Keep the Change (10 page)

“Well, all grade horses. And no appaloosas! Know why the Indians liked appaloosas?”

“Why?”

“They was the only horses they could catch on foot. And by the time they rode their appaloosas to battle they was so mad it made them great warriors.”

“I have four hundred dollars I will give for a gelding seven years of age or less that you say is a good horse.”

“Done.”

Joe looked off at the pen of loose horses. “What did I buy?”

“Your purchase is a five-year-old bay gelding with black points named Plumb Rude, a finished horse. He’s as gentle as the burro Christ rode into Jerusalem. How about a dog?”

“Have one, a dilly.”

“I got two I could let go. One’s fifteen and one’s sixteen. The sixteen’s the mother of the fifteen. The fifteen’s got a undescended testicle but not so’s a man’d notice.”

Joe gave him the four hundred, which he had already rolled up in his shirt pocket with an elastic around it. Smithwick stuck it in his back pocket next to his snoose can.

“Let’s go look at him,” said Smithwick. He pulled his lariat down and they walked to the bronc pen. Plumb Rude was in a bunch of eight horses, easily spotted by the way he was marked, and by his habit of walking sideways and pushing other horses out of his way. He wasn’t very big.

Smithwick made a loop and pitched his houlihan. The rope seemed to drop out of the sky over the head of Plumb Rude. Smithwick drew the horse up to him with the rope. The horse must have been caught this way regularly; he didn’t seem to mind. “Appear all right to you?” The gelding looked like a horse in a Mathew Brady photograph, long-headed, rawboned, with sloped, hairy pasterns.

“Looks fine.”

“He’s a little cold backed but that ain’t gonna bother you. Saddle him and let him stand for a few minutes and he’ll never pitch with you. And he’s hard mouthed ’cause I got hard hands! Haw!”

“Bill, I don’t have a trailer. Can you drop him by when you get a minute?”

“Where’ll I leave him, in your dad’s old corrals there?”

“That’d be fine.”

Smithwick turned around and put his hands on his hips and gazed at the pen of broncs. He was the very picture of what Joe took to be happiness. “Lemme see,” Joe heard him say, “who am I gonna mug today?”

About a week later, the yearlings started coming in on partial loads, eastbound. They never could get it together to make up a whole semiload. Joe just had to pick them up as they arrived. The truckers left them at the stockyard in Deadrock and stuck the receipts and brand inspections under the door at the scale house. Joe went out there with a stock trailer in the evening and an old irrigator’s cow dog he had borrowed for the day. The low buttes on the prairie to the north of the stockyards were ledged with hot weather shadows, and blackbirds were lined up on the top planks of the cattle pens. Joe’s cattle were bunched around an automatic waterer at one end, a mixed batch of light grass cattle. Joe backed the trailer to a Powder River gate and used the dog to load the cattle. He closed the door and looked in along the slatted sides of the trailer where the wet muzzles pressed out. He took his time going back out the river road and hauled them right through the wire gate on the south pasture. He stopped and opened the trailer just at dark. A few yearlings craned and looked out into the space; then one turned and stood at the
rear edge of the trailer looking down. The others crowded in front, bawled, and the one looking down jumped. After a pause, the rest poured out to look at the new world. They scattered and began to graze. Joe felt something inside him move out onto the grass with the cattle. It was thrilling to feel it come back.

The house was below the level of the immediate surrounding hills. Before sunrise, the tops of the cottonwoods lit up as though they were on fire, while the lower parts of the trees and their trunks continued to stand in the dark of night. Gradually, the conflagration moved downward, revealing the trees, and finally raced out along the ground, emblazoning the horizontal sides of the ranch buildings.

Into this bright scene came old man Overstreet on a bony little grulla mare, and wearing an overcoat. Alongside of him, a middle-aged man hurried to keep up. He was wearing hiking boots and a buffalo plaid shirt. Overstreet gazed around the buildings from his trotting horse until he spotted Joe.

“Joe, I’m tickled to death to see you back. This here is Mr. Prendergast of the town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” Joe shook Mr. Prendergast’s hand. He had a horsy, eager, well-bred face. “Mr. Prendergast is writing about our area for … for what?”

“For a German travel magazine,” said Mr. Prendergast.

