The Cadence of Grass

by Mcguane, Thomas

  That night, chatting blearily with his father-in-law in the latter’s suite, Paul showed him his latest plan for a promotion, which consisted of a fistful of Polaroids with which the girl from North Dakota had provided him for five cool century notes. Whitelaw didn’t show a bit of annoyance at the connection between these pictures and his son-in-law’s economic well-being, and Paul could hardly have known that he himself was about to go on the black market. Sunny Jim took possession of the Polaroids with inexplicable gratitude and, resting a heavy paw on Paul’s shoulder, said, “I just like getting my ashes hauled.” Then he announced he was tired and wished to go to sleep. But for a nightcap, he recommended the Capitol, in Henderson, where Paul could use his credit by just identifying himself as his son-in-law. After giving him directions and begging Paul’s indulgence, the old fellow rolled over and closed his eyes.

  The Capitol was next door to Seizer’s Palace, an agency specializing in repossessing unpaid-for goods. Its motto, emblazoned on poured concrete walls, reminded Paul of a book he’d once read. “Render unto Seizer, that which is Seizer’s.” The cabby who’d dropped him there said the women wouldn’t be prostitutes, but they’d be close. The Capitol had white columns fastened directly to its stucco facade and its discreet entrance promised high jinks. Overhead, the sound of arriving and departing airliners was constant; the night air smelled of jet fuel, and desert clouds were lit repeatedly, at heartbeat intervals, by strobes and beacons from the city. The persistence of odd-hour life gave the town a kind of fluorescent alpenglow.

  Late as it was, it was early for this bar. A few people were drinking, their belongings scattered in front of them, purses, wallets, cigarettes. When Paul established his relationship with Whitelaw to the bartender, he was rewarded with a significant nod. Down at the end of the bar, two women were talking to each other in a manner that disinvited interruption, yet they perked after this exchange. Their dress suggested that they were on their way home from work rather than out for the evening, but before Paul could even order a drink, he found himself accompanied by one of them, a young, dark-eyed, humorous-looking girl with mid-length auburn hair parted casually at the middle. “Next, I buy you a drink,” said Paul.

  “As you wish. I can afford it.”

  “Really? Then why don’t you buy me a drink?”

  “You got credit here, sport.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “A little birdy told me.”

  Not long afterward, when things seemed to have slowed to a crawl, Paul asked a question whose answer he was not destined to hear. “What’s there to fucking do in this town?”

  He woke up in a bathtub full of ice, a row of new stitches like a parade of ants across his abdomen; on a chair beside him, a portable phone rested atop a note: “Call 911 for post-operative care. And remember, your health comes first!” Even before the immediate pain of surgery, he was aware of an odd, sweeping tingling that soon turned into horror. Looking at the faintly puckered slit across his stomach, the neat dimpling of the stitches, he pounced on an oversight of his abductors: Since he didn’t know where he was, how could he tell Emergency? His clothes were neatly folded and the hopsacking jacket, whose wheaty hue had seemed so lighthearted and summery in the Vegas night, was draped carefully on a hanger embossed with “Courtesy Hotel.” Paul climbed out of the tub and dried and dressed himself, sitting down several times in a recliner by the window where he tried to form some impression from his view of telephone wires and languorous side-street traffic. He was on the second floor, he concluded, of an out-of-the-way hotel perhaps called the Courtesy, and, judging by the traffic, well away from any significant artery. Still, there was some reassurance in daylight, but it was short-lived and Paul found himself in misery again. The clock radio went off and Latino music filled the room.

  When the macabre mystery of his surgery came sweeping back, he rose and started for the door, a general sickliness sweeping over him, combined with a stab of guilt as he saw himself explaining to Evelyn how he’d been drinking with some girl, but he’d been drugged! Right! Unlike the kidnappers of a dictator or industrialist, his didn’t want money or power. They wanted one of his insides and he didn’t yet know which one, though they hadn’t gotten anything he couldn’t do without because here he was lacing his cordovans, lightheaded with fear, in a dull glare from the window. A shiver began in his colon and rose to the back of his throat. He emitted a small, peculiar sound, like the mewing of a kitten.

  Paul opened the door, then turned the lock so it wouldn’t close in case he had to get back inside. The doorknob was wet from his own hand. He started down the stairs, worrying remotely about passing out and gripping the steel railing with both hands. An old cleaning lady holding vacuum cleaner parts watched him from the landing, sizing him up as if he were something she could use.

  Once he had attained the lobby, Paul had to sit down even before he could say a word. The desk clerk looked at him indifferently and, after an ensuing quiet, said, “You missed checkout,” pointing at a sign on the counter with a ballpoint pen. Paul declined to state that he didn’t know who’d checked him in and instead just stared without energy at the desk clerk, at the tomato-colored coat, the thin, slicked-back hair, and the horn-rimmed glasses that spanned the man’s cheeks. Reaching across his chest with his right hand, Paul clasped his wallet and pulled it out. The rushing creeps abated at the discovery of his own picture on his driver’s license.

  He looked at the desk clerk, held up his driver’s license and said, “This is me. I need an ambulance.”

  “Oh?”

