Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

Shea threw up his hands in innocent surrender. “Whatever you say, chief.”

  He was barefoot and barechested, wearing only a pair of dirty chinos. A broad tight bandage ran like a bandolier around his rib cage and over his shoulder; another protected the right side of his forehead and a third showed in his scalp, covering a shaved swath. He had a black eye and his jaw and mouth were swollen purple.

  “You look lovely,” Blanchard said.

  “I’ll survive. Cracked ribs according to the doctor, that’s the worst they did. That and twelve stitches, plus a possible concussion.”

  “Teach you to go around rescuing ungrateful mutts.”

  “That’s what Ronda said.”

  “How is she?”

  “Sexy. Even when you’re half dead, she’s sexy. I hit on her, but I didn’t get anywhere. Guess she prefers older men.”

  “Must be.”

  “Speaking of romance, what’s this Tommy tells me about Susan going to Saint Louis?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Why?”

  “Spur of the moment thing. She just wanted a break, that’s all.”

  Through his wounds, Shea regarded him dubiously. “She didn’t run out on you, huh? It ain’t a separation?”

  “Of course not. It’s just a vacation. They’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

  “I see. So, meanwhile, who cooks?”

  “Why not you?”

  Shea mauled his face. “I’m on R. and R. Why not Ronda?”

  Tommy had come back onto the porch looking unhappy and ashamed, undoubtedly having remembered by now that Blanchard did not want him to drink beer or liquor. And this would have upset him, for the most important thing in his life Blanchard knew, was to please his older brother. It was a burden Blanchard did not take lightly.

  He went over to him now and put his hand on his shoulder “Any calls while I was gone?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No calls,” he said. “And I listened too. I stayed right by the house.”

  “Good boy.”

  “And then Shea come home.” Tommy picked up his tote bag and hugged it to him. “Bad guys beat him up. That’s why he’s all hurt.”

  Blanchard looked over at Shea, who shrugged.

  “He asked me. What else could I tell him, that I got hit by a train?”

  “They beat him up,” Tommy went on. “They kicked him and hit him with guns. And hit him and kicked him.”

  “They’re not bad men,” Blanchard said. “They were just drunk. They won’t hurt anyone else. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Will they come here?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “If they did, would they hurt you, too?”

  “They won’t hurt anyone anymore. They promised not to get drunk anymore.”

  Hearing that, Tommy seemed to relax a little. “They must been real drunk,” he said.

  Blanchard decided to change the subject. “About time we checked on Clarence. And maybe fill the salt feeders, too.”

  “I do it, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  Filling the feeders was Tommy’s favorite job on the ranch, one he could understand and help with, one he and Blanchard always did together.

  “He’s in charge of the salt feeders,” Blanchard said to Shea.

  Tommy confirmed it. “I in charge of salt feeders.”

  “That’s just great,” Shea said to him. Then he lifted his can of beer to Blanchard. “And here’s to you, old buddy. You’re a man of parts, that’s what you are.”

  “Most of them used.”

  Shea grinned, and had to reach for his mouth in pain. “You say that to me?” he got out.

  “I see your point.”

  “Naturally. But again—what about supper? Who cooks?”

  “I will.”

  “Why not Ronda?”

  “You serious?”

  “This is her night off.”

  Blanchard had forgotten. In the press of events since he had left her, he had forgotten that intriguing fact. “Well, I did tell her I’d call her,” he said.

  “Do it.”

  “Not to cook for us, though.”

  “Why not?”

  Blanchard did not answer. Going to the door, he gave Tommy a wink. “You stay here and look after this poor fella, all right?”

  As he went inside, heading for the phone in the kitchen, he thought of the possibility of having her come over for the evening and he knew it would not be right, that it would confuse Tommy, cause him to worry. And he did not want that. On the other hand he did want to see her and he knew he could not go to her place, not leave Tommy alone again this night, even alone with Shea. So he made no decision. He dialed her number and let his voice tell him what was to be.

  Shea had arrived okay, he told her. “He’s sitting on the front porch now, swilling beer as if nothing happened.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I guess he’s what you call a stout fellow.”

