Black Angus

by Newton Thornburg

  Hour by hour the storm went on, letting up for a while every now and then only to redouble its fury moments later. Twice during the day hail fell, so intensely Blanchard did not doubt that somewhere in the Ozarks a farm or small town or trailer park was being decimated by a tornado. And occasionally as he stood looking out through the rain sheeting over the windows, he would see long black fingers dangling from the wall of clouds passing overhead, and he would find himself wondering if one of them might not reach all the way down and touch him, single him out for a just retribution.

  Through most of the day Tommy watched television, the one channel whose signal was strong enough to come through despite the storm. But it was obvious to Blanchard that his brother was not really interested in the shows that were playing or in the toys he had spread out on the floor. Almost every time Blanchard glanced his way he would catch Tommy looking at him, with a worried expression. And Blanchard knew why. During bad weather it was not his custom to stay indoors. In fact it was the one time above all others when he felt he had to be out checking the cattle, making sure they had feed and driving them to shelter if he could, especially any animal that looked sick, a possible prey to pneumonia. But on this day Blanchard did not even venture outside. He listened to the markets on the radio, and he kept refilling his glass of scotch and water. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and he stood at the window looking out at the storm—without really seeing it. What he saw instead were the four trucks and their drivers, and his cattle jammed into the rickety trailers. Could they have been unloaded yet? he kept wondering. Could they already have started through the sale ring? Would they bring “top dollar”? Would Ronda get the check in time to cash it at a bank there? And, finally, would the three of them manage to be back that night, as planned, to divide the money at Ronda’s trailer?

  There were times when he thought the rain falling just outside the window was answer enough, a sure augury of what was to happen to his own fortunes. But that, he knew, was more than a little stupid, in fact was nothing less than that hoary old villain the pathetic fallacy. And anyway, in a rancher’s life rain was almost always a blessing, he reminded himself, the very precondition of his survival. In any case, he knew there was nothing he could do about it except tough it out, wait it out. And maybe, just maybe, it would all come right in the end.

  Every time he refilled his glass Tommy would ask him what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” he would say.

  “Should we check the cows?”

  “No, they’re all right.”

  Tommy would nod as if he understood, but Blanchard could see that he did not, that he was still troubled.

  For supper Blanchard heated two TV dinners but found that he could not eat his, that his stomach was in no shape for such a labor. So he stayed with his scotch and somehow managed to get through the evening, to ten o’clock and bedtime for Tommy. This time he told him that he would be going out, to Ronda’s, but only for a while, and that he would be home by midnight.

  On the way he tried to drive slowly, knowing that he had drunk more alcohol than he was used to and that the road was wet, but his foot seemed to have a will of its own and within a short time he was there. He was the only one there, however. Her mobile home was dark and when he checked the door he found it locked. So he went back to the car to wait. The storm was over now but the sky was still overcast, a vault of blackness deepened if anything by the lone polelight burning across the river road at Ronda’s grandmother’s place. And to that single light he added the burning coals of cigarettes, one after another, as he sat smoking and waiting, trying not to think about all the things that could have gone wrong.

  By eleven-thirty he decided to go to the Sweet Creek to see if by any chance the others had stopped off there to celebrate. He knew it was an absurd idea, that they would not have had anything to celebrate until the job was finished and the money divided. And even then, Shea and Ronda would not choose the Sweet Creek—he knew that. But he went there anyway and had a couple of beers. And he called Ronda’s number twice, each time letting the phone ring ten or twelve times before he hung up. Finally he drove back to her trailer and this time sat it out, waiting until almost three in the morning before he gave up and returned to the ranch. Even then he kept calling her number every fifteen minutes or so. And he got out the bottle of scotch again and sat drinking in the dark. Once, on the way to the phone, he knocked over a lamp and Tommy came hurrying downstairs to see what had happened. Blanchard angrily told him to go back to bed and stay there, and Tommy went, like Spot or Kitty fleeing him.

  All that night Blanchard did not sleep and at seven in the morning he got in his pickup and drove back to Ronda’s, but once again no one was there. He drove on to Rockton then, to the phone booth at the edge of town, where he placed a call to Ansell Brothers in Kanasas City. He realized, as no one answered, that it was not yet eight o’clock, so he waited another twenty minutes and placed the call again. When he finally got the broker, he told him that his wife had not returned home yet and he was wondering how the sale had gone.

  Well, the rain had kept some buyers away, Ansell said, so the dollar numbers were not as good as they might have been. The calves and yearlings did better than the cows for sure, but then that was to be expected in today’s depressed cattle market.

  “How much?” Blanchard asked him.

  “Your wife didn’t call you?” Ansell sounded surprised.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, let’s see, after commission and yardage, the check came to forty-nine thousand two hundred dollars.”

  “When did you give her the check?”

  “Why? Is there some problem, Mr. Whitehead?”

  “No, I was just wondering if she had time to get it to the bank yesterday, that’s all.”

