Old Stuart was off and running. “I explain that our sugar content and carbonization differs. I tell them that Pepsi is flatter. I tell them Coke is more orange based, while Pepsi’s more of a lemon flavor.” He concluded in a tone of quiet reason, “I tell them Coke is cocaine free, but that the caffeine’s still there.”
Suddenly Paul was contemplative, his handsome face and great brown eyes at rest. “You know there’s every reason to fear glass bottles are going to be phased out. You need to make it clear that aluminum recycling is iffy as hell and that the best interests of their communities are served by returnable glass bottles. Glass bottles hold carbonization and flavor better than anything. Also, on the Coke front, your customers need to be reminded that Coca-Cola is more American than apple pie.” Here Paul began to speak in a stentorian tone that would’ve done Lincoln proud. “Dr. John Smith Pemberton first made this elixir in his backyard in 1886, and the world has been drinking it ever since. Forget the expansions—Minute Maid, Fanta, Sprite, all those peripherals. Stuart, please try and forget them. You need to sell the old original, and you need to sell it out of glass bottles.”
“I tell them we combined with Tri-Star to form Columbia Pictures!” Stuart cried, causing a brief but unsettling quiet.
“No, Stuart, please, they don’t need that, Stuart, they mustn’t hear it. They do not need Hollywood. They need a time-honored cold drink in a glass bottle. But look, the headline for today is water-management services, the sort of slam dunk you can do on the weekend across your neighbor’s fence while you’re roasting weenies on the barbecue. Tell the one about how the problem isn’t keeping his wife out of your yard but keeping your yard out of his wife! It’s an old one, but the old ones are the good ones, aren’t they, Stuart? I think they are. And you can make stuff up, too. Tell them Pepsi gets its water out of the cyanide leach fields from abandoned mines.”
“Uh, I’m going to dig into it today, Paul. Services basically.”
“Good, Stuart. And look, I know this takes some getting used to, but what are we going to do? Jim Whitelaw is dead.” Paul felt strangely soiled by his own performance.
“I realize.”
“And puhleeze don’t pretend you miss him.”
“I did respect him though, Paul.”
Paul clenched his forearms to his rib cage. “I bet you got a million more where that one came from.”
Now Stuart was rising from his seat, shaky and undefiant. Paul found his search for an appropriate facial expression semi-risible; it was like Stuart came in a shoebox full of spare parts. With a slight frown of ostensible concern, Paul urged him to pull himself together.
“I can’t, Paul,” Stuart said. “I never expected to be treated this way. I should’ve prepared myself better.”
He didn’t know how he found her here, nor how he managed to get her to share a bench with him, though she maintained a certain distance by pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her winter coat and withdrawing her neck into its collar so that the only actual flesh of Evelyn on display was the bridge of her nose, her eyes and the portion of forehead that showed below her Irish wool cap. Paul—coat open, gloveless—seemed warmed by his not inconsiderable charm. “Why don’t you just call off the divorce? That satisfies everything.”
“God knows there’s plenty of pressure on me. Why can’t you at least get a bit of money out to my mother?” Her eyes still followed the dogs, the Frisbees. “And Nat could use a boost.”
“I don’t make those choices. These distributions are based on profits.”
“What happened to the profits?”
“They’re going down,” said Paul glumly.
“Why? Don’t you know how to run the place?”
“Of course I do. But there are market forces I can’t control, and our sector is getting hammered everywhere.”
“Sector? Paul, you just make stuff up. What if I did stay married to you—let’s just say I did—all that happens is I inherit Dad’s equity in the ranch. In other words, no difference. You keep appealing to my greed, and it’s not working. Why be so tiresome?”
“You may not get any money, but it would enable us to sell the company and cash out your mother and your sister. Your mother and your sister.” Evelyn decided not to comment on this appeal to family values. “I don’t see Bill living forever, and that land’s worth a fortune. Someday you’ll sell it and—ta da—you’re in San Juan Capistrano shaded up under a California oak, a margarita in one hand, a Palm Pilot with stock quotes in the other, just waiting for the fucking swallows to return.”
