Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  Little asked him about the Bang’s and what would happen if any of the cattle tested positive at the stockyards—would the whole herd be impounded and their sale canceled? Blanchard explained that he had not put his infected bull, the Angus, on any of his cows except the small group of blacks, which he would not be shipping. So it was unlikely that any cows in the main herd could have contracted the disease. Blanchard then asked Little about the trucks, whether he and Shea would have any trouble driving them, and Little said that he had driven eighteen-wheelers many times and that he and Shea would go to Jack’s early on Tuesday to give Shea some practice time before they went out onto the highway.

  And so it went. Blanchard covered every aspect of the operation he could think of, while the others added their comments now and then. Little came on straight and eager for a time, then more cocky as the evening wore on. Ronda said almost nothing and Shea predictably treated the affair as if it were a fraternity lark. And all the while the ranks of empty beer cans grew steadily at his elbow, on the marble top of one of Susan’s tables. He went through the last of the popcorn and moved on to a box of Ritz crackers and Swiss cheese, devouring all of it.

  Finally Blanchard said that he was finished and that the meeting was over as far as he was concerned. Little drained the last of a can of beer and got up, very slowly, as if he were a seven-footer. He said goodnight to Shea and “my sweet little sister over there too,” then winked cryptically at Blanchard and gave him a mock punch in the arm, as if he shared with him an intimacy not enjoyed by the other two. Then he left.

  “What a creep,” Ronda said, getting up.

  Shea clucked his tongue at her. “Remember Saint Francis’s words,” he said.

  “What words?”

  “I’ve sinned against my brother the ass.”

  Ronda looked over at Blanchard, and if she had cried or laughed he would not have been surprised. Instead she turned and headed for the stairs.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said.

  As she disappeared up the stairs, Shea got up too. “She makes herself to home real nice,” he said, playing hillbilly again.

  “I asked her to stay.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “No reason you should.”

  Shea shook his head dolefully. “I’m getting awful tired of sleeping alone, you know that? One of these days I think my mama’s little boy’s peepee is gonna shrivel up and fall off.”

  “Well, after Wednesday you’ll be rich. You’ll be able to pick up some cute young thing and be her sugar daddy.”

  Shea laughed at him. “Sugar daddy? Where’d you come up with that one?”

  “From the past.”

  “I can believe it.” Shea looked over at the stairs. “Well, I guess it’s about time I repair to my cell, and my trusty jar of Vaseline.”

  Now Blanchard laughed. “You won’t mind if I don’t look in on you.”

  “Coward.”

  Blanchard did not follow Ronda to bed immediately. Worried and restless, he tried to watch television for a while, and then he raided the refrigerator and had coffee out on the porch in the dark, sat there thinking for over an hour, stewing in the juices of all his problems and plans. Finally he went inside and turned off the lights and trudged up to bed, his own bed instead of Whit’s this night, Ronda having already lost her compunction about sleeping in what she called her bed, Susan’s bed.

  He was relieved to find her asleep, for he did not want to talk. Nor did he want sex. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sleep, for days if he could. But it was a long time before he dropped off, and even then the sleep did not last. He woke hours before dawn, the kind of waking he would not even have known about in the past, because he simply would have rolled over and gone back to sleep, without a thought. Not this night, however. Sleep, he recalled from high school English Lit, was for the innocent. Well, it was also for the solvent, he decided, for them more than anybody. It was the poor who murdered sleep, or at least the incipient poor.

  For a time he did not move. He lay there under the sheet he unconsciously had pulled off Ronda sometime during the night, and he looked at her lying naked on her side in the reflected light of the moon. He looked at the way the light fell on the swell of her hip and he looked at the sharp tuck at her waistline and the way her breasts nestled against each other, their nipples small and roseate in the shadowed light. He saw the curve of her neck where it joined her shoulder and the slight, almost invisible sickle of fat under her navel, softening the flatness of her belly as it narrowed into her pubis, the dark heart of her beauty. And it struck him how strange and fortunate it was that a woman’s body could be for a man an object of the purest, most joyful beauty and yet at the same time fill him with the most physical of needs.

