Gallatin Canyon (11 page)

“Take your time,” said Neville, moving instinctively for the television. As he watched it, she opened the door to the bathroom for an instant and took his picture.

“Memories.” She smiled and closed the door again, wondering what the cops would make of a guy with nothing but a channel changer and a rubber. She created a bit of noise with the shower curtain, the faucets, and a cupboard door. It seemed like enough. She stood stock-still and listened. She thought someone else was in the room; then the realization that it was only the television made her doubt her sexuality.

Downhill Racer.
Neville was Robert Redford. He locked his knees together and bent into every slalom, concentrating so thoroughly that the condom fell off. After a while, he began to miss Dulcie and rapped politely on the bathroom door. Neville wasn’t stupid. He smiled to himself; he knew she wasn’t in there. He got dressed and went outside. The bathroom window was wide open, the curtains hanging against the wall of the motel. The car was gone. He returned to the room and tried to kick the condom across the rug, but it just rolled up under his foot. He carried it dangling to the wastebasket and then stretched out to enjoy something reliable. Even the light of the TV flashing on the ceiling seemed pleasant. During the slow parts of the movie, he luxuriated in his relief. He couldn’t fathom Dulcie and he wasn’t even going to try. Nevertheless, out of fealty to his father, he would confide his intuition that she’d make a poor vice president. It was not out of a sense of having been betrayed but the unseemly picture of a vice president crawling out the window of a cheap motel. In this, he was well brought up, and he loved his poor, confused papa.

Dulcie was at the station house turning in her expense receipts, principally gas, motel, along with film, when they brought Neville Senior in for booking. He stared at her as they tugged him past. The cop at the desk didn’t even look up as he stapled her chits to a large sheet. So Dulcie in effect spoke to no one when she said, “He bonds out, he settles, the beat goes on.”

When Neville Senior dragged himself through the front door that night, Neville Junior was there to console him, having heard all about what had happened to his father on the local news. They fell into each other’s arms. Senior’s heart was overflowing, while Junior felt he was in a school play in which he had memorized the lines without knowing what he was saying.

Finally, Senior spoke. “I was lonely.”

“Mom’s dead,” said Junior, in his odd blank way.

Neville’s father explained his scheme so that his son at least would know that he hadn’t been on some unseemly quest for his own carnal pleasure.

He had offered Neville Junior numerous pets in the years since his mother’s death, hoping that greater familiarity with animals might help him understand his father’s urges—and expenses!—but that had come to nothing, as Neville Junior found animals to be little more than a stream of unpredictable images and therefore unsettling. The dog was given away, the cat was given away, and the hamster bit an extension cord and was electrocuted.

“That Dulcie sure is mean!” he now cried. “It’s just not right, Dad. I’m going to pay her back.”

When the newspaper published his name as a patron of whores, Neville Senior lost his job at the bank. We’ve all been there, his friends and former colleagues told him, but they hadn’t, nor had they forfeited their homes to their own bank as he had, though he was allowed to keep the rather fussy furniture his late wife had chosen. In time, that too would be sold and the funds applied to a rental house on the south side of town, where the homeless walking on their battered patch of lawn reminded the Smithwicks of just what might be next.

Senior’s friends had got him a job as assistant greenskeeper at his old golf club, where the summer heat frequently laid him low as he tried to perform work for which he had little training. He was one of eighteen assistants, and when the chief learned the bunker crew on which he’d placed Neville Senior was ridiculing him with requests for car loans or mortgages, he reassigned him to moisture sampling, which allowed Senior to wander the golf course alone with probe and notebook under a hard prairie sun. The greenskeeper himself took subtle pleasure in lording it over someone who had fallen through the invisible ceiling that had separated them for so many years. A former caddie replaced by electric carts, he understood perhaps better than Neville Senior ever had how perilous is all employment, though as a working-man it was unlikely society would bother to take away his job for consorting with prostitutes, as there wasn’t enough class separation to produce a stirring fall. In many places, whores were now “sex workers” moving freely between golf courses and no-tell motels like any other independent contractors.

Neville Junior’s habits remained little changed, except that because of the danger of muggings his former acquaintances were reluctant to visit him. Since his father had not shared his plan to commit suicide, there was no reason for Neville Junior to imagine a time when the television would be shut off and he would have to bestir himself should he wish to eat or be sheltered from the weather. His father’s decision was based equally on his failed career and his now-accepted inability to communicate with his son at any level.

He made his departure as uneventful as possible. For two straight days he watched shows with his only child, including uplifting sitcoms, sitcom reruns, and sitcom pilots that were seeing the light of day that very night. An agnostic, he retained a faint hope, magnified by overpowering loneliness, of meeting his late wife and that gave him the courage—indeed, a certain merry determination—to gas himself in the garage. Before he went there to seal the windows and start the car, he needed final confirmation and so he returned to the living room, whose shabbiness was emphasized by the prissy furniture. The back of Neville Junior’s head was outlined against the square of light of the television. “Tomorrow, I’ll be gone,” he said, but his son didn’t hear him. “Goodbye, Karl.” The consequences began: the discovery of the body, the unattended funeral, the eviction of Neville Junior, and the loss of all things familiar to him, including those he cared for most: the smell of lilacs and spring perennials filling the air, the sounds of pickup baseball in the park a few blocks away, and television.

Dulcie Jones’s days were numbered.

On the Fourth of July, four months after the passing of Neville Senior, Orval looked up the dirt road in front of his house toward the Cheyenne car garden, the crooked line of telephone poles, the mud puddles mirroring blue sky and thundercloud silhouettes, the watchful hawk in the chokecherry thicket, and saw a willowy man in old clothes coming toward him, a man whose still-dark beard and bounding gait marked him as younger than his apparent circumstances might have suggested. Orval sensed he was coming to see him, and indeed he was. There was no reason for him to know that this was Neville Junior, or to know what brought young Neville to his ranch.

