Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  The visit was a raucous parade behind Joe’s father, who thundered through the rooms, refusing Smitty’s suggestion of a drink and Lureen’s of tea. He borrowed the telephone for a quick call to the bank in Minnesota, then hung up the phone conclusively as though his conversation with the bank had been the end of his conversation with Lureen and Smitty.

  “Junior’s got to go to work,” he said, gesturing at Joe with his straw hat. He bobbed down to kiss Lureen goodbye, then shot his hand out and let Smitty walk over and shake it. “We’ll call you Christmastime!” he thundered and got around behind Joe, pushing at his shoulder blades until the two of them were out on the street and a very strained Smitty and Lureen were waving at them. “You can’t have a drink with Smitty without having to go his bail that night.”

  As they drove, his father said, “Can you imagine a grown man living off his spinster sister like that?”

  “I thought Smitty had some problem from the war,” Joe said.

  “Oh, he did, he did. But I was in the same goddamn war. Listen to me, I want to make a long story short. Don’t ever take your eyes off Smitty. He’s dumb like a fox. Cut Smitty a little slack and he’ll take her all.”

  They drove back out toward the ranch. “I wish I could have found a way of staying in this country,” said his father. “But any fool can see it’s going nowhere. Still, you look at it and it just makes you think, What if? You know what I mean?” Joe was so startled by what for them was a rare intimacy that he looked straight down the road and waited for his stop. He thought he knew exactly what his father meant. What if.

  Joe’s father dropped him at the Overstreet headquarters, next to the tin-roofed granary and saddle shed and bunkhouse where Joe would live for the summer. He leaned over and gave Joe a hug. Joe felt his great body heat and smelled the strong and heartening aftershave lotion.

  “Well, son,” he said, “it’s time to whistle up the dogs and piss on the fire. Have a good summer, and keep an eye on things. You make a hand and they’ll have to use you. Then you can watch. Think of it as being yours someday and you’ll watch fairly closely.”

  “Tell Mom hi for me.”

  “In particular,” said his father, “the hay ground. If they aren’t changing water three times a day they’re lying to both of us.”

  All of Joe’s father’s quirks, including this one of not listening to him closely, only made Joe love him more. He loved the motion of his father, the bustle, the clear goals he, Joe, could not always understand. After all, he was the only father Joe would have and Joe seemed to know that.

  3

  Joe was over at the headquarters of the Caywood Fork the next day to get his orders. It was first light and the big riverine cottonwoods that hung over the somber headquarters buildings seemed to hold the last of night in their dense foliage. He had no car for the summer and he’d had to walk. The dogs barked at his arrival and Otis Rosewell came around from behind the saddle shed leading a horse. Joe walked over to him and stopped. Rosewell gazed at him. Finally, a small smile played over his lips.

  “Must be tough around your camp,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your old man.”

  “Yes, he is,” Joe conceded, wondering in dismay if he was failing some test of loyalty. But he thought Rosewell had extended a small gesture of amiability and he didn’t want it to slip away. It could be a long summer.

  “Do you know how to run a swather or a bale wagon?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Can you fence?”

  “Sure. And I can run a backpack sprayer, you know, for malathion or whatever.”

  “Well, most of the fence on your old man’s place is falling down because he never took care of it and because it was fenced poorly in the first place. But I imagine he thinks it’s perfect and I want you to make his dreams come true because my yearlings are pouring through the sonofabitch like water. Get yourself a pocket notebook and start walking that fence. Pull it up when you can and rebuild it where you have to. Knock out that old crooked cedar and put in some steel. You can get a sledge, stretcher, pliers, post pounder, and staples in the shop and you can use the old Ford to haul it around.”

  “I’ll get started today.”

  “That’s right. And you’ll never finish. Now let me tell you something else. You was sent to us. If you don’t care to put in an honest day’s work, that’s your business. I ain’t going to hang over you. I work for Mr. Overstreet.”