“You make a romantic case for liquidation, but in my version Bill gets to a hundred and I live in peace out there at least until menopause, at which point your plan might start making sense. But say all this happens. Where are you?”
“The usual place, trying to get back into your good graces. Natalie says I can use the spare bedroom once Stuart gathers up his sea boots and boogies. Then I’d have to look around for something to do, pretty good at selling myself.”
“You’ll need a fresh audience.”
“Could be, but what’s for you to think about is this company, which, despite its quantifiable value to others, seems to be caught in bad undertow. And, frankly, are you selling enough cows to support your mother? Not to mention the various treatment bills lying ahead for Natalie, given her deepening despondency—i.e., more than pissed and gone back to stealing, just for instance?”
After a moment’s thought, Evelyn said, “This is an absolute curse.”
“Maybe so, but I didn’t put it on you. Your father did. Remember, I’m not the devil.”
“You just work for him.”
“Really? I wonder why. The pay sucks.”
The doors were all closing. Paul’s mother called her that same night, undoubtedly tipped off by him to some perceived weakening. And knowing he would report to her probably kept Paul from going crazy. She claimed to be correcting papers but was, in fact, stinking drunk. “You’re not sufficiently aware of the value of continuity,” Mrs. Crusoe began in general garrulity, “or other long-run values that make your apparent need for some dreamed-of bliss shrink by comparison. Marriage is like the devoted study of a long, sacred document. Think of the Bible! Think of the Koran! What’s that other one? Where all parties are raised to sacramental heights by the dedication of their lives.” Evelyn’s attempts to interrupt were unavailing. She actually put the phone aside for as long as it took to put a few dishes in the sink. When she picked it up again, Mrs. Crusoe was winding down and growing confused. Finally, she demanded, “Who is this? With whom am I speaking?”
Natalie stood outside fastening her coat and determining if she’d left any lights on. The wind cut into her cheek while she took in the tidiness of the bungalow with both faint distaste and some alertness to maintenance issues. She recalled putting its little rectangle of a garden to bed as though it had been an act of complicity with seasonal forces that wished to make her colorless. She understood that she had to work this particular fear. She knew it was not reasonable when Stuart asked if they could move the boat from Canyon Ferry to Flathead Lake, and she’d replied that it made her want to kill herself. And it mattered less than it should have when Stuart made his little puzzle-face and tried to cheer her by describing the huckleberries west of the Continental Divide and the summer theater and shopping opportunities around Bigfork. Foolishness of this sort had once landed her in a karaoke joint lip-synching Tammy Wynette to gales of laughter and a booby-prize free pizza. Natalie was a Vassar graduate, and at the time this had seemed a very long fall indeed.
She was heartened by the surge of her Mustang as it pulled inexorably through the snow in front of her house, while a westbound train called through the storm. An old man with earflaps on his hat came down the sidewalk towing a sled with two bags of groceries beneath the bony outlines of snow-laden trees. A hundred fifteen thousand miles, and the Mustang still pulled like a Georgia mule. The weather report on the radio revealed a desperate
picture from across Montana and through the Dakotas, sweeping south beyond Medicine Bow and threatening the faux-Indian village of the Denver airport; fatal strandings lay ahead, chained-up ghost ships on the interstate, and Natalie felt a commensurate desperation to be around people instead of standing at the kitchen window and watching the birdbath in her backyard turn into a colossal ice cream cone. With considerable irritation, she pictured Evelyn’s insouciance out there on the ranch, soldiering on when the shit hit the fan. That much virtue could choke a hog.