He removed his hat rather formally on arrival at Orval’s porch, the hair under it looking wet and plastered down close around his small skull, while Orval eyed him suspiciously from his rocking chair. Neville’s well-cared-for teeth gleamed through his beard, whose black bristles falsely suggested a hard life. “Mister,” he said, “I’m in a bad way. Throwed a rod here a mile or two back and didn’t have the do-re-mi to get it fixed. I need a job.” Neville had the Appalachian accent routinely heard in Westerns down pat.

“Not hiring.”

“A little sumpin’ to eat, place to sleep, and a TV; wouldn’t have to pay me.”

“Wouldn’t have to pay you? What exactly is it you want to do for free gratis?”

“I’d work, but like I say you’d need to train me.”

“But not pay you?”

“You heard right, mister. Just those things I mentioned.”

The two swept out the old milk house, which had a two-stage concrete floor and a place for the creek to run through, though the creek had been diverted long ago and the room was dry enough. Then they assembled an iron bed and rolled out a thin mattress, which they beat until the room filled with dust. “No telling what’s been living in here,” said Orval, with an ingratiating smile. Neville threw up his hands in wonder. “But I guess that’ll do you. Gon’ have to.”

“TV.”

“What’s that?”

“I said TV.”

“I hadn’t got but one and it’s up to my house.”

“I told you when we started in on this,” hissed Neville, “that I’d require a TV.”

The reception was exceptionally poor in the milk house, but by adding aluminum foil to the rabbit ears they were able to get two channels, one all snowy with Greer Garson. The tension seemed to go out of Neville’s body as he told Orval to call him for supper and then settled down on the pipe bed for some viewing, ignoring the dust that continued to rise and the perhaps-too-vigorous closing of the door by Orval.

In the morning, Orval was determined to see if he could get his money’s worth out of this man, who had introduced himself as Karl “with a K.” He could tell right away that Karl meant to stay, as he hurled himself into shoveling out the calving shed, a job requiring no experience whatsoever but a strong tolerance for grueling repetition. At one point, he went at this with such demonic energy that it caused Orval to tell him whoa-up, he had all day. Neville wiped his forehead, leaned on the shovel, and asked Orval if he had any family, smiling as he heard about Dulcie as though for the first time. Today he’d parted his hair in the middle, and with the dark beard he had the appearance of an old-time preacher, someone who could talk about Jesus with plausible familiarity. Orval thought he’d have to find him some other clothes if he worked out, something brighter, because he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the preacher look. There was always one going up the road with a Bible in the glove box supposedly to convert the dump bears but probably to check out the little squaws.

This one was here for vengeance. “She ever get out to see you?”

“Just on weekends.”

“But that’s tomorrow.”

“The horse sees more of her than I do.”

“Could be, now you got a hired man, there’ll be more time for the two of you to visit.”

“I’m available!”

It seemed like he spent half of Saturday, the set on mute, listening to her gallop up and down the place, wondering when she’d get the curiosity to come over and say howdy. Poor old Orval was doing the vigil thing in his rocker, Saturday beer in hand, but Neville could tell he wasn’t getting much in the way of contact either—on a day made for family, a light breeze in the cottonwoods, the Cheyenne sleeping it off up the road, and the rare lowing of distant cattle. Springtime!

She knocked on the door.

Neville had a loose, gangly act ready for this, head tipped to one side, wire lightly wrapped around his left hand as he turned to let her in. Blue light from the silent television jerked around a room that smelled like concrete and once stored an ocean of purest milk. Dulcie wore jeans and tennis shoes, a snap-button Western shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had on sunglasses. He liked her firm arms, the lariats and roses that decorated the pink shirt. She gazed at him and, crossing her arms behind her back, leaned against the door she’d just closed. She raised her forefinger to slide the sunglasses down enough to look over their top.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“That’s more than I can say!” Neville called out.

“May I turn that thing off?”

“No!”

“Well, I am. I’m turning it off.”

Dulcie went past him and bent over the set, reaching for the controls. Neville had the wire on her in nothing flat, called her a lowdown escort service. Though there was a spell of tumult— more like a rerun than anything new—it was the moment when movement stopped that finally produced surprise, and Neville was swept by desire at last. Everything in his life had led to this ravishing stillness. He knew who to dedicate this one to.

Orval went on sitting in his rocker, stubbing out his cigarettes in a tomato juice can. Sooner or later, Dulcie would have to put the horse up and come have a few words with him. At the same time, his new hired man wandered down the darkening road away from the little ranch, away from the Cheyenne and their old cars, weeping at the innocence now beyond his grasp, never to be a virgin again. It was great to feel something so strongly. He hoped to weep forever. If only his father could have been there to see him with tears streaming down his face. It would have been a beginning, something good. He could just hear his voice.

“Well, son, I’ll be damned. You feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you?”

Miracle Boy

We always went back to my mother’s hometown when someone was about to die. We missed Uncle Kevin because the doctors misdiagnosed his ruptured appendix, owing to referred pain in his shoulder. Septicemia killed him before they sorted it out with a victorious air we never forgave. The liverless baby was well before our time—it would have been older than my mother had it lived—but my grandfather’s departure arrived ideally for scheduling purposes in the late stages of diabetes; we drove instead of taking the train and en route were able to stay over for an extra day at the Algonquin Inn in western New York, taking advantage of Wienerschnitzel Night, and still make it in time for the various obsequies while reducing prolonged visits by priests. (My father was an agnostic and fought sponging clergy with vigor, remarking that he had “fronted his last snockered prelate” and adding, “Amazing how often it’s Crown Royal.”)