Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  “They are.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does she do?”

  “She is a retired schoolteacher.”

  “So, she has a pension?”

  “A small one, and a small income from a small family ranch.”

  “Which belongs to?”

  “Uh, to Lureen. To my aunt.”

  “And Mister Smitty got his stake in the shrimp business by?”

  “Mortgaging the ranch.”

  Bowen sucked on a paper clip pensively.

  “It’s none of my business, Mr. Starling. But why don’t you let this wonderful fellow just go to jail?”

  “I’m pursuing my aunt’s interests, as I see them, as best I can.”

  “Okay,” said Bowen, dropping his hands to the desk decisively. “I sense that we can speak to one another with candor.”

  “I sense the same,” said Joe earnestly.

  “May I be very direct with you?”

  “Please.”

  “Joe, your aftershave stinks to high heaven.”

  “I really can’t do anything about that now.”

  “As to Mister Smitty, yes, we can try to get the charges dropped. Yes, I foresee that being a discussable possibility. Under this scenario, Smitty fails to recoup the thirty thousand. In addition to which, the insurance company is out of pocket, I am guessing, another thirty, in fees, and in ascribable overhead.”

  “What overhead?”

  “They’ve got twelve floors in Denver.”

  “I see. Well, look, let’s examine the cost of dropping this. You get me some specifics and I’ll try to sell it to my uncle.”

  “But remember, he doesn’t have to buy it,” said Bowen. “He can go to jail.”

  “I admit it’s tempting,” said Joe.

  “The first time he stoops for the Lifebuoy in those big showers, he’s going to meet some very nice Indians.”

  “Like I say,” said Joe, “the temptation is there.”

  24

  It was a long drive back. He listened to a local radio station for a while and absorbed himself in the community announcements. Money was being taken up to purchase bibs for senior citizens. A truculent Boy Scout made the following statement: “This week we decided what badges we are going to do. The two main ones are Tending Toddlers and Science-In-Action. And we are going to bring dues of twenty-five cents even if we are sick.” After that a member of the Lions Club explained the problems they had had building a concession stand for Little League games. They had to find out if the neighbors would object. Zoning ordinances required it be a certain distance from the street. That meant they had to move the backstop. A building permit would have to be applied for. To meet Class A Residential zoning requirements, the concession stand would have to go between the pitcher’s mound and first base. The planning board granted a special-use permit. So, after five years, they were now prepared to build the concession stand. Finally, before Joe shut the radio off, the fire chief said they were sick of putting out prairie fires started by the railroad.

  Oh, this is an odd little life, he thought, turning onto Smitty and Lureen’s street. Great shafts of sunlight came down between the old trees that lined the badly cracked sidewalk. A newspaper boy jumped the curb with his bicycle and a man in a wheelchair, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and smoking a cigar, coasted down the slight incline of the sidewalk serenely, the spokes of his wheels sparkling in the afternoon sun. Two young carpenters with a long plank resting on their shoulders, made a wide turn at the corner and disappeared. Pigeons poured out of the abandoned Methodist church like smoke and ascended into the sky; they were the reincarnated souls of miners, railroaders, and ranch hands. Things seemed so right to Joe, he was able to enfold himself in the breaking wave. Ambiguity was at a safe distance now; it was not necessary to have an opinion about anything.

  Lureen led Joe into the parlor. She set out tea. He cast his eye over the curios and the lugubrious draperies that declared this an inner world. He felt he had arrived.

  “I’ve been to see the lawyer for the insurance company.”

  “Oh,” said Lureen, “I wonder if that was a good idea.”

  “I think it was. We talked about the possibility of dropping the charges.”

  “Let them charge him. He’s innocent. They can take it to court. I almost prefer it. It’s in the rumor mill anyway. It might be good to have Smitty’s name cleared publicly.”

  “Are you certain this is your wish?”

  “My wish is that it had never happened. But since it has, it has to be cleared. You know, I blame my own mother for this. She doted on me and I’m grateful for that. But to her dying day, she went around town saying, ‘My daughter is an angel from heaven, but my two boys’—Smitty and your father—‘are common swindlers!’ Words like this from a mother hang on in a small town for years.”

  Looking at Lureen as she poured the tea and thinking of the multitude of first- and second-graders who had gone on from her bare schoolroom greatly strengthened by her attentions, he couldn’t help thinking his grandmother had been partly, and maybe entirely, right.

  He was so fond of Lureen that, against his own inclinations, he said, “If you change your mind and I can help, let me know.”