“How are you, Mr. Overstreet?” Joe shook his hand. The old man had aged startlingly to a kind of papery fierceness like a hornet.

“Where’s Otis Rosewell?” Joe asked.

“He rode a sedan to the bottom of the Gros Ventre River. Otis has been gone for years.”

“I’m sure sorry to hear it.” Joe was startled that he had never heard this before.

“I’ve been seeing these mixed cattle coming in. Who do they belong to?” Overstreet asked crossly.

“Really, they’re Lureen’s steers. I’m taking kind of a break. I told her I’d watch them for her.”

“Why didn’t she come to me?” Overstreet demanded.

“She said you had given up your lease.”

“I had, I had! But I didn’t expect her to cut off communications!”

“I don’t think she meant to do that, Mr. Overstreet. But like I say, I was willing to watch them for her. And the grass was already coming.”

“Let me tell you something, young man. This outfit sets slap in the middle of me. I would have had it long ago if it hadn’t galled me to let your dad stick me up. But you people need to clear some of these ideas with me before you go off half cocked.”

Joe was not happy with the phrase “you people.”

“Mr. Overstreet,” he said, “we don’t need to do any such a thing.”

“I’m only interested in what’s neighborly,” said Overstreet, turning to go. “That’s how the West was won.” Prendergast laughed uncomfortably and the two of them went off, Prendergast having to jog to the horse’s walk as old man Overstreet shouted, “Prendergast, write that down!”

There was a dog living underneath the house, a mass of gray fur living in solitary misery. Joe had glimpsed it three different times, just at dusk when it sat on a low ridge, looking out over the empty country north of the ranch. He began to leave a
pan of kibble on occasion to see if he couldn’t get this dog to accommodate itself to some degree to the human life of the ranch. But it was pretty clear he was going to have to shoot it; skunks were showing up with rabies and an untended dog like this would be held responsible for all depredations on local livestock.

Joe sat on a nearby hill with a rifle watching the pan of dog food, often drifting off into a nap during which he inevitably had bad, guilty dreams about shooting the dog. It was a job Joe didn’t want.

Once he shone the flashlight under the cabin. Exposed teeth glistened in its beam. The dog snarled without ever taking a breath, a continuous, bubbling drone. Joe could have shot it where it was. Getting the corpse out was one thing, but the idea of killing something which had retreated to a final crevice not one other creature desired was insupportable.

Sometimes Joe sat outside the cabin until the dog thought he had gone. Then he would hear the dog moaning to itself, a whimpering agony as its parasites gnawed away at it. Joe put a piece of meat on a pole and shoved it up under the cabin so that he could feel the jarring of the feeding dog, and its agony resumed like a great outside force.

He went to the vet and bought an aerosol can of boticide, antiseptic, and a pair of sheep shears. He now had forty-three dollars tied up in the dog. Then he bought a T-bone. That brought it to almost forty-nine. He drove out to the cabin.

When he played his light underneath the building, the wolfish eyes burned yellow. The dog growled on, both inhaling and exhaling. Around its face, a thick corona of matted fur extended for half a foot in all directions. Joe pushed a pole up in there at the end of which he had arranged a noose of broken lariat. The dog shuddered back to the ultimate inch of recess,
driving dust forth in a swirl around the beam of light as the pole approached. It snapped with lightning speed at the end of the pole but the loop kept on coming forward until it was around the brute’s neck. Joe tightened the loop slightly, then slipped the pole out. Now holding the nylon rope, he could feel the throb of life at its end. A peculiar quiet reigned in the dusty yard as Joe looked around in an attempt to foresee the consequence of pulling the creature into the light of day. Maybe the dog had the right idea. But Joe had grown up with dogs and this one had lost all shadow of the old alliance with mankind and had become an instrument of secrecy and fear.

The time had come. Joe began to pull. A scrambling could be heard from within and a faint dust cloud rolled out, accompanied by the most piteous tone, a pitch of voice rendingly universal. Joe was about to overwhelm all of the dog’s accumulation of temper and habit and to drag him out into the daylight.

