Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  So Daniel got sillier and sillier and more and more addicted to having toddies. And after a while James Hand, Senior, and James Hand, Junior, grew tired of him and turned their attention to their own affairs. He’ll grow up, they told each other. He’s still wet behind the ears.

  Then only the women were interested in him. His mother and his sister Anna and his sister Helen, and for years he could charm and snow them so continually that he almost never had to hear a cross word. On the surface he was their gorgeous son and brother, such a catch, the one all the girls were after. Underneath he seethed and fretted. He wanted to do something, be something, overpower, achieve, but he did not know how to go about it and it grew later and later and later.

  One day he grew so frustrated by trying to figure out how to be successful that he went down to the bank and turned all his assets into cash. He took the money into a vault room of the bank and laid it out upon a table and looked at it, trying to believe this unearned bounty belonged to him.

  Now, in late May of 1991, he was down to about seven hundred thousand dollars in total assets and he thought of that as poverty.

  Also, he was down to three girlfriends, a model in Nashville who was too smart to marry him until he quit drinking, a painter in California who loved him too much to marry him until he quit drinking, and a department store buyer named Margaret who would have married him but she was too fat to turn him on unless he was really drunk.

  Fine life, he decided. He poured some brandy into a julep cup and drank it. Fine how-do-you-do. He shook his head, made an obeisance in the direction of the photograph of his grandfather and strode on through the kitchen. He went down the back stairs and out to the guest house where his fifty-seven-year-old black farm manager was living that spring to keep him company. The black man’s name was Lucas Dehorney. He was three-quarters Nigerian, one-eighth Iroquois, and one-eighth Scots. He had had as much trouble in his life with women as Daniel had had, but not as much with whiskey. They shared a love of hard physical work, a love of horses, a love of basketball, and an ability to curse that would have shamed Caliban. Lucas’s nickname was Spook. He had been Daniel’s friend as long as Daniel could remember. Spook had been Daniel’s nurse during summers on the farm. They had loved each other then and they loved each other now, although a word of love had never passed between them.

  Daniel knocked on the door of the guest house, then pushed it open and went on in and found Spook in the living room, sitting on a straight chair, reading an autobiography of Louis L’Amour one of his girlfriends had given him.

  “Listen here to this,” Spook said. “‘The dogs bark, but the caravan passes on.’ That’s this oriental proverb he starts out the book with. What you think that means, Daniel? What you think he’s getting at?”

  “It means, don’t pay any attention to dogs barking. You got to get that tennis court cleaned off, Spook. And get somebody over here this afternoon to cut the yard. Goddamn place looks like it’s deserted. No one’s hit a lick in weeks. Where’s that yard service you got me?”

  “It’s been raining so much they couldn’t get here. This L’Amour guy’s got a lot of stuff like that in this book. It’s called his memoirs but it’s mostly a lot of stories old folks told him that he’s written down. How much you think he gets paid for putting something like this together?”

  “Shit, how would I know? Anna used to get a hundred thousand for writing one, sometimes less, sometimes more. It depended on how much they sold of the one before. She was always bitching about it.”

  “I might write me a book, Daniel. I used to be good at writing. My teachers were always praising me for it. I got to find something to do. I’m giving up chasing pussy. That damn Charlene’s been calling me all morning. After the way she went off last week.”

  “You been out to the farm in the last few days? We got to get Vaughn to plant that fescue. It’s dry enough to put in a second crop.”

  “Fescue’s in. I told you that a week ago. I don’t know where your mind’s been, Daniel. You’re getting mighty forgetful. You’re too young to be so forgetful. And another thing, I got to move back to the farm for the summer. I can’t take staying in town all the time. It’s too noisy. I can’t get any sleep. Airplanes flying over. Traffic going up and down the roads. I heard a truck starting up at five this morning. I haven’t been to sleep since.”

  “You couldn’t hear trucks back here. It’s a mile from the nearest highway.”

  “I heard them. I haven’t been to sleep since.”

  “Go on back to the country then, if you want to. No one’s stopping you. But I want that court cleaned off today. Olivia’s on her way home. She might want to play tomorrow.”

  “That goddamn Charlene left in the middle of the night last time she was here. Got up, put on her clothes and left. Now she’s calling me.”

