Keep the Change (7 page)

He crossed the Trinity River in a bright sun that made approaching traffic flash its windshields in a stream of glitter, along the edge of the Fort Worth stockyards. A radio preacher shouted, “Satan is playing hardball!”

On an awful-looking scrapped-off former mesquite flat north of Fort Worth, he passed “Fossil Creek, The Community on the Green. Next right, Blue Mound, Texas.” Getting on toward Wichita Falls, the radio briefly stilled, there began to be well-kept ranches, lots of horses, the houses on elevations with windmills to catch the breeze and fanciful entryways welded together out of rod and angle iron. Fetishistic paved driveways. There were things here in Texas that made Joe nervous, but he blamed it on whatever produced that radio religion, fire and brimstone delivered at a nice dance tempo.

It began to grow stormy looking and the conflict of spring and winter produced a cascading immensity of light that Joe felt levitate him as he drove in and out of vast shadows. State Highway Department trucks were ignited from within by a tremendous yellow light. The signs shone fiercely at him with their brusque messages. Railroad track crews were lit up like the cast of a Broadway show. A windy squall separated itself from the general pattern and arose before him like a dead king in an opera. A battered farm truck passed with a tuxedo hanging in the rear window. There were flattened armadillos on
the road. The weather looked worrisome—worrisome and bad enough to drive him back to Astrid. Or, if it wasn’t for the awkwardness of driving her car, he could have given her a call. He could have said, “I’m en route!”

So, he stopped at Henrietta and ate pinto beans and corn bread and listened to a distant kitchen radio issue fairly dire weather forecasts. The restaurant had wooden booths and a few young men in work clothes sat sideways in them with their arms over the back and spoke in courtly tones to the black-haired, aging waitress.

Back on the road, Joe saw at a considerable distance the British flag emblazoned on a solitary billboard. But when he drew close, it turned out to be an ad for Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. Tumbleweed blew furiously across the road near an old brick high school that stood like a depressing fortress against the distant horizon and slate, moving clouds. There were cotton fields and, here and there, cotton wagons were drawn up on the side roads. The sign in Quanah said, “Stop and Eat with Us. Willie Nelson Did.” Joe noted that the goofy faces of the Deep South, the tragic and comic masks donned down there, had been replaced by a kind of belligerent stare. The highway signs said, “Don’t Mess with Texas.” It didn’t look too damn friendly out there. Maybe it was the weather.

Right after he crossed the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River a train approached from a distance. When it came close, all that was visible was its windshield; the rest was a vast blowing mound of snow and ice. What’s going on here? Turn on the radio, my friend. He got another preacher, this one explaining that the mind does not work the exact-same as a Disposall and we cannot grind up the filth that goes into it. We must be careful not to put filth into it in the first place.

Suddenly, he was driving on a solid corrugation of ice in a
whiteout. It just dropped from the heavens and put an end to visibility. He hunched over the wheel as though to examine the road even more closely than he could in a normal seated position. The outer world was filled with phantom vehicles, some floating by at eye level, others sunk to one side plainly disabled. A human silhouette arose and vanished. It was terrifying. It was a regular bad dream. He thought, I am being punished for stealing, for doubting the truthfulness of my aunt and uncle in withholding my lease money, for not painting and for walking out on a good woman.

He came up behind a twenty-year-old luxury sedan heaving along sedately. He clove to that sedan. It had a bumper sticker that said
XIT Ranch Reunion
and Joe tried to tag it as it appeared and disappeared in the snow. He passed an old tractor-trailer rig full of fenceposts and woven wire jackknifed in the ditch. Then he lost the sedan; it seemed to dematerialize in the whiteness and he was alone. He slowed to ten miles an hour and felt his insides labor against the white indefinite distance before him.

A fashion center for babies was advertising on the radio. They had a special for those hard-to-shop-for preemies. Including diapers for their little thumb-size bottoms. Then all of a sudden, a great miracle occurred, simultaneous with news of these glorious infants. The sun came out on a perfect world in the middle of which, surrounded by hysterical people, a Greyhound Vista-Cruiser lay on its side: red, white, and blue with tinted windows, in the ditch. Joe crept by in case he was needed, but the passengers were having their moment as they watched the driver set out orange cautionary cones, and they didn’t seem to need or want Joe, who had not been with them when it happened but rather with the well-dressed babies of the radio.

