Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

“Is that a fact?”

  “Yes, it is. I’m afraid you have much to learn.”

  “About life, right?”

  “And death too, kiddo. Don’t forget the second act.”

  “You care to explain that?”

  “There you go again.”

  “Did I?”

  “Right. Explain, you say. Because you think life yields to explanation—to reason and to courage—and, God forgive me this gaucherie, to righteousness. But it don’t, old buddy. It simply don’t. We are on a darkling plain here—and by that I don’t mean just the Ozarks, though it is surely darklinger than most—but getting back, a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold.”

  “The Ivy League lifts its hoary head.”

  “Now don’t sneak off like that. Face it squarely.”

  “My dumbness.”

  “There you have it. Face it. Deal with it. Overcome it.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Shea clapped him on the arm and headed out of the restroom, almost taking the doorjamb with him on the way.

  Back in the booth, the two of them discovered that they were in the company of a celebrity. First there was a trio of young punks who entered the bar and, seeing Little, promptly came over to say hello. They were what Clarence called goat-ropers, ranchers’ sons who had to work in town to support their heavy four-wheel-drive habits, souped-up pickups with special metallic paint jobs and mag wheels and tape decks and CB radios and velvet tasseled curtains in the rear windows. The three actually seemed nervous and giddy talking with Little, as if he were a sports hero or country-rock star home for a holiday. After they drifted away, two other men, on their way out, stopped by the table to pay their respects, tell Little how great it was to have him back and that they shore hoped he’d be around fer a while this time and not let the goddamn Jew-nigger government railroad him into the pen again. Little did not seem to know what they were talking about, but he went along anyway, nodding and laughing and even slapping hands in the end, evidently in unspoken agreement that if the niggers could steal their country they could at least appropriate a nigger ritual in return.

  Blanchard meanwhile settled down with his vodka to kill the remaining half hour till Ronda got off. He never really felt at ease drinking at the Sweet Creek, not only because he was an outsider there and knew he always would be, but also out of simple old middle-class gut fear. For the clientele was not just redneck but the meanest cut of it, thieves and deadbeats and boozers and brawlers, most of whom carried small arsenals in their pickups: pistols and sawed-off shotguns and automatic rifles, and not just for looks either. In the four years Blanchard had lived in the area there had been a half-dozen shootings at the tavern, most of them in the parking lot, indoor fights that Reagan had driven outside with his baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger he kept under his cash drawer, next to a loaded forty-four magnum pistol. Two of the shootings had ended in deaths, one of a drunken local trapper who, after casually beating up on two young goatropers, had unwisely chosen to sleep it off in his pickup right there in the parking lot, a sleep interrupted—no, prolonged, forever—by a twenty-two caliber slug fired point-blank into his head. The second death was of a black man from Kansas City. Refused service, he had gone off his rocker, according to Ronda, cursing her and Reagan and everyone else in the place. He had been thrown out of course, that was all Ronda knew, all she had seen. But two days later the man’s shotgunned body had been found in the creek, about a mile from the inn. Afterward there were the usual inquests—and that was all. No one was charged with murder, no one was arrested, no one was suspected. The county sheriff and state’s attorney had what Susan termed a laissez-faire approach to certain crimes. Murder and mayhem did not upset them half so much as pornography. In Rock County you might shoot a man and get away with it, but you could not buy a copy of Playboy.

  So Blanchard did not just relax and drink up when he was at the Sweet Creek. He kept one eye peeled for trouble and if he saw it coming he moved to avoid it. But this evening everything seemed peaceful enough. A week night, there were only about a dozen men in the place besides Little, Shea, and himself. Most of them he recognized as livestock dealers and truckers, a few ranchers, a few others. Almost all of them wore cowboy boots and denim outfits, jeans and brass-buttoned jackets worn pale and shapeless by time, almost as rough-looking as those sported by art directors in Saint Louis. Only here the cowboy look came with much shorter hair and big knobby hands and also that special Ozark cigarette-smoke squint, that air of torpid menace Blanchard never would get used to.

