Keep the Change (19 page)

They drove into the ranch yard. The dog retreated to a juniper and stared indifferently. Joe jumped out of the truck and, crossing in front of the hood, turned to face Astrid through the windshield. Joe felt she’d been away for years. He spread his arms in welcome. A terrific smile consumed his features. Astrid lit a cigarette and pushed the windvane open while she watched Joe.

“Baby, we’re home!” he cried. He thought the pain of his love for Astrid would be more than he could stand.

Joe arranged to meet Smitty at the dining room of the Bellwood Hotel and got a table off to themselves. From the lobby, Joe had watched Smitty drive up in a Cadillac. The car was so astonishing and had such power to undermine any subsequent conversation that Joe hurried into the dining room to prevent Smitty’s knowing he had seen it. In this small town, a new Cadillac was an item of almost exaggerated splendor and dimension and had the effect of a cruise liner on remote native populations. Joe feared that Smitty had been unable to live up to this new vehicle, and under Joe’s gaze would slink from its interior in defeat.

But Joe was wrong. Smitty appeared in the doorway to the dining room, chucked the waitress under the chin, and waved the leather tab of his car keys at Joe. “Joe boy,” he called, waltzing toward him. “Am I late?”

“Oh no, Smitty, you’re not late. You’re on time.”

Smitty hung his coat over the back of his chair and sat down with a bounce. “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” he inquired, letting his eyes drift to the royal elk over
the entryway to the kitchen. A waitress emerged and Smitty arrested her with a grin. “My nephew and I would like a sarsaparilla.” The waitress took their orders and when she was gone, Smitty said, “There’s a side to my drinking, I admit it’s small, that I really enjoy. Isn’t that surprising? After all these years? A side to this disease that I’d hate to see changed.” This moment all but took the wind from Joe’s sails. When the drinks arrived, Smitty held his glass of sour mash to the light and said, “You have no idea what this looks like to me. I do not see an instrument of torture. I see something more golden than any casket in the Theban tombs. Knowing that it will kill me in the end, I see the purest, most priceless ambergris of the Arctic cetaceans, the jewel in the crown, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Does it bother me that I will die in abject misery, shaking myself to death in delirium? I have to be honest:
not right now it doesn’t
. It’s a strong man’s weakness.”

“I’ve been to the insurance people,” Joe said. “We’re going to have to settle with them.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll go to jail if they press charges. The insurance company still won’t pay. Lureen would be miserable without you. And it is not customary to serve cocktails in jail.”

“What do you think, Joe?”

“I think you’re guilty. Lureen’s your ace in the hole.”

“Yours too, Joe.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you? Whose ranch is that?”

“Mine.”

“Really?” said Smitty. “Say, I knew your father very well and I don’t really buy all this. He didn’t like you much, my friend.” Smitty’s incredibly wrinkled, almost Eurasian face split into
laughter. Joe thought of the word “dynamite” as it was used a few years ago. He thought that Smitty had a dynamite laugh, except that it made Joe want to dynamite Smitty. He was weary of trying to understand Smitty. He had just seen a child abusers’ support group on television. It seemed society didn’t understand their need to beat children. It was getting harder and harder to be understanding. It had always been a problem but now the problem was almost out of sight. Smitty was capable of love, he’d heard; but Smitty’s great drive was to get out of the rain. It was hard to understand Smitty completely and not hope his dynamite laugh blew up in his face.

“Let me ask you something, Smitty. Did you borrow the money for the shrimp against the ranch?”

“Yes I did,” he said smartly.

“And is there any left?”

“Not much!”

“I see.” It was going to have to be a great year for cattle. A century record.

“And I presume you’d just as soon concede that the insurance company has a point.”

“That’d be fine.”

Of course, thought Joe, let’s be honest. Smitty had challenged Joe’s claims to the ranch. He didn’t know whether or not he cared; but at least he knew he should care. Moreover, he’d be damned if it was Smitty’s to decide. On the other hand, as the booze hit Smitty and began its honeyed rush through his bloodstream, he slumped into vacancy and into the great mellow distances past judgment. Joe had been around alcoholism all his life but didn’t really understand it. Liquor was just a pleasant thing to him, possessed of no urgency; he would never have resisted Prohibition. It just didn’t
matter to him as it did to his parents or to Smitty, who was bound for glory.

