Minutes later she came out of the bathroom wearing the short white terry robe, which he liked almost as much as he abominated her blue one. He poured her a drink and she took it without a word. She went on into the living room and sat down in one of her tiny overstuffed chairs, not the davenport, where he could have sat next to her.
“I don’t know why you’re so put-out,” he said.
“Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m just tired.”
“And maybe you’re lying too. It’s the cattle thing, isn’t it?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
“Well, don’t let it. It’s none of my business.”
“It isn’t something I want to do, Ronda. Believe me. It’s just I don’t seem to have much choice.”
“It isn’t that.”
“What then?”
She shrugged. “Him. I just hate to think of you being in with him.”
“Who, Little? It’s just this one time. He can get the trucks, that’s all.”
“He’s a pig,” she said. “A filthy little pig.”
“Well, I don’t much care for him either.”
“Then why not get someone else? You can’t trust him. He’ll cheat you.”
“I’ll arrange it so he can’t.”
“I wish they’d never let him out. I wish he’d died inside.”
“You hate him that much.”
“Yes, I hate him that much.”
Blanchard was surprised by her look, the intensity of it. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “We can handle him.”
“You don’t understand. I said I hate him.”
“I know that.”
“You care to know why?”
Blanchard nodded, reluctantly, for he could already see the pain coming into her eyes. And suddenly she was crying. She put her drink down on the coffee table and dropped her face into her hands. Blanchard went over to her but she shook off his touch and looked up at him, her eyes shining with rage as well as tears.
“He started on me when I was—oh God, I can’t even remember when he wasn’t doing it to me—touch it, hold it, suck it. And if I didn’t, then he’d hit me in the face with his fist or he’d bend my arm up behind my back so hard my elbow would swell up. And he was always trying to shove it in me too, and anytime I’d try to tell that old lady over there about it, she’d hush me up and say I was lying and anyway, men are like that. She actually said it, all the time—men are like that. Boys will be boys, you know? So I finally told a teacher about it and they had me examined, and then they made him move out of the house, move in with our cousins, who were all boys. But he still kept coming around and trying, and beating up on me when I wouldn’t put out, which I wouldn’t finally, never again. And I thought he was gonna kill me then, so I got myself pregnant with this neighbor kid who really wasn’t much better than him, just another little creep. But at least it got me out of there. The old lady gave me a bus ticket and ten bucks.”
As she cried, Blanchard wanted to take her in his arms and try to console her, but something in her look warned him off, told him that in her mind this was her pain alone, her hatred, and no one could share it with her, no one lift it from her. So instead he thought of going across the road and beating the little man half to death. But he did not. He stayed there and waited, and finally he gave her his handkerchief.
“Why’d you ever come back?” he asked.
“He was in prison. And Whitehead wanted this piece of ground—it was free and he was cheap.” She shook her head disconsolately. “But I really don’t know why. I always hated it here, and I always will.”
“I won’t use him,” Blanchard said.
Again she shook her head, in indifference now. “It doesn’t matter. Who else could you get?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t have much time to look, because of the Bang’s. I imagine the state vet will come out before the end of the week to bloodtest the whole herd. Then I’ll be trapped.”
“So use him,” she said. “What difference does it make, what he did years ago, and to me? I’m not involved.”
But she was involved, or at least might become so, though she did not know it yet. Only Blanchard knew, and even he was not sure now that it would be worth it—his future and Tommy’s balanced against her past, their need against her pain. There was no way to judge, no way to decide. And yet he did. He spoke.
“But that’s the trouble, I did want you to be involved.”
She looked up at him. “Me? How?”
Blanchard sat down on the couch. “Well, I knew I couldn’t trust Little,” he said. “With the money, I mean, after the cattle are sold. And if Shea started drinking afterwards, then I couldn’t trust him either. So that left you. I was hoping you’d go along with them as the ‘owner,’ the money handler. Any problems with either of them and you could call me and I’d blow the whistle, claim the cattle had been stolen. It’s about the only protection I’d have. Otherwise they—or Little anyway—could just walk off with everything.”
Her eyes were dry now, dry and perplexed. “But it’s still illegal,” she said. “A crime. I could go to jail. Why would I do it—for money?”
It was a question, not an accusation. And Blanchard did not have an answer, at least not one good enough for her, not one she would believe. To say he expected her to do it for money would have offended her, he knew, and yet the only other logical reason—that it would simply be the gesture of a friend, a lover—did not seem sufficient. He could not imagine her buying it.
“For us,” he said finally. “I thought maybe for us.”
She sat there looking at him, trying to read him. “What does that mean?”
Blanchard knew he was moving onto dangerous ground now, ground he himself knew very little about. Certainly he liked the girl enough, maybe even loved her enough, not to lie to her just to gain her help in the coming operation, vital as that help would be. The trouble was he no longer seemed to know exactly what was the truth and what was not. Two nights before, in his bed, he had loved her, felt a very real love for her—that was true, was it not? And as for the ranch—staying on it, making it solvent, making it work—he could not really hope for that, could he? At best, it was only a goal, a forlorn ambition. So he settled for a kind of truth, for what he imagined she would want to hear, and what indeed might in time turn out to be the truth itself, fact, the way things were.
