Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  The old man made a face. “Hell, I wouldn’t bother, little old scratch like that. Jist let it be. It’ll heal up before ya know it.”

  Blanchard made no reply. Four years ago he would have said something, tried to get through: Humor me, I’m a tenderfoot. Or one man’s scratch is another’s surgery. But he knew better now. There was no getting through. You didn’t argue with Clarence any more than you did with cattle.

  All the way to the house Tommy loped along beside him, commiserating over his wound, which he had not noticed until the vet looked at it. Now it filled his world.

  “Does it hurt, Bob? Does it hurt? You be all right? You think you be all right?”

  “It’s okay,” Blanchard assured him. “I’m fine, Tommy. You go find Spot, okay?”

  At the back door Tommy finally let go of his arm, probably anticipating the way Susan’s gaze would fall to his muddy boots inside and stop him in his tracks, like some futuristic ray gun, rendering him speechless and immobile. Only Blanchard—and sometimes Whit—would be able to get him started again, helping him off with his boots and prompting him on into the house, into the bracing air of Susan’s sanctum santorum. Four years earlier he had been her very special love and concern, poor retarded Tommy, one more aspect of the true and beautiful lives they were all going to live here in the hills, away from the sickness of cities and commerce. Somehow, somewhere, Tommy too had lost his specialness.

  In the living room Whit did not look up from the television, which showed a fat woman leaping up and down like a manic kangaroo while the young game-show host with her tried valiantly to hold his shiteater’s grin. Blanchard thought of saying something to the boy—“You should’ve been outside; the bull tore off the headgate”—but he did not want to see the feigned show of interest or the look of guilt that would quickly follow. Whit was twelve years old, a small male version of his mother, pale and blond and good-looking in a fine-boned, fragile sort of way, with the same cool gray eyes and the same look of listlessly concealed condescension. But in the boy’s case there was also the guilt, for he was sickly, an asthmatic who seldom ventured from the house’s conditioned air out into the swarming heat and pollen of the ranch. He rarely complained, however. In fact, he rarely even spoke except to Susan, and then usually in anger, both of them railing impotently at each other over such matters as his failure to throw his dirty clothes in the wash hamper. Blanchard often wondered why he was exempted from the boy’s recriminations, for he after all was the author of most of their problems, the reason they were here, tied down in the Ozarks like exiles without passport.

  As usual he found Susan reading in the sunroom. Showing her his wound, he asked if he could borrow her for a few moments.

  She took off her glasses and put a placemark in her book. “What happened?”

  “Bull broke out. The Angus.” He followed her upstairs.

  “So what did you do, wrestle him to the ground?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And Clarence?”

  “Banged up his leg. But I don’t think he knows it.”

  “Good old Clarence.”

  In the bathroom, Blanchard took off his shirt and pants and boots.

  “Your shorts too,” she said. “They’re bloody in the back.”

  As he slipped out of them she turned away and busied herself getting a clean washcloth and bandages. “Better get in the tub,” she told him. “No sense getting the floor dirty.”

  He did as he was told.

  Using the washcloth with warm water and soap, she cleaned and rinsed the wound, so roughly Blanchard had to look away to hide the tears of pain that came briefly to his eyes. But he said nothing. Finally she patted it dry, put on the ointment, and bandaged him.

  As he got out of the tub she turned away from him again, from his nakedness, and put away the box of bandages. It had been almost a month since she had let him make love to her, and she would not talk about the problem, nor let him talk about it. It was as if they had lost a child. Almost without thinking, he wrapped a towel around himself.

  “I don’t know why you take such chances,” she said, “especially in a lost cause.”

  “I don’t consider it lost.”

  “Realism never was your strong suit.”

  “That’s what I hear.” He had followed her into the bedroom, where she got clean underwear, workpants, and a shirt out of his dresser. Resignedly she handed them to him.

  “You don’t think I care if you get hurt?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You never say anything. You just hang on, like a bulldog.”