  Lureen looked off and thought for a moment. “When you were a little boy, you sucked your thumb. You sucked your thumb until you were seven years old. And the orthodontist said it had given you a severe overbite and that if you didn’t quit immediately, it would have to be corrected by surgery. Remember? It was in August and you were such a desperate little boy. But it was Smitty who sat up with you at night when you cried and put a sock over your hand and stayed up night after night with you—for a week!—until you succeeded. Night after night! He never had a drink until you quit. These people who want to put him in jail don’t know anything about that side of Smitty.”

  Motoring along, unable to sort out his feelings about his aunt and uncle, he mused about his early days with Astrid—the high flying, the courtship, the glands titrating explosive juices into their systems, followed one noon by Astrid’s announcement that she was considering suicide.

  Later, she rejected it, saying, “Suicide is far too peculiar for me. It’s something that should be done by science majors or Mormons. It should be done by people we know little about, like ship brokers and risk arbitragers.”

  They were so chipper then, embedded in time. Joe could paint blindfolded. They moved in the direction of their intentions as quickly as figures in cartoons. He remembered thinking it was swell past measuring. But somehow it got less juicy. Somehow it got annoying. Astrid never mentioned suicide again. She was far too bored to commit suicide. And they were both beyond something. He couldn’t wait to see Astrid and try to sense whether or not it was true they were beyond everything.

  He went to her, held her face in his hands, bent over and kissed her softly. “I’ve never stopped loving you,” he said.

  “Oh, great!” said Astrid. Joe felt the ache of tears come.

  25

  A man from the Soil Conservation Service came out in the morning and Joe walked him up the hill to show him where he wanted to put some concrete turn-outs and drop lines for his irrigating water. The man kept stuffing his lower lip with Copenhagen and staring out at the edge where the sagebrush breaks reached the brilliant green of the alfalfa. He had recently been through a divorce, he explained, and wasn’t all there. Joe just couldn’t stand to hear this. He was counting on this man to represent the real world right this very minute.

  “We’ll have to survey the ditches in again because we’re burning up on the tops of all those knolls,” Joe said. “I don’t think they were ever in the right place.”

  “She took me to the cleaners,” said the ASCS man, elevating the brim of his cap with a rigid forefinger. “She left me a purple pickup and one clean pair of jeans and that was all she wrote. Propped up in front of the game shows smoking weed all day and this baldheaded old judge says she gets the works.” “I h
ear you,” said Joe absently, and tried to get back to his subject, which was an aging alfalfa field and a ditch that leaked because of all the shale. “The thing is, I’ve got some backhoe and concrete work that has to be done and it’s going to be expensive.”

  But before he could enlarge on his subject, the government man said, “We’ll pick up seventy percent on all irrigation projects whether you shit, go blind, or piss up a rope. But you’re going to have to come to town and fill out some forms.”

  That was what Joe wanted. So he commenced a laying on of hands, murmuring effectively about the victim’s life in America. The ASCS man told him the working man don’t stand a chance. They walked down through the alfalfa, the white flowers just beginning to come, the shadows curving toward them over the plateau. A hawk flew levelly across the space toward a single tree; just before he got there, his line of flight took a deep sag and he swooped up to his perch.

  Joe’s cattle were such a sorry, mixed bunch, under such a variety of brands, that it was imperative to get them in and rebrand every one of them. The state brand inspector practically ordered him to. “You better have you a branding bee,” he said to Joe when they looked over the receipts.

  Joe branded a hundred and thirteen yearlings on Sunday. Astrid left early to tour Yellowstone. She had heard about branding and was determined, she said, to go through life without ever seeing it. Two strong neighbor boys, Ellen’s nephews, came down to wrestle. Joe roped the whole time off his gelding, enjoying the good job of breaking Bill Smithwick had done. Old man Overstreet, his plaid overcoat safety-pinned across his chest, showed there were no hard feelings by helping Joe at head and heels as they worked the yearlings in the pole corral. But Joe remembered the old man had been told about Clara. Joe was a little uncomfortable.

  Joe thought, I’ve been away too long. I feel sorry for these animals. A tall sixteen-year-old in a red shirt, which had rotted out in the center of his shoulders, followed the dragging cattle behind Joe’s horse and grabbed a front leg so they would drag more smoothly. The other boy put a knee on the head and crimped a foreleg around. The sixteen-year-old sat on the ground holding one leg and subdued the other with his feet. Still, they got kicked. Old man Overstreet applied the irons, J-S, Joe’s father’s brand. When the smoking metal seared into the flesh of the steers, they stretched their necks out and opened their mouths; their gray tongues fell forth and they bawled. Joe could hardly bear it, though he let no expression cross his face. The sixteen-year-old freed Joe