  Nevertheless they were men who fitted perfectly into the Sweet Creek, with its ascetic lack of decoration, its plain wood floor and cheap assortment of furniture—wooden booths and plastic tables and chairs that did not match, like the stools facing the Reagan-built bar and the crude plank shelves of beer bottles and mugs lined up behind it. In fact the only typical barroom artifact in the place was the jukebox, a funereally lit Wurlitzer from which boomed the sound of country singers picking and wailing their sad ballads of broken hearts and lonely roads.

  It was a sound that Shea did not appreciate, and he fished some change out of his pocket now and pushed out of the booth, saying that there had to be something else on that “cruddy machine,” something besides country and western. Blanchard wished him luck, but Little could offer only puzzlement

  “Hey, what’s wrong with what’s playin’? Why, that’s Johnny Cash, for Christ sakes.”

  Blanchard shrugged. “What does Shea know? He’s never done time.”

  If Little had any reaction to that, Blanchard missed it, for his attention had been drawn to the table where Shea had arm-wrestled the locals. There were four men crowded around it, including the Rockton mechanic and the man who had bitched at Shea. Now the center of attention, this man had just returned from outside, from his pickup probably, carrying a small and very nervous beagle dog, which he placed in the middle of the table, facing an empty plastic popcorn bowl that one of the other men was filling with beer. Despite the racket in the place, Blanchard could catch a little of their conversation, or more accurately, their shouting.

  “He gotta drink it all,” the mechanic insisted. “And I mean drink it, not just git his snout wet.”

  “He drink it, all right,” the dog’s owner said. “My hard-earned money says he drink it all. That good enough for ya?”

  The mechanic nodded. “Okay then, two bucks. Two bucks says he don’t.”

  “He shore as hell will.”

  For ten or twelve long seconds the dog’s owner waited, glaring down at the tiny animal as it stood trembling on the table, its tail between its legs. When it was obvious that the dog was not going to touch the beer, the owner angrily grabbed the animal by its nape and drove its head down into the bowl and held it there while its legs skittered helplessly on the beer-wet tabletop. The other men jumped back from the splashing.

  “’At don’t count, Jiggs!” the mechanic laughed. “You lose. You and that beer-guzzlin’ hound of yers, you lose.”

  Furious, Jiggs continued to hold the dog’s snout down in the bowl while the other men laughed and hooted. Beyond them Blanchard saw Shea at the jukebox, giving up on it and turning away, coming back past the dog’s table now, still unaware of what was going on there. Then, as he saw, he hesitated for a moment, looking more puzzled than anything else. And Blanchard could see the thing coming as the look of puzzlement gave way to one of disgust. Abruptly Shea reached out and took hold of Jiggs’s skinny neck and brutally drove his face down into the bowl in place of that of the dog, which scampered off the table, yelping and sliding, heading for the door. Jiggs tried to free himself, pushing wildly sideways along the table until the bowl toppled to the floor, but Shea effortlessly stayed with him, somehow continuing to hold his face down in the bowl with one hand while he snatched a beer pitcher off a nearby table with the other and refilled the bow
l, sloshing the beer against the man’s face. And none of Jiggs’s friends made a move to help him, not one good old boy in the place, and Blanchard could see why, feeling intimidated himself by Shea’s great size and strength suddenly magnified by rage. Then he saw the burly Reagan coming out from behind the bar with his baseball bat.

  “Behind you, Shea!” Blanchard called, getting up.

  And Shea heard. Standing, he placed his foot on the dog owner’s rump and sent him sprawling across the floor. Then he turned to face Reagan, seemingly indifferent to the bat, not even lifting a chair to defend himself. And the meaning of this indifference must have gotten through to Reagan, that you could hurt a bear with a baseball bat, you could get in your lick and maybe even break a bone or two—but then what? Nevertheless habit almost carried him through. He had raised the bat and even started his swing, gone that far before his arm turned to jelly.

  Shea took the bat as if it were an offering. Then he walked over to the middle one of three pillars running the length of the room, rough six-by-six timbers that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Blanchard imagined that it was Shea’s intention merely to break the bat, that he did not like the idea of Reagan having it there to discipline innocent inebriates like himself. But as he drew back and then followed through his swing, it was the pillar that broke, splitting in two along an old crack, and as it fell, the ceiling dropped a few inches at that point, spilling dust and straw and old feathers all across the floor.