  “The bull didn’t think so.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Not if you were there.”

  “You get more like Shea every day.”

  “Bloody but unbowed.”

  She was not amused. “That’s a perfect example. You get more frivolous. More pathetic.”

  “And Shea’s the cause?”

  “I said you get more like him, that’s all. Maybe it’s just natural mimicry. You bring a pig into your house, you get more piggish. It’s probably a law.”

  “Susan’s law.”

  She stood there looking at him with the cool, tough, level gaze he once had admired so much, because it was so unfeminine and guileless, so full of honest self-assertion and intelligence. Now, somehow, he found it only boring.

  “Susan has no laws,” she said. “Nor any rights either, except to hang around and wait for her husband to face facts.”

  “What facts are those?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  Blanchard had tucked his shirt into his pants. He began to draw on his belt. “Getting back to Shea,” he said. “He give you any trouble this morning?”

  “How could he? He’s still in bed. Still sleeping it off.”

  “Well, that’s something anyway.”

  “Yes. Our model houseguest.”

  “You used to like him.”

  “He used to be likable.”

  “He used to be employed.”

  “What does that mean? Because a man has a few bad breaks it’s all right to just give up, leave your wife and kids, sponge off your friends?”

  “He didn’t leave Evelyn. She kicked him out.”

  “So he told you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why’s there a warrant out on him?”

  “Ask her,” Blanchard said. “She’s the one who called in the police. I guess it’s just his money she wants, not his body.”

  “What money?”

  “His support, then.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you say she’s got it coming—with three kids, his kids?”

  “You can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

  “Or work out of a drunk.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I still think we should let Evelyn know he’s here. She’s probably worried sick.”

  “The warrant, Susan. You keep forgetting that. She’s got a warrant out for his arrest.”

  “Which makes us accessories, I believe.”

  Blanchard shrugged in defeat. “I think I’ll get him up.”

  “You do that.”

  He started out of the room. But Susan had more for him.

  “Dad called this morning.”

  “Ah, the good doctor. And what did he have to say?”

  “He asked about you. Asked me how the Marlboro man was doing.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Oh, doing just fine, I said. The cattle we can’t pay for, on this ranch we can’t pay for, are now in quarantine, I told him, unsalable.”

  “And did he get a good laugh out of that?”

  “Not really, no. What he did was ask if I wanted to come home for a while, with Whit. Sort of a return to civilization.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until you joined us.”

  “That long.”

  “Oh yes, I keep forgetting. Now that you have Shea as well as yo
ur new hillbilly friends, you don’t really need us anymore, do you?”

  Blanchard ignored that. “We’ve got money tied up here, remember? The only way I can walk away from here is broke.”

  “You’re broke now.”

  “Only if I quit.”

  “You’re going to borrow your way out of bankruptcy, is that it?”

  “It’s been done before.”

  She said nothing for a few moments, just stood there looking at him, almost sadly, as if he were Tommy. “Even if you could do it,” she said finally, “even if you could bring it off, we’d still be here, Bob, here in this fucking, Bible-swilling, cow-ridden backwater.”

  Blanchard smiled. When she wanted, his wife could trade invective with the best of them, including Shea, the old copywriter, the wizard of wind.

  “And that won’t do?” he asked.

  She did not bother to answer. Abruptly changing the subject, she told him that she would be taking Whit to his allergist in Springfield that afternoon and that the two of them were going to stay in the city and have dinner at a restaurant before driving home. “We’ll be back around nine,” she added. “Will you be here?”

  She did not look at him as she asked this last, and Blanchard was grateful. He did not like to lie to her face, even when she expected it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine so.”

  “I’d like you to be here.”

  Blanchard nodded, as if in agreement. Then he left.

  Shea slept in what Clarence called the “h’ard man’s” room, a narrow dormered cubicle on the third floor of the old wood farmhouse. Frigid in the winter and a cauldron in summer, about all it offered was quiet and privacy, enough for a man to sleep through the day as well as the night if he was so inclined, which Shea was.

