The Cadence of Grass

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “I don’t know about that. I wish to be on this trip. Paul, I hope to be disoriented by comfort and services. I don’t want to suffer, but I don’t want to be around here before I can make sense of things.”

  “What do you mean ‘sense of things’?”

  “Just what I said. We’re not having the easiest time of this, Paul. And we hear quite frequently from the employees. Maybe you can see our point of view.”

  Paul was aware of the discontent but thought, I’m going to kick ass and take names. “Of course I can,” said Paul with surprising mildness. “I find it very awkward, and I hope that by running things profitably and intelligently that I will win your confidence.”

  “As a businessman,” Alice Whitelaw said, “you already have it.”

  Paul was not about to go digging around about what other areas might lie in Ma Whitelaw’s omissions when it was far better to pour tincture on her remark and treat it like blanket approval. At all events the bottom line was the bucks.

  While Natalie watched in amazement, he beamed like Howdy Doody and stated his gratitude. He said nothing whatsoever about what it was to be chained to the bottling plant for as far into the future as he could see, or to go through life as an ex-convict in a Paul Stuart Canadian twill suit and a hundred-dollar shantung tie. What chance was there of persuading her that he had a stain which no money could reach, and which was perhaps not entirely visible to someone heading for an Alaskan cruise in a haze of thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume?

  Aware of their gazes crossing somewhere in front of him, Paul felt rather hemmed in and took a geographer’s note of the form and movement of altocumulus clouds through the garden window, some starting to stream in from the north. He knew perfectly well that he would forever feel the gust of his predatory urges. To stay the course, he wasn’t anxious to dance with the devil; he wanted to find smaller, more efficient bottling plants, to hog the franchises, the relationships, the new containers, to get both the kids and the tavern rats, to score with the celebrities who visited each summer, big Hollywood guys who were willing to put their name on some pork-and-bean microbrewery just to be part of things in the West. And all for what? So Mother Whitelaw can see a hundred and give him a watch? He didn’t think so. Even this house, which he now wanted out of fast, was deader than a federal correctional facility, where life, after a fashion, ran riot. At least there you could sleep and not fear waking up crazy in the way that marked his first days of freedom, a fear that ended only when fortune gave him a going concern and the family that depended upon it. There was some poetry here.

  He rattled off a few hopes for plant expansion, alluding to a simple and remunerative harvest of opportunity, and had managed to create an atmosphere of fiscal security by the time he bade Mrs. Whitelaw good-bye. Natalie silently raised a hand in sardonic farewell, and Paul drove to the bottling plant, noting with satisfaction that his name had been applied to his parking space. When he got out of the car, he could smell the fresh paint; he looked up at his factory and smiled.

  On Monday, freed from the mood of resentment surrounding Mrs. Whitelaw and Natalie—a true horn dog!—he felt entirely relieved and happier still as he walked around the plant among his workers. He found his erstwhile brother-in-law, the “vice president of sales,” as per Paul’s spontaneous invention, talking with the maintenance supervisor, Herman Schmitz, who wiped his hands on his shop apron in the unlikely event that the boss wanted to shake hands. “Herman,” said Paul, stepping back a bit, “I am very aware that the one thing we don’t bottle around here is water.” He said “water” with an aspect of astonishing sourness. He had been raised by a mother for whom water was almost the only subject. Amidst the violent tinklings and forklift rumbles of the thriving bottle plant, Herman seemed unable to reply, and so Stuart butted right in.

  “Well, Paul, we have such good water in our area. Even at that, we treat it with ferrous sulfate, hydrated lime and chlorine, then run it back through the filters. It’s crystal pure.”

  “Our area” is what particularly stuck in Paul’s craw, the very idea of drinking water without the messages, interactions and fairly binding deals that ensued once you got the stuff into a bottle. “It may be that we have good water, but thinking like that drives no business. We are encircled by a very remunerative world of designer water, Stuart. So, anyway: floor space.”

  “How’s this?”

