Keep the Change (6 page)

Astrid came over and sat next to him. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said.

“I always promised myself that in the future I would quit living in the future. But I may have to do a little planning now.”

“Joe,” she said, “why don’t you call some friends? I’m going out. I’m tired of this. Or at least, I’m not interested in this. It’s time to do something.”

Joe made a few calls to people he knew out West. About the time he got off the phone, Astrid was back carrying packages. She set them down, picked up the hall rug, and gave it
a pop. She popped the rug as if she was in a bullfight. Joe’s mood had sunk even further since he’d been calling around Montana.

The next time Ivan came down from New York, he took them out to dinner. By the time they got to the restaurant, which was situated next to the ocean on its own band of seagrape-shaded beach, the sun had gone down and the sunset watchers had finished their drinks and were heading home for dinner. Astrid wore her hair up, pinned with a rose-colored enamel flower. Joe accompanied her with his hand lightly rested in the pleasant curve in the small of her back. Ivan Slater seemed to be rushing, though he walked no faster than they did. “I hope I’m not late,” he said. “I got caught up watching TV, Oprah Winfrey squeezing the shit out of some little white lady.” He wore a blousy Cuban shirt and had rolled his pants up in some ghastly sartorial reference to peasantry; instead of appropriate sandals or huaraches, he wore the lace-up black street shoes of his more accustomed venues in New York. Nevertheless, he bounded along confidently without actually going faster than his companions. He was marketing a thing called “The Old Vermont Dog Mill,” which was a treadmill exerciser for overweight suburban labradors that also served to grind coffee and provide the power for a kitchen knife sharpener. It seemed impossible that he didn’t see the ridiculousness of this but he didn’t; he saw only opportunity. When Joe thought of the developing problems with the grazing lease and imagined he could be reduced to working with Ivan on the Old Vermont Dog Mill, he was chilled deep within.

They got a table on the deck under the seagrapes and immediately began to look into their menus as though they had a job to get through.

“That’s not good conch salad,” said Joe. “It’s chum.”

“Don’t start in,” said Astrid.

“Are stone crabs in season?” asked Ivan.

“Who knows,” said Joe. “I don’t know.”

“The tone is burn-out plus,” said Astrid.

“Ivan,” said Joe, “why don’t you get your own girlfriend? The waiter thinks this is a ménage à trois. Ditto the maitre d’.”

“You’ve asked this same question since our school days.”

“Never getting an answer.”

“I do have girlfriends but they are never presentable.”

“You could present them to us,” said Astrid. “We would be prepared to understand almost anything.”

“You talk brave,” said Ivan.

“We could take them if they were truly awful,” Astrid said. “It’s the little things that suck.”

When their dinners came, there seemed to be almost nothing on the plate. Joe understood that this was in response to current views on cuisine held in France; and of course that helped to justify the price, but Joe was hungry. He tapped the tines of his fork all around the empty areas of his plate as though probing for food. Astrid was annoyed with him and gave him furious looks, and the waiter sighed operatically.

“If you were back in Montana,” she said, “undoubtedly they would put a great haunch before you and you would be happier.”

“That’s right.”

There was a whirlwind of activity as Ivan began to eat.

“Joe,” said Astrid, “I’ve been here all my life and you are a classic snowbird. After basking in the sun for a couple of years, you got ironic about everything.”

“He’s homesick,” said Ivan through his food. “When you’re homesick and home is three thousand miles away and you’re
broke and there’s a gulf of communication between you and the faggot waiter and the plate is half empty before you half start, your heart is sore afflicted.”

“Thank you, Ivan,” said Joe.

“You like a quality of care and selection in your life, Joe. I like life bulging at the seams,” Ivan said.

“I like it with loud music and hot sauce,” said Astrid.

“Because you’re Cuban,” Joe said.

“That’s racist, actually,” Astrid said.

“I’m serious, Joe,” Ivan said. “Don’t be so meticulous. Quit weighing things out. It’s neurotic. Man was made to consume. Say yes to fucking well everything.”

