Keep the Change (17 page)

“Leasing is the only money there is left in these places.”

“The money? What money? So far as I can tell, the grazing fees aren’t even making it to Lureen.”

“We’re listing it as a receivable. We’ve had some problem collecting. If we can’t collect it, we can write it off. We all need that.”

“To write it off you’re going to have to sue the man that owes it to you. The government requires that.”

“Whatever.”

“Maybe the rancher you were dealing with needed to be examined more closely.”

“He’s over twenty-one. What can I say?”

Smitty put a cigarette in the exact center of his mouth and with a book of matches in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, looked off into space and thought. “Joe,” he said and lit the cigarette. “Why don’t you kiss my ass?”

“Because I have preserved my options, Smitty. One of them is to keep an eye on you.” Then he added, “I know the seafood business hasn’t treated you well. You must be under pressure.” Smitty’s eyes flicked off to the wall.

Well, thought Joe, at least it’s a beginning; we’ll gradually move old Smitty into position and then do the right thing. He watched Smitty and tried to get to the bottom of the combined helplessness and guile, without much luck. The signals of an old boozer like Smitty, thrown off by the cheesy deliquescence of the brain itself, were seldom instructive.

The glow of Astrid’s cigarette in the twilight of her room looked as cheerful as a Cub Scout campfire to Joe as he finished telling her the whole story. He leaned over from his straightback metal chair and lifted the cigarette from her lips. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost a month. He was tempted to take a drag and told Astrid so. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s so hard to quit.” He could feel her easy thought. “God,” she said, “that’s a wonderful
story. But you must have such complicated feelings about all this.”

“I’m working on it.”

Astrid began laughing. She was really laughing too hard. He leaned over and gripped her shoulders to steady her. The laughter made him nervous and he took her cigarette. He had to stick her cigarette way out in the corner of his own mouth to keep the smoke out of his eyes. Then her face began to glisten with tears. Anyway, she wasn’t laughing anymore. Joe sat off to one side, holding her cigarette for her.

“One of these days,” he said, “it’s going to get cold. And that beautiful white snow is going to come floating down.”

Joe arranged to buy an old iron woodstove from a rancher up toward the Musselshell River. It was in one of the livestock papers and he bought it very inexpensively, but he had to haul it himself. He took the flatbed truck and drove up through a vast expanse of bluish sage-covered hills. He went through two isolated hamlets, huddled with their Snow Cats and hay sleds piled outside in the heat. One little town had a bar the size of a single-car garage and a log post office that seemed dwarfed by its wind-whipped flag. He drove up to the edge of a stand of lodgepole pines bordered by a big buffalo grass pasture. Someone was burning ditches and high above the column of smoke a blue heron soared, trailing its legs, looking for its accustomed lowlands. Old black automobile tires hung on the fenceposts, painted
Keep Out
as a small log house was approached. The house sat low and defensive behind a field of discarded machinery: old iron wheels, wooden spokes, and last year’s winter kill dragged out among the disarray—hides over skeletons, decomposing calves.

An old man answered the door, a glass of whiskey in one hand, his stomach hanging over the top of his pants and chew dribbling out the corners of his mouth. He had hairy nostrils and small, crinkled eyes. “Here for the stove?”

“Yeah, I am.” Joe got the money out of his shirt and reached it to him.

“Thank you much,” said the old man.

“There’s a Farmhand on the Minneapolis-Moline. You load that thing on your own?”

“You bet.”

The old man narrowed the doorway. He scrutinized Joe. “Sonny Starling wouldn’t be your daddy, would he?”

“Yes, sir, that he was,” Joe said. The old man nodded and thought.

“He was a hand, really what you’d call a pretty hand.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” said Joe.

“But the bank took all the pretty out of your old man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He come in and ruint me in ’fifty-six. I never made her back. That bank just took Sonny and made him into an entirely different feller.”

Joe had heard this sort of thing before.

“Well, let me get loaded out of here,” he said.

“That’s a hell of a way to get ahead in the world.”

“Maybe,” said Joe, “but anyway, he’s dead.”

“Good,” said the old man.

