Blanchard gave the bottle back to the sheriff and returned to the body, not really knowing what he was doing now. He sat down in the dirt and took hold of Tommy’s hand. And he did not let go of it until the ambulance arrived.
Throughout the afternoon and evening Blanchard stayed in his house. He closed the shades and the drapes and he sat in the kitchen and in the living room drinking the last of his scotch. Every now and then he would get to his feet and wander about the house, one time winding up in Shea’s room on the third floor. Occasionally he would lie down and breathe deeply, trying to relax and ease his pain, but it remained with him. And he found he was unable to pass Tommy’s room without entering it and standing there as if he expected by will alone to make him materialize, bring him back just as he was before, the best of all of them, the most steadfast, the purest in heart. Once he even lay down on Tommy’s bed—why, he did not know. But always he would return to the kitchen and the bottle of scotch, knowing that if he did it often enough and long enough there would be a release of sorts waiting for him, an ephemeral oblivion anyway.
During the afternoon the mortician in Rockton called about the funeral arrangements and Blanchard told him to go ahead and do what he wanted, put Tommy in a casket of gold if he chose, and the man asked if there was anyone else he could talk to, a friend or relative who could handle things for him “in his hour of need.” Blanchard said no, he was alone, he had no friends or relatives, he would call later. Then he hung up.
He knew that eventually he was going to have to call Susan and let her know what had happened, but for now he could not do it. For her, Tommy had been a cause, a brief noble cause, like a clothing style that had caught her fancy and then had to be set aside as it lost its cachet. In the beginning, when they had brought Tommy to the ranch from Bloomington, she had been even more enthusiastic than Blanchard. She had seemed to love Tommy more than she did herself. But as the days turned into seasons, he had failed her too, had remained retarded, just as the hillfolk had remained uncouth and unfriendly and the ranch isolated and harsh. But none of that mattered now, he knew. In the end he would call her. He would have to do that at least.
For the present, however, there was only his pain. And his loss. The deaths he had experienced before—that of his mother and of his grandparents and of a few distant relatives and co-workers—had caused him to feel only a kind of abstract sorrow, more at the fact of death itself than at the passing of an individual. But with Tommy, he felt as if he had lost a part of his own being, a better part, a part he had not even known he had until he had taken him in and assumed responsibility for him. And then suddenly it was there, something in the dead center of his being, something bone-hard and still, a sense of strength and peace he had not known before. But it was going now. Already he could feel it dying within him. And he regretted the loss. He resented the man he would become again.
Even more, though, he mourned the loss of Tommy for what he had been, for his sweetness and his heedless love, for his infirmity even, in that it had made him better than ordinary men. In a world of Tommies there might have been no wheel or calculus, but neither would there have been any cruelty or killing. Over and over the thought struck Blanchard that he would never again wake in the morning, tired and worried, and come upon that face smiling at him, the eyes shining with a love and admiration that almost made Blanchard esteem himself. And he wondered who he was—what stupid, almighty dreamer—to have thought that he could have gotten away with it, escaped the common fate of his countrymen, fled the city’s canyons of death and futility and built here in the wild a structure of life and purpose. What arrogance to have thought he could bring it off. And the irony was that the dream itself had done him in. It was the ranch that had broken up his family. It was the cattle that had cost him his cattle farm. It was the black bull that had killed his brother, and maimed his own spirit.
So he wandered the house. And he drank. He finished the scotch and started on a fifth of gin, not caring that the combination would make him sick in time. As night fell and the air cooled he opened the front door and started going out onto the porch occasionally, usually just to stand there for a few minutes staring into the darkness before going back inside. A couple of times he turned on the television only to switch it off immediately as the gaudy, inane images began to flare into life, violating the sanctuary of his grief. Once he tripped and fell coming down the stairs, and he angrily got up and kicked over one of Susan’s precious lamp tables. He stomped on it, turned it into kindling. He kicked the lamp across the room and smashed his fist into a framed, glass-covered photograph of Susan and Whit and himself.
“Where was Tommy?” he asked out loud. “Wasn’t he one of us?”
Regularly, he would go back to the kitchen and refill his glass, drinking the gin straight, not even caring that in his mind its taste had always been the taste of poison, a popular hemlock. Now and then he tried to eat something—usually bread or crackers—but he would spit it out and throw the loaf or box aside. Sometime during the night, as he finished a drink in the living room, he set his glass down and lay back on the davenport and fell asleep, for how long he had no idea. But it seemed that almost immediately he began to hear the phone ringing, over and over, and finally he got to his feet and stumbled into the kitchen to answer it. The voice on the other end was Shea’s.
“That you, old buddy?”
“It’s me, yeah.”
“I’m sorry to call you so late. I really am. And sorry about a couple of other things too. I really am. I really and truly am sorry, old buddy.”
He sounded drunk. Even drunk himself, Blanchard had no trouble hearing the other’s drunkenness.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Just to explain, that’s all.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“Not to me it ain’t. ’Cause I really feel lousy. Like a real loser. The worst I’ve ever felt. You hear me, man?”
Blanchard said nothing.