  “Get him out of here!” Reagan cried. “Out of here!”

  But Shea was not ready to go. First he had to come back to the table and finish his glass of beer. Only then did he leave, hefting the bat to his shoulder as he walked out.

  Reagan immediately came charging over to Blanchard to save what face he could.

  “He’s your friend, ain’t he!”

  Blanchard said that he was.

  “Yeah, well you tell that horse two things—one, he’s got damages to pay, and two, he better not show his ass around here or he’ll get it shot off. You got that?”

  Blanchard did not answer. He too was bigger than the Irishman. Little, getting up, tried to cool things off.

  “I know the big guy, Pat,” he said to Reagan. “I’ll talk to him, make sure he knows he can’t mess with you. He just lost his head, that’s all. He’s had a lot to drink.”

  “Yeah, well you tell him then, Little. You make sure the bastard understands—I want damages and he keeps the hell out of here.”

  “Right.”

  As Reagan angrily bulled his way back to the bar, Blanchard picked up his pint of vodka and went to the door, where Ronda stood waiting for him, ready to leave. With Little trailing behind, they went outside and into the parking lot just in time to see Shea give the baseball bat a mighty toss out into the creek, which was running fast and bright in the moonlight.

  “That was some performance,” Little said to him.

  Shea smiled wryly. “Yeah, wasn’t it? And I don’t even like dogs.”

  But Little would not have it denigrated. “Listen, that was beautiful, man. For a minute there I thought you was going to bring the whole building down on our head, just like Samson done.”

  “Maybe if I hadn’t had a haircut.”

  Blanchard asked Shea if he could drive.

  “On occasion.”

  “I mean, are you sober enough?”

  Shea held out his hands, making them shake as if they were palsied. “Look at that. Steady as a rock.”

  Again Little stepped in. “Hey, I always wanted to drive a Mark Four. What d’ya say, big man?”

  Shea got out his keys and tossed them to him. “Where he drives me, I will follow.”

  Blanchard told Little to take Shea back to the ranch, but Little had other ideas.

  “Aw, he’ll be okay. We’ll drive around some and then maybe have coffee and eggs at home, at Grandma’s—she’s always in bed by now. Hey, why don’t you two come on over later?”

  Blanchard thanked him but declined. There was nothing he wanted less to do.

  As the Continental roared off, spewing gravel, Blanchard and Ronda got into his pickup. Normally she would have driven her own car, a Vega, and he would have followed her. But this night Reagan had given her a lift to work, so she was free to go with Blanchard. For a change they could have talked on the way to her place, they could have necked. But all Ronda did was move close to him and lay her head against his shoulder.

  “I think I’m scared,” she said. “I think those two scare me.”

  3

  Blanchard first met Ronda at the Sweet Creek two months before, on a weeknight so cold and slow she had joined him right at his table, evidently intrigued by strangers who sat drinking alone and looking as if they had lost their last dollar on earth, which in fact he almost had, then as well as now. Though he was not looking for sex or another woman, he had gone home with her that same night, and probably a dozen times since. And each time had been so much like the others, so casual and impersonal, that until recently he had assumed he was not the only man sharing her bed. Now he was not so sure, for even though she made no claim one way or the other, there was never any evidence of another man. Nevertheless she seemed committed to keeping the relationship strictly sexual, like a one-night stand repeated over and over. And this was exactly what he wanted it to be, all he wanted it to be. For there was still Susan. There were still Whit and Tommy.

  But even if it had not been for his family, he knew that he and Ronda made an unlikely pair. He was thirty-eight and she was only twenty-two. He was a college graduate and she had not finished high school. He knew a good deal about the world and she knew only this small corner of it and a strip of bars and go-go joints in Kansas City. In addition, she read almost nothing, watched television indifferently, and in general troubled her head with little except the lyrics of country-and-western music, which droned from the radio and stereo in her mobile home almost constantly. Yet she was anything but stupid. Blanchard in fact was often amazed at the disparity between her obvious intelligence—her sure, quick grasp of the world around her—and yet her woeful ignorance in other matters that did not interest her, as on the night when there was a news item on the radio about President Carter and the senate, and she had turned to Blanchard and asked, “Just what the hell is a senate anyway?”