  At the top of the single flight of stairs leading to the room Blanchard knocked on the door. Getting no response, he went on inside, where he found what appeared to be a hairy white whale beached on the small bed, a whale with a hard-on that looked sadly miniscule in comparison with the mountain of flesh from which it sprang. Blanchard picked the sheet off the floor and tossed it over his friend, knowing Shea was somewhat sensitive about this single touch of moderation in his person. Then he kicked him awake, lightly but firmly, and Shea’s baby face gradually opened in terror. Where was he? Who was he?

  “Rise and shine,” Blanchard said.

  “What’s the matter? What’s up?”

  “Nothing. It’s almost noon, that’s all. I could’ve used you this morning.”

  In point of fact, Shea was one of the few men nature had equipped for handling bulls, for he stood four inches over six feet and weighed close to three hundred pounds, not much of it fat either. He could have been a pro football lineman except that in his mind he was a pixie, a kid in manly drag. On a football field he would have died laughing.

  Blanchard opened the windows wider. “It stinks in here,” he said. “Couldn’t you piss away some of your beer? Do you have to sweat it all?”

  Shea slowly sat up on the bed, bowing it like a hammock. “Oh God, I feel awful,” he said, mauling his face. “I wanna die.”

  “Again.”

  The big man reached for the sides of his head, as though to keep it from exploding. “Oh boy, here she comes.”

  “Maybe you ought to try life sober.”

  “I already did.”

  Just looking at Shea, at the huge cherub’s face and body ashen with hangover, made Blanchard feel a touch of nausea himself. “You better give it up,” he said. “You better go back to Evelyn and the kids.”

  “Up yours.”

  “Just a suggestion.”

  Shea slowly pulled on a pair of jockey shorts and got up. Trying his morning legs, he shuffled unsteadily to the window, then turned away from it, from the brightness. “This can’t be hangover,” he lamented.

  “What then?”

  “Fear and trembling.”

  “The old angst, huh?”

  “Old Angst. Sounds like a beer. Wonder if I could sell it.”

  “Why not?”

  Standing there, trying to smile, Shea suddenly had tears in his eyes. “When’s it end, huh, Bob? When’s it turn around? Or is it once you hit the skids, at my weight anyway, there just ain’t no stopping? You just go straight on down the tube, like a turd in the plumbing.”

  “You ought to write.” Blanchard was pretending he could not see.

  “Yeah, I know. Got a million just like it.”

  “How about get-up-and-go? Got any of that?”

  Sagging onto the bed again, Shea lit a cigarette, with two hands. “Oh, you bet, coach. You bet. You just send me in there and watch me do my stuff.”

  “Clarence misses you.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Me too. Had a real interesting morning. But then there’s still afternoon, if you’d care to join us. Maybe we could sweat some of that stuff out of you.”

  “And maybe not.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  The cigarette seemed to have eased Shea’s pain, for suddenly he was grinning. “You should’ve been there last night,” he said.

  “Great time, huh?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it that. Let’s say instructive. I mean these people are something else. Far as they’re concerned, it’s still eighteen-eighty, you know that? Firewater, shootin’-arns, and unabashed machismo.”

  “I told you not to go there alone.”

  “No problem. I had the cock-of-the-walk taking care of me, Ronda’s big brother Little, no less.”

  “I thought he was in prison.”

  “Well, he’s out—all four and a half feet, one hundred pounds of him. He comes over and says he’s Ronda’s brother and he hears I’m a friend of her new boyfriend, and would I care to bend a few elbows with him.”

  “Which you did.”

  “Naturally. I’m not fussy.”

  “Well, I’m happy for the two of you. Hope it works out. But right now I got other matters. I wanted to warn you—stay clear of Susan today, all right? I mean make your own breakfast, don’t use all the hot water, and above all don’t plug the toilet.”