  But a woman was also more than that, more than a body, more than beauty. And that was the problem. He thought of how it had been in the afternoon in Ronda’s trailer, no longer just sex but something more now, something he had not wanted, something he did not need. After coming, lying in his arms, she had cried again, silently, and he had asked her what was wrong. Nothing, she had said. Nothing was wrong except that she loved him. And for some reason unknown to him he had said the same words to her then, like a teenager, a child, a fool. I love you too. She had had more sense than he, though, more honesty.

  “No, you don’t. But it doesn’t matter. Just so you don’t back out, that’s all. Just so we get out of here together. I’ll be good for you. I promise.”

  Now she lay in the moonlight, without a cover, without tears or words or complexity, more beautiful than he had ever seen her, so beautiful he almost wished she would never wake, never open her eyes and see him whole. But then he drew back, rising to his own defense. He reminded himself that he had never really lied to her, because he did love her, in a way. And he had never really promised her anything, in fact had told her that he could not make any promises.

  But there in the dark, awake, mocked by her beauty, his casuistries were a wintry consolation.

  As he was about to get out of bed he heard the attic stairs creaking and then he saw the massive silhouette of Shea pass by his door. He spread the sheet back over Ronda and got out of bed. He put on his pants and followed Shea downstairs, out onto the front porch.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” he said.

  Shea was lighting a cigarette. “You noticed.”

  “Yeah, I’m sharp that way. Give me one.”

  Shea handed him his cigarettes and a book of matches. “Truth is I ran out of Vaseline,” he said.

  “Your own little energy crisis, huh?”

  “Some kind of crisis anyway.”

  “Midlife.”

  “That’s what this is—life?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “A rumor, I think.”

  “Could be.”

  Shea shook his head. “Tonight, though,” he said, “now that was really something. Really fantastic. Really unreal, as Armpit would have said. There we are, the two of us sitting down with a couple of hillbillies, and laying plans not for some ad campaign, mind you, but for stealing cattle. For the commission of a felony.”

  “Unreal, huh?”

  “And more.”

  “Comical?”

  “Of course. But also disillusioning.”

  “Illusions? I didn’t know you had any.”

  “About me, maybe not. But now you, that’s another matter—old clean-cut Bobby Blanchard, the straightest arrow at Darling. Why, I remember one time I was at the typing pool trying to make out as usual, and you came up with something you wanted the girls to type, and as you left, this one girl says, ‘There’s the nicest guy in the whole place.’ And I say, well, for an atheistic sodomist, I guess he’s okay. But she knew better. She knew a straight arrow when she saw one.”

  “God, I’m sorry,” Blanchard said. “Destroying your illusions this way. But as I recall, you were the one who pushed this thing from the beginning.”

  “Well,
I recommend muff-diving too, but it does have its disadvantages, doesn’t it? Its fallout, you might say.”

  “You want to back out?”

