Nothing but Blue Skies

5

On Tuesday afternoon he drove to Harlowton for lunch with Bob Cheney, who managed the JA ranch. The JA was a pioneer cattle ranch that once belonged to the Melwood family; Mrs. Melwood, the widow of the last rancher in the family, left it to the Salvation Army and Bob Cheney managed it for them. Frank met Cheney at the Graves Hotel, waiting for him a short time on its veranda and staring out at the clouds over the prairie. They were as white as shaving cream. Cheney arrived in a truck filled with fencing materials and salt blocks, and parked right in front of the hotel. They went inside and ordered lunch.

“How long has it been since you had yearlings on us, Frank?”

“Long time ago. ’Eighty-one, anyway. Are you going to have any room for me this year?”

“I don’t quite know yet. How many head?”

“I’ll have to see where the market is, where the bank is.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to tend them. I’m short a man this season. I could find you a fellow, if you want to pay him.”

“That could work. Do you think you’ll have room for three hundred head of steers?”

“I might,” said Bob. Their lunch arrived and he smiled up at the waitress. Bob had a thin mouth, sharp nose and chin. He looked like an English pirate. “Did you bring your clubs, Frank?”

“You know, I didn’t. I have to go straight from you back to town.”

“What a shame. Can’t even make nine holes?”

“I can’t,” Frank said. “And you know what else? I haven’t played since the year I last had cattle on you. I just kind of pulled my business life over my head and that was that.”

Some war was on the radio and the café was quieter than usual. Conversations murmured on about the eroding price supports for grain, the cattle feeder monopolies, baseball.

“Your boy still at the college?” Frank asked.

“Getting ready to graduate.”

“Is he going to come back to the ranch?”

“I don’t think so.” Bob smiled, shrugged.

You didn’t work your way up in ranching. You might get the job but the owner was always someone else. Frank saw a man appear in the doorway with his dog. The continuity was going out of ranching, and Frank felt sorry for the people who had seen so much in it and couldn’t go on with that, in their families or in any other way.

The waitress announced, “No dogs.”

“No dogs?” the man in the doorway said.

“No dogs.” She bent behind the counter and emerged with a large beef bone. “Take him outside and give him that.”

The man took the bone and went out. He was back in a moment without the dog. “I gave him the bone,” he said. He had a pushed-in upper lip and gray-black crinkled hair that grew well down on his forehead.

“Yeah, good. You going to have lunch?” the waitress asked.

“I might just have a cup of coffee while she’s working on that bone.”

“Yeah, that’d be fine,” she said.

“Where’d that great bone come from?”

“Today’s soup.”

“Oh, sure. Well, she’ll appreciate it.”

Frank’s father used to eat here regularly when he had an interest in the hardware store and then an insurance agency that later moved to Grass Range, where it was absorbed by an office in Lewistown. Then he had a ranch at Straw, west of Eddie’s Corner, and it was easy to use the Lewistown office for the ranch business. The ranch, as far as he was concerned, was just another file at the Lewistown office. Payroll, government programs, expenses, everything was just that one file, ran almost a thousand mother cows. Bob Cheney started at the Straw place when he was a young cowboy, later went to work on the JA for Mrs. Melwood and then the Salvation Army. All the same job except the Salvation Army didn’t speculate but ran it as a conservative cow-calf place and in good years leased some grass. And it was good grass: buffalo grass and some bluestem.

Bob and Frank had always gotten along, once even worked together, so Frank got the first call on the grass. It wasn’t insider trading; he paid the going rate, but it was an awfully good grass deal. Frank thought he could make some money on it, a little anyway. He did these yearling deals only when he thought he was having a good year. You took out a big loan and bet it on one throw of the dice. He liked being in business with people like Bob Cheney, liked talking to them.

“When’s your girl finish school?” Bob asked.

“Two more years.”

“She’s at Missoula?”

“At Missoula.”

“She got a boyfriend?”

“She did. I hesitate to tell you this, but he had a gold ring in his nose.”

“Aw, come on.”

“I ain’t a-shitting you,” said Frank rakishly. He wallowed in the fellow feeling produced by sharing this impression of weirdness in his child’s generation. The nose ring was part of the bohemian stance of the young man, a stylish underpinning for his scheme to get into “pizza graphics.” Frank hadn’t asked about that. He’d just said, “Right.” He was baffled by young people these days and knew full well that that was a cyclical thing. He just couldn’t fathom how they could be so indifferent to their own future and security when it looked like the country had much to fear in years to come. Even the entrepreneurial adventure that Frank had more or less backed into was without appeal to them. Frank thought he himself must be a transitional figure, unlike his father, who had never wanted anything but a business life; Frank had waffled into it, then grown to like it. The young people he ran into seemed only to have a sense of entitlement to clean air and money.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” said Bob. “My boy brings his friends out to the ranch. They think it’s a kind of zoo. He brought this big old football player out, boy about yay big, and he wanted to know which one of the animals he could pet. I told him, ‘Size you are, you can pet ’em all.’ He didn’t want no part of that. Says he wasn’t petting nothing he didn’t know all about.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him to pet the goddamn lambs. He kind of flutters out in the pen and goes to petting. I tells him, ‘You’ll be okay’ ”

They thought about this.