  “A fart plugs that toilet.”

  “Then don’t fart.”

  “Okay, I’ll mind my manners. But what gives? What’s happened?”

  “She’s just uptight, that’s all. Her father’s after her to come back to Saint Louis again, her and Whit.”

  Struggling into his bathrobe, a maroon silk tent, Shea shook his head wonderingly. “I don’t know about you, kid. If I was getting ass as righteous as Ronda, I wouldn’t care who left me, including Susan.”

  “I thought she was too glum for your tastes.”

  “That was before last night. I tell you, you spend six hours watching her carry beer pitchers back and forth, and that keester of hers gets downright hypnotic.”

  “You like it, huh?”

  “Like it? Listen, I’d give up Evelyn and the three kids and our dog too—”

  “You already have.”

  He did not break stride. “Well, I’d do it again, and throw in you and Susan and Clarence even—toss over the whole bunch if I could just push my nose in there and leave it for about a week, let it turn nice and brown.”

  “It’d never satisfy her.”

  “Oh, that’d be just the first step. I’d get around to her front in time. I just wouldn’t be in any hurry, that’s all.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her.”

  “I already have.”

  “I believe you.” Blanchard was at the door, about to leave. “Remember what I said about Susan, okay?” As he started down the stairs, Shea followed him to the doorway.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I got the solution to all your troubles. You know what Little was doing time for?”

  Blanchard, at the bottom of the stairs, shook his head.

  “Cattle rustling.”

  The idea made Blanchard grin. Even as a joke, a typical She
a inspiration, it did have a certain appeal.

  “Okay,” he said. “You set it up. But meanwhile, don’t plug the toilet.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen Blanchard started to get himself some lunch. He ate his noon meal alone, Clarence having volunteered almost a year before that he did not care to sit at the table and watch “a growed man rustlin’ up his own eats.” So Clarence ate in the barn now, feasting from a brown paper bag that bulged with meat sandwiches and fresh fruit and slices of homemade pie and cake and thermos jugs of hot soup and coffee, a daily repast that added not a pound to his stringy frame. Not for him the kind of “meal” Blanchard threw together, a lunchmeat sandwich with canned peaches and instant coffee and Oreo cookies. Clarence had not bothered to articulate the second and implicit part of his criticism, that while the “growed man” rustled his own food, his growed woman sat reading a book in the other room. But Blanchard had no doubt that was his hired man’s real objection, the true heresy in his rheumy old eyes. And it was an objection Blanchard had no ready answer for. Somehow it seemed inadequate to explain that Susan was not a housewife like other women but a professional, a Stephens College graduate with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a successful ten-year career in advertising, first as a copywriter and then a television commercial producer and finally as a broadcast department executive earning thirty-five thousand dollars a year, which had been very good money in the Saint Louis market and embarrassingly more than Blanchard himself had earned as an account executive on his nickel-and-dime farm products accounts. Nevertheless she had been every bit as dissatisfied and restless as he, just as eager to take the unexpected inheritance from his mother’s estate and plow it and everything else they could lay their hands on into the ranch, into this new and totally different, totally real life they had envisioned here on the Ozark plateau. That it had not worked out, in fact had become a sinkhole of hope and treasure, was not her fault any more than it was his. He believed that. No, he knew it. He knew that the basic problem simply had been one of timing, that in a world of ever more rigorously organized power blocs, the cattleman still went his own sweet way, independent and powerless, and for the last four years, uncompensated. Ironically the year preceding this period, the year Blanchard had bought the ranch and started his herd, had been the best in history, with cattle and dressed beef selling at the highest prices ever. The cows he had bought then—ninety head—had averaged close to five hundred dollars each, over twice what they would bring now. Just as bad, the calves they produced consistently sold under forty cents a pound, far below his break-even point. So with every animal he produced, every steer and heifer, every pound of red meat, he lost money. And he had been doing just that for over four years.