  “Not at all. No, I need the bread. And I guess maybe that’s what really irritates me about the whole thing—it’s so goddamn tacky, you know? Stealing a bunch of lousy cows, and your own cows on top of it. Now if we were planning a Vesco-type job, say hustling a couple of thousand investors out of a couple hundred million dollars, well then I think I could live with my disillusionment a little better, probably even still be asleep.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  Shea dropped his cigarette onto the porch floor and stepped on it, then sagged onto the wicker couch. He yawned, sighed, shook his head. “And then there’s me, old buddy,” he went on. “I guess I got to confess to a slight feeling of comedown there, too. But then that’s something of a habit with me, isn’t it? In fact you might say I’m a veritable titan of consistency in that regard.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh yes, that is so. Verily, it is. For instance I remember at college I used to get my sleeping bag and go up on one of the cliffs above the lake—high above Cayuga’s waters, I believe the phrase is—and I’d just stretch out there under the stars, no beer, no girl, no nothing except me and my destiny. And you have no idea how great it was gonna be, how totally and absolutely convinced I was that I would be great and famous. Oh, I didn’t know exactly at what, but that didn’t matter, because I knew, you see, I knew I had it. I knew I was one of the chosen, that I simply couldn’t lose, no way. So every now and then I’d just go up there and lie under the stars and revel in my future. It was just great. And then five years later, when I was at Y and R, I get this call from one of the new bunch at Welles Rich Greene and he invites me to lunch at Twenty-One, no less. He knows my work, he says, and he makes me an offer—to be a copy star at Welles Rich instead of just one of the herd at Y and R. Well, that was just great, was it not? Nevertheless—it was also a comedown. It wasn’t quite what I had seen in the stars at Ithaca. And then another five years go by and I’m sitting in my office at Darling looking out through the Arch at the Mississippi sliding past and East Saint Louis beyond, all that hip misery and hatred—and I keep writing my little ads about dog food. And now—well, now I sit here sweating in the Ozarks and look forward to stealing some cows.”

  Blanchard dragged on the last of his cigarette and threw the butt out into the yard. “That wasn’t in the stars either,” he said.

  “You could say that,” Shea allowed.

  “Well you’re not alone.”

  “Oh, I know. And that makes me feel just great.”

  “Maybe that’s our mistake.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have expected to feel great.”

  Shea laughed feebly. “I’ll try to remember that,” he said.

  8

  Blanchard was waiting for Clarence when he arrived for work the next morning, parking his pickup where he always did, next to the corral under an oak tree, indifferent to the bird droppings that rained on it throughout the year. And though the old man saw Blanchard waiting for him, something that almost never happened, he still took his sweet time getting out of the pickup, first fishing out a bag of Redman and stuffing a chaw inside his lower lip, then putting the bag away and fussing with the shoulder straps on his overalls before closing the truck windows finally. Blanchard meanwhile was pretending interest in the Angus bull and a few of the cows that had followed it into the corral, which connected with the barn where the bull had luxuriated on grain and protein supplement during the winter, in preparation for the breeding season, which was still in progress. But often, if no cow was in heat, the bull evidently would remember the taste of the grain and would come plodding up the hill and into the corral on its way to the barn, only to be blocked by a closed gate—a pilgrimage Blanchard’s other two bulls might also have made, except that the pastures they were in did not connect with the corral.

  In any case Blanchard was glad the bull was there, for it presented the opener he needed.

  “Well, he’s got it,” he said.

  Clarence spat over the fence. “Hell, I knew that.”

  Blanchard asked him how he knew it.

  “Well, I knowed you’d call Parnell soon as you could. And since you didn’t say nothin’ Saturday, makin’ hay, well I jist figured he had it, that’s all.”

  “Him and six of the cows. I’m gonna have to bloodtest the whole herd.”

  “That’s the way she goes.”

  “And that’s not all.”

  Clarence did not pick it up. It was not his style to show undue interest in anything.

  “The bank turned me down. Gideon won’t renew my notes.”

  “I knew that, too.”

  Blanchard resisted a strong urge to hit the old man. Instead he smiled. “Yeah, I kind of figured you did.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Well, there’s one other thing—which I imagine you already know too. My wife didn’t just go to Saint Louis for a vacation—she went for good.”

  Clarence responded by letting fly another missile of tobacco juice. “Bound to happen sometime,” he said. “She didn’t belong here. Any fool could see that.”

  Blanchard lit a cigarette and dragged deeply, as if to fortify himself. He did not like what he was about to do. “I’m not sure you understand what all this means,” he said. “I’m gonna have to let you go.”

  Clarence looked at him now, squinting. “You what?”