  “Well, I think so. My secretary says we gave her the check around two-thirty. Your cattle were one of the first bunches to go through the ring in the morning.”

  Blanchard thanked him and hung up. He drove home and made breakfast for himself and Tommy, who by now had the look of a frightened child. Suddenly he had grown even more clumsy than he normally was, knocking over his milk and later falling on the back porch steps. And he kept glancing furtively at Blanchard, as though he expected to be scolded again at any moment. Blanchard wanted to put him at ease but somehow could not manage it, for once could not conjure up that attitude of easy self-confidence and filial affection that always put his brother’s many fears to rest. Instead Blanchard continued to pace the house and to dial Ronda’s number, letting the phone ring only five or six times now before hanging up. Once, just as he was about to dial, the phone rang and he jumped at it, feeling his heart begin to sprint. But it was not Ronda. It was the state veterinarian, a Doctor Roswell calling from Springfield. He was afraid he had some bad news, he said. The tests run by the state laboratory confirmed the local veterinarian’s findings. Seven of Blanchard’s cattle, including the bull that was tested, had Bang’s disease and would have to be destroyed. He wanted to come to the ranch to brand those seven for slaughter and to bloodtest the rest of the herd. How soon could they do it?

  “I’ve got a custom sprayer coming tomorrow,” Blanchard said. “It’s a pretty big job. I’ll be with him most of the day.”

  “How about Saturday, then?”

  Blanchard hoped to put him off as long as he could. “Well, I’ll tell you, Doctor, my corral and headgate really aren’t adequate for a job this big—I’ve got almost a hundred cows, you see. But I think I could have it all ready in a week or so.”

  No, that would be too long, the vet told him. The reactors had to be branded and sold for slaughter “immediately, if not sooner.” And the rest of the herd had to be tested as soon as possible. He could bring a mobile squeeze chute and corral panels, plus a helper. What about two days from now, Saturday at ten?

  Blanchard had no choice. “All right. I’ll try to be ready for you.”

  “Good. I’m sorry to push you, Mister Blanchard, bu
t it’s got to be done. And it’s a lousy job, I know—especially doing it every month. But it’s just one of those things. You get it in your herd and you just gotta keep testin’ and cuttin’ till you’re clean.”

  “Yes, I realize that,” Blanchard said. “I’ll be ready for you.”

  After he hung up, he remembered the blacks that had not been tested yet, those few that had plunged on through the chute after the Angus bull had torn off the headgate. They were the only ones the vet would have to test—instead of a hundred cows and heifers, less than a dozen. And Blanchard did not doubt that the man would entertain the suspicion that the missing cattle might not have been stolen at all, but that Blanchard simply had rounded them up and sold them after he received the veterinarian’s phone call. It would be only that, however, a suspicion. For now, Blanchard had a more pressing problem on his mind.

  Once again he dialed Ronda’s number, and once again there was no answer. He tuned in a Kansas City radio station then and lay down to listen for any news of a traffic accident or shooting or other calamity involving Ronda and the men. But there was nothing, and in time he fell asleep. When he awoke, over an hour later, he found his anxiety already giving way to a deadening resignation. He waited until five o’clock before trying to phone her again. And then later, after supper, he took Tommy with him and drove to her mobile home once more, but more slowly this time, not really expecting to find her there. When he saw no car parked in front of the trailer he went across the road to her grandmother’s first, checking the barn and looking in the windows of the house, where he saw the old woman sitting in front of her blaring television set exactly as before, wearing the same dress and rocking steadily as she fingered her New Testament.

  Blanchard went back across the gravel road. He got a tire iron from under the seat of the pickup and pried open the front door of the trailer, breaking the lock. Inside, he checked the drawer where she kept her personal papers and the small photo album she once had shown him, containing snapshots of her mother and of herself in high school and dancing in Kansas City. The drawer was empty. And in the bathroom he found her birth-control pills and douche syringe missing. Her clothes and other possessions were still there, but that did not matter. With fifty thousand dollars one could buy much nicer, more expensive things, clothes suitable for the phantasmal life she would lead at her California beach resorts. What one could not buy was an album of snapshots, one’s sole claim on the past. And as for contraceptive pills, one would have had to find a doctor and make an appointment, a messy business when one was on the run.

  When he got back to the pickup, Tommy asked him if he had found what he was looking for.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  “Who lives there?”

  “Ronda did.”

  “Is she gone?”

  “Yeah, she’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “California probably.”

  “What’s there?”

  Blanchard laughed, for the first time in weeks, it seemed. “Beats me,” he said.

  10

  That night Blanchard finally got out of his clothes. He took a shower and put on pajamas almost as a symbolic act, a ritual proving to himself that he no longer believed the phone would ring at any moment and he would be on his way to Ronda’s to collect his money, his due.

  Now and then during the night he fell asleep, but never for very long, and when he woke he would go out onto the narrow verandah outside his bedroom and smoke a cigarette or he would go downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. And he would think. He would try to understand. He would try to figure out just how and when he had lost her, at what precise point she had decided to betray him and take the money for her own.