  “Take the cover off the pool and turn the pool cleaner on while you’re out there. I want things spruced up before she gets home. She’s all I got now.”

  “I’ll get it done. Soon as I finish a few more pages of this book.” Daniel stood by the door. He had done everything he could think of to make Spook stay. He had bought him a big new Sony and a VCR and gone out and rented a dirty movie and offered to watch it with him. They had poured a drink and sat down to watch. The movie was called The Houseparty. As soon as one of the women took off her clothes, Spook got up and turned off the TV. “Turn that damn thing off, Daniel,” he said. “I can’t look at something like that. If that’s what’s going on in the world they can leave Lucas Dehorney out.”

  “I guess I won’t ever see Jessie again,” Daniel said now, making one last play for sympathy. “It does look like she’d bring the boy to see his granddaddy, doesn’t it?”

  “They live their own lives now,” Spook said. “They don’t give a damn about the past.”

  Chapter 6

  MAY 27, 1991. Ten o’clock in the morning, Mountain Time. Starcarbon Ranch, Montana. Sunlight is pouring in the windows of the Macalpins’ kitchen, a large, square, high-ceilinged room in a hundred-year-old ranch house situated in the middle of six thousand acres of wilderness and pastureland. A hundred yards from the house and down a steep embankment Sliver Creek winds down to meet the Chene River and the western fork of the Missouri.

  Biscuits are in the oven. Bacon is frying in a pan. A Boston cream pie with two slices gone is sitting in the middle of a table set with yellow placemats. Beside the pie is a vase of blue wildflowers. The owner of the ranch has been gone for three days trying to renegotiate his loans with the bankers in Billings. His wife, Sherrill, and his trainer, a young man named Bobby Tree, are stirring around the kitchen waiting for the coffee to perk and the bacon to fry.

  The sun grows even brighter, comes out from behind the last cloud, and sunlight pours down through the long windows above the sink. Like a laser it turns the air to fire, turns the porcelain to marble, the table into an altar. A blue-and-white teapot in the center seems to dance in the light. “I wait all winter for this weather,” Sherrill says. She is smiling her Morning Smile, for which Tom Macalpin has named a sailboat, a Palomino mare, and a book of poetry which won the Lamont in 1984. Her fabled breasts (Ten Degrees Centigrade, pages 13 and 74; Golden Tree, pages 46, 49, 53; Haven, page 92) shake beneath her pale blue sweater as the smile turns into a giggle. “If Tom doesn’t get home soon, I’m going crazy. This sunshine makes me horny.” She lifts the bacon from the skillet with a fork and lays it on a paper towel. She takes eggs from a carton, breaks them, and drops them into the bacon fat. She is wearing the blue sweater, a pair of skintight blue jeans faded the color of the sky, and a wide leather belt with a buckle she won at the Grand National when she was eighteen. Except for Olivia Hand when she is angry, Bobby thinks she is the sexiest woman he has ever seen in his life. Perhaps the sexiest woman who has ever lived. (Helen, Tom called her in his fiction. Helen Aimee Detroy.) She is also the closest thing to a mother Bobby has ever had. All during the long fall and winter of 1990 and 1991 she
has mothered him and bossed him around and made him study, educated him and ennobled him and made him secure. Tom Macalpin had taught him more about cutting horses than he had ever dreamed a man could know and Sherrill was teaching him to believe in himself. Slowly, slowly, he had learned to trust, and then to love them. He had gotten to where he told them anything he was thinking the minute he thought it up.

  “Don’t talk about being horny. I get so jealous thinking about Olivia down there fucking some boy in Carolina. I’ve gotten to where it’s all I think about, Sherrill. It’s ruining my life thinking about it. She’s the horniest girl I ever saw in my life. I know she’s getting laid. She’d get laid if they sent her to the Gulag Archipelago where they sent that guy Tom writes to. I know she’s fucking somebody.” He got up, took two mugs out of a cabinet, and stood by the coffeepot while it perked out the last drams of coffee. “I ought to get you a better coffeepot. They got them now that you can get the coffee out before it finishes.”

  “We don’t need a coffeepot. We need you on this ranch.”