  Blanchard laughed and said he would tell Shea that. Then he plunged on: Susan and Whit had gone to Saint Louis for a few weeks and would she consider coming over for supper? He didn’t want to leave Tommy alone again tonight.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “To your house? With Shea and your brother there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think that’s wise?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t be for all night,” he told her. “Just through the evening. I’d like to see you.”

  He suggested she pick up a bucket of fried chicken at the new state-line shop, and he would pay her back later. She was silent for a few moments. Then she said all right, she would come.

  With Tommy following, Blanchard went out to the equipment shed to see how Clarence was progressing, but he found him gone, along with the small Ford tractor, which meant the old man was already out in the field mowing hay. The baler was put back together, greased, ready to go.

  “Old Clarence is a sweetheart,” Blanchard said. “When he’s working anyway.”

  Tommy did not understand. “Clarence is a sweetheart?”

  “Just joking. I mean he’s a good worker.”

  “Oh.”

  “C’mon. Let’s load the salt mix. And I want to check that field he’s cutting.”

  After they had loaded a half-dozen bags of the salt-and-mineral mix, Blanchard drove the pickup from one pasture to another, with Tommy hopping out at each feeder they came to and hurriedly, clumsily, picking up one of the fifty-pound bags and waddling with it to the feeder, sometimes dropping it and then having to wrestle it up into the bunk before laboriously slitting one end of the bag and pouring its contents in with the old and mixing them. Blanchard was always amazed at how physically weak his brother was, how his damaged brain somehow had managed to impose a commensurate weakness on his body, which appeared normal in every other way. But the work gave him such an obvious sense of accomplishment and pleasure that Blanchard was glad to pay the price, to sit there in the truck smoking and waiting and drumming his fingers.

  Finally the job was finished and they drove on to the hay-field, seventy acres of bottomland running along a stream that eventually fed into Sweet Creek. Clarence had already made three rounds and was moving toward them on a fourth. Next to the distant tractor the tall thick fescue grass fell with a fearsome precision as the sickle bar sliced through it. Blanchard picked up a handful of the cut grass and examined it, the texture and color of the stems, the fullness of the seedheads. In the past, fescue was almost never cut so early in the year, ranchers naturally assuming that the riper it was, the better hay it would make. But agronomy experts now were saying that late May was the best time for putting up fescue hay, because the grass was richest in protein then. For Clarence the whole idea was so much “pig shit,” professors and book farmers once again demonstrating their unbounded stupidity, cutting hay before it was ripe. He went along, however. It was not his grass, not his cows. And
in addition it gave him something more to grouse about.

  Coming abreast of them, he raised the sickle bar and cut the engine.

  “Shore is green,” he said. “Like cuttin’ weeds, that’s what it is.”

  “Any problems with the mower?”

  “Not so far. How’d it go for you, at the bank?”

  Blanchard was often surprised at how much Clarence knew about his affairs, considering that he seldom told him anything. The only explanation seemed to be Susan’s observation that the county was basically one large extended family, with everyone related in some way to everyone else, and most of them gossiping most of the time, including doctors, lawyers, and bankers.

  “Went all right,” he said.

  Clarence spat. “I bet it did.”

  “What about the crew in the morning?” Blanchard asked.

  “Don’t worry, they be here. I talked to Russell last night. If the weather holds, they be here by ten o’clock. We should be balin’ by then.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “What about the Bang’s?” Clarence asked. “You call the vet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Puttin’ it off won’t change a thing. If it turns out they’s all Bangers, then they’s Bangers. That’s all there is to it.”

  Blanchard nodded wearily. “I plan to call him tonight.”

  Clarence looked out over the field and spat again. “And if they’s Bangers, we sure gonna have a lotta hay to eat.”

  Blanchard got back into the pickup. “I’ll start raking in the morning. Be dry enough by nine, don’t you think?”

  “Lessen it’s still too wet,” Clarence said.

  At that, Blanchard drove off, shaking his head and laughing finally. “Yeah, he sure is a sweetheart, old Clarence.”

