The Cadence of Grass (18 page)

Now that his own marriage was effectively in escrow, Paul moved quickly to the trust documents themselves, which specified the conditions that permitted the sale of the company and found that a broker had already been appointed, as though Sunny Jim had reached out from beyond death to extend one final arrangement. He called the broker, C. R. Majub, at his office. Majub had at this time a beautiful British accent, lived in Atlanta and described himself as a specialist in selling companies related to packaging. It was ten years since they’d met in Las Vegas, and Paul tried strenuously to place him, certain there had been a previous meeting. Majub examined the trust document and finally stated that it was the first time he’d seen a will function as a lien. He emphasized that there was some ground for optimism, since “never was a trust that couldn’t be busted,” a hope Natalie seized upon as though it were already an accomplishment. Thinking of their possible liberation from the bottling plant, she said, “I’m excited for you, Stuart. I always thought Dad and Paul made too much of your small earnings.”

“Golly, I guess I just got used to it. I have other rewards. Maybe they’re known only to me. What was it Emerson said? ‘It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.’”

“Ralph
Waldo
Emerson?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he knew better than that.”

“What do you mean, Nat? Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“I saw a special about him.”

“Really, about Emerson?”

“I think it was. I’d have to see it again. I never forget a face.”

“I can’t imagine them having a special on Emerson—”

“Well, maybe they didn’t, for Christ sake, Stuart. But whoever it was, it’s childish to expect people not to want credit for the things they do.”

“Sure, Nat.”

“Now what? We’re hurt?”

Stuart shook his head no and began to busy himself with small tasks around the house, while Natalie imagined how it might be after this fork in the road, given of course that Mr. Majub had the mother-wit to make good on his statements. Natalie decided to find some way of meeting with this Bengali.

A pillow doubled under her head, Evelyn watched the streaming night clouds outside her window, a cold new moon illuminating their apparent speed. She was thinking of girlhood stories wherein the dead inhabited a paradise beyond the stars; and later, near-death stories that seemed to validate this outward voyage her entire species longed for. Were they all there, Dante, Torquemada, Lincoln, even Elvis? She felt ill with worry that at the very end of her great escape into starry darkness, Paul would still be in full pursuit. Perhaps these thoughts were just precursors of sleep or part of a troubling enchantment. Her father was speaking. “My mother once told me, ‘They say if you break a mirror it’s seven years’ bad luck.’ She broke one on her wedding night and told me I was her first bad luck.” Why had she never forgotten this conversation?

“Evelyn,” he asked, “have you ever wondered if I was happy?”

“I suppose I must have.”

“Would you like to hear a surprise? I am. I’m happy.”

“Dad, you should show your happiness. You should smile more.”

“I’ve heard that all my life.”

“Mama says you smile in your sleep.”

“That’s gastric. People smile to get others to agree with them. It’s pitiful. If they had any guts or leadership, they wouldn’t care.”

Evelyn wondered why her father gave such awful advice.

“And Paul,” said Sunny Jim.

“Yes?”

“I like this guy.”

“I know you do.”

“I’ve been waiting for this guy.”

The light had not come on for Sunny Jim with her previous boyfriends, not Fred Casey, the Yale-educated forester; neither Drew Bolt, a doctor of remarkable innocence; nor Aaron Coulter, the star of the National Finals Rodeo and heir to the vast Diamond J southeast of Winifred; and obviously not the several jejune drips with whom she fornicated through her junior and senior years in college. This refraining light had come on in only one case and for a man some saw as a career criminal in the making, but whom Sunny Jim considered his ideal successor, this son of an eccentric history professor and a teenaged juvenile delinquent she was counseling under a university-sponsored community outreach program in Boulder. Only much later would Edith upgrade his biography to “arid-lands botanist.” By that time, Paul had decided to pay his father a visit.

Southern Rockies Investigative Services—once engaged by Whitelaw Bottling—had provided him with a street map of Gillette, Wyoming, and the address of Richard “Doc” Sanders, presently living on disability from Badlands Coal Company. Paul billed their somewhat expensive investigative services per prior arrangement to Whitelaw Bottling.

Paul knocked on the front door, peering inconspicuously into an interior lit only by quietly explosive flashes from a television that was out of sight. Backlit by this intermittent blue light, a figure emerged in the hallway, Paul thinking, “Oh God, this must be
my old man
.” He decided to begin with stroke after stroke of untruths and he felt an odd electrical sensation at his hairline.

“Yes?” Sanders said with thorough suspicion. He was short, and Paul quickly and gratefully calculated the genetics of height contributed by his mother. He was less excited by the thinning hair, and instinctively touched the crown of his own head. Doc Sanders’s teeth were blindingly white, and he was unrealistic about his figure, for Paul could see that the top of his newish pants were far from buttonable. Obviously Sanders viewed his own son as a Badlands detective and reached a hand to the small of his back with a helpless-looking wince.

“Mr. Sanders?”

“You’re lookin’ at him.”

“Paul Whitelaw, Badlands Coal. I come in?”

“I’m afraid the house is a mess.”

“You ought to see my place!” Meant to put his father at ease, his remark had the opposite effect. Doc Sanders apparently did not wish to imagine Paul’s place, and his lips were flattening with cold wrath.

“Pull my comp and you, me and the State of Wyoming are back in court!” he bayed from a face that was turning several new colors.

