Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  This night, however, Ronda was not at all indifferent. And when they were finished he discovered that her eyes had teared, which for some reason moved him unexpectedly. For a time they kissed and embraced like lovers, but finally she pulled away from him and lay on her side, watching him. And Blanchard did not miss the new thing in her eyes, almost the aggrieved look of the victim.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said.

  “Out of bed?”

  “Don’t be funny. Here. This goddamn backwoods.”

  “No answer on your ad yet?” She had recently started running a classified ad for her mobile home in a Springfield newspaper.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Pretty soon I’m just gonna pick up and leave anyway. Give the damn thing to the finance company. The devil with my credit rating.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “You’ll get by.”

  “It’s so bad here?”

  “Yeah, it’s so bad. Especially the Sweet Crick. Another week in that dump and I’m gonna go bananas. What a bunch of animals.”

  “That include Shea?”

  She laughed listlessly. “Well, what would you call him?”

  “Big,” Blanchard said. “A big kid.”

  “Kid, my foot. I never saw Pat Reagan back down from anyone before, let alone a kid. But he did tonight.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  She was silent for a time. “I still can’t figure him,” she said finally. “Shea, I mean. I can’t figure what he’s doing here.”

  Blanchard had already tried to explain him to her last week, when Shea turned up at the ranch and of course promptly found the Sweet Creek. Blanchard had told her about the years the two of them and Susan had spent at the Darling Agency in Saint Louis and what a gifted advertising writer and idea man Shea had been, both there and in New York, where he had earned big money and had won many national awards, and how none of it had mattered for him, how even after he had reached thirty he had not been able to resist treating his career as a lark, once even showing up for work in a rented Nazi Gestapo uniform when the management said they wanted to see more esprit de corps. Blanchard had told her about Shea finally getting fired, over two years after Blanchard himself had left the company, and he had told her about Shea’s half-hearted search for another job since then, his problems at home, and of course his drinking. But then, as now, Blanchard had no real answers for her, because he did not know any better than she did what Shea was doing in the area, what he was after. He could only guess.

  “My guess is he’s just running.”

  “From what?”

  “I doubt if even he knows.”

  “You can’t run from something unless you know what it is.”

  “Sure you can. You don’t run from the dark, you run from what you think might be in it.”

  “Still, you must have some idea.”

  “What he’s running from?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nineteen eighty-four,” he said, for no good reason.

  “Why? What happens then?”

  “It’s already happening.”

  She moved closer to him, resting her chin on his chest. “I don’t think I like you tonight. You’re kind of smartassy.”

  “In what way?” he asked, though he knew.

  “Forget it. Just tell me this—how come he’s hanging around Little? What are they up to?”

  “I’ve got no idea.”

  “All Little’s ever done is use people, get all he could out of them. He must figure there’s some way he can use Shea.”

  “Maybe they’re both trying to use each other.”

  “Could be. But I don’t know. Shea’s different. The way he’s always on stage. It’s like he can’t help himself.”

  “Compulsive.”

  She nodded. “He reminds me of this manager we had in one of the clubs in Kansas City. He found out he had cancer, and overnight he changed. He just started talking and he couldn’t stop. He didn’t make any sense after a while, but it didn’t make any difference to him. He’d just keep right on talking like he was afraid that if he stopped, his life would stop. The cancer would get him.”

  Blanchard looked over at her, impressed. “I think you’re right—you can do better than the Sweet Crick.”

  “Who couldn’t? You know they were both there this afternoon? Him and Little? I didn’t want to sit with them because of Little, but Shea kept pressuring me.”

  “So you sat.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. And Shea did all the talking.”

  “About what?”

  “You, mostly.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Mostly stuff I already know, like your money problems and your wife hating it here and all. And he said maybe you got Bang’s now too.”

  “It’s nice to have friends.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t putting you down. He just said you haven’t got no way out and that maybe we could figure out some way to help.”

  Blanchard laughed at that, a despairing laugh. “Jesus, he is beyond belief. Don’t tell me, let me guess—he said Little could rustle my cattle, sell them, split with me, and I’d get the insurance, pay off the bank, and live happily ever after.”

  Ronda managed a smile. “Something like that.”

  But Blanchard did not consider it funny. In fact it infuriated him, the idea that Shea—his old buddy, his uninvited house-guest—was not only discussing Blanchard’s personal and business problems in public but was also proposing their solution, through crime. The fact that Shea was drinking at the time, that he was playing his usual games—none of it lessened Blanchard’s anger. At the same time he knew Ronda was in no way to blame, deserved no part of his anger. So he said nothing. He lit a cigarette and waited, blowing smoke at the low, flocked ceiling above them.

  “Well,” she asked, “what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Shea’s plan.”

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Just beautiful.”

  She took a drag on his cigarette and returned it. “Well, it doesn’t sound so dumb to me. Cows you have to feed. Money you can spend. Spend to get out of here.”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Smart lady. I say anybody hates it here can’t be all bad.”