“I didn’t tell you the truth about Susan,” he said. “She and my boy went to Saint Louis, probably for good.”
Ronda looked at him in disbelief. “She left you? Ran out on you?”
“Oh, she left the door open a little. I can sell out and crawl back, pick up where I left off four years ago.”
“Which you won’t do?”
“Well, I imagine I’ll have to sell out in the end. The bank will see to that. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to Saint Louis.”
“Where will you go?” she asked.
He looked down and shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking of that moonlit beach you told me about. That beach and us.”
“Us?”
He looked up at her now and found her eyes upon him, cold with anger and fear. “Don’t play with me,” she said. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“Be very sure.”
“I’m not promising anything,” he said. “Because I can’t. I’m only telling you what I want, Ronda, right now, sitting here.”
“And your brother?”
“Where I go, he goes.”
“We’d have money? From the sale of the cattle?”
He nodded. “If it all works out, maybe forty thousand. But I can’t make any guarantees.”
And he did not have to. She got up and came over to him. And her normal look, the hard and weary cynicism, once again had softened and run, exposing the buried child in her, the longing and vulnerability. She slid in next to him on the couch and put her arms around him, hugging him like a child.<
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“I don’t know what will happen,” he went on, trying to backpedal now, realizing he had gone too far. “I can’t make any promises. I’m only saying this is what I want, the way I hope it could work out.”
She squeezed him tightly. “No promises, I understand. I don’t care. Just the hope, that’s all I need.”
“And that’s all it can be.” He kissed the top of her head and she looked up at him.
“I’ve been kicked around by experts,” she said. “I’ll be careful.”
“Good.”
She let go of him and moved onto his lap, straddling him, facing him. She undid the belt of her robe and then began to unbutton his shirt.
“Far as that goes,” she said, “who needs a beach? Who needs moonlight?”
Blanchard took her in his arms and kissed her, deeply, for some reason thinking of her brother as he did it, wondering whether the little man had ever felt as squalid as he did now.
Blanchard had set the meeting for nine o’clock because he knew that Tommy would be tired enough by then to go to bed if Blanchard insisted, which he did. It was important to him that his brother not be up and around when Little was there, that he not see him sitting down at a table and making plans with him, as a colleague and friend, because Blanchard knew that whatever part of his brother’s brain had been damaged at birth, it was not that part which judged someone’s character. One look at a stranger’s face and he would either remain where he was, smiling, or he would turn away and try to get behind Blanchard for protection, as though the negative thing he sensed were as tangible and threatening as a loaded pistol.
So he was already in bed when Little arrived, driving a Jeep whose provenance Blanchard could only wonder about. Little had his hair slicked back and he was wearing a fancy cowboy shirt with new jeans and pointed fake-alligator boots with three-inch heels. When he saw Ronda, who had come there with Blanchard straight from her mobile home, he made a big show of surprise, saying that she just couldn’t stay away from him, this “cute li’l sister of mine.”
“Why, no matter where I go—the Sweet Crick or here or anywheres—there she is, all bright and sassy, ready to give me what-for.”
He laughed excitedly, even though Ronda did not bother to look up at him from where she sat in the living room, eating some popcorn she had made earlier. Shea, on the other hand, got up to greet the little man, and even clapped him on the back, suddenly old buddies in crime.
“My, my, don’t you look just fine,” he said, slipping into his hillbilly routine. “What’d you do with Trigger and old Dale?”
“Who?”
“It don’t matter. Come on over.”
“Hey, you lookin’ good too,” Little told him. “I mean, you git around just fine. I thought you’d be in a wheelchair.”
“It only hurts when I cry.”
Again Little laughed.
“Time for business,” Blanchard said.
He joined Ronda on the davenport while Shea and Little took the overstuffed chairs facing them across the coffee table, which was actually a nineteenth-century rosewood parlor table with the legs cut short and a marble top added to match the end tables flanking the davenport. The furniture grouping sat at right angles to the fireplace, which Susan had painted white along with the walls and ceiling, a smoky off-white that made the rose wool carpet seem at times and in certain lights to glow like autumn sumac. It was a beautiful room, a room Susan had created, a room she had loved.
So Blanchard could not help feeling a touch of guilt as the four of them, planning a crime, his crime, settled in among her lovingly chosen pieces with cans of beer and popcorn, Little oozing brilliantine onto the back of his chair while Shea propped his feet on the marble of the coffee table.
“I sure didn’t know any ladies was gonna be a part of this,” Little said.
“It’s all right,” Shea told him. “Tell him you’re not a lady, Ronda.”
She made no response.
Blanchard lit a cigarette. “I take it you lined up the trucks,” he said.
“Yep. Old Jack, he come through just like always.”
“Good old Jack,” Ronda put in.
Little bristled. “That’s right—good old Jack. At least he’ll be contributin’ to this here thing. Which can’t be said about everybody, now, can it?”