She pulled up in front of Just the Two of Us and parked between a motorcycle and a florist’s van, its ice-plastered corsage rapidly disappearing in the blast. The day her father died, Natalie had been busted for shoplifting a tortoiseshell comb in Jan’s, the in spot for out-of-towners, faculty wives and bureaucrats; the news made the papers, but her mortification failed to preclude visits to other shops, despite Jan’s small-scale but successful prosecution. Never done it before. Now she stole entirely from Just the Two of Us and because she was also a good “paying” customer, she felt a complex emotional game of cat-and-mouse whenever she prowled their aisles. She had had several allusive chats with Violet and Claire, leaving them with a somewhat cloudy view of her as an interesting person suffering an illness, and this, combined with normal competitive feelings, made them hate “the old sluts” at Jan’s for being too stiff to accommodate her small awkwardness. Plus, Natalie was a nice person. Never did she suggest to Violet or Claire that they were wasting the best years of their lives showing the wives of yokels how to accessorize or how to avoid looking a fright when Mr. Right appeared on the horizon. Nevertheless, Natalie thought that Evelyn rather overrated this duo simply because they’d grown up on ranches.
All of which seemed beside the point as Natalie entrusted herself to the store, knocking snow from her sleeves and breathing this perfumed comfort beyond the cold solace of the hearth, amid the scents and soaps and bibelots, under the beautiful tin ceiling of a former Dodge Garage which threw a gentle light on the stacks of blouses, sweaters, scarves and hosiery.
“Don’t say anything nice about this weather,” Natalie cautioned the two proprietors who stood shoulder to shoulder at this challenging appearance.
“We won’t,” said one or the other. These were mountain geishas, indistinguishable but for Violet’s hatchet jaw and Claire’s close-set eyes, which showed equal concern when listening or sorting rubber bands.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Natalie, “I’m just going to poke around.” The exchange of glances at the level of supper-club theater gave Natalie the sense the jig was up, and she cast a longing glance at the sensuous rows of merchandise.
Remembering dear, dopey Stuart coming to the police station to pick her up, she had the teeniest frisson that an involuntary joyride awaited her; but the tolerance of the shopgirls had the effect of tempering desire. She knew that wrong numbers floated from the murk of troubled selves.
“Girls, stick with me while I shop. I don’t want to have a slip.” And she didn’t. Violet and Claire, too, were disappointed at this lapse in Natalie’s dark wishes, reducing them all to spectators in a mountain storm. Now they went to the front window and commented on pedestrians. The motorcyclist was beating the snow from the seat of his machine with his hat. Across the street, ice fog had created rows of bodiless faces. All you could read of the movie marquee was a fragment—FESTI—and a steady, throbbing light was the little that showed of what perhaps was an arrest in progress.
“Come on in and buy something!” Claire shouted through the glass.
“You look like an asshole!” Violet cried out to a bundled-up passerby.
“This is like being locked in an elevator,” said Natalie quite sensibly.
“No shit,” Claire commented sadly. “Why don’t you steal something.”
“I’m not in the mood. You steal something.”
“We can’t; they do inventory.”
“Then steal from the cash register.”
“You’re pretty naive,” said Violet, looking at Claire. Both ignored the ringing phone and Natalie suddenly felt anxious. She thought of the bulbs of perennials asleep in her garden, wondering how they were doing in this terrible cold. She thought next of Stuart’s unwavering sense of duty and loyalty. Then she thought she might cry but elected to postpone it.
In the opinion of his father-in-law, whose greatest praise for anyone was “reminds me of myself at that age,” Paul was a ball of fire. For years, he had barreled around the State of Montana in a white Ford Crown Victoria, dry cleaning hanging in the backseat, calling on every conceivable customer of their bottled products. And he bragged to his own father-in-law that the towns he visited were chock-full of cheating housewives.
“But where is your expense report?” Sunny Jim demanded.
“My what?”
“Your expense report. You must submit an expense report complete with receipts, after every trip. Where is it?”
“Mr. Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away.”
“What in the hell’s the matter with you, son?”
“I hate it when you’re sore. You’ve got a face that could stop a clock.”
This appealed to Sunny Jim Whitelaw but not at first.
It was Paul’s capacity for unstinting companionship that endeared him to Sunny Jim Whitelaw, whose business acumen and family leadership were matched by another life entirely, that of an unwearying old goat. For this, he needed company, and it illustrated his remarkable ingenuity that he chose Paul to accompany his carousals.