When Smitty resumed speech it was in a mellifluous tone. “I knew with the loss of the lease,” he said, “something had to be done. And you were the one to do it. I also knew that it was not necessary, technically, for you and Lureen to consult with me—”

“You were much occupied with the seafood business—”

“—but I am family, and I would like to be kept abreast of things.”

“You will be.”

“Our vital interests are now tied together, at least emotionally, and when you buy cattle with the ranch as collateral, I should be told.”

“Hereafter, you will be.”

“And when you sell those cattle—”

“Yes.”

“Just tell me.”

“We will.”

“I would like to accompany those cattle to the auction yard.”

“You may conduct the sale yourself,” Joe said feelingly at the sight of Smitty’s twitching face, the watery blue eyes seeming to plead for a stay of execution. “Once we bring those cattle down off that grass, I will have done all I could.”

Smitty rested the nail of his right forefinger on the rim of his glass. “Along about when?” It was only then that Joe suspected Smitty’s intentions exactly.

“October fifteenth,” said Joe. There was now no one else in the restaurant; the two sat in its streaming vacancy as though they were in a great train station on the edge of empty country. “Lureen and me,” said Smitty, musing. “I don’t know. Our
mother was a saint, an uncrowned saint. And our father. Um. A short-fused man with a little white mark in his eye. Kind of blind in that one, he was. He used to whup your dad till he was black and blue. Supposed to have made a man out of him. What’s that mean, anyway?” Joe didn’t know. He wasn’t thinking of the question, really. He had just had a presentiment of disaster.

As Joe drove home, his mind wandered back a year or so and, as though for the first time, he could see Astrid, her very real beauty, the peculiar elegance of her every gesture, the air of mystery lent her by a gene pool across the Gulf Stream, the saddest river of them all, where some of the world’s most interesting races fell into the sugar kettle together. As he dodged the small cattle trucks on the way, he asked himself if he was remembering this right, about Astrid’s presence, if that was what it was, her aura, her allure, and if it was still there at all, through the intervening history.

When he drove into the yard, Astrid was knocking apples out of a tree with a stick. She stopped and leaned on the stick to watch him come in. He looked at her. It was still there.

Astrid felt good enough, it seemed. Joe had to take the position that the stress and colitis were gone and now she was better. She immediately made an attempt to fully inhabit the house, to rearrange it, and make it her own. This produced a pleasant
feeling in Joe and he was happy to move furniture as instructed and even to dust the tops of tables and bureaus, and the surfaces of the Venetian blinds. Astrid had been raised in a conventional Cuban-exile household in Florida, had duly celebrated her
quince
in the tarted-up strumpet costumes that suggested the elders were putting their daughters on the open market. Her life until then had made a regular little wife-prospect of her, but an American high school and four years at Gainesville had flung her into the future. Astrid’s latinity became a romantic feature as she went from hippie spitfire to a goddess of the Florida night. Anglo girls in her company always seemed to feel both hygienic and anesthetized. Astrid liked that. She called them “white girls.” Now she was up on the sagebrush prairie getting over a broken heart. In a short while, they would both be on social security, trying to eat corn on the cob with ill-fitting dentures. If there is reincarnation, Joe thought, I want to come back as a no-see-um.

They sat down to dinner right after sunset. Coyotes came down close to the yard and howled back and forth. Astrid put the serving dishes on the table: black beans, yellow rice, chicken. Joe lit the candles. “That would be your coyotes?” Astrid asked, at the latest uproar outside the windows. Joe nodded. “You know,” she said, “I’m sort of beginning to appreciate this place.” She looked off. “Sort of.”

“Good,” said Joe, gazing in rapture at the tropical food.

“But this country, it’s the big romance in your life, isn’t it?”

“For what it’s worth.”

“The mountains?”

“I don’t particularly like the mountains,” said Joe.

“You like all that other stuff. The stuff that doesn’t look like anything. The prairie.”

“Yep.”

“Because why? Because it makes you feel big or because it makes you feel little?”

“Jesus, Astrid, how should I know? You don’t necessarily like things on the basis of the size they make you feel.”

“Very well,” said Astrid. Joe looked at her blinding and mischievous smile. He could feel his pulse racing.

“What a meal,” said Joe. “Like we never left.”

“Really, you left,” said Astrid.

“I guess.”

“I followed.”

“It’s sweet, isn’t it.”

“Because you stole my car.”

“Yes …”

“And because you hated me,” Astrid said.

“You followed because I hated you?”

“Hated me enough to steal from me.”