Blanchard told them to cool it. “This isn’t some kind of party,” he said. “We’re not playing games. We’re here to arrange a shipment of cattle, that’s all, an illegal shipment.”
Little smiled innocently. “Never thought anything else. I was just askin’ about her, that’s all. You didn’t say she was gonna be part of it, as I recall.”
“You object?”
“Well, I don’t know. I guess not if her being in don’t cut my share.”
“It won’t.”
“Okay then. But what’s she gonna do? There ain’t nothin’ for her to do, far as I can see.”
Blanchard told him. “She’s going to be in charge.”
Little was not smiling now. “You puttin’ me on?”
“Not a bit. At the stockyards, this shipment has got to seem as normal and straightforward as any other. And that means arranging ahead of time with the brokers there, telling them just what I’ll be shipping, how I want to sell the different groups and so forth. And most of all—I’ll have to give them a name.”
“What name?” Little asked.
“Well, it can’t be mine, can it? So instead I’ll be C. C. Whitehead, shipping from midstate somewhere. Ronda’s got all her old I.D., if it’s required.”
“Which it won’t be,” Little said. “Whoever brings the cattle in, they just make the check right out to him, no questions asked.”
“To you or Shea, you mean?”
“That’s right. So how come we need her?”
“Because he says so,” Shea put in.
Blanchard had already filled him in on the matter, and while Shea undoubtedly had seen through his words to the real reason for Ronda’s participation—that Blanchard trusted her more with the money than he did him or Little—he had not raised any objections. The prospect of earning four thousand dollars for a night’s work seemed enough for him.
Not so with Little. “Well, I just can’t see her in charge, that’s all. She don’t get the trucks. She don’t drive ’em. She don’t load the cattle or unload ’em. Just what does she do?”
“She owns them,” Blanchard said. “As far as the stockyard is concerned, she owns them. And she gets the money for them. That’s the way it is.”
Little thought about it. He lit a cigarette and dragged deeply, sighing as he exhaled. “I guess it’s you don’t trust us,” he said. “You think we’d just pocket the money and take off, is that it?”
Blanchard shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Shea’s my best friend, so of course I trust him. But I don’t think either one of you’d be believable as owners of the cattle. They’d ask you questions you just wouldn’t be able to answer, like how old the bulls are and what their bloodlines are, and when the cows were bred—information they need to have, and that only the owner can give them. And if he isn’t there—with a shipment this big—well, it just might look a little fishy. So instead his wife goes in his place—with a list from him, containing all the facts. It will seem legitimate.”
Little sighed again, but in resignation now. “Okay, all right—I’m workin’ for my little sister.”
“For Mrs. C. C. Whitehead, that’s right. I call the stockyards Tuesday and tell them the shipment will be in early Wednesday, for auction that same day—two hundred and some cattle in four trucks—and that my wife will be there to handle the transaction. I’ll tell them you truckers have been paid in advance, because the cattle broker usually pays the trucker himself, by check, out of the seller’s gross—which we don’t want. We don’t want any more canceled checks floating around than necessary. Just the one, which I’ll tell them to make out to my wife, supposedly so she can bank it in Kansas City. But a
ll she’ll do is cash it there and then all three of you will head back. You drop off the trucks, pick up Shea’s car, and come on back to Ronda’s trailer, where we’ll meet that night. I pay you off, and that will be that.”
Shea was grinning. “My, my, Robert, I think you have found your metier at last.”
“His what?” Ronda asked.
“His calling. His true vocation.”
“Then why didn’t you say that?”
“Snobbery, sweetheart. Only snobbery.”
By whatever name, Blanchard did manage over the next hour to cover the operation in detail. He explained further the reasons for using Ronda’s married name throughout, that though the stockyards would not likely require any I.D. from her, the bank where she ultimately cashed the check undoubtedly would, but only to make sure they were paying the money to the right party, which meant they would not bother to record the numbers on her driver’s license and credit cards as they would normally do if she were cashing her own check or some out-of-town check rather than that of the stockyards, which naturally would be known to them as a local institution with solid credit. So the use of the Whitehead name and identity was simply insurance, bona fides they might have to show somewhere or other during the operation. To frustrate tracing anything back to her, Ronda was to point out to anyone who checked her I.D. that the address on the cards was an old one, that her husband’s new address was Route I, Sarcoxie, Missouri 64862—an address that would lead nowhere.
Blanchard told them that he was going to have to let his hired man go the next morning, on the all-too-credible pretext that he could no longer afford to pay him. Clarence would yell bloody murder, Blanchard said, but it would make no difference. The old man was simply too nosy and too smart and too talkative to be kept on the scene. Once he was gone—by noon tomorrow, Blanchard said—they would move all the cattle except the blacks to the north pasture, where they would load them Tuesday evening, from the old corral in the far corner of the pasture. He said that he planned to phone a custom herbicide sprayer the next day and contract for spraying brush in the vacated fields, which would serve as a legitimate reason for his having moved the cattle out of those fields and into the north pasture, for he imagined that was a question that would come up, once the police and insurance investigators started looking into the “theft” of the cattle.
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