  “I’m gonna have to let you go.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Money. I don’t have any more money to pay you with.”

  Clarence thought about it for a few moments, scratching his stubbly chin. “Well, I guess I could take a cut for a while if I had to. And you could pay me the difference later, when you git it.”

  “I don’t have it, Clarence. Not now. And not in the future either.”

  “What about all them yearlings? They’re ready to ship, ain’t they?”

  “We’re in quarantine, remember?”

  Clarence was becoming agitated now. He was chewing furiously and his hands would not stay still. “Well, what in hell you gonna do alone? You still got all thet hay to put up. And—”

  “Shea’s still here,” Blanchard said. “I told him if he wanted to stay, he’d have to work.”

  Clarence spat again. “Shea—shit! Jist what could that big horse do, huh, ’cept drink beer and talk smartassy?”

  “He’ll work. He’ll have to.”

  Clarence suddenly kicked out at the corral, hitting the bottom board. And if anything broke, it was in his foot.

  “Damn!” he cried. “Damn it. Jist when everything was goin’ good.”

  “It hasn’t been going good for some time, Clarence. At least not for me.”

  “Well, I’ll talk it over with the woman tonight,” the old man grumbled. “I guess we can git by fer a spell. But you jist got too much to do here. And anyways, what would I do at home—jist sit around and stew all day.”

  Blanchard had been afraid of this, knowing that work was quite simply the old man’s life. He and his wife, who held a part-time job at the Rockton chicken plant, lived on practically nothing. They owned a small ten-acre farm on which they raised almost all their own food, making do without indoor plumbing or a phone or air-conditioning, drawing the line only at refrigeration and television, which in the Ozarks as in the big-city ghettoes seemed to be the only real necessity.

  “If I can’t afford to pay a man,” Blanchard said, “then I can’t afford to let him work for me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just that. I can’t pay you, so I can’t let you work.”

  “You mean right now? I’m through right now?”

  Blanchard nodded. “Until I can afford to pay you again. Then I’ll let you know, and try to get you back.”

  “Try to git me back?”

  “That’s
right. Because this hasn’t got anything to do with you, Clarence. You’re a good hand, I know that. If I could afford to keep you, I would.”

  Clarence spat again. He shook his head and ran his sleeve across his mouth. “This jist don’t seem real,” he said. “Folks always used to ask me about you and I always told ’em you didn’t know much, in the beginnin’ anyways, but I always said you was straight—’cause I thought you was. But this here ain’t straight. No sir, this jist ain’t straight.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry, are ya?”

  “That’s right.” And Blanchard truly was, for he saw tears—of pain or rage—welling in the old man’s eyes.

  “Well, you jist go to hell, Mister Bigshot,” Clarence got out. “You jist go straight to hell.”

  Gimping back to his pickup, he struggled into it and instead of backing up, threw it into the wrong gear and lurched forward into the corral, breaking the two middle boards at the point of impact. Then he backed up and slammed the truck into gear again and roared away, not once looking over at Blanchard. And Blanchard was glad of that, for suddenly he was feeling sick. His gorge had risen, and he could feel his breakfast stirring in his stomach. As he struggled not to vomit, it occurred to him that he finally knew what the old phrase meant, the one about not being able to “stomach” oneself.

  And yet he also knew that he had had no real choice in the matter, once he had decided to get rid of the cattle. The old man would have known something was wrong as soon as they began moving all the herd except the blacks into a single pasture, for it simply was not the way Blanchard operated, putting more than one bull in with a group of females, or risking having the yearling heifers bred before shipment. And after the “theft,” Blanchard could not have the old man knowing the truth and spreading it around—that Blanchard himself had supervised the bunching of his cattle in one pasture on the day before they disappeared—for that could have furnished the sheriff and the insurance people with all the reason they would need to press an investigation that in time could have led to his arrest and conviction. And of course he did not want that, no more than he wanted to lose the respect and friendship of Clarence.