“Frank,” said Bob, “I believe a man could put five hundred head out there.”

Bingo. That was what Frank was waiting to hear. He kept talking but he was already running the numbers in his mind, already picturing the strategy with the bank, perhaps deferring some interest. He wanted a reason to have to come out here. Something about the other stuff was starting to go.

“Here’s where we left off,” Frank was saying. He was back in town. The banker George Carnahan was standing between Frank and the Dolan Building, which housed a shoe store and a row of second-floor apartments. There was a man in the window of the shoe store hunkered down in his stocking feet, arranging shoe samples. “You were going to go halves with me on the cattle. We were going to fix the rate at nine and there wasn’t going to be any points or other charges.”

“That’s where we left off?”

“Yeah.”

Carnahan had a young face and white hair. His mouth was small and level and it was right under his nose. It was like a face by someone who couldn’t draw too well.

“Where did we have to go from there?” The banker smiled.

“Size,” said Frank.

“Size?” asked Carnahan.

“Size,” said Frank. “This is going to be what you guys call a jumbo product. I’d like a quarter of a million dollars. More or less. It’s five hundred yearlings, basically. You’ll have to get back to me, right?”

“Right.”

“And remember this, it’s only money.”

“I’ll let you know, Frank.”

“And I hope we won’t be talking about other collateral than the yearlings.”

“Right, Frank. Frank, we walk it through. Don’t always be so adversarial. I think it makes you feel you haven’t sold out if you act like you’re always in a fight with the banks.” Carnahan laughed; it was really a sharp remark and he was quite proud of it. Frank had to smile. “I think you know it’s kind of a joke about confining the collateral to the yearlings alone. We like you, Frank, but if you fuck up we’re going to get you. We’re a traditional small-town lender, just like it says in our ad.”

Frank had come to rely on this fiscal narcosis in the last few years. He suspected it had to do with insufficient spiritual values, but those seemed to have gone out the window with his wife. Press forward, he thought. Buy things, then sell them. Try to make a profit. Embed yourself in the robust flux, the brushfire of commerce. Sometimes, when he ate at Julio’s deli with his friends, he saw the university people here and there. They looked positively lost among the florid car dealers and subdividers. They winced at the loud townspeople or gazed fondly at the farmers and ranchers, who they thought were purified by their proximity to Mother Earth. Maybe they would like to have the farmers and ranchers up to try their special spaghetti sauce. And what a shame it was that some of the weavers and potters up at the college didn’t take more time to get to know the snowmobilers. It wasn’t just that fellow feeling was plummeting around the land but that the animosity was getting to be so detailed. Frank wondered if maybe he was getting morbidly sensitive to all this floating ill will. It was a terrible thing when a neighborhood deli felt like the Gaza Strip.

He got the loan, and in the wild fluctuations of the cattle market it was a dangerous loan. They were happy to walk it through when they thought it might blow up in your face. Despite his bold speech to the banker, it cost Frank a lien on the clinic.

The yearlings arrived in nine bunches, from Choteau, Camas Prairie, Sumatra, Sedan, Wise River, White Sulphur Springs, Ekalaka, Cat Creek and Geraldine. Frank stayed at the Graves, in Harlowton, and met each load with his summer cowboy, a very competent twenty-eight-year-old nephew of Bob named John Jones. When Frank sat down in the café of the Graves with Jones to do his W-4 form, he found that this bright young man could neither read nor write. For some reason, as he helped Jones, whose face blazed with shame, he felt like a transubstantiated version of his father, a patient and unambiguous man who would see Jones’s illiteracy as just a small impediment in getting the yearlings onto the grass in an orderly way, where they could begin to gain weight and be worth more money. To Frank’s father, every animal had a dollar meter on its back and the needle was always in motion. Sometimes it was going down. If you ran a thousand head, you had a thousand meters and you had to keep those needles going up.

Frank wondered what his father would have thought at a time when big calves were going for five hundred dollars a round and that quarter-million-dollar note was dragging its ass at nine and a half percent, compound interest all summer long, rain or shine, secured by a note on a medical clinic! He would have made money, Frank concluded, for the simple reason that his father never saw any romance in cattle. There’s a little money in cattle, he used to say, not much, and no romance. A hundred years ago there was big romance in cattle because there was big money in it. There is no big romance combined with small money. Period. Frank’s uncle Rusty once said: The lady doesn’t marry the carpenter unless he’s got a second home in Santa Monica or a two-foot dick.