A little way past the town of Goodnight, he could see cattle running the fenceline in wild amazement at nature. A truck went by like the home repair truck back in Louisiana but this one said, “Don’t sleep with a drip—Call a plumber!” The day was almost done. Joe flew through the slush to Amarillo, took a room, ate in a Japanese restaurant and went to bed. He felt like he was breaking his back trying to get through Texas. This ghost wanted to go home.

The next day, before he was fully awake, before he had had any opportunity for banishing thoughts, he was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where the wind blew so hard the shadows flew on the roadway and where, stopping on the edge of a plowed field, he had to lean backward into the wind to take a leak and even then it just sprayed from his dick like sleet. The radio said that Kansas steer prices were down because several of the packing plants had been closed by blizzards. Joe drove on. Near the horizon, there was the most overcrowded feedlot of Black Angus cattle Joe had ever seen. He stared at it until he overtook what turned out to be a vast depot of worn-out automobile tires, extending over many acres.

He began to see mountains and his spirit rose with the accumulating altitude, kept climbing until it sank again around Monument Hill and new snow and population; finally he was in the Denver rush hour, which caused him to sink into complete apathy as he took his place in the teeming lanes.

He cleared out of north Denver, traffic thinning about the
time he passed a vast illuminated dog track, amazing against the darkening Front Range. It was dark and wild and cold after that, after the St. Vrain River and the Wyoming line. A genuine ground blizzard was falling by the time he got to Cheyenne, so he stopped at a place called Little America, the home of fifty-five gas pumps, and slept like a baby, knowing all that gasoline was out there. There was enough gasoline for a homesick person to drive home millions of times. Joe was hugely annoyed to have had this thought.

He was gone before daybreak, following a Haliburton drilling equipment truck with a sign on its rear that said it braked for jackalope. Joe’s sense of mission had reached a burning pitch and he tailgated the big rig over sections of road varnished by the manure that ran out of the cattle trucks. The two vehicles went down through Wyoming in a treacherous eighty mile an hour syncopation.

Wheatland, Wyoming, had sentimental Spanish haciendas out in the windswept tank farm at the edge of the sage. A somber and detached-looking herd of buffalo stared out at the highway across five strands of barbed wire. Tonight was going to be Olde Southe Gumbo Night at the restaurant in Douglas where Joe released the Haliburton truck and stopped for breakfast. There was an array of condiments that suggested people ate at all hours here. Joe examined the salad dressing. It looked like the styling gel in a beauty parlor. Buddy Holly sang “True Love Waits” from a red and chrome speaker at the end of his booth. While he ate, the sun burst out like a hostile and metallic stunt. Beyond the window, the land of the jackalope shone under a burnishing wind.

Back on the highway, a sheriff’s car shot past with a little gray-haired prisoner in the back. Joe drove until he reached Kaycee, not much more than a small depression in the ground
east of the highway: gas station, quonset buildings, a few houses. He stopped and bought some homemade elk sausage from a man he knew there. He was getting close.

The Tongue River was green and low and clear. It was the last thing he noticed until he crossed into Montana. At Crow Agency a sign said, “Jesus Is Lord on the Crow Reservation.” Loose horses were also Lord on the Crow reservation. An ambulance tore off down a dirt road, its red light throbbing like a severed artery.

Three hours later he drove through his old hometown, Deadrock. He took a left by the switching yard and took the dirt road south toward the ranch. He followed the river bottom back to his house. Before long, the cottonwoods would make a cloudy tunnel for the racing stream but they were just now beginning to leaf out; and where the stream broadened out and flowed in flat pastures, its every turn was marked by an even growth of willows. The light flashed on the shallow streams that fed the river where they emerged from their grassy tunnels; and in the marshy stands of cattail, blackbirds jumped up and showered down once again. A rancher went alongside the road, a great fat man on a small motorcycle. He had his shovel and fabric dams lashed behind him and his felt hat pulled down so firmly against the wind that it bowed his ears out. A small collie lay across his lap as he sputtered along. Some of the fields had great splashes of pasture ruining yellow spurge. The ditch bank along the road was a garden of early spring wild flowers, shooting stars, forget-me-nots, lupine. Snow still lay collected in the shade. You couldn’t really tell you had left one ranch and gone onto another. A cattle guard marked the actual boundary but the rolling country was the same in every direction. The house sat down in some trees, old trees that were splotched with dead branches. There was
a seasonal creek underneath the trees but it had dried up now into nothing but a wash. A half-acre had been fenced to enclose the place but the cattle had beaten the ground down right to the boundaries.