Joe threw himself into loading the stove. He lowered it onto the flatbed with the Farmhand and boomed it down with some chain he had brought along for the purpose. Evidently the old man didn’t need it anymore. He had a better one or he’d gone to electric or gas. Joe started back. When he was
nearly home, he saw a pickup truck pulled off the interstate next to the barbed wire. A man stood next to a horse whose head hung close to the ground. The man looked quite helpless and Joe sensed the horse was at the end of the line. It was at this point that his eyes finally filled with tears.

Joe drove to Billings on Tuesday to meet with an attorney for the Continental Divide Insurance Company. He dressed in a coat and tie and parked the old flatbed far enough away to dissolve association with it by the time he reached the office. He was early.

He walked into the Hart-Albin store to use up a few minutes and collect his thoughts. He strolled through the toiletries section, admiring the beautiful young women who sold perfumes and intimate soaps, and who tried the delicate atomizers on one another. He sprayed some sample cologne on himself. The glass display cases revealed an Arabic world of indulgence. He tried more cologne. He invented biographies for the salesladies. Reared on hog farms or in the families of railroad mechanics, each greeted her discovery by the perfume manager with an effulgent blossoming. He politely tested one last cologne with a sweaty squeeze of the bulb. A musky, faraway penumbra engulfed him, quite startling in its power.

Time to go to the lawyer. He crossed the street, walked half a block north, and entered the offices. He announced
himself to the secretary and immediately the lawyer, Gene Bowen, appeared at his door and gestured Joe inside with a handful of papers. Bowen was a lean, harried-looking man, plainly bright and short of time.

Bowen moved around behind his desk. Joe sat in a comfortable chair in front of it. Bowen rested his chin on his hands and let Joe begin. “My Uncle Smitty, Smith Starling—”

“Yes,” said Bowen decisively, suddenly wrinkling his nose. Joe was astonished at the lawyer’s reaction to the mention of Smitty’s name. “Is that you? What is that?” Then Joe understood Bowen’s reaction.

“Canoe.”

“You what?”

“Canoe. It’s a cologne. And a couple of others. Musk was one.”

“Very well. Go ahead. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“My Uncle Smitty—”

“Would you be offended if I opened a window?”

“Not at all.”

Bowen got up and struggled with the window behind his desk without freeing it. “I’m gonna end up with a fucking hernia—”

“Here, let me help.”

They got on either side of the window and heaved upward as hard as they could. Bowen pulled his face to one side and wrinkled his nose fiercely. “It’s not as if it was some kind of animal droppings,” Joe said.

The bottom of the window casement tore free; wood fragments and dried putty flew across Bowen’s desk. His finger was bleeding. He walked around and opened his door. “Let that air out while I get a Band-Aid.”

The secretary poked her head in. “What’s going on in here?”

“We had a little trouble with the window.”

“I’d better ring up maintenance.” Turning to Joe, she asked, “May I ask what you’re wearing?”

Joe was getting angry. “I mixed a few scents, trying them out. But socially speaking, I’ve had better luck shitting my pants.”

Bowen returned and went straight to his desk. “Leave that open, Mildred,” he said to the secretary, pointing at the door. “Let’s try to bear down and get through this as fast as we can. Okay, ‘Smitty’ is your uncle. Smitty’s got his tail in a crack. You want to help Smitty. Why?”

“I have an aunt who I like very much. She depends on him. They are like a little couple.”

“They are.”

“Yes.”

“And what does she do?”

“She is a retired schoolteacher.”

“So, she has a pension?”

“A small one, and a small income from a small family ranch.”

“Which belongs to?”

“Uh, to Lureen. To my aunt.”

“And Mister Smitty got his stake in the shrimp business by?”

“Mortgaging the ranch.”

Bowen sucked on a paper clip pensively.

“It’s none of my business, Mr. Starling. But why don’t you let this wonderful fellow just go to jail?”

“I’m pursuing my aunt’s interests, as I see them, as best I can.”

“Okay,” said Bowen, dropping his hands to the desk decisively. “I sense that we can speak to one another with candor.”

“I sense the same,” said Joe earnestly.

“May I be very direct with you?”

“Please.”

“Joe, your aftershave stinks to high heaven.”