  “I never said she was.”

  “It’s just a phrase. I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Don’t worry, I still know the score—wife one hundred, Ronda zip.”

  “And what game is that?”

  “The game of life.”

  “You do all right.”

  “Oh sure, I’m a real success. But once I get out of here ...” Her voice trailed off, inadequate to her expectations.

  Blanchard smoked in silence, thinking of that time when he would not be lying next to her anymore, when he would not see her again. “Where will you go?” he asked. “Still California?”

  “Or Vegas. Someplace warm anyway, with lots of lights and men with razor haircuts and tanned foreheads.”

  “You don’t ask for much.”

  “Would it do any good if I did?”

  He glanced at her, expecting her customary sardonic look. Instead there was the new thing, the vulnerability. He rose on his elbow to kiss her, but she rolled away. He pushed down the sheet and ran his lips along the beguiling curve of her hip and waist. He put his arm around her, squeezing her breasts. But she was not to be aroused. Without ceremony, she pulled the sheet up over her, at the same time breaking his embrace.

  “You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Yes, you do. But more than dumb. I mean—” She rummaged for the right word. “Silly. Not serious. You know.”

  “Frivolous?” he said.

  “Yeah. Just a good-time girl.”

  “Well, you’re no farmer’s wife.”

  “And you put me down for that, don’t you? I mean secretly. Oh, you like me, I kno
w. Here in bed anyway. But deep down, you really don’t respect me, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “More than you think.”

  “But you figure me wanting California—nightlife and swimming pools and all that—you think it’s not worthwhile. Not important. Not like raising some goddamn calves.”

  “For me it isn’t.”

  She smiled again, with disbelief. “I just can’t figure that. I can’t figure why messing with those dirty ugly things is so important. You know what you’re gonna wind up doing?”

  “What?”

  “You’re gonna lose all your money. You’re gonna lose your wife and kid, and probably your pride too. It usually goes with the money.”

  Blanchard said nothing for a time. It was a heavy indictment and not all that far from his own thinking lately.

  “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “Carry a briefcase the rest of my days?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? Or you could do what Shea says—bail out. Be free. Why, you could even come to California with me. I think maybe I could take you with a razor cut and a tan forehead. For a while anyway.”

  “How can I resist?”

  She was on her hands and knees now, about to crawl over him, out of bed. But she hesitated a few moments, dangling above him like some incredible assortment of ripe fruit, and his hands rose helplessly to pluck.

  “How can you resist? I really don’t know,” she said, with unexpected mischievousness. “I’ll throw in a moonlit beach—with a blow-job you’ll remember the rest of your natural life.”

  Blanchard tried to drag her back down, but she slipped on out of bed and headed for the kitchen.

  “You want coffee?” she called back.

  Groaning, he got out of bed and put on his shorts and pants. Down the long corridor of the trailer he watched her slipping into her robe, a floor-length electric-blue polyester concoction resembling lamb’s wool, such junk covering such finery, and he questioned his sanity. In the back of his mind the picture still burned, the two of them on a California beach at night. Shaking his head, he went on through the kitchen and dining area to the living room, reluctantly, for it was an oppressively ugly place, a veritable citrus grove of off-green, lemon and lime and chartreuse burgeoning in the shag carpet, in the crenellated draperies and the furniture, all the fancy little pieces of overstuffed fake satin and velvet. To Ronda, however, it was a handsome room—“kind of classy, don’t you think?” as she had said to him one night. It was also the location of her stereo, the closest thing to a religious artifact in her life. So he was not surprised to find her kneeling before it now, adjusting the sound as Linda Ronstadt’s big voice began to fill the room. Satisfied, Ronda got up and went around the dining bar into the kitchen to make coffee. While she worked, Blanchard watched her, the awful robe flowing and rippling under her long thick hair as she turned and reached and measured, her movements as swift and sure as a dancer’s, and suddenly he felt an ineffable sense of loss and failure, as if he had already put it to death, whatever it was between them. And the feeling must have shown, for she stopped suddenly and looked at him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “Maybe I just need some coffee.”

  “Coffee’s not that good,” she said.

  “A week of sleep, then.”

  But she continued to stand there watching him, and for once he could not read her look, could not tell what it was tempering the usual hardness of her gaze. And he was not to find out, for suddenly in the distance he heard the sound of car tires ripping through gravel and engines revving and cutting out, and he knew it was not just another car passing down the river road in the night. Moving to the front door, he opened it just as the lead car turned into Ronda’s driveway, careening in the gravel, almost overturning. Behind it came three pickup trucks, the first one so close its front bumper ripped into the car’s trunk while both vehicles were still moving, skidding off the driveway into the small patch of lawn, demolishing a birdbath and a wheelbarrow planter. Even before the car came to rest, the driver’s door had flown open and Little came scampering out of it like a steer out of a rodeo gate, heading for the trailer. And though Blanchard recognized the car by now as Shea’s Continental, only dust-covered, tan instead of maroon, he saw no sign of the big man, only Little racing toward him—and stopping abruptly now, almost falling, as a shotgun was fired behind him, fired into the air from the nearest pickup.