  Joe built fence for twenty-one days before he took his first break. He went down all the boundary fence and had five strands of barbed wire on stays sparkling from staple to staple. Where the rotten cedar had given out there were new green-and-white steel T-posts and the soldierly order they gave to the rise and fall of boundaries helped Joe see how his heritage lay on the benign face of the county.

  About halfway through his fencing assignment, Joe reached a high divide between two drainages, Crow Creek and Nester Creek. A thousand years of wind had blown all the topsoil to Wyoming and it was just bare rock on top of the world where old barbed wire sang like an Aeolian harp. Otis came up and helped him with this stretch of fence. They started to build jack fence, then changed their minds and dynamited post holes for half a mile until the line pitched down into the woods and was easy again and beyond the eerie sound of the steel strings above them. There was pleasure in working the ratchet on the fence stretcher, watching the wire rise, tighten, and sparkle in the light through the trees, sing in the wind, turn at the corner posts, or drop out of sight over the crown of a hill. Joe was going all round what would one day be his.

  On the twenty-first day, he was fencing the bottom of a narrow defile. Cattle had grown accustomed to escaping here by lifting the poles that were meant to hold the bottom wire low. Joe was sewing the fence to the earth along the floor of this cut with a post every ten feet when he was visited by the daughter of the owner, Ellen Overstreet. He had watched her covertly ever since he first got there, mostly when she was riding out through the ranch in the front of a flatbed truck with Billy Kelton, a neighbor Joe hadn’t spoken to since a boyhood fistfight almost ten years before. Without any thought of Ellen herself, Joe would have loved to take her away from Billy, who looked so complacent in the truck, lariat hanging in the rear window and his blue-eyed gaze remote under a tall-crown straw hat. It was a grudge.

  Joe’s first thought was that her timing was perfect. He was dark from the long exposure to sun and the muscles of his arms were hard and defined from driving posts and stretching wire. Ellen was a rangy brunette with startling gray eyes.

  “What’s the point of this when my dad is going to own it all anyway?” she said with a bright smile.

  “I’m getting paid. And I’m here to tell you your dad will never get our place.”

  “You’re getting paid. Otis says you can work or not work, it’s no nevermind to him.”

  “Well, it is to me,” said Joe, letting the red post pounder tip over and drop with a clang.

  “One way or another, Otis says. He doesn’t care.”

  “You can’t go by Otis,” said Joe. “If he knew anything he wouldn’t be here.”

  “Otis has been with Daddy since we ranched at Exeter Switch.”

  “It’s not Otis’s fault he isn’t smart.”

  Ellen sat down in the deep bluestem and began pulling up the russet pink flowers of prairie smoke, making a bouquet in her left hand and blowing ants off the blossoms.

  “Daddy says you’re in military school in Kentucky and you’re that little bit from graduating and going to Vietnam.”

  “Only I’m not going to Vietnam. I’m going to college in the East. I’m studying art. Is that for me?”

  He reached out for the bouquet of prairie smoke blossoms and she handed them over with a shrug.

  “Why aren’t we going to Vietnam?”

  “Because we aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Everybody knows that.”

  “Not everybody knows th
at. A lot of my friends can’t wait to get there.”

  “Well, you’ve got the wrong friends.”

  “You better not let them hear your Vietnam theory. I know one or two will fix your little red wagon. We believe in freedom. Y’know Billy Kelton?”

  “Yeah, I know Billy.”

  “Well, he plans to go quick as he can get shut of school.”

  “That’d be about right for Billy.”

  “Did you know he was top five saddlebronc rider in the Northern Rodeo Association two years in a row?”

  “Nope.”

  “He’s about as pretty a hand with rough stock ever come out of these parts.”

  “That should just chill the Vietcong,” said Joe.

  Joe wasn’t really paying close attention. Almost the only thing he and Ellen had in common was that they were both being dunned by the Columbia Record Club. He was trying to see what she had in the way of breasts. If she hadn’t wanted that noticed, she could have bought the right shirt size.