  “They . . . they . . . cut me open.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Please—” At which point, he lost consciousness.

  When the emergency team asked what happened to Paul, the desk clerk replied distantly, “Somebody went to town on him.”

  He did in fact wake up in the hospital, thinking nothing quite brings out the good Samaritan like an unconscious body at the front desk. Simply because most people there were at work, the hospital seemed to peacefully imply that all was normal. And Paul soon learned that the procedure by which he had lost a kidney was one of high professionalism, the wound was clean, and he heard several admiring remarks about the surgery.

  Paul could have taken it hard and learned nothing from the experience, but in the end his lesson was one that only people like Sunny Jim Whitelaw could give, people free of confusion and self-doubt who looked at the rest of humanity as perhaps the astronauts do. But Paul’s full control of his fate would not arrive until he figured out what to do with the dead motorcyclist.

  At Firestone, the young man with the two-tone goatee who said it would be at least an hour before her snow tires were installed clearly enjoyed making this statement. It was dark, but Evelyn was tired of being cooped up all day at home and wished, even in this terrible weather, she could be out on the ranch. So, instead of waiting around, she walked up to see Natalie, mentally preparing herself to be patient as Natalie seemed more than usually erratic. But the house was empty, so Evelyn headed back downtown, thinking she might get a cup of tea someplace. Then, when she passed a house belonging to the last of her father’s many doctors, Randy DeRozier, the door opened abruptly and Randy leaned his whole good-looking self through, including the great big blue eyes previously approved by the sisters. “Evelyn! How are you?” he called. They’d not spoken since her father’s death, and she was surprised that his look of concern seemed somewhat overlearned, given that he and his wife, Juanita, were friends of the whole Whitelaw family.

  “Just fine, Randy.”

  “’Cause if you’re not, let me know.”

  “Is there something you take for it?”

  “Evelyn, come on in for a moment.” He took a tentative step onto the snowy porch. “You need a break from the cold.” There were already globes of cold, hazy light around the streetlamps, and it would be nice to duck in somewhere close by until the car was ready. She could hear tire chains clanking a
way one street over and the weirdly clear whistle of a train north of town. Hastening into his front hall, she noticed how youthful Dr. Randy was, in college sweats and bare feet. He could have been fifty, but he cultivated a scrubbed, boyish dishevelment. She was less comfortable with the open inspection he gave her while helping with her coat.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, leading her toward the Poggenpohl futuristic kitchen with its granite counters and deep black double sink. Next to it was a beautiful wet bar, bird’s-eye maple and stainless steel with little circular lights above like the cabin of a yacht.

  “Where’s Juanita?” she asked. Juanita was a great girl, an Oklahoman with a powerful contralto voice who reminded Evelyn of tornadoes. On at least two occasions that Evelyn knew of, Juanita had slugged people who richly deserved it, including a fantastically pompous state legislator.

  “That’s my surprise!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No Juanita.” He dropped lime slices into two glasses and repeated, “No Juanita.”

  “It’s time for Larry King Live!” Evelyn said quite irrationally.

  “Come on, Evelyn. Take a moment here: she left me.”

  His own vainglorious disbelief in this helped Evelyn decide that silence was the best policy, silence without any comforting grins or the doctor was going to launch himself onto her before the two lovely drinks he’d just made were consumed. He touched a button activating the audio system and said at the first notes, “Pavane for a Deceased Infanta.”

  She took a sip of her very strong vodka and tonic, which Dr. Randy had correctly remembered was nearly the only thing she ever drank. This one was a shade high-test.

  They moved into the study and sat on a black, flowered sofa, where Evelyn registered a welcome feeling of nothingness or serene detachment, of letting it all go, that didn’t last ten seconds.

  “And Paul’s out too?”

  “Yup, regular grief workshop for the two of us, eh Randy?”

  “Maybe Juanita’ll be coming back.”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “Evelyn, you don’t know a thing about this.”

  “I can spot a man in a hurry.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Evelyn,” he said, slipping his arm around her.

  She’d made the mistake of putting her drink down. Now he was trying to kiss her, his neck straining against her forearm. “Randy? Randy! Stop this.”

  He sat straight up, shoulders square, folded his hands in his lap and gazed around the floor, then said, “I have to make a call.” He went into the next room, and she could soon tell, from the sharp bursts and long silences, that he was talking to Juanita. Still, she couldn’t quite see the right way to walk straight out of here to her snow tires. She’d actually been up for a bit of this, had there been any way of skipping all the posturing. When the conversation in the next room stopped and Randy failed to return, Evelyn found herself searching for him, despite a feeling of queasiness. She discovered Dr. Randy in his den having changed into starched pearl gray pajamas with red piping, and sitting in a bay window, his handsome face profiled against the falling snow.

  When Evelyn told him how sickening she found his performance, Randy turned his big pretty eyes toward her and his lips retracted from surprisingly small teeth. “So puke,” he said.

  Evelyn rued the vodka on her breath as she pawed around in the closet for her coat. She flung open the front door, glad to be in the light-shot whirlwind of snow. Glancing back at Dr. DeRozier in his pajamas, fighting the door shut against the wind, she levitated her way toward Firestone, thinking, This is weather!