  “Jist you hold it there, Little,” a voice drawled, the voice of Jiggs, voice of sweet revenge.

  Little turned toward it, toward the headlights and the gathering men, turned to their guns with his hands outstretched, innocent, begging.

  “Jiggs, I just drivin’ the sumbitch, that’s all. I didn’t have no part in what he did. You know that.”

  Backlit by the truck headlights, Jiggs swaggered forward, gesturing with his shotgun as if it were a pointer, a tool of pedagogy.

  “I know you with him,” he said. “That’s what I know.”

  “And that’s all! How could I know he’d do what he did? I left with him just to cool things, that’s all! Honest to Jesus!”

  Jiggs had moved in between Little and the Continental, whose other door came open now, slowly, as Shea struggled out, blinking in the glare like a baby waking from sleep. But he was alert enough to move no farther, to keep the car between him and Jiggs.

  “You just tell me what to do, Jiggs,” Little begged. “You say the word and I do it.”

  “Ya do it, will ya?”

  “You know it, Jiggs. You just say it, you got it.”

  “Okay, I say it, then—git me a bucket of water.”

  “You got it!”

  Blanchard was still standing on the small front porch of the trailer, had moved that far before the shotgun blast stopped him too, rooted him in place. He sensed that Ronda was behind him, but he was not sure, and could not bring himself to look, for that would have meant taking his eyes off Jiggs and his friends. Even as Little scurried past him into the trailer, Blanchard did not look at him.

  Jiggs was reaching out with his pointer again. “Hey, Sandy,” he said, “gimme that deer gun of yers.”

  He and the mechanic from Rockton exchanged weapons. Moving closer to the car, Jiggs raised the rifle and sighted down it at Shea, held it on him for five or six interminable seconds, enjoying himself, grinning, his face a Halloween pumpkin in the glare of the headlights. Then abruptly he whirled and fired at a terra-cotta lawn planter, which disintegrated as if a bomb had gone off inside it. And Blanchard understood why Little was running water in the trailer and why his own mouth was rat-nest dry, why he had not moved or said a word or barely even looked at Shea, who was equally silent, equally paralyzed. It was the guns. Guns rearranged the atoms of life, created a wholly different and wholly terrible world in which everything was suddenly at critical mass, in which everything counted, for keeps. It was a world Jiggs liked.

  “Git yer big ass out here,” he said to Shea.

  But Shea did not move.

  Grinning still, Jiggs turned to his friends. “Git him out here. Out here where we can see him.”

  Besides the mechanic there was one other man from Jiggs’s table at the Sweet Creek as well as two young longhaired goat-ropers Blanchard had not seen at the tavern. Both wore cowboy outfits and one even had a holstered pistol as well as a thirty-thirty, which he used now to prod Shea out from behind the car. And as Blanchard watched them, watched his friend shuffling around the Continental toward Jiggs and knew that he, Blanchard, could not lift a finger to help him—no, would not—he felt something totally new in his life, a sense of humiliation and abasement he had not known was possible. It was like being a Negro at a Klan raid, a Jew in a Nazi death camp. The guns had emasculated him.

  Suddenly he felt Ronda behind him, her hand on his arm. “I’ve got a shotgun inside,” she whispered. “You want me to get it?”


  He could hardly believe he had heard her correctly. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Keep it cool. Cool, you understand?”

  Jiggs turned toward him. “What’s that, mister? You got somethin’ to say?”

  Blanchard nodded hesitantly. “We’ve all had a lot to drink,” he said. “Keep that in mind, okay? Keep it cool. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

  Jiggs and the others were already laughing, rejoicing in his fear.

  “Man, who the fuck is zat?” one of the goatropers asked. “Zat a preacher-man, Jiggs? Zat what that is?”

  “I do believe so,” Jiggs told him. “A scared-shitless preacher-man, that’s what that is.”

  Shea was standing with his back to the car now, facing Jiggs and the others. But he seemed unable to look straight at them, kept his eyes on the ground most of the time, possibly remembering from some long-ago Cornell psych class the folly of eye contact with an animal aggressor, the challenge implicit in it. Or maybe it was only that a sixth aggressor had joined the others, none other than the little beagle he had rescued at the Sweet Creek and which now was yipping furiously at his feet, as if it were about to take a bite out of him at any moment. Once Shea looked over at Blanchard, just a glance, and strangely there was no plea in it, no fear or desperation, nothing but a kind of shame, a look of rueful sheepishness, as if he had been caught redhanded at some outlandish prank.