  “Floor space. Do we have the space for a small plant?”

  “We cou—”

  “One simple complex for washing, filling, capping and conveying at, let’s say, four thousand bottles an hour. But it takes floor space.”

  “Maybe we could find a few hundred square f—”

  “Get me some quotes.”

  “The onl—”

  “And make sure it’s a stand-alone in case the thing goes tits up. We should be looking at some bigger containers too, with, you know, tamper-evident snap closures, leak-proof low-density polyethylene. And I mean, make it thick! Like thirty-eight millimeters, which is the industry standard. Stuart, you and Herman both look like you fell out of your high chairs.”

  Herman tried to contribute. “Maybe the tamper thing with plain water—”

  “Tampering? Tampering is on the way. That’s all we have in America: tampering.”

  At four, Paul went for a smoke behind the buildings. Guys from other plants were in the alleyway smoking too. Smoke in back, talk in your car, relieve yourself in the john; it was always something. Someday, all you’d do in these buildings would be work. But it was nice to get some air and see the sky at the top of the alley and enjoy the quiet glee he’d always felt, yes, even in prison where the patterned movements of the men were broken by hot spells of peril that had been, with some awful exceptions, an adventure.

  He kept walking, soaking in the pleasures of what peered at him in the form of nature: mushrooms at the base of steel bins, an effulgent cloudscape way down toward the RV lot, children playing in front of a very run-down day care center, children soon to grow old, wave after wave of them in a town as ordinary as the flat earth, waxing, waning, pushing each other off the edge into the abyss and no God to care. But in the meanwhile, a rather rich and detailed picture! All of this, thought Paul, is why we must hunt down the wherewithal that held irritation at bay, not that it saved so much as an ant from oblivion, but for its anesthetic properties in a phenomenally bleak deal handed down to the human race by the Joker. However, money was another thing: Money brings us closer to nature.

  In his special views of beauty and nature, Paul sought the semi-eternity that helped make up for the security that sort of atomized in sixth grade, when his mother told him the disturbing story of his conception involving a father she described as little more than a worthless stranger, an all-consuming vacancy that suddenly gave his young life a cartoonish quality complete with flying faces, dither, interruptions and babble. He also missed the God that had been described in his small-town grade school, a terrible old tyrant who seemed to demand all the wheedlings and importunings mankind could send his way.

  When Paul noticed movement behind the green bin that secured trash for the Marvel Foundry, not far along the alley from the back of his own factory, he suspected it was the striped russet mutt he’d observed lurking around most mornings. He hung over the bin to peer into the space between the Dumpster and the wall, and immediately found himself looking into a bright pair of eyes belonging to the suspected dog. Scouring the garbage, Paul retrieved a burger fragment with matching bun halves and tooth marks. This was all it took to lure out a narrow-faced and expressive mutt, more brindle than anything and possessing an elevated indecisive curlicue tail over its back. Paul gave it the wasted meat and managed to get a hand on its back with only a suggestion of lips raised over teeth before the contact of Paul’s hand and murmuring voice reassured it, “You eat like a cannibal.” Further rummaging produced a length of wrapping twine with which Paul devised a noose and leash and to which he attached the still dining dog.
But towing it was not easy as the dog reared back and fishtailed at the end of the twine, revealing an endearingly freckled belly. Paul, obliged to hold the twine with both hands, towed the dog the short distance into the back door of his plant where, in front of all employees, another battle of wills ensued. Once things quieted down, he called out an order to Herman while peeling a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet: “T-Bone!” then added, “You may call him Whitelaw!”

  “I don’t see how you figured this out on your own,” said Evelyn. She was grilling poor Bill Champion about horses all over again. The first of every month, she helped him update his cattle records. Getting out to this unprofitable little ranch had been the most important part of Evelyn’s life since the days of childhood when her father sent her here to learn to ride. It was an unsurprising piece of short-grass prairie yet had a strange hold upon her imagination.