The rope was as hard as a stick in his hand. It yielded a degree at a time. Sweat poured from Joe. It runneled down his laugh lines. It stung his eyes. As the dog advanced to meet its fate, it occurred to Joe that he didn’t know what it looked like, except for that big wedge of muzzle. For a split second, a part of him wondered what would happen if the dog weighed a thousand pounds. Joe regained enough rope to be able to coil it at his feet. He made one coil, then another, and while he was making the third, the dog shot out from under the cabin, hit the end of the rope and snatched Joe onto his face. Joe held on while the dog ran baying in a great circle, its hindquarters sunk low to scramble against the restraint of the rope.

Joe got to his feet with the rope still in his hands, his palms burned and stinging. He retreated until he reached a pine
tree that once shaded the yard of the cabin. Here he was able to take a couple of turns around the base of the tree, and bracing his weight against the rope draw the dog to the tree and snub its head against it. Joe’s heart ached at the suffering of the animal in its captivity, the misery which broad daylight seemed to bring. The dog lay there and howled.

Joe bound the dog’s mouth shut with twine, narrowly avoiding being bitten, and began to clip the fur with the sheep shears. As soon as he broke the surface of the matted fur, he hit a bottomless layer of pale, thick maggots and felt his gorge rise. He drove back his loathing until he had clipped the dog from end to end, down to its festering skin. He got an old rusted gas can from the shadow of the cabin and went to the small creek that ran past to fill the can with water. He rinsed the dog over and over while the dog, thinking that it was drowning, renewed its moans. Once Joe was sure the dog was clean, he sprayed it with antiseptic and then finally a blast of aerosol with the botfly medicine. The dog lay panting.

Joe cut the twine binding the dog’s mouth, placed the T-bone within reach and freed the rope. The pink medicated mass of the dog, whose wounded pride found voice in a sustained howl, bolted across the dirt yard past the eloquent T-bone and into the hayfield, where it sat and poured out a cry and lamentation for the life in the dark which it had lost.

Joe spent the rest of the morning sealing up the space underneath the cabin with rocks. The dog sat in the field and watched him, making small adjustments in its position toward the steak. Joe noticed these adjustments and, as he walked back toward the ranch, he felt that, given time, the dog would sell out. He thought he knew how the dog felt.

•

The phone rang. There was some excitement about getting his first call. A small voice came over the line. “Joe, this is Ellen Overstreet. Do you remember me?”

“Why I sure do. How are you, Ellen?”

“I’m just fine, Joe. I was excited to hear you were back.”

“Where are you living these days?”

“Until recently, outside of Two Dot. But we’re separated. I think we’ll work it out though.”

“ ‘We,’ who is we?”

“Actually, I’m Ellen Kelton now. Do you remember Billy Kelton?”

“Are you kidding? After all the thumpings he gave me? Is he still the wild cowboy I remember?” Joe’s question was polite in the extreme.

“Well, not nearly. He’s gone to ranching.”

“Are you all going to make it through this dry spell?”

“I honestly wonder,” said Ellen in a musical voice. “We have had such dust pneumonia in our calves from following their mothers down these old cow trails to water. We’ve lost quite a few of them. Billy’s spent all his time doctoring.”

“I can’t tell you how nice it is to hear your voice. It
sounds
like you’re as pretty as ever.”

“I’m not!” Ellen laughed. “On the other hand, nobody puts on weight around here. But let me get to the point.”

“All right,” Joe said warmly; but the truth was, a nervous feeling had invaded his stomach, something which had just crossed time from where he used to be to where he was now.

“I just thought—and I don’t know how easy it will be to do—but I just thought you might like to see your daughter.”

“
My
daughter? You say
my
daughter. Well, yes! What’s her name?” Joe watched the wind toss an end of the curtain into
the room. He knew what was meant when people talked about time stopping. He felt his hand moisten on the telephone receiver.

“Her name is Clara.”

“Clara. Where did you get that?”

“It’s Billy’s mother’s name.”

“I see. Kind of an old-timey name. I guess I’m going to see her, huh?” A sudden intimacy descended with the crisis. “I mean, why in hell don’t you just tell me what I’m supposed to do, Ellen.”

“That’s up to you, Joe. I’m just making the offer.”

“Anybody know this?”

“I told Dad.”

“You did? And what did he say?” His mouth had gone chalky. “You told your father?”

“He said, ‘Good,’ ’cause Clara will get it all when you people’s place is part of his and it all makes a perfect square.”