On one such jaunt, before Paul had hit on the bright idea of trading jail time for corporate glory, he had traveled with Whitelaw to Las Vegas for a bottlers’ convention, evidence of which, in the form of brochures and industry newsletters, was strewn in Mother Whitelaw’s path. Paul had long acted as beard to Whitelaw’s secret life, a simple enough arrangement except that he increasingly associated his confidentiality with raises to which he felt entitled, an association Whitelaw indulgently called blackmail while plotting, without so revealing, a severe reprisal. For this secret reason, Sunny Jim had invited a guest on this trip, a business acquaintance named C. R. Majub, whom he described as a “very, very, very old friend.”
At first, they saw little of Majub; he was ailing and he was also a hockey fan. If any sort of game at all was on television, Majub was absent; if the Montreal Canadiens were playing, he took the phone off the hook, piled pillows under his door to remove extraneous noise and drank Crown Royal from a bathroom glass. “You can’t believe a towelhead could love hockey so much!” Whitelaw exclaimed, then added, more thoughtfully, “but he’ll show you how to get rich, so long as you don’t care how you make it.” From the beginning, Majub cheerfully exuded mystery and secret knowledge, and he was one of the few people whom Paul had ever instinctively feared. Majub’s attentiveness was like the savoring of a cannibal.
Sundown seemed prolonged on the eve of their arrival, and it was not quite dark by the time Sunny Jim attached a mercenary showgirl named JoAnne to his arm, a high-kicking hooker with muscular hands. Paul, straggling along like a remora following an old shark, tried to make small talk, citing Evelyn’s love of her horses and cows, and causing JoAnne to moan tragically at the recollection of her North Dakota yesteryears. For obvious reasons, the two men kept separate rooms, the latter a suite where Whitelaw could entertain. Indeed, he entertained so many that Paul began to wonder just what demons drove his father-in-law; it was hardly a moral judgment, since Paul sometimes did some entertaining himself. At such occasions C. R. Majub often appeared, a precise and well-dressed man of forty with a flat midwestern voice. Majub, it developed, was an Ohio Bengali, and too ill to entirely indulge the technical investment questions in speculations as to “where our economy is headed” that so absorbed Whitelaw. Majub seemed to be in Las Vegas looking for a cure, though when Paul asked if it was to see a doctor, Whitelaw said, “Not exactly!” and laughed uproariously. Majub saw no humor in this and contin
ued sizing Paul up. Whitelaw beamed upon his sick friend. Trying to curry his favor, Paul told him, once Whitelaw had left the room, “His teeth are loose but he still wants sex.”
Whitelaw enjoyed Paul’s prying nature and was willing to feed him tidbits about Majub on the rare occasions when the whores were elsewhere. He was, it seemed, a successful broker of businesses who’d helped Sunny Jim acquire, with leverage, several—“semi-mom-and-pop”—going concerns in the Midwest, including a sign company, a foundry and a Dunkin’ Donuts. During a steep and unforeseen downturn, in which the offspring threatened to eat the parent company, Majub saved Whitelaw’s bacon by “spinning the subsidiaries way offshore.”
“This guy knows from loyal,” Sunny Jim said. “He’s on the business end of loyal. P.S. I owe him.” As he almost never acknowledged debt, Paul figured this was merely a figure of speech.
Paul’s only private exposure consisted of a single drink at the hotel bar where Majub acknowledged that he was not well; but when Paul asked what he was doing about it, he merely shrugged and said, “Waiting.” The brown rascal’s Perrier made Paul’s Budweiser seem the epitome of vice, and Paul was further discomfited by the silence of Majub, a quality that—being unattainable by Paul—he always rather admired. At length, Majub turned to him wearily and said, “Sunny Jim isn’t going to be around forever,” then handed Paul a card that read C. J. Majub, broker and, after finishing his Perrier at a swallow, added, “I make companies get bigger or I make them get smaller. Best of all, I make them go away.”
The Cadence of Grass Page 11