  Like most of the hill people—college graduates the same as grade-school dropouts—she gave no thought to the rules of grammar and pronunciation, preferring instead the same twang and slang and solecisms that served everyone else. And though the idiosyncratic spelling of her first name was her mother’s doing and not her own, she carried on the tradition to an extent every time she printed the name, forming the middle letter backwards, as и, a mistake so pervasive in the Ozarks that it even showed up on local television commercials.

  Despite her stated indifference to the past, her own as well as the rest of the world’s, Blanchard had managed to draw out of her a rough idea of what her life had been. Her mother, he understood, had been something of a child bride, bearing Little in her early teens and Ronda a couple of years later, each of them by different fathers, both of whom quickly disappeared, to be followed finally by the mother herself. After that the children were raised by their widowed grandmother, whom Ronda described as “deaf and dead,” a prematurely old woman who was almost never without a New Testament clutched in her hand, even as she sat rocking and watching television all day, every day, turned up so loud one could hear it driving past her small native stone cottage, which was situated across the river road from Ronda’s place.

  Though over the years it was Little who kept winding up in reformatories and prison, in the old woman’s eyes Ronda was the true sinner, the one who dressed like a Jezebel and toiled in a tavern, serving the devil’s own brew in a house that once had been the Lord’s. And this was only the most recent of the girl’s transgressions. At fifteen she had gotten herself pregnant and the old woman had promptly shipped her off to a Kansas City home f
or unwed mothers. After having the baby and giving it up for adoption, she entered a three-year period as a cocktail waitress and topless dancer in a series of Kansas City dives, until she met an older man named C. C. Whitehead, a stolid, solvent trucker able to give her security, leisure, and a degree of luxury in the form of a brand-new sixty-foot mobile home, which he brought back to Rock County and parked on her grandmother’s place. Unfortunately he was not also able to give the girl excitement, and as the marriage degenerated, so did Whitehead, drinking and brooding and finally jackknifing his eighteen-wheeler on Interstate 44 in a Christmas-week ice storm, losing twelve thousand frying chickens and his own life, uninsured. After the funeral Ronda found herself with nothing but a small equity in the mobile home, enough however to have kept her in the area through the rest of the winter and spring in the hope of selling the trailer for enough money so she could move to California and have a little of what she called “the sweet life.” But to date no offers had even covered what she owed on the home. So she had taken the job at the Sweet Creek.

  For the Ozarks, it was not all that unusual a life, Blanchard knew, probably no more blighted and impoverished than most. Yet all he had to do was look at her to see the fearful cost of it, in the paradox that while all her parts were beautiful, the sum of her was plain. She had a dancer’s leggy, sinuous body. She had thick auburn hair and a nice face with large green eyes and a sensuous mouth. But she seldom let any light into those eyes and she almost never smiled. Her habitual expression in fact was a cross between boredom and contempt, as if she were forever waiting on a table of slobs. It was true that lately she had begun to smile more when she was alone with Blanchard. And their last time together, as she laughed at some thing he had said, he had been struck by her beauty, more than ever appalled at how life had abused her.

  Unhappily, that abuse showed up in the bedroom too. Despite her background as a topless dancer, he found her sexually inhibited, exhibiting none of the verve and inventive abandon he had come to expect in a woman, even one as cool and cerebral as Susan. The minute the two of them would enter her trailer, she would draw the drapes and go into the bathroom and lock the door, then take a very long and very silent bath, never saying anything to him through the paper-thin walls, never singing or humming. Blanchard meanwhile would go back to her bedroom and undress and lie there waiting for her, some of the longest minutes of his life, for when she finally did come out, naked, her hair curlier from the bath steam, her body gleaming clean, firm as Carrara marble, he would almost swoon with lust. But then she would just go about her business, dutifully returning his kisses, dutifully going down on him, dutifully submitting as he mounted her finally. And he was convinced that on a few occasions, especially during their first few times together, she had faked her orgasms, for they had seemed slight and theatrical compared to her response more recently. But even with this improvement, he still found her inhibited. There was no play between them, either before or after they climaxed. Nor was there any fun or laughter. She would just come into her tiny bedroom and go to work, as if she were stepping up on a runway to dance topless for a certain length of time.