The Cadence of Grass

by Mcguane, Thomas

“I assure you it is not,” Evelyn heard herself say.

  “Let me tell you something, lady. When I read the prison reports on this guy, I was afraid to be in the same building with him.”

  Evelyn reluctantly noted the woman’s prettiness, and furthermore disliked being addressed as “lady.” She also thought that in making Paul seem so fearsome on the basis of some in-house files and reports, this bitch was acting as both judge and jury. Moreover, Evelyn’s heart went out to Paul, who must have felt imprisoned by these attempts by state wage slaves to malign him. “What exactly did these reports say?”

  “Well, one of them implied he’d taken the fall for your father, and that had made him pretty bitter.”

  Evelyn recalled that Sunny Jim made numerous general remarks about Paul, the strongest being that he was “incomplete.” Evelyn found this a very troubling observation about her husband. When she finally found the nerve to ask him to elaborate, Sunny Jim looked grim and then stated that while Paul had the prettiest swing since Bobby Jones, his short game left much to be desired.

  “Anybody would be bitter just to be in prison.” Evelyn said, trying to reference something—she thought, perhaps, a study how prison actually created criminals—but it wouldn’t come. She remembered how having a husband in the penitentiary had changed her own status. It was an education she intended to remember.

  “Paul did well in the general prison population. Plenty of people were afraid of him, which is surprising for someone in on fairly small charges. He had a lot of leadership. Depending on who you believe, it may be that he misused it. I’ve got to hand it to Paul, he makes his own trouble.” Geraldine was in full control of the situation.

  “This is where it all turns into interpretation.” How Evelyn hated the defensiveness she heard in her own voice.

  “Okay.”

  “So, I guess that’s it for the facts.”

  “You could say so. Some very informed people think he figured out how to burn through the Plexiglas on the guard shacks to release the secured wing. It cost some lives. But what do they know?”

  Having heard all she could stand, Evelyn abruptly departed, driving toward home to the sound of hectic, disquieting jazz coming from some low-wattage station on the High Line, whose host implied he was broadcasting from a smokey, hip and urban dive—“bebop, fusion, acid jazz”—instead of this wind-blasted cow town on the Canadian border. Evelyn gave plenty of room to a Nova in the ditch, three annoyed young people regarding the car as though it were a bad dog. On the other side of the street were seasonal vehicles, hunting rigs, firewood trucks, covered in deep snow, that people didn’t care if they saw until spring anyway. Evelyn remembered one of Paul’s favorite pitches about liking women with ideas, and how unwelcome hers had been to him. Approaching her neighborhood seemed increasingly strange: trotting horse wind vanes, ferns crowding snow-covered windows, family names—KUCKER, ORDWAY, GOOLEY emblazoned on signs—amber icicles hanging from roofs bristling with antennas, uncollected newspapers, solitary figures smoking behind windows and watching the street, windowsill figurines, blue glow of TV. It was bewildering.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul and even remembered loving him, if that’s what you wanted to call that lurid abdominal yawning. Worse still, how spiffy and cool he was while making love, a stone-faced officer in some conquering northern army. She never doubted that her craving for him was a vice. She’d had crazy spells, telling people she was a cheerleader for the Calgary Flames, wearing a T-shirt with a snarling Rottweiler over the caption: I don’t dial 911. She also had an awful feeling her father was presiding, somehow, or conspiring with him. He would sit back and cast a cold eye on old relationships while Paul changed the rules, abandoned former restraints and undertook, far from federal regulations, the ruin of the competition. “Consolidate or die,” one or the other of them would say, folding up another mom-and-pop enterprise leaving a handful of shallow-margin bottlers stranded by the demographics, soon to be empty, bat-filled, broken-windowed hulls where winos, glue sniffers and unowned dogs could get out of the wind.

  The last thing Geraldine had said to her was, “We’ll never really know, will we, Evelyn?” And how confidently she laughed!