  And Tommy laughed with him, as he always did. “Clarence sure is a sweetheart,” he said.

  When they reached the farmyard, Blanchard parked and told Tommy to stay with him in the truck a few moments, there was something he wanted to talk to him about. Then he tried to explain to him about Ronda. He said she would be coming over for supper that night and she was a friend of his, like Shea, that was all. She was not coming over to take Susan’s place or anything like that. She was just a friend, nothing more. But she was a very nice girl and Tommy should try to be nice to her, make her feel welcome.

  Tommy was frowning and nodding. “Is she purty?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “I be nice,” Tommy promised.

  “Good. You’re a sweetheart.” Again the brothers laughed.

  Shea had already put away a six-pack of Budweiser by the time Ronda arrived, but that did not keep him from devouring half the “family” bucket of fried chicken she brought with her. As usual, however, his gluttony did not seem all that flagrant, possibly because he did most of the talking as well as the eating, so one did not notice the steady filling and emptying of his plate, unless, as with chicken, there was a residue, in this case a pile of bones that looked almost sinister in its mounded plenitude.

  Ronda on the other hand barely touched her food. She seemed more interested in her new surroundings and in Tommy and especially in Blanchard, whose eyes she kept searching as if for clues to the truth of what he had told her, again, upon her arrival: that Susan had gone on a trip with Whit, that was all, and that he had wanted to see her but had not wanted to leave his brother alone again.

  Tommy also ate very little. He was too busy looking at Ronda. In fact, the only time he seemed able to take his eyes off her was when she would look over at him and smile as she caught his moonstruck stare. Then he would look down and swallow and blush before slowly glancing up at Blanchard as if for rescue. And Blanchard understood. He thought Ronda looked better than he had ever seen her before, possibly because she smiled often, for once seemed more shy than cynical. And in addition she was wearing faded skintight jeans and a tiedyed T-shirt under which she was braless, her small high breasts the cynosure of all their eyes.

  Normally Blanchard would not have liked the idea of Tommy being infatuated with a girl, and especially Ronda, but in this instance he was almost grateful for the development, for it seemed to have taken his brother’s mind off Shea and his wounds and how he had gotten them. Blanchard still could not understand why Shea had told Tommy the truth about what had happened to him. He felt that Shea must have had some idea what a problem violence was for Tommy, how it both frightened and fascinated him, how even the sight of a simulated brawl on television would cause him to sit transfixed on the floor, unable to move or even breathe until the battle was over and the threat to him gone. And yet Shea had told him, apparently even embellishing the story, if that was possible. Blanchard could only chalk it up to the same sense of recklessness that had brought on the beating in the first place, in fact had brought on all of Shea’s misfortunes. Like some great fat moth he was forever flying straight at his destruction. But even considering this recklessness, this cavalier courting of disaster, Blanchard was surprised at Shea’s manner during the meal and after, as they sat drinking the last of the beer. He seemed totally himself, no different from any other evening, as if nothing unusual had happened to him the night before. One would have thought his wounds were mosquito bites.

  Somehow the conversation worked around to Darling and Shea’s last days at the agency, which, predictably, involved two of his favorite bêtes noires, both vice presidents at the agency then as well as when Blanchard had worked there. And in truth Blanchard had to admit the two men were flaky characters, almost as comically absurd as they were uncomically powerful. The one, Mack Donald, had been a group vice president over the account service section in which Blanchard himself had worked. As such, Donald had the final say on anything and everything pertaining to those accounts, including not only the work of the account executives under him, like Blanchard, but also all the creative work produced for those accounts by art directors and copywriters like Shea. Though he encouraged everyone to call him Mack, and liked to refer to himself as the Old Man, as if he were a tough but beloved young war commander, unfortunately he had had to make do with other monikers when Shea was around, such as “Little Mack” and especially “the Mad Bomber,” this last both for his unparalleled talent for sinking promising ad campaigns and for his vast office collection of photos and paintings and mounted miniatures of U.S. warplanes commemorating his strictly stateside service in the Air Force during the Korean War.