  “I never said I did. There’s always a lot of folks gone before. And, you know, I had Robert Wood. I don’t know who he had, but I’m sure neither one of them made it up either.”

  Evelyn had seen a picture of Robert Wood hanging in a cowboy bar on the south side of Billings. He had long uncut white hair and looked like George Washington. “I guess he was your hero.”

  “He was a horseman. Said he got it all in Nevada, had ’em up in a bridle rolling a copper cricket.”

  Evelyn understood the peculiarities of Bill’s language, like calling the accelerator the “foot feed.” When Paul had been in the picture, Bill would scarcely talk to her and certainly not about anything important. Maybe a cow, or farming, but no chance of horses nor their pride and beauty. While Paul may have earned his enmity, it must be said that Bill disliked him the first time he saw him. It was quite unreasonable. But right now it was different; she wasn’t going back to Paul and Bill was at peace.

  “It was the last Mother’s Day before I went to the navy . . .” Here was another of his tantalizations: never a word about the war except vague references to his Cheyenne friend, a chief petty officer named Red Wolf. The only decoration in Bill’s house was an old black-and-white photograph of the light cruiser he’d served on in the Pacific, and references to Red Wolf ran throughout all the years Evelyn had come here. If Bill said he had an appointment with Red Wolf, it meant he was busy and didn’t have time to explain why. If the truck broke down, it was Red Wolf, and sometimes it was Red Wolf who came around disguised as the tax assessor. But evidently there really had been a man named Red Wolf, a strangely unforgotten part of Bill’s life. “You and Nat was just little bitty.” Here was another one. Evelyn couldn’t quite understand why she and her sister kept appearing in these early stories, other than that her father had thought farms and ranches were repositories of basic virtue and had sent his girls out to Bill every chance he got. But still, that was early. “I want to tell you a little story about what a hand Robert Wood was.” Evelyn had a feeling that Bill needed to tell these stories. He’d had a brief marriage and had two kids from that whom he might just as well not have had. All he said about his wife was “Somebody throwed a switch, turned her out on a blind siding and she never got back on the main line.” They almost never visited him, and when they did, it was mostly hoping to stumble on something they could take. About ten years ago, the girl, Karen, came up with some friends and tried to make methamphetamine in the old line shack, but they claimed she’d changed her ways and had a family of her own, living near Powderville with a good cowboy she’d met at the Calgary Stampede. The boy, Clay, sold cars in Glendive and was a gloomy type who hated winters and stayed close to his mother, who had inherited the local Penney’s store; together they were paying on a lot in Mesa, Arizona. All Bill ever said was that no thanks to him, they’d turned out good.

  “We had just got our horses up for the year. They was out all winter and the saddles didn’t fit and them horses would buck all hell west and crooked till we could get ’em rode. I was down in the ranch yard and Leo, the illegal worked for me then, said some old-timer had arrived on a wild horse and rolled out his bedroll under the loading chute, put his head on his saddle and gone to sleep. I had an idea it was Robert Wood, and it was. Course I didn’t find him asleep, just caught his eye and told him I would see him in the morning. I pretty much knew what he was after. He had a band of mares up on the bench behind our ranch, you know, Ev, where that tank went dry, mares that was running out with wild horses there, not real mustangs but just cayuses folks had turned out when they went to war and they’d reverted and was all outright broncs. I’d promised to gather ’em for Robert when we had a full complement of help, because it wasn’t going to be easy in any way, shape or form. Well, Robert lost patience with me . . .”

  By this time, Evelyn had sunk full length into the couch, and the only thing that moved were her extremely attentive eyes. She was afraid that if she moved she would make some sound and lose a word or two and that was just out of the question. She had long wished to know about all the disappeared horses of the surrounding hills.