  “Otis said you really know how to work.”

  “He did?” Joe practically sang.

  “That seems to mean quite a little to you.”

  “Not really.”

  She scrutinized him. He was at a loss for words. The very sound of air seemed to increase. She took a deep breath. “What bands do you like?” she asked.

  “The Stones. What about you?”

  “The Byrds.” On the word “Byrds” he sensed his opportunity and reached to take her hand. It felt small to him, though it was hard to notice anything more than the nervous energy pouring back and forth between them. He would have liked to announce that he was going to kiss her or that he was attracted to her, which he was. But anything which contained much meaning would have subjected him to overexposure. Nevertheless, for things to continue, it was necessary that he express something about the moment. He said, “Oh, wow.” To his immense relief, “Oh, wow” was very acceptable. Ellen Overstreet seemed to melt very slightly at these less than eloquent words. “I mean it,” Joe added and took the other hand.

  “What are you taking?” she breathed, her face angled down at the ground between them.

  “Algebra, History, Spanish, English. What about you?”

  “Soc. Home Ec. Comm Skills. Phys Ed.” Joe wasn’t thinking so much about her courses. He could tell that she was looking to him for leadership. That he knew next to nothing, probably no more than she, didn’t matter because he had arrived from out of state and his real background was lost behind this ripped T-shirt, these new muscles, and this tan. He drew Ellen to him and kissed her. Feeling the hard line of her clamped lips, he realized that Ellen was ready to be kissed but didn’t know much more than to lean face forward. It might take all summer to get those lips open.

  They went on kissing. A couple of times, she had “thoughts” as she called them that made laughter burst through her nose. Joe waited grimly for these “thoughts” to pass and went back to the awkward business of kissing and hugging. He had numb spots from the rough ground, and any attempt to get “more comfortable” as he explained it, that is, to lever Ellen into a reclining posture, failed miserably. Finally, she detached herself and got up.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Joe. We’ll have to do something one of these days.”

  “That’d be great,” he said, quite certain he knew what she meant by “something.”

  “Like maybe we could ride on Saturday.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  When she started to leave, he gave her the peace sign. His best friend back at school, Ivan Slater, said day in and day out you could get familiar with strange girls faster by using the peace sign as a greeting than any other way.

  But Ellen, seeing his raised fingers, said, “Two what?”

  Joe just shook his head.

  “The two of us?” she said. “Oh, you’re sweet!”

  4

  Joe and Otis crossed paths as two professionals, and Otis had taken to questioning Joe about little things he was noticing, the levels of springs, the appearance of yearlings that had had diphtheria, pink eye, cancer eye, bag problems, warbles. Joe renewed the fly rubs up in the pasture and ran the chute when Rosewell had cattle in to doctor. He had gotten so he knew all the levers of the headcatch, the catch itself, the gate, the squeeze. He knew which bars to flip out on the cattle they had missed branding so that they could get old man Overstreet’s 9-Bar on the left hip. At first, it disturbed Joe to watch the irons smoke into flesh, and the tongue-slung bawling of the cattle as pain drove manure down their back legs. In the end, he turned the irons over in the fire himself to get the right pitch of heat, to make sure the brands went on bright and clean. He quit noticing when the burning smell drifted on the summer air. And to make up for it, he doctored the ones that had eye ulcers from burdocks in the hay they had been eating.

  Not long after Joe and Ellen had started to see each other, he was asked up to the Overstreet house. It was an old two-story ranch house with a dirt path beaten from the driveway to the entry. With ill-concealed distaste, small, fat Mrs. Overstreet led Joe to her husband’s office, a room off the bedroom where water rights filings, escrow receipts, bills, brand inspections, road permits, cattle registries, breeding and veterinary records, defunct phone books, memorandum pads, and calendars were heaped up on a rolltop desk. Mr. Overstreet sat on a kind of spring-loaded stool that permitted him to swivel around, tilt back, and regard Joe all in one movement. He was nearly as small as his wife and in every gesture he radiated a lifetime of sharp trading. Like many old-time ranchers, there was nothing “Western” about him. A topographical map on the wall illustrated the boundaries of the ranch. He went to it and pointed to the large missing piece on the south side. “See that?” His eyes burned at Joe. They seemed to consume the papery little face that curved up under a halo of thin iron-gray hair.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That belongs,” said Overstreet, “to you people.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It spoils the shape of this other, don’t you think?”