The door was unlocked. Joe went in and looked around. There wasn’t much for furnishings but there was enough. There was a woodstove, an old Frigidaire, and two army blankets on the bunk. The toilet bowl was stained with iron but it worked. Someone had fixed the well. There was a table in the kitchen. And the phone worked. Not owning or even caring about any of it made this seem blissful. His nights wouldn’t be interrupted by bad dreams. It was going to be all right.

When Joe’s father began leasing the pasture to the Overstreets, the ranch began to go downhill. The house started toward its present moldering state; the fences were kept in what minimal condition would hold cattle but where the property adjoined the lessors, the fences were allowed to fall and be walked into the ground by herds of cows. The pastures were eaten down year after year until the buck brush, wild currants and sage had begun to advance across their surfaces, with the result that the carrying capacity dropped and with it, the grazing fees. Evaporation from the stripped ground reduced the discharge of the good springs to trickles; the marginal springs had long since been milled to mud by cattle and finally the mud itself had dried up and sealed the springs. But the worst problems of the ranch existed at the level of paper, where liens and assumptions clouded its title.

At first, it hadn’t mattered. Joe had had a good enough career painting; he had found handy equivalents with Ivan Slater and others, all somewhat in anticipation of his desire to resume his work.

Joe had sometimes felt that it would be a great relief to give up on recovering his talent; and now he was facing, in the confines of approaching maturity, the fact that he was broke and there was nothing new, nothing at the edge of things, nothing around the corner that would save him. He hoped he wouldn’t soon be known as the man who evicted his own kin-folk from their ancestral pasturage.

Joe had come to believe from reading books that in many landholding families, there existed perfect communication between the generations about the land itself. He noticed how many Southerners believed this. Even if they were in New York there was always a warmhearted old daddy holding out for their possession and occupancy an ancient farm—viewed as a sacred tenure on earth rather than agriculture—whenever they should choose to take it up. Price of admission? Take a few minutes, after the soul-stirring train ride down yonder, to make friends with the resident darkies. Where had people gone wrong in the West? In the latest joke, leaving a ranch to one’s children was called child abuse. But Joe couldn’t really take that view. He had to go see Lureen and straighten things out.

It had gotten too quiet in the neighborhood. There used to be a roar of roller skates on the sidewalk. The small garage next to the house was empty. It had once held his Uncle Smitty’s Ford, a car he called his “foreign car.” “It’s foreign to me,” Smitty explained. Many years ago, Smitty came home from the war. He never left after that.

Joe walked around to the side entrance of the house, the only one anyone had ever used. The front door opened onto a hallway and then into a large sitting room that was reserved for the high ceremonies of the day. He remembered how the
furniture was kept covered, dreadful shapes, the drapes drawn until life could resume on a special occasion. Children, who were allowed every liberty in the other rooms, including the right to bay down the laundry chute, build matchstick rockets, and even play in the avalanche of coal in the cellar, were frightened in this room. Joe’s grandmother sat for weeks here after her husband died as though the dream of respectability they had shared was alive in its sad furnishings, its curio cabinet, its damask-covered love seat and its solitary volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When the silence of his grandmother’s mourning overpowered the rest of the family, Joe was sent to see her. She sat with her hands in her lap and her feet crossed under her chair. He moved to her side and she didn’t respond. He knew he had to say something but he could smell new rain on the sidewalk and know that already things were going on that consigned his grandfather to the past. His mind moved to that miracle. “I was wondering,” he mused, in his little-old-man style, “if Grandpa happened to leave me any gold.” Joe’s grandmother stared, and began to laugh. She laughed for minutes while he examined the postcards, fossils and pressed flowers in the curio cabinet, ignoring her laugh and thinking about the curiosities and the miracle of rain, of opportunities beyond the funereal door. There was a ring of keys fused together by fire that he held in awe. His grandmother got up and looked around as though recovering from a spell. She walked straight back into her life, revitalized by the cold musing of a child.