  “Robert’s horses were quick, and the only safe place around them was on their backs. They was quiet in a herd of cattle and had the lightest noses in the West. It always looked like he’d put high-volt lights in their eyes. Robert showed them all the little connections between what he asked them to do and their jobs, and it was so pretty the way they’d look for a cow. O. C. Drury hauled cattle as a sideline, and he hated to haul Robert’s calves. Invariably, he’d arrive in the ranch yard mid-October and Robert would start whining, ‘O. C., anyone can see I’m so shorthanded just now. You want to catch up old bay and help me bring these cattle in? We’ll sort ’em off right here and now and call this year done.’ O. C. didn’t want to do it, in fact his blood ran cold. But he had to. So, he’d climb up on old bay or old sorrelly who’d know right then and there this wasn’t Robert Wood: one false move and the wreck was on.

  “Back to Mother’s Day, I let Robert sleep through the night and by the time I woke, just before sunup, I could smell his fire and coffee. Then in a bit I heard Leo’s voice and knew the two of them throwed in and was layin’ a plan. I made something decent for the three of us, mostly just to buy some time in the hopes Robert would quit this idea to bring his broncs off the bench with just me, him and Leo, a small fellow out of Sonora who listened to this kinda like polka music when he was homesick. Hair fell in his face in bangs, hard, square hands, and no sense of humor. Couldn’t read nor write but he had a perfect memory. If you lost something, could be a week ago, he’d walk straight to where you put it down.

  “Robert Wood was just an old puncher who’d outlived his day. Thought the Old West could be brought back if they’d just quit dammin’ up water to make alfalfa. He hated alfalfa and would go a long way out of his way to keep from seein’ it. I suppose he was seventy-five years old ’cause I seen in the papers when he died about ten years ago he’d made ninety or better. Wore a Stetson right out of the box, no crease, no nothin’. He wouldn’t wear a straw hat in the summer, said it was a farmer’s hat.

  “Robert said, ‘Here is the deal. We’ll go up the switchback together to the bench and when we get there I’ll ride around and see if I can’t stop them.’ The right place to get their attention was that big earthquake fault, you know, where we seen that lynx last summer, which no man could cross with a horse. That slope beyond it could’ve been a good escape route for those mares. ‘And hide in the brush and don’t show even the end of your nose else they’ll see it. Then you two get around them mares and start ’em home. I’ll make sure they come back down the trail. When they get down to the flat somebody will have to get outside these horses and thataway turn ’em into your corrals. I hope you don’t mind me borrowin’ your corrals.’

  “Ev, you’ve seen that crack in the ground. It’s a long way to the bottom. I really doubted Robert would turn those horses there. Wild horses and canners like these just as soon jump it and break their necks, whereas a horse and rider would never do such a thing. I guessed it would end there and we’d turn
’em down off the bench and lock ’em up at the neighbors. Then we’d have time to get a proper crew together.”

  Evelyn started to speak, but thought better of it.

  “When the horses got out on the flat, somebody’d have to ride out around that wild band, outrun them on broken ground, turn them into the corrals. And I wondered how all of this might look to Robert, who kind of despised our horsemanship. I mean Robert Wood worked for the Hash Knife, the N Bar, the Pitchfork, the Matador. And sure always rode a finished horse, but it had to be tough as whang leather or he just wouldn’t have it around. Horse needed to stand up in that bridle and look for work.

  “First off, we had to get crooked old Robert on his horse. He led his sorrel mare out of the pen behind the scales and tied her to a plank of the chute. She was a little sickle-hocked, which I’m sure he preferred, and she had good withers, short pasterns, kind of coon-footed, low-croup cow-horse look to her, ears pricked forward, even whickered at him quick as she seen him.

  “It was just painful to watch him saddle this horse. He threw the Navajo up all right, but when he lifted that old slick-fork saddle, we felt how it hurt him and yet knew we ought not to help. He bridled her up in a little grazer bit and led her around to the front of the chute. He threw one rein around the horn and wrapped the other around the corner post of the loading chute. She stood all right—I mean, he’d dare her not to stand—but that wasn’t no kid’s horse, bad as anything he’d force O. C. onto, nose blowed out and white around her eyes. Cross a horse like that and she drives you into the ground like a picketpin.