  Joe said nothing.

  “Besides that, I’d like to hear how you’re getting along. In your own words.”

  “I’m getting along fine.”

  “Your salary comes out of my lease arrangement with your daddy. So I’m not out there wringing the last penny from your hide. I do that mainly with Otis. But he says we’re getting our money’s worth.” He removed his glasses and worked his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets as he spoke. He turned his gaze to the map of the ranch and restored his glasses.

  “Joe,” he said, “you come from the big wide wonderful world out there. Ellen comes from right here on this little bitty patch of ground. Now no more than I’d try to sell you a pasture without water, don’t you sell Ellen something she really isn’t in a big way of needing. You catch my meaning?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You do, Joe. Take it from me. You catch my meaning. Now go on out and keep doing the good job you’ve been doing. Your dad will be proud of you. You’re doing a man’s job. If he ever fires you, you come and see me. I’ll take you to Billings and teach you to trade fat cattle. I’ll teach you to wear out two Cadillacs a year packing cattle receipts. Why, if I had your youth and my brains, I could walk on the backs of my cattle to Omaha. Go on out there, Joe, and bow your damn back.”

  But Joe didn’t get the message exactly. He was stirred instead by the romance of landholding that the old man radiated from his cluttered office. And when he and Ellen returned to their little wickiup in the willows alongside Tie Creek, he was less accepting of the plateau that they had reached weeks before. The wickiup was just a place where they had artfully bent the willows into an igloo shape and lashed them down. Ellen had read somewhere that it was the way the Indians had once sheltered themselves. The wickiup was an easy walk from the house and perfectly camouflaged. They were so secure in this shelter that they calmly went on with their activities even when Otis Rosewell rode past a few y
ards away. They lapped their tongues while the backs of their heads moved in vague figure-eights. They repeated “I love you” and tried to key their utterances to blissful peaks or reflective sighs. A long silence, a sigh, and an “I love you” indicated they had foreseen an extensive future with all its familiar appurtenances and had taken the phrase “I love you” as a kind of shorthand. Joe ached with meaning. Ellen undid the metal snap in back of her brassiere and her breasts were revealed. Either he would sweep his hand slowly up her rib cage and encompass them, or he would unpack them carefully. They were full handfuls with graceful small nipples. And once when Ellen was doing a handstand, Joe made out the faint blue veins underneath. No matter what position Ellen was in, they stuck straight out. If he mashed them gently, they resumed their perfect shape upon release. If he pushed them to one side and let go, they sprang back. They were practically brand new and the feeling Ellen insisted upon was that they were so wonderful they canceled any further expectations.

  Joe overflowed with feeling for the girl in his arms. He had never felt such strong emotions. Everything meant something bigger. He could look at her for hours from only a couple of inches away.

  5

  Together Joe and Ellen began to adopt the mopey love-struck postures, the innocent paralysis of young lovers in small towns. On Saturdays, they took one of the ranch trucks and drove into Deadrock for a swim at the city pool. Instead of yanking at each other and yelling by the poolside, they demonstrated the depth of their feeling by quietly working on their tans in fingertip proximity, or eating quietly by themselves at a shady snow-cone franchise. Joe could accept this because he knew the necessary crisis was coming. Gliding along on these parallel paths, feeling vaguely upset in this atmospheric filigree, watching the others thunder past barefoot at poolside, hot on the heels of screeching females, or crammed in fleshy heaps within sun-scorched automobiles, was almost acceptable to Joe because he was being swept along by something thrilling that he had no interest in understanding.