve got to have and the two of you look at me like a pair of Chinamen. You tell me that not only have I stolen these cattle in the first place but that I am not entitled to fair market value for them. Which is: eighty-four cents a hundredweight with a nickel slide at, what, six hundred pounds?”

“Five seventy-five slide,” said the younger man.

Frank shrugged. He minced over to another spot in the room in a golden fatigue. Even he could feel a sort of doom. At least these fellows weren’t rubbing his nose in it. A pleasant, protective code was in the air.

“Five seventy-five,” Frank repeated.

Part of the formula, which comforted everyone in a cattle deal, was to lose deal points without losing face. This price slide really knocked the wind out of Frank, but he didn’t let it show. His mind was moving fast. He knew he wanted to be out from under these cattle, but this thing on the slide was a fucking double hernia. He was in too good a mood when he bought them, and lately he had quit tracking them in the marketplace, a loss of interest that could get costly if it went much beyond this. With the doctors out of his building, the bank was surely wondering about him. It was time for the parachute before the USDA issued one of its devastating inventory reports or some bullshit about lighter cattle going on feed, various ruinous allegations about seasonal erosion of fed cattle marketings. He used to track this sort of thing like radar, but with Gracie gone he had begun to notice that often he just didn’t know. He didn’t really know now, but he had the urge to take flight, to bolt.

“I guess we could write you a deposit,” said the man in the glasses.

“No, I don’t expect you could,” Frank said, trying not to get in a rush, trying not to spill, trying not to let on that this was something he wanted out of now. He wanted to get this thing down to the bone. They had to know he was hurting.

“Mister, we’re a good ways from home.”

“Yeah,” said Frank, “this one I’ve also heard. You don’t dare show your face without ten pots of yearlings. You can’t even go up to the house without a thousand head because of what people expect of you in the Sand Hills.” He thought this would warm things up toward a closure, and he was right.

The older man said, “They expect quite a little, don’t deny that.”

“If you’re shipping as quick as you say, I need to show this stock paid in full. Get out your checkbook and start writing.” Frank was really saying, Don’t tell me you can’t write me a great big check for these cattle, I know you’re plenty stout.

The older man slid his eyes to his companion, moved his chin very slightly. They were going to leave Frank his shred of dignity. It wasn’t costing them anything. The round-faced younger man reached under his coat without looking and elevated his checkbook from his shirt pocket.

“I used to know a man who wrote checks for a million dollars,” Frank said, “then lit his cigar with them. Can you tell me who I can call to verify the funds?”

Frank was back out of the cattle business again. If the check didn’t bounce, he could go to the bank and tell them that although they just lost fifty thousand dollars, it could have been way worse, blah blah blah. No surprise to them. Changing times, like an ice water enema. They sent these guys. They knew there was a loss. It was just a question of how bad a one a man could take. That evening, as he walked home from the office, he made his way over to Endrin Street, to the small storefront building he owned there, the former locale of Gracie’s restaurant Amazing Grease, a modest institution she referred to as a “bio-feedbag mechanism.” The very recollection of this phrase reminded Frank bitterly of the witless companionship he had enjoyed since. No, that was ungrateful; but it didn’t give him anything like the same feeling, to say the least.

He let himself in and sat at one of the six tables. He looked around, taking things in by the light that came through the front window, past the small counter and the doorway to the kitchen. Next to the kitchen doorway, the blackboard still hung and he was able to make out a few words. He got up and went closer, peering at it. It said “Crawfish Etouffée” and it was written in Gracie’s hand in that powdery, fragile chalk script. He sat down at the table again and looked out through the window into the declining light of day.

He had a sharp feeling that he had lost his touch, a feeling that once the slide reached a certain speed, it couldn’t be stopped until it reached the bottom. He felt a chill. “Gracie,” he said aloud, perfectly aware that it was not a great thing to begin talking to yourself. “I think I’m going broke.”