“I really can’t do anything about that now.”

“As to Mister Smitty, yes, we can try to get the charges dropped. Yes, I foresee that being a discussable possibility. Under this scenario, Smitty fails to recoup the thirty thousand.
In addition to which
, the insurance company is out of pocket, I am guessing, another thirty, in fees, and in ascribable overhead.”

“What overhead?”

“They’ve got twelve floors in Denver.”

“I see. Well, look, let’s examine the cost of dropping this. You get me some specifics and I’ll try to sell it to my uncle.”

“But remember, he doesn’t have to buy it,” said Bowen. “He can go to jail.”

“I admit it’s tempting,” said Joe.

“The first time he stoops for the Lifebuoy in those big showers, he’s going to meet some very nice Indians.”

“Like I say,” said Joe, “the temptation is there.”

It was a long drive back. He listened to a local radio station for a while and absorbed himself in the community announcements. Money was being taken up to purchase bibs for senior citizens. A truculent Boy Scout made the following statement: “This week we decided what badges we are going to do. The two main ones are Tending Toddlers and Science-In-Action. And we are going to bring dues of twenty-five cents even if we are sick.” After that a member of the Lions Club explained the problems they had had building a concession stand for Little League games. They had to find out if the neighbors would object. Zoning ordinances required it be a certain distance from the street. That meant they had to move the backstop. A building permit would have to be applied for. To meet Class A Residential zoning requirements, the concession stand would have to go between the pitcher’s mound and first base. The planning board granted a special-use permit. So, after five years, they were now prepared to build the concession stand. Finally, before Joe shut the radio
off, the fire chief said they were sick of putting out prairie fires started by the railroad.

Oh, this is an odd little life, he thought, turning onto Smitty and Lureen’s street. Great shafts of sunlight came down between the old trees that lined the badly cracked sidewalk. A newspaper boy jumped the curb with his bicycle and a man in a wheelchair, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and smoking a cigar, coasted down the slight incline of the sidewalk serenely, the spokes of his wheels sparkling in the afternoon sun. Two young carpenters with a long plank resting on their shoulders, made a wide turn at the corner and disappeared. Pigeons poured out of the abandoned Methodist church like smoke and ascended into the sky; they were the reincarnated souls of miners, railroaders, and ranch hands. Things seemed so right to Joe, he was able to enfold himself in the breaking wave. Ambiguity was at a safe distance now; it was not necessary to have an opinion about anything.

Lureen led Joe into the parlor. She set out tea. He cast his eye over the curios and the lugubrious draperies that declared this an inner world. He felt he had arrived.

“I’ve been to see the lawyer for the insurance company.”

“Oh,” said Lureen, “I wonder if that was a good idea.”

“I think it was. We talked about the possibility of dropping the charges.”

“Let them charge him. He’s innocent. They can take it to court. I almost prefer it. It’s in the rumor mill anyway. It might be good to have Smitty’s name cleared publicly.”

“Are you certain this is your wish?”

“My wish is that it had never happened. But since it has, it has to be cleared. You know, I blame my own mother for
this. She doted on me and I’m grateful for that. But to her dying day, she went around town saying, ‘My daughter is an angel from heaven, but my two boys’—Smitty and your father—‘are common swindlers!’ Words like this from a mother hang on in a small town for years.”

Looking at Lureen as she poured the tea and thinking of the multitude of first- and second-graders who had gone on from her bare schoolroom greatly strengthened by her attentions, he couldn’t help thinking his grandmother had been partly, and maybe entirely, right.

He was so fond of Lureen that, against his own inclinations, he said, “If you change your mind and I can help, let me know.”

Lureen looked off and thought for a moment. “When you were a little boy, you sucked your thumb. You sucked your thumb until you were seven years old. And the orthodontist said it had given you a severe overbite and that if you didn’t quit immediately, it would have to be corrected by surgery. Remember? It was in August and you were such a desperate little boy. But it was Smitty who sat up with you at night when you cried and put a sock over your hand and stayed up night after night with you—for a week!—until you succeeded. Night after night! He never had a drink until you quit. These people who want to put him in jail don’t know anything about that side of Smitty.”