The waiter looked significantly at Astrid. They were friends. In three years, Joe had not gotten used to Astrid’s friends. The waiter accepted the little illness of her hanging around with straight men. A bright wave caught the lights of the restaurant and rolled obliquely onto the beach. The restaurant was beginning to fill. Joe felt the smile on his face fade pleasantly. Astrid put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for Ivan to light it. Joe enjoyed their friendship. He loved the sight of Astrid smoking, while angry people at neighboring tables waved into the air around them.

Astrid’s uncompliant nature made her the only woman friend of Ivan’s life. Joe watched with approval. Sexless friendships reminded him of children. Quite lovely until someone whipped it out.

So once again Joe and Ivan were going to work together. Ivan was inspired by this work he was doing; Joe was trying to accept its necessity. At one time he had painted and had some acceptance; but he painted so slowly at the best of times and was so seldom sufficiently moved by an idea that he had to
take work that did not depend upon strong feelings. Lately, he wasn’t really painting at all. He was trying to “face it,” a phrase Astrid found overpoweringly bleak. He told her he had sold out; she said he lacked sufficient mental health to sell out. “I’m going to face it,” he said.

“Don’t face it, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

Now Joe watched gloomily as Ivan paid the bill. When the waiter went off with his credit card, Ivan asked, “What’s twenty percent of ninety-three dollars?”

Joe groaned.

“Crass!” called Astrid.

Out in front, intensity was building. The hostess had gold-rimmed glasses hanging on her bosom from a chain. She only put them on to check dubious reservations in the big book on the stand. There was a line and Joe was pleased they had eaten early. They walked onto the street where the suave shapes of automobiles, parked on the fallen palm fronds, glowed in the streetlights. The breaking surf could be heard and Joe admitted to himself the tremendous romance this seemed to imply, though it always seemed to remain in the world of implication. He felt like an old steer with its head under the fence straining for that grass just over there.

They got into Ivan’s rental car. Ivan did not start it up immediately. The streetlight shining through the coconut palms lit up all six of their knees. “Joe,” Ivan said, “you’re very quiet. And I know you, Joe. You are my friend since we stood shoulder to shoulder in the school lavatory popping zits, betting our pride on the hope of hitting the mirror. But this quiet, this looking off, is a calm before the storm, which I know and have seen before, Joe. I only ask that you remember a few commitments and that you be a gentleman about it, if
it kills you. I say all this knowing it may be well out of reach for you.”

Ivan looked straight ahead through the windshield. Joe looked straight ahead through the windshield. Astrid looked at Joe.

Joe said, “Start it up.”

In offering Joe the use of her car the next morning, a small pink convertible, Astrid had naively said to get a pound of snapper fillets and a choice of two vegetables and Joe had said he’d be back in a minute. Now clouds settled in the upper curve of the windshield, slowly wiped around, and disappeared. The yellow center line ticked in the side mirror. Lizards and tropical foliage managed to survive in the atmosphere of a New York subway. The traffic on the great divided parkway moved at a trancelike evenness maintained by the Florida Highway Patrol. He wanted to keep moving in case Astrid reported her car stolen.

In the end it was a day that was missing from Joe’s life. He didn’t turn on the radio until he left his motel near Pensacola the next morning. He realized he was about to hit the real torso of America and his spirits rose. He crossed into Alabama and took a few minutes out to view an arts and crafts fair in a vast baking parking lot. It was as if a thousand garages had been emptied onto a runway. Solemn people stood behind tables that held wan attempts at art in oil and ceramics and a
twentieth-century history of appliances. Portraits of Elvis on black velvet. He pulled out onto the highway and resumed, having to go very slow for a mile until he could pass a pickup truck full of yellow lawn chairs. Battered, rusted cars passed with hard faces framed by Beatles-type haircuts. It seemed that before he even reached the Mississippi line, the sky had begun to grow, to widen: at the Escatawpa River the pines strained upward against a terrific expanse of blue sky. The highway was empty. The clouds stretching down to the horizon majestically ruled the scene. Joe was filled with a mad sense of freedom, free to eat fast food, free to sleep with a stranger. Instead of solving his problems, he had become someone without problems, a kind of ghost.