“What happened was—oh, Christ, I don’t even know. Everything went like clockwork, just like you laid it out. Ronda had the money and we were driving back, the two of us in my truck. And—well, she started working on me, promising things, you know? Like that incredible keester of hers. And—well, to make a long story short, she got to me. I thought screw Blanchard—he’ll only blow the money on cows anyway. So after we dropped off the trucks and picked up my car, we pulled over outside of Springfield and made Little get out, right there on the highway, in the dark—how about that, huh? He was screaming and crying, but we just left him there and peeled out. We turned west on forty-four and wound up in Tulsa that first night. I’d bought some booze along the way—Chivas Regal, only the best by then, of course—so I wasn’t feeling any pain. ’Fact I wasn’t feeling nothing except your little bimbo by then. Didn’t even give my old buddy Blanchard a thought—how about that, huh? Hey, you there, old buddy?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Blanchard heard and understood, but he did not care about any of it, not now.
“I was potted and she was the potter,” Shea said. “And I’m sorry, Roberto, I really am. But I’m also nowhere—Albuquerque, I think it is, with my car and five hundred bucks, all she left me. She split while I was asleep. Not even a note.”
“That’s fine,” Blanchard said. “You keep the money. Invest it in something.”
“No, it’s yours, and I’m bringing it back.”
“No, you’re not. You stay away from here.”
Shea laughed. “Hey, man—this is Shea, remember? Your old buddy, your partner in crime.”
Blanchard hung up on him. And for some reason he did not yet understand, he went straight into his office off the kitchen and got his Winchester thirty-thirty and began carrying it with him. He refilled his glass again, emptying the bottle of gin. And as he drank this last glass he roamed about the house, trying not to think about anything, especially Shea and Ronda and the money. Occasionally a spasm of rage would shake him and he wou
ld lash out with the gun and break something. Occasionally he would cry.
At first light, he put on a jacket and went into his small office again and filled his pockets with cartridges. He loaded six more cartridges into the magazine of the rifle and one into the chamber, and then he went outside, heading back past the barn and the corral. As he walked, it crossed his mind that the veterinarian would be arriving later in the morning and he would have to talk with him, put him off. And there would be the mortician calling again, the insurance people and Gideon and the sheriff to deal with. He still had to make the phone call to Susan, and there would be a funeral and in time a bankruptcy sale. And somehow he would get through it all. He would sleepwalk through it until finally he would be just as he was now, alone and free, free as Shea, as lost as Shea. Somehow Susan and Whit did not figure in, not as dependents anyway, not as someone who really needed him, needed him as Tommy had. He knew now that in keeping his brother from sinking he had had to swim himself. But now there was nothing, no one to keep him from drifting away, going with the flow. He thought of the coast, Ronda’s phantasmal beach at night, and he wondered if he was not ready for it now, just the sort of wreckage to wash up on those receptive shores.
As he moved across the holding field, the small wooded pasture where they had freed the Angus bull from the headgate, he was struck by the beauty of the still-sunless morning. There was a ground fog and the grass was heavy with dew, and between the trees the webs of spring spiders trembled and gleamed in the growing light. But the bull was not in the field, nor any of the other blacks either.
Now and then Blanchard would stumble as he walked, and he would remember how much alcohol he had ingested. Still he did not feel drunk, not in his mind anyway. There he felt a cold and deadly sobriety. There he knew what he was doing, and why.
He came to the corner gap leading to the knob pasture, a gap which Shea was supposed to have closed after they had driven the cattle through on Monday. But it was open, and he went on into the huge field, at the far end of which he could see the knob rising steeply from the mist, a rocky promontory already sunlit at the top, with a nimbus of scraggly cedars shining bright green upon it. As he walked, he studied the edge of the woods that bordered the pasture on two sides, and gradually he was able to pick them out, legless in the fog, scattered against the darkness of the trees behind them.
The first group he came upon were two cows and their calves. While the mothers grazed, the two young bull calves cavorted in the high, wet grass, butting each other and playing grownup. At Blanchard’s approach all four stopped and looked at him. And he felt a wave of nausea; he felt sick with regret. But he knew that if they did not already have the disease, they would eventually. Somewhere, sometime, they would kill the dream for some other man, just as they had for him.
The four continued to stare at him, indifferent as he raised the rifle and sighted down it at the chest of the nearest mother. Then he squeezed the trigger and the soft damp peace of the morning exploded as the cow dropped to her knees, her eyes bulging in shock. The other had jumped at the sound but did not run off, still unsure what had happened. He shot her just as he had the first one, and he shot the calves as they ran about in panic, wanting to flee from him and yet unable to leave their mothers dying in the grass.
He moved on to the other cattle then, hitting them one by one, in the open and in the woods and bunched along the fence at the corner of the pasture. Some of them he accidentally gut-shot and then he had to track them down and hit them again. One of the mothers seemed to connect the roar of the gun with her pain, and she charged him, falling in a great pile at his feet as he shot her a second time. Twice again he reloaded, the last time when the sun was already climbing free of the knob and the fog was gone and the turkey vultures were beginning to gather overhead.
During the slaughter he had come upon the bull once and had let it run off. But finally it was the only animal left and Blanchard followed it into the woods at the base of the knob, meeting it in a small opening in the close-growing cedars. As before, the bull stood glaring at him with the same old mindless hatred, as if he were just any man and not Tommy’s brother.
Blanchard decided against hitting the bull in the chest as he had most of the others and instead aimed directly at its head, at a point a few inches below the poll. Then he squeezed the trigger and the animal crashed to the ground. While its legs were still thrashing he turned and walked away, moving out of the woods and across the field toward his house in the distance. His clothes were heavy with sweat and he was aware of his heart pounding hard. He did not feel good or bad. He felt alive. That was all.
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