  Surely this storm would paralyze the city. The great yellow plows were flashing lights in every direction, the powdery, weightless snow pouring from one side of the blade, burying cars and blocking alleys, leaving ghosts of diesel fuel in midair. As Evelyn lay in bed, she felt the luxury of stolen time as the burden of human planning was absolved by weather. Surely the intensity of this storm, with all its fury retained during long passage from the Gulf of Alaska, would have to abate. Because she was remembering her life with Paul, Evelyn began to weep, abandoning herself in this isolation to choking sobs, remembering two things: the breadth of his back and Mexico, somewhere near San Felipe, in low desert far to the south, when he had done something to the car. It looked as if it had tractor tires and you practically needed a ladder to get in it, but they’d parked right out on the sand next to the Sea of Cortez where Evelyn sunbathed in the most provocative bikini, one you couldn’t wear just anywhere, though their sense of reckless liberty was such that they made love in any patch of sand free of vinagaroons or sidewinders, the bikini generally dangling from the thorns of the nearest cat’s claw bush.

  They’d hiked on a night as bright as blue day, and discovered a tiny owl occupying a hole in the arm of a tall cactus that stood above a trail where gaunt-ribbed Corriente cattle walked oblivious around them, horns rattling in the narrow passage.

  Her love there had unfurled in agitated, unrecognizable cries, and she had no hope of getting a grip on herself. She trusted Paul and was fascinated by his sauntering style, judging him in his bleached-out Waylon T-shirt and canvas shorts held up by twine to be free of the usual claims that clipped the wings of most young men. She also understood that women suffering hypnosis by criminals or mama’s boys was nothing new. Good-looking, quick-witted, a soul rented to darkness, Paul had everything.

  Evelyn had first met him at her parents’ house one nice night in May. Though she was in a rush to get back to the ranch, he seduced her on her walk to, and finally inside of, her car; it was that kind of abandonment, from the beginning. She didn’t even know what he did aside from turning up in Bozeman on a “fact-finding mission” for some agency. He’d met her father at a local association concerned with treason in national life, and the two became immediate friends despite their great difference in age. Had it not been for Sunny Jim Whitelaw’s success in conveying the glamour of the entrepreneur’s life, Paul might have satisfied his mother’s dreams and gone to graduate school.

  Though sex probably caused her marriage, Evelyn had tolerated so many cautious suitors that she failed to notice that Paul’s admirable lack of self-pity was actually part of a cold and predatory nature. The marriage also improved her relationship with her father, something she’d longed for since childhood. Sunny Jim was happily fascinated by the unerring way Paul homed in on the bottle company and wasn’t so much surprised when Paul began stealing as he was enchanted by the impertinence. With disarming honesty, he told Paul he would recoup his losses by selling his vital organs, if these thefts should recur. His son-in-law, of course, didn’t believe him.

  Whitelaw never backed away from his passionate approval of the marriage. Even when Paul was in prison, he kept him in control of numerous accounts. It was the opinion of Sunny Jim that here was a man’s man, one with real value to a fellow with a few skeletons in his own closet. They shared a lack of sense of humor and a conviction that the general population was crippled by the need to see only what it wanted to see. They both loved the Shakespeare-in-the-Park program and referred to their secret girlfriends as strumpets or jades. Sunny Jim was so swept by the feeling of youth restored that he sometimes described his marital endeavors with Alice in bed, racking his mind for high points and rare instances of pleasure. Paul found this, as he later confided to Evelyn, “icky,” though he was amiably wowed by the old man’s profound indecency. Once, when Sunny Jim told him he thought Alice loved someone else more than him, though he never said who, Paul was touched. He assumed it was God, or her gynecologist.

  The light of day revealed a cavalcade of shadows on a still landscape of snow. The city was out of order. Evelyn dead-bolted her front door and pulled the phone cord from the wall. In the bathroom mirror, she seemed such a haggard preview of her own old age that she waved to herself, then went into the bedroom where she reflected on her fate in walking past Dr. Randy’s house. She pictured him washing their cocktail glass
es, and she recalled his ludicrous appearance in the front door, pajamas flapping in the gale. These reminders of her freedom gave her the peace to sleep.

  In the deep snow outside, the plow was as quiet as a sailing ship.

  Evelyn got up, made coffee and plugged in the phone; it was the middle of the afternoon. While she was on the back porch refilling her bird feeder and before the coffee was done, the phone rang. It was, of all people, Dr. Edith Crusoe, who was in town and wished to see her, “oh so briefly.” Evelyn complied as cordially as she could and got off the phone, trying not to start thinking about something to which she could hardly look forward. Though Paul’s mother had little interest in the fortunes of her son’s marriage, separation, divorce or any other aspect of his domestic arrangements, she was keenly interested that he get on in life; therefore, she felt his present malaise was something she ought to do something about. That, and she so stated, was why she had driven all the way over from Missoula solely to meet with Evelyn. She’d raised Paul with the belief that he needed only the broadest views to get through life in the West; these included nativism, appropriate settlement and the dizzying romance of low rainfall. It went right over his head. He only thought about such large themes when he was smoking reefer or had the flu.