“Oh, let’s not make more of this than there really is. I needed to get home and my sense of style precluded catching the old outbound dog. Do you mind if we finish this nice meal before we pursue this?”

“You can’t hate and eat at the same time?” Astrid asked.

“I can if I have to.”

They were nearly finished eating. The rich dishes had left a lovely sheen on the plates.

“I wonder if there is some way we can have sex,” Astrid said. Joe felt a sudden tension in his stomach.

“It’s really up to you, I—”

“My God, Joe, you’re hard already!”

“Not for long, my darling.”

Astrid covered her face and let out a Cuban-coyote laugh of extreme merriness. When she was quiet, she allowed her eyes to gaze back. “It’s still there.”

“Astrid.”

“The unsightly bulge of legend,” said Astrid. “We’ll have to be very gentle.”

“Look!” Joe shouted as he stood up and pointed to his trousers. “This time it
is
gone!”

Joe began to clear the table. He didn’t like all these jokes. He rinsed off the dishes and thought how he disliked sharing chores. And he’d long since decided it was easier to eat out than show gratitude for home cooking. He’d rather do it all himself, or have somebody else do it all while he did something entirely different but complementary and useful. He wouldn’t mind looking after Astrid but he preferred doing it all. In general, he was appalled by the various duos: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, the Reagans. He looked around him and all he saw were these duos. It was like needing the prescription changed in your reading glasses; the world was made incoherent by duos or by people trying to cook side by side.

By the time Joe followed Astrid into the bedroom, she had undressed and was stretched out on top of the blankets. There was a small lamp in one corner with desert scenes depicted on its shade that gave only a small amount of light. He undressed and lay beside her. He put his hand on her and she closed her eyes. The light seemed to waver as he felt the wetness begin around his fingers. She tipped her legs open. He heard the coyotes start in again. He slipped down between her thighs and put his tongue inside her. When he moved up, she said, “You may now enter,” and he did. She pressed upward and shuddered; he sometimes felt that the Latin woman in Astrid was revealed in the indignation of her orgasm. Then he came and it was suddenly almost impossible to keep his
weight off her, the feeling of an external force using then discarding him.

“I’m hungry again,” Joe said after a bit.

“Real hungry?”

“For a snack.”

“Make some toast. There’s some preserves in the fridge.”

“I love the word ‘fridge.’ ”

“Make me a piece too.”

“
Like a fridge over troubled waters,
” sang Joe.

“How can you be so happy with someone you hate?” Astrid said.

Joe looked at the toaster with its astounding automotive shape, its haunted black slots now showing the faintest smoke of the toast inside. He examined the glints on the toaster and found little curved details of his house. When it popped up, he buttered the toast and spread strawberry preserves. He headed back to the bedroom. Every other woman he ever knew now bored him.

“You ought to put on some pants,” Astrid said, “if you’re going to serve food.”

“You can’t please everyone.”

“It’s waving around.”

“It’s not ‘waving around.’ ”

He went to the window to look at the full moon. Everything was so clear, it was as if he was right out there with the moon. The stars showed in great sheets like the spray from a breaking wave. Beneath them were the curves of the prairie. Joe ate his toast and jam in the window and watched. He didn’t think it made man seem small to see the vastness of the natural world. I’m just going to stand here, he thought, drained of sperm, my brain in the constellations.

“I don’t know if I ever told you this, Astrid,” Joe said, turning back toward the bed. “But I used to be a pretty darn good caddy. I was captain of all the caddies when I was sixteen years old. Carried double with those big old leather bags. Nine out of ten of those golfers let me pick their clubs. I never played myself. I was saving up for college. My father could afford to send me to college but his drinking had made him so erratic, I wasn’t sure he would keep it together until I got there. Sure enough, he went tits-up on a land development deal and I was lucky to have my caddy savings. One time, I tried to help him. He was such a good fellow when he was sober that I was sure he had no idea of how he acted when he was drinking. So I bought a tape recorder and spent the evening with him. He went crazier than usual. The next day, while he was still hung over, I brought the tape into his bedroom, set it up on the dresser and turned it on real loud. Well, it should have worked. As a theory it was very much in the ballpark. But the actual sound of his own ranting and raving was much more than he could deal with. He bellowed. He smashed the machine. He kicked me out of the house. Not long afterward, he drank himself to death. Possibly, that is where he was headed. Sometimes I think I murdered my father with his own voice.”