  Blanchard remembered one large meeting involving Donald and one of his pet projects, a public service ad campaign designed ostensibly to promote the idea of a new mass transit system for the city of Saint Louis but which in reality was simply one of many such public service boondoggles that in the end promoted little except Darling and Donald—or D. and D., drunk and disorderly, as Shea referred to them. And he, like Blanchard, was among the fifteen or twenty workers there, all sitting around the conference table listening to their leader expatiate on the impending momentous arrival in Saint Louis of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, who was going to cut the ribbon over a new stretch of freeway and then pay a visit to the Darling Agency to acknowledge the ad campaign, which had won many awards, and which Shea had conceived and written. This last fact however was not mentioned at the meeting, nor was any other except how D. and D. were going to milk the glorious occasion. In fact, so glorious was it that Donald kept referring to himself in the third person, as if he were a monarch: “Donald will be at the airport with the Mayor when the Secretary arrives” ... “We will want publicity shots of Donald and the Secretary at every opportunity” ... “At the agency Donald will give a speech.” And on he went, until finally Shea pushed back his chair and noisily got up. As he walked out, he announced his mission.

  “Shea has to shit,” he said.

  It was one of the great moments in the agency’s history, one that undoubtedly would live in legend. And Blanchard would never forget Donald’s look. Normally bulbous-eyed and slackjawed anyway, he became even more
so in those memorable seconds following Shea’s departure.

  Shea’s other black beast, Armfield, was more likable than Donald but in the end probably no less ridiculous. Armpit, as Shea called him, was a group creative director, a job he held less through any special creative expertise than through his simple ability to sell, to take any effort no matter how schlock it was and jam it down the account executive’s throat and then down the client’s too, and leave them happy for the experience. And, oddly, he managed this in spite of his appearance, which was startlingly simian, short, hairy, and ugly, a dockworker’s dockworker, not the sort of man one expected to find treading the carpeted corridors of an advertising agency. And on top of it, he was a devout Catholic, never missing morning mass and prone to the display of large liberal gestures: Unable to have children of his own, he and his wife over the years had adopted a small United Nations, one of each color and race and creed. At a party one night Shea had gone up to him and his wife like a drug pusher and whispered that he knew where they could pick up a Chicano baby cheap, and Armpit had laughed. And again, at an office Christmas party during which Shea as a temporary master of ceremonies had caustically introduced him—“What can I say about this man except that he is nasty, brutish, and short?”—Armpit had laughed. Over the years he had laughed and gone straight to the top. He had laughed and taken credit for other’s work. He had laughed and fired friends.

  And now Shea was recounting his final days at the agency and how Armpit and the Mad Bomber had figured in them, a tale that seemed to mystify Ronda as much as it did Tommy.

  “It was the last meeting, kind of like a last supper without the bread and the wine, and with me of course as Judas. And here’s old Armpit going out on a limb for a change, with his own work, stuff he made up all by himself. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I figure he must’ve been at mass when it hit him, kneeling there fumbling with his goddamn beads and whammo, there it was—how to land the Biff dogfood account, which we’d been invited to pitch. Well, he does it all himself—ads, posters, TV storyboards, point-of-sale, the whole schmeer—and all of it is turned to the wall when we show up for the meeting. Must’ve been thirty, forty people there. And finally he pulls it on us—literally. He gets out this empty dog food can and puts his finger through a ring in the top of it and pulls out this string and lets it go—and the can speaks. It says, ‘Biff speaks for itself.’ Well, by then old Armpit is standing there looking at us like a gorilla practicing anal retention—and everybody cheers. Honest to Christ! All these professionals, these sharpies, these Olympian shiteaters—they sit there and cheer and clap. And when they stop, Armpit is standing right over me. ‘What about you, Shea?’ he says. ‘What do you think?’ Well, all this time, all morning, my bowels have been rumbling with gas. So I try it on him. Like a kid I raise my little pinkie and say pull it, and so help me, he does it. He knows better, but he does it anyway—and I lay down about a seven-second beer fart. Well, nobody laughed. Nobody but Armpit. And I knew why.”