  “I know you do. And I’m sorry I have to leave.” He looked down at his feet. Twisted his napkin, turned it into a noose. “After all you guys did for me.”

  “We didn’t do much. You did it.”

  “You got me set up to go to college. And I won’t forget that, no matter where I end up. But I have to go, Sherrill. She’s on her way to Tahlequah. I called her aunt Mary Lily and it turns out she’s coming home. I have to be there when she gets there. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try. I want to wait until Tom gets back, but I got to leave soon. It’s a long drive.”

  “You need some new tires on that truck. Get those ones out of the shed that were on that Toyota Callene totaled.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “Go on and take them. I’d be glad to see them used for something.” Sherrill filled two plates with eggs and bacon and handed one to Bobby. They sat down at the table. They held hands. “Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service,” Sherrill said. “Are you going to call her and tell her that you’re coming?”

  “No. It’s got to be a surprise. I’m going even if she told me not to, so I don’t see any reason to call her.”

  “What are you going to do when you see her?”

  “Ask her to marry me. Tell her I’ll do anything she wants. Tom said he could get me in a college in Carolina. So I’ll go there if she wants to stay. Whatever it takes, that’s what I’ll do. I know if I can see her, I can make her love me again. Well, I have to try.”

  “Have you got a ring?”

  “A what?”

  “An engagement ring. If you’re going to ask her to marry you you need a ring. How much money do you have saved?”

  “Nine thousand seven hundred and forty. Plus the money for the show in Fort Worth if Rose Sally wins. Tom said he’d give me a cut of that. I know she’ll make the top ten. She might win. I’m coming down and ride her no matter where I am.”

  “You can afford a ring. Let’s go into town this afternoon and see what Pat Morrell’s got in his store. You want me to go with you? He won’t rip you off.”

  “God, I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to have a ring. Ride to win, Bobby. If you’re going to Oklahoma to get your girl, take some oats.”

  “Okay. When you want to go?”

  “As soon as we finish breakfast. Go turn the two-year-olds out into the pasture and I’ll do the dishes, then I’ll meet you at the truck. This is going to be fun.” She took a bite of bacon, washed it down with black coffee, laughed again. Her breasts rose and fell beneath her blue sweater, sunlight poured through the windows, hope filled the room like snow, possibility, danger, the terror and possibility of love. “Eat, Bobby, I’m not going with you unless you eat every bite on that plate. I’m not going ring shopping with a hungry man. How long have you been in love with this girl?”

  “Since I was sixteen and she was fourteen. I saw her walking up the sidewalk to the high school and that was it. She walks like she owns the earth. She walked like that before she even found out her daddy was rich.”

  An hour later Sherrill and Bobby were sitting in the back room of Morrell’s Jewels and Furs, a two-room emporium on the main street of Star City. Spread out on a cloth was a small collection of possible rings. Most of them were antiques, left for hock and never picked up again. There was one diamond solitaire in an old-fashioned Tiffany setting. Bobby was holding it in his hand. “That’s the one,” Sherrill said. “That’s the one she won’t be able to resist.”

  “You’re sure? You think she’ll like it?”

  “Give it here.” Bobby held out the ring and Sherrill slipped it on her finger and held her hand up to the light. “She might turn you down,” Sherrill said. “But it won’t be because she didn’t want this ring.”

  “We can give you a discount,” Pat Morrell said. “Since it’s for the sake of love. I could knock two hundred off. Hell, if she don’t take it, you can bring it back.”

  “He’s got to buy it on time, anyway,” Sherrill said. “He’s going to college in the fall. He has to save his money.”

  “I’ll take it,” Bobby said. “I’ll pay you five hundred now and the rest this summer as soon as I get a job.”

  They all stood up. The ring was boxed in a velvet box and the box was slipped into a paper sack. Bobby counted five one-hundred-dollar bills out onto a counter and was given a receipt and a bill. They all shook hands. Then Bobby and Sherrill walked out into the brilliant noon sun. A perfect day. Sixty-five degrees. Mountains on three horizons. “She might not even remember me,” he said.

  “She remembers you.” Sherrill took his arm, pulled him close to her. “No woman would forget a man like you.”

  “I hate leaving you guys shorthanded, but the Whitehead twins are home from school. They were over yesterday looking for Tom. They’re good. They can do anything I can do.”