  “This cruise I’ve just been on was an absolute eye-opener,” Alice exclaimed, “a large group of average people who were quite wonderful. It must not have occurred to me that such numbers of people could be completely normal. I thought that half the world was sick, sick, sick. It turns out, if that cruise is any indication, significant numbers of persons are able to be grateful for life and each other’s company. They do not wish to humiliate one another for sport. My, did I enjoy learning that!”

  Later, Natalie remarked that her mother was “just doing her number.” Evelyn found Alice’s diction loftier than normal, but said, “She has certainly conquered her grieving!”

  Natalie got right to the point. “You want to tell us about him, Mother?”

  Alice tried to look at her sternly, eyes grazing past Evelyn’s in a kind of warning. Then she looked at the ceiling as though pondering the best answer to Natalie’s question, but her mouth collapsed in a goofy, beaming smile. Finally, Alice Whitelaw collected herself.

  “Bill Champion and I are together at last. I never thought I’d live to see it.”

  All the meekness, all the compliance that had defined her life seemed to have evaporated. Her two daughters suddenly felt themselves to be in no position to ask questions.

  Nevertheless, Natalie thought she’d try. “Do you think this is realistic, Mother?”

  “Don’t be asinine.” Then she chuckled out of some deep reserve, some private enjoyment. It was all quite unnerving. The songs of humpback whales on the stereo, though scarcely audible, didn’t help a bit. Their mother was offering no direct statements whatsoever, and besides seemed transformed by this new daunting will of her own. She talked about anything she felt like talking about, regardless of her two daughters, who’d brought her a Sunday Denver Post, coffee and croissants, and now sat there among her plants in mild frustration.

  “Everything about my school days is clear,” Alice happily proclaimed. “And my childhood is clear. I had a loving father and a very distant mother who always seemed destined for great things, but it stopped there.” She declined to mention that they’d lived on the edge of starvation, and that her father was rarely sober. “I was very popular in high school. Thank God I was pretty, though it brought so many temptations. I like to think I passed that test, because I failed conspicuously in so many other ways. But everything since school is a blur, a blur. Even your fa—, my husband is a blur. Don’t you think that when people take over your life, they really stop being people at all? They just become a . . . a situation. Still, I’m living in a whole new world now. I knew it would be and it is. I have learned one lesson from my girlhood, though: I’m not good at being alone.”

  “So what do we do about that?” asked Natalie pointedly.

  “Only time will tell,” said Alice, “but I’ve noticed a funny thing. There doesn’t seem to be a big difference between having your whole life ahead of you and having only a small part of it left. The amount of hope seems the same.”

  It may or may not have occasioned the end, though it did give a serviceable signal that things were phenomenally askew. Natalie and Stuart had asked Evelyn to join them for drinks at the Bar and Grill in Livingston, where Stuart would give them the average man’s view of the latest developments.

  It’s true that the big back bar facing into a room of diners had always invited theatrical drinking, but neither of them suspected its effects on Stuart. Both he and Natalie were mildly drunk when Evelyn arrived, but before long Stuart had a jar of jalapeños under one arm and he was strolling among the diners showing them how courageously he could throw down these extremely hot peppers. Evelyn had never seen him so aggressive.

  “Wait,” said Natalie, “it gets worse.”

  Stuart had passed beyond the usual offensive ken, and had brou
ght the humped-over drinkers off the bar to demand his removal. By that point, Natalie had renamed him “Shit-for-brains.” He returned from his wanderings only long enough for another drink, then resumed by commandeering the dessert cart, wheeling it around while bellowing various sea chanties. “I signed aboard this whaling ship, I made my mark it’s true. And I’ll serve out the span of time I swore that I would do!”