He passed a little bayou where a young fellow in knee-length surfer shorts covered with beer commercials watched a bobber rest on the mirror surface of water. This plain scene held a great mystery for him. There was a lovely waterland around the Pascagoula River with silver curves showing through the sea grass for a great distance while the road crossed in low, loping arcs. He stopped and watched fishermen unloading crab boats. He walked down and sat on a broken-off piling. A woman handed an old fisherman a pint of whiskey in a paper bag. She said, “If you beat me up like you did last weekend, I ain’t going to buy you no more of that.” Joe heard this with amazement.

He went to sleep in a motel. Outside in the parking lot, a couple leaned up against their car and listened to James Cotton sing the blues. “I don’t like white and white don’t like me.” Joe thought about that as he lay in bed. He couldn’t quite understand why, lying in this unknown motel in this unknown place, he felt such a desperate joy.

•

At seven in the morning, he was rolling through Danville Parish, Louisiana. Pine forests stood on the high ground between the bayous, pine pollen filling the air so that the car was covered with pollen and the air was so heavy with pollen there were times he thought he ought to turn on the headlights to see. But rush hour in Shreveport was different from other rush hours, the thickness of humidity, the crazy songs on the radio, flirtation between speeding automobiles. Secession had worked! The marquee in front of the Louisiana State Fairground announced county pig champions and English rock and roll bands. The radio advertised bass boats, fire ant control potions and the Boot Hill Racetrack.

Joe thought that crossing into Texas and getting past the Red River would give him the feeling of being back out West but it didn’t happen. The thunderstorms lashed the highway and it still looked like Louisiana with all the gums and hickories and tupelos. A home repair truck passed with a sign on its side that said, “Obsessed to serve the customer.” Nothing halfway about the South. Someone shot up behind Joe in a little Japanese car, face pressed against the windshield, passed, then lost his motivation. Roostertailing through the rainwater, Joe had to pass him again. The cloudburst intensified and a mile or two down the road toward Longview, Texas, a pickup truck went into sideways slow motion, slid across the meridian and went into the ditch. Three men got out and stared at it. These men seemed to feel their pickup owed them an explanation. Once he reached Longview, he could see back to the thunderstorm, see its grand and sculptural shape, its violent black underside. The radio said they were glad about the rain because it would keep the pollen down and people could get some relief from their allergies and wasn’t that what people wanted, some relief? Joe liked it
for the feeling of dropping a curtain between him and the past, a welcome curtain. This was the highway and he was a ghost. It was a relief.

Somewhere past the Sabine River, Joe started to spot the little oil patches, the active ones with bright painted pumps, bobbing away and pumping oil. And oil patches that had seen better days, with their pumps stopped and the paint rusted off like a field full of giant grasshoppers that had died or reached some eerie state beyond normal death. The radio had used the phrase “nuclear winter” and increasingly Joe was relying on the radio to shape his thoughts. He was still thinking about fire ants. Fire ants in the nuclear winter.

Van Zandt, Texas, was blushing green in a deeply wooded succession of gentle, rolling woodlands. For thirty-five seconds, Joe ached to live there. Then by Terrell, glad to no longer live in Van Zandt, he was out of the woodlands and in an ugly cattle country that looked like Iowa where there were no fire ants and pollen and mulattoes in convertibles, and no race music on the radio. Joe went blank and stayed that way until he came over a big long ascent and there below him was a cloud of mesquite and telegraph wires and glittering buildings. The hard angles of light on each surface seemed to communicate that the West had begun and he was on his way home. The sky picked up the white edges of the ravines, rocks and subdivisions equally. The skyscrapers cheerfully said, “We see you passing, you ghost! So long, Joe-Buddy!” This was Dallas!

There was a perfect Texan urban river bottom at Grand Prairie with scrub willows whose roots gathered trash in the flash floods that shot through new neighborhoods. Joe was maddened by joy at being in the country of the West. He felt that he would find a restored coordination for his life here. This
was the West’s job. Gustav Mahler of all people was on the radio. Great Southwest Parkway! Lone Star Homes! Texas Toyota! A subdivision of multifarious grandeur, half-timbered Tudor homes baking in the dry air and clinging to the hillsides. A sign in front read
From the 80’s
. Joe could not understand the message because he thought they were talking about the decade of these homes; then he realized they meant the price of the units. Holy fire ants! Little places like that?