  “We’ll be okay. We’ll be here if you want to come back. We’re not going anywhere. We’re here to stay.” She pulled his arm closer into her body. He felt her breasts beneath his elbow. He looked down into the blue eyes that had welcomed and disarmed and protected him. “Goddamn, Sherrill,” Bobby said. “You could make a man believe in fairies.”

  When they got back to the ranch, Tom Macalpin was back from Billings and helped Bobby change the tires on the truck. “Go on if you’re going then,” was all he said. “I’m going to miss you like my right arm. And you be ready to meet me in Fort Worth in December. Don’t forget how to ride.”

  “I’ll be there. Wherever I am, I’ll be there for that show.”

  “Sherrill’s going to cry. You might as well get ready for that. She’s already on the verge.”

  “I have to go. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t. This is the best deal I ever had in my life and I’m leaving it. I don’t want to leave. I have to.”

  “Remember us. Remember who you are.”

  “I’ll try to. I’m not sure I know.”

  “You know, when you can remember.”

  The next morning Bobby packed his gear into his pickup truck and started driving, heading toward Wyoming. That morning, when he had gone out to tell the horses goodbye, frost had been on their withers. The world’s made out of water, he remembered. Shit, what do I have to lose? My life’s not worth living without her. I got to take a shot at it. He patted the ring box in the pocket of his jacket. He hunkered down over the steering wheel and really began to drive. He was leaving paradise and he knew it, but up ahead were the long months of summer, horse shows and rodeos and long starry nights in the Cherokee Nation.

  Chapter 7

  BOBBY drove steadily down Highway 87 toward Billings. He was leaving behind the unbelievable vistas of the Chene River Plains and he was not immune to what he was leaving. Several times he stopped the truck to look a long time to the north and west. The vast plains, the clear, clean air, in the distance, snow-capped mountains, their cones rising from the vast dark purple of th
e plains. Nothing could be that pretty, Bobby thought, and dreamed he lived a long time ago and was Crow or Pocatello, Blackfoot or Chinook. He dreamed he hunted clad in furs, half-frozen and dreaming of meat. He dreamed he wore bracelets of Pacific Ocean shells, vests of animal bones, carried walrus oil for lamps. In his dream Olivia waited in a hut made of skins. Wearing deerskin she waited, on fur they would make love. Here is this ring I got you in Montana, Bobby said. You don’t have to wear it unless you want to.

  The sun slipped past its zenith as Bobby drove and dreamed. The afternoon wore on. Clouds formed on the horizon, purple and gray and green and gold, pink and red and palest lavender and azure, tangerine and dark deep blues. I’m leaving paradise, Bobby knew, but it will always be here. A man could always return to this. Tom and Sherrill would take me back. Cast to the future, that’s what Tom said when I was leaving. Find your destiny. Well, I will. I might.

  Bobby furrowed his twenty-two-year-old brow and thought about the scraggly pine trees and soft hills of eastern Oklahoma. He saw his dad standing beside the trailer lighting a cigarette, laughing at a joke, telling someone the scores of football games. He remembered a game with Broken Arrow. He had scored the winning touchdown and the crowd was on its feet. His dad stood by the coach applauding loudly, and afterward, when the crowd poured out onto the field, Olivia had let him kiss her in his muddy uniform. She had stood beside the goalpost in her white cheerleading skirt and he had pulled her into his arms and danced her around the end zone. That was before I even asked her out, he remembered. When I was just flirting with her. I got mud all over her skirt right at the place of her pussy and she didn’t even care. She brushed it off while I was looking. I knew you liked me, she told me later. Everyone had already told me that.

  So I’m going down there and ask her to marry me. That’s that. I don’t care who she’s fucking in Carolina, it won’t be what we had. There won’t ever be anything as good as that. I guess she’s found that out by now. She called me in March and she sounded like she was sick of Carolina. I should have called her back the next day, but I had to go to Idaho with Tom. Then I called up and that goddamn answering machine said she was in Florida. So I got pissed off and pissed that chance away. Well, I’m making up for it now. Everyone makes mistakes. Tom said he’d like to have a nickel for every mistake he made with Sherrill before they finally got together.