  Several diners began waving for their checks. Chanting rhymes about the capstan and raising the anchor from “Poseidon’s floor,” he attempted a sailors’ jig: arms akimbo, knees pumping, feet causing several of the desserts to fall onto the floor. When he threw his head back for a final “Way hey, blow the man down!,” he lost his footing and, with a bounce, sent the dessert cart on a slow roll toward the toilets and not so much collapsed as gave up in a heap, perhaps struck down by returning self-awareness.

  “What happened to Stuart?” Evelyn asked. “I thought he was going to give us sensible advice.”

  Natalie presently went home, locking the front door behind her. Evelyn lingered outside to watch the northern lights, which hung in tapestries, stripes to the horizon, gradually growing slender as the ribs of an umbrella. She had to smile. She’d never seen Stuart so lovable.

  The following day, after Natalie had filed for divorce, Evelyn went to see him. He was alone in the house. “Stuart, what is to become of you?”

  “Well, Evelyn . . .”

  “Really, I’d like to know.”

  “I see this as . . . as a chance . . .”

  “To do what?” she prompted. “To go home?”

  “I thought I was home. Maybe I’ll just adopt a baby.”

  “As a single man, Stuart, I’m not sure you could.”

  “Oh I bet you could, sure. There are older ones, ones no one wants.”

  “Is this practical?”

  “No, of course it’s not.”

  “But you don’t care?”

  “I do. Oh, sure . . .”

  Evelyn found his lassitude unsettling. As they spoke, Stuart rearranged empty pots on the stove and fixedly observed his backyard from the kitchen window.

  “I can’t believe how fast they go through that feed,” he said. “It’s a terrible winter.”

  A gust of wind kept obscuring the view with flying snow. A paper wrapper passed airborne toward the alley, somehow as full of expression as a ghost.

  Stuart gazed at Evelyn, trying to say something. Finally, it came. “I think we learned one thing from last year’s Stanley Cup. You can’t second-guess the referees and have a game anybody wants to watch. Waiting for overhead cameras to tell us if we can celebrate, why, no fan wants that.” Stuart’s looked so close to losing it entirely that Evelyn tried to move him to a happier note. “Well, the playoffs are a long way away.”

  “Never count out the Maple Leafs,” he cautioned her. She chose not to tell him of her manic desire to become a cheerleader for the Calgary Flames, because she wasn’t sure hockey teams even had cheerleaders.

  “The expansion teams are hardly the whole story.”

  “Stuart, are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’d really like to be available to you as your friend forever.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that I’ve always liked you, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Stuart was a man in front of a firing squad.

  “I won’t make you talk. We can continue this when . . . when—”

  “When I’ve absorbed my situation,” he said with sudden clarity.

  “That’s right,” said Evelyn, oddly desperate to confirm his discovery. Stuart would absorb things and they would go on from there. He would take in the idea that his dedication of a serious portion of his life to someone he loyally loved was now to be canceled by divorce, and that he must begin to plan how he would get on with his life.

  This feeble concept was barely enough to allow Evelyn out the door; his eager nodding was about to break her heart. Stuart had indeed hit bottom, but it would be amazing to watch how far he would bounce.

  “We have to deal with one of Daddy’s lawyers again, Melvin Blaylock. Why can’t we get one of the nice ones? Remember the nice one with the breath mints? This Blaylock was always against us.”

  “Exactly,” said Evelyn. “So fuck him.”

  “I’m there,” Natalie nodded emphatically. “When’s this shit supposed to go down?”

  “At three o’clock. But which one is Blaylock? Is he the one with the pointed teeth?”

  “No, that’s Larry Crowley. This one has wiry hair.”

  “Long earlobes with creases?”

  “No, that’s Calvin Banning. This one is just wiry hair, no neck and a wet lower lip.”

  “Of course.”

  Neither knew why Melvin Blaylock wanted to see them, but they feared bad news. Seated in the conference room at Valley National Bank, they were doodling on complimentary pads. Natalie was making a picture of Melvin Blaylock from memory, and it was surprisingly accurate. Evelyn’s horse was a juvenile silhouette.