  Looking back, he could remember clearly all the signals she had given him, almost as if she had wanted him to stop her. But it seemed that he had been on some other wavelength entirely, some channel receiving only the signals of his own guilt and misgivings. And so he had ignored her repeated vow to “take care of herself,” and he had not really listened to her story about the dogs, the ravaged little bitch that lived so sorely in her memory and which he should have seen not only as a paradigm of her own abuse at the hands of males but as a statement of her total hopelessness, her recognition that there was nothing ahead for the two of them. But he had not listened. And finally, as she climbed into the truck and glanced down at him, trying to smile, trying to hide the look of shame and anger in her eyes, he had not seen. For some reason he had not wanted to see.

  Thinking about it now, he imagined that his critical mistake had been to suggest that he might have been able to run off with her, with the money, and live together on the coast. He believed that she would have helped him anyway, without that inducement. But once it had been offered, and then in effect had been withdrawn—on the night she overheard him with Tommy—that, he imagined, had been the breaking point, the point at which she decided to look out for herself and no one else.

  Of course there was always the possibility that she had planned to betray him all along, ever since that moment in her trailer when she had agreed to join him in the enterprise. But Blanchard discounted the possibility. If that had been her intention, she would have been all sweetness and light those last days instead of the girl he had found on the front porch, huddling in her deep black hole. No, Blanchard believed the thing had just happened, that was all. The girl felt he had failed her, betrayed her, and so she had gotten even, in spades. And in a way, he understood. He understood, but he did not forgive.

  When it came to Shea and Little, however, he did not even understand. If Ronda had tricked them and disappeared with the money, he would have thought that Shea at least would have let him know, called him on the phone even if he was chary of coming back himself, returning to what he probably would have termed “the scene of the crime.” As for Little, Blanchard naturally would not have expected any favors. Yet he believed that if Ronda had indeed absconded with the money, even her brother might have wanted to get in touch with him, if for no other reason than to throw it in his face, the cost of his mistaken judgment, putting a woman in charge of the operation.

  On the other hand, there was the most obvious explanation for the men’s silence—that all three were parties to the conspiracy and that Ronda simply had divided the money among them and each had gone his separate way. He knew that crime, like politics, was supposed to make strange bedfellows—but not that strange, he felt, not with that degree of antipathy. He had a hard time imagining Ronda giving her brother anything, least of all an acceptably equal slice of so large a pie. Nor could he believe that Little himself was behind it all, appropriating the money for his own, possibly with the help of Jack and Junior, for that would have meant violence and possibly a shooting, after which Ronda or Shea would either have phoned Blanchard as survivors or made the newspapers and television as victims. But neither had happened. And anyway Blanchard did not believe Little could ever have found the guts to take on both Ronda and Shea.

  As for Shea himself, Blanchard could not see him involved in any way, not as a participant and not as an entrepreneur either, taking the whole thing for himself. With his great size and physical strength it would have been no problem for him of course. He simply could have banged a few heads together, picked up the money, and walked away. But Blanchard did not think he had it in him. In fact he believed that of all the men he knew, Shea was probably the least likely to steal from a friend. From a wife or a finance company, now that was another matter, but not from a friend, and especially a male friend, a buddy. It was part of the code, the same as the old tweed jacket and the chinos and the contempt for Armpit, for Jiggs, for toil.

  No, it was not Shea, and not Little either, Blanchard was sure of that. It was Ronda who had changed him so abruptly from a criminal into a victim. And, oddly, he felt no great pain or sense of loss at the metamorphosis. It was almost as if she had given him back his soul, his pride as a man. What he would not get back, however, was
his ranch. That would have to go now, for good. That she had taken. He wondered if it was a fair exchange.

  After breakfast he phoned the custom sprayer Ross and told him that his fields were still too wet from Wednesday’s rain and that the job would have to be postponed. Ross didn’t like it. He’d already filled his tanks with diesel fuel, he said, and he was just about ready to mix in the brushkill. Blanchard told him that he was sorry but that he had no choice in the matter, there was no way they could go into his wet fields with such a load, they would have to wait three or four days at least.

  With that out of the way, Blanchard reluctantly began the charade of discovering his cattle stolen. With Tommy tagging happily along, he went out to the barn and loaded a few bags of salt mix into the pickup and set out for the north field. When Tommy got out to open the fencegap, Blanchard told him to leave it open because there were no cattle anywhere near and they would be coming back through it in a short time. Tommy looked puzzled at this, a laxity that was not Blanchard’s normal style of operation, but he jumped back into the truck without a word and they drove on across the green expanse of the pasture, toward the woods which ran all along the north and west perimeters of the eighty-acre field. Though it was still midmorning—grazing time—there were only four cattle visible, the two yearlings and the cow and calf that had broken out of the corral three days before.

  “Where are they all?” Tommy asked.

  “Probably in the woods. I’ll drive along the edge and you go through it, okay? See if you can find them.”