“No, sir, Mr. Sanders,” Paul blurted through the screen. “You have misunderstood me
completely
. I’m here to reconfirm for Badlands that one of our most cherished employees is getting along as well as can be hoped, given the sacrifice he has made to our corporation. We contribute to workmen’s compensation not because we
have
to but because, like all Wyoming coal companies, our employees are our first priority.”

Sanders’s look suggested that he’d never seen so much airborne shit in his life, a quick signal to Paul to dial it down ASAP. “Of course I’m kidding, aren’t I? You can see that, can’t you? Most coal companies are happiest when their people leave their blood in the pit, squeeze ’em till there’s not a drop left, right? We’re somewhat different, maybe not a lot. But we’re satisfied in your case, and frankly have no interest in disallowing your claim. We’ve got plenty of other workers we can crush in your absence.”

“We better get us a beer,” Sanders said. He left Paul standing in the small living room facing a soundless talk show on which a striding, vigorous woman with a microphone and furrowed brow faced a row of seated people, all of them crumpled, some weeping bitterly but with enough vitality to watch their hostess cautiously. In a moment, Doc was back with two cold cans of Grain Belt. Bending from the waist, he probed for the channel changer and the television screen shrank to a blue dot and disappeared.

“So, how’s the back?”

“Aw, I can hardly move.”

Holding up his beer, Paul said, “Badlands will support you for
ever
.” Sanders, bright-eyed as a ferret, weighed these welcome but not entirely trustworthy words. “We’re committed to our family of workers from the
e
rection to the
res
urrection.” Both men erupted with artificial laughter, and then Paul resumed his debriefing of Sanders, many of whose features he could reluctantly acknowledge from his many hours in the mirror. “When’d you come up from Colorado?”

“’Bout seventeen years ago. You found that out, eh? With Badlands all that time.”

Paul could see now that he’d confused weariness with age. Sanders wasn’t so old, and Paul imagined rejuvenating him, dress him up a little and put him in a BMfuckinW.

“We was old settlers in the Boulder area. The college pushed us out.”

Flannel jacket with an easy drape, pleats across the protruding belly, cuffless but with a break over oxblood loafers. Hardly know it was him. With chuckling complicity, Paul decided to introduce some family lore with his next inquiry. “Weren’t you some kind of juvenile delinquent?” This Paul could see was outside what might have been in the employee records of Badlands Coal, and a flash of confused suspicion crossed Sanders’s face.

“A vagrant,” he said sharply, as if defining a highly evolved category.

“And there was a little group of you.”

“They was three or four little groups of us.”

“With a counselor.”

“Yeah.”

Sanders was freezing up, so Paul hoisted his empty. “Spare another cold one?”

“Yeah,” Sanders said, watching closely and getting to his feet.

“Gotta keep the li’l buzz goin’.”

“Right.”

Once they were resupplied, Paul said, “I actually went to school down there. Had a history prof name of Crusoe, Edith Crusoe, did some of this counseling you’re talking about. Ever run up onto her?”

“What’d she look like?”

“Tall.”

“Real wild, kinky hair?”

“Yes, at that time.”

“She have humongous tits?”

“Well . . .”

“If we’re talking about the same professor, she had some bodacious knockers on her. What’s the matter with you? You smell somethin’ bad?”

“No honestly, Richard, I’m a big fan of humongous knockers myself.” Paul’s upper lip pressed fretfully into the lower, and he acquired something close to a look of prissiness. “Yes, Professor Crusoe was
substantially endowed
.”

“Well, spit it out, son. Is it too hot for you in here? I can turn it down.”

“No, no, more than comfortable. But thank you, Richard, I—”

“Anyway, back to them knockers: I knowed ’em good. I was just a kid, but when I spotted them I was harder than Chinese arithmetic, know what I’m saying?”

“Ha, ha!” said Paul, but the laugh was so ghastly it gave Sanders pause. “Got you a little, did you?” croaked Paul.

“You bet your life! I got plenty!”

“Where on earth did you find to go?”

Paul, so close to his moment now, feared that so much as the sound of a fly landing would send Sanders out of his grasp forever, and he urgently wanted to be present at his own beginning.

“We was in her office. She went into the coat closet. I kept hearing the hangers fallin’ on the floor. Then she more or less ordered me in there.”

“In the closet.”

“Yes.”

“And you, what?”

“Piled on.”

“Piled on. Ha ha! That’s
great
,” Paul cried from a twisted face. Perhaps, he wasn’t enjoying his own conception as much as he’d hoped.

“Hangers just everywhere.”

“Whoa, that’s too much! What a scene!”

“Yup, them was the days, wettin’ the old wick. Big pile of hangers, but I got ’er in all right. Got ’er plumb home.”

“Whooee,” said Paul, from behind his hand.

Doc Sanders scrutinized him. There was something definitely not right here.

Evelyn met Natalie at Prairie Coffee, where young people in stocking caps were getting coffee to take out and a more sedate group, coatless and hatless, were drinking their coffee over back issues of the
Hungry Horse Times
. The two women took their mugs to a broken-down sofa in front of the gas log fireplace and talked over the happy, inchoate chatter of voices occasionally joined by frigid drafts of air from the front door tainted slightly by exhaust fumes.

“I called the ship,” said Natalie ominously.

“And?”

“No reply.”

“I guess she just changed her mind, I mean, it’s her vacation.”