  The only surprisingly thing about Melvin Blaylock, looking as he always had in gloomy worsted, his bald pate allowing wrinkles of insincere surprise to travel all the way to the back of his head, was that he was accompanied by Stuart who, through size and vitality, seemed comparatively glamorous. Because of his dramatic black turtleneck sweater, the central heating was giving him a red face. He still had his blond hair in bangs, and the big watch that gave time and tide for both hemispheres was fastened outside the sleeve of the sweater.

  “Which of you are we meeting with?” asked Natalie, exhibiting extreme wariness at the sight of her vigorous husband.

  “You’re meeting with Stuart,” Blaylock said, closing the door. “Can I get anybody anything?”

  “Then why,” Evelyn said, “are you here?”

  “Stuart wants to keep the record straight, and—” he lit up the pause with his smile “—he has hired me to represent him. You’re here to preview the impact on the estate. That’s a courtesy for which you can thank Stuart.”

  It was hard to believe that Stuart had called this meeting. Having deployed papers in front of himself, he looked, for the first time since entering the room, at Natalie. “I told Mel here that nothing you say is true, and Mel told me that if we go to trial we don’t want somebody else controlling the dialogue, that we want a level playing field. Isn’t that how you put it, Mel, level playing field?”

  “Just like that, Stu.”

  Natalie made an exaggerated slump into her chair and breathed out through pursed lips while allowing her raised eyebrows to drop. Evelyn went back to work on the horse. Melvin Blaylock was thinking how the opening rounds of a divorce were like the first bowel movement after Thanksgiving, awful and unforeseen. But it was great having an irate client, since reasonable ones turn you into a bureaucrat. Stuart’s opening salvo was gratifying, though Melvin was glad no extrafamilial witnesses were present, as a large percentage of them would’ve concluded that Stuart was ready for the booby hatch. He’d need to clip his wings if this thing ended up in court. Also, the sweater would have to go; all you could see were those blond bangs.

  Stuart was ready. “It started with a dance, the way you moved your pelvis like a breeding polar bear. I went for it. I slaved for your dad, that goddamned cannibal. I couldn’t do what he wanted, not and go on believing I was still a human being. Then I got a pile of wood and bricks and pipes and wires and concrete and shingles and I built a house.” He showed them his hands. “I built a house and moved a whore in. Then I moved in with the whore. The old man beat me up on the job, and the whore sold me out every way she knew how. My answer was to work harder so my father-in-law could screw me over and lavish opportunities on Paul. Evelyn, did I ever tell you who I think Paul is?”

  Evelyn shook her head infinitesimally.

  “Well, let me tell you now, Evelyn, because you’re a good perso
n, maybe not quite on the planet but a good person anyway, and you should know: Paul is the Antichrist.”

  “Ah,” said Evelyn. This was one she hadn’t thought of.

  “That’s strong,” mused Natalie.

  “I wanted a baby, but you wondered how you’d look in a bathing suit. That’s understandable, but you didn’t want to go swimming. Natalie, when I get done with you, I’m adopting a houseload of little kids from Bulgaria, where they let you have as many as you want, and I’m raising them to college age on your money.”

  “You’ll have to get it first, and that comes after I get it.”

  “Oh, you’ll get it.”

  “Thank you, Stuart, I appreciate that.”

  “I thought, Natalie’s going to be fine, Paul’s going to be fine, Mama Whitelaw too, even though she abandoned her babies. Evelyn, I hate to put you in the same list with them, but you’ll be fine because you take it as it comes. When I asked Natalie where I’d live after we got this behind us, she said she had ‘no idea because as far as this house is concerned you’re shit out of luck, I’ve come to like it, corny grows on you.’ I had my mother’s china—now I don’t care about china—but I had this china she painted and it’s not well done and it’s not worth anything, but Natalie, when you told me I couldn’t have it because you expected company, I said to myself, ‘Let’s blow this cunt out of the water—’”