“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 forever.” Sanders, bright-eyed as a ferret, weighed these welcome but not entirely trustworthy words. “We’re committed to our family of workers from the erection to the resurrection.” 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.”
“Don’t be naive, Evelyn, not now. We need to speak with her, and above all we need to know when, exactly, she’s returning.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Majub isn’t going to wait around forever.”
“What’s this Mr. Majub have to do with it?”
“Mr. Majub has offered to meet with the whole family to see if he has a mandate to open this trust and liquidate the business.”
“It’s just so depressing.”
“We’ll get through all this,” said Natalie fixedly. “We’re going to be well off, you and me.”
“Oh, good.”
“At first I thought about moving to a better climate, but I’m not sure about starting over someplace where people don’t understand my problems. The idea of being no spring chicken under some palm tree, I just wonder. Plus, with the bottling plant we had status.” Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “We might not notice it until it’s gone. But now that you’ve called off the divorce Paul’s got Majub involved.”
Evelyn’s eyes widened. “I had reached the point where I thought it was time to write off our losses.”
“I know,” said Natalie. “And, Evie, I realize that wasn’t easy.” She looked vaguely around the room. “Who are these people?”
“They’re our fellow Americans,” said Evelyn.
“I’m starting to get like old lady Crusoe. This looks like an invasion to me. How’s our friend Bill getting along?”
“He’s fine, looking after the mares. Cows have a ton of feed where the hay froze before he could get to it. He had to go to Ekalaka for another funeral—a cousin, I think.”
“What becomes of him when Mr. Majub sorts out the estate?”
Evelyn declined to comment on what she took to be arrant wishful thinking, Instead she said, “Bill stays.”
“Evelyn dear, I hope we’ll come into a bundle. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to buy my way out of.”
“You think that works?”
“I sure do. It’s pathetic when they say the rich aren’t happy—”
“Paul’s going to haunt us even if this Majub succeeds in getting us liquidated.”
“I know,” said Natalie, suddenly wide-eyed. “I’m scared shitless. I realize it’s sick that I need to be comfortably off. But tell me, Evie: we’re for sure coming into a bundle, aren’t we?”
Natalie’s great faith in serendipity seemed confirmed when Alice Whitelaw returned with no more fanfare than a call indicating when she would arrive at the airport. She’d had to overnight in Denver, she explained over the phone, where all her belongings went astray in an automatic baggage handling system that sent both of her huge Samsonites back to the South Pacific via Los Angeles. If she hadn’t had such a helpful companion, she said, she would have lost her mind.
“What companion?” hollered Natalie as she and Evelyn pulled up to the curb.
In the crepuscular afternoon light the little airfield, mysterious in descending snow, looked like an outpost. They went inside, pulling off their mittens as they did so and unbuttoning their coats.
“I don’t know what companion,” said Evelyn, peevishly.
Looking everywhere but at her sister, Natalie said, “I dislike surprises.”
From a glass-enclosed corridor, it was possible to watch the arriving passengers come out of the jetway and into the boarding area, then pass through security into the lobby. From here they hoped to get a preview before greeting their mother, for whom they had several questions. Alice was not among the first to file out, as these consisted almost entirely of hurtling recreationists already attired for skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing, a surprising amount of Texas and southern accents. Finally, they saw the top of their mother’s head, reasonably sedate but not quite natural blond, the shearling collar of her black coat, the new tan! It was impossible to determine much about the companion at her side as he was wearing a hat with enough brim to suggest a convinced cow man. It was not impossible that they already resented the spring in her step. There was little for them to do now but face the swarm and wait.
What they laid eyes on—and what Natalie later claimed in the most sanguine tones to have foreseen—was their mother beaming through her embarrassment and, at her side, tall, tan, hard-eyed and not remotely uncomfortable, Bill Champion.
Geraldine knew something was changing, though she was unaware that Paul had gotten his wife to call off the divorce. She wasn’t happy when he insisted that she must never act as if she knew him, because having a parole officer at all was “incriminating.” She sympathized with several of Paul’s fears, even if she didn’t entirely agree with them, because of the years of mistreatment he’d received at the hands of his wife, who clearly had never understood him or how he’d been maligned and wronged by the system, and who could use a swift kick in the rear of her excessively tight Wranglers. Sometimes Geraldine imagined a fulfilling scene wherein she gangster-slapped Evelyn until she whimpered for mercy.
As she was well short of recognizing that her heart was being broken, Geraldine was reduced to examining her own reports on Paul and was fascinated by how rapidly they evolved from the first, which compliantly reflected the alarming view of the prison officials who believed without any proof that Paul had planned a violent and murderous uprising among the inmates. No one with such small charges against him had ever been accused of so much. She by now had decided that his role in unlocking the secured wing, so the most violent prisoners could get at the snitches, was fabricated in the fevered minds of the guards whose professionalism was thereby placed in doubt, and whose pride was impaired by having been barricaded in the showers for two days. Geraldine alone had come to understand how Paul had been swept up in a maelstrom exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the facility. Her letter to the prison board elaborating this view nearly cost her her job; they couldn’t know how scrupulously she’d reached her conclusions, discounting much of what she’d learned while she and Paul were drinking or in bed or both at once. If he’d had a few failures, they were pure products of guilelessness. When the prison board cited his wearing a T-shirt illustrated with a Glock handgun and the phrase “Snitches, A Dying Breed” as evidence of his lack of rehabilitation, she was thunderstruck by their gullibility. She had actually forced them to settle for the tepid notation that Paul Crusoe was “a lightning rod for evil.”
She devoted her heart to trying to resolve the contradictions of their situation. This was difficult in the sense that Paul didn’t seem to want it resolved, seemed to prefer their love sealed in its own compartment. “Like a cured h
am!” he’d said in a ghastly explanation she quickly forgave. The progress of their love was a boozy, twilit enterprise in motels along Interstate 90, with wheeling lights, air brakes and clamorous movement of snow-handling equipment the principal accompaniment to their intimacies. If Geraldine tried voicing her wish to take their place in a real community with daily, sunlit duties, he either drifted off absently or crudely groped her. When she overcame the worry that she was growing stupider by the minute, she saw this all as a kind of rough magic despite the occasional inkling that she might not get out of this nameless love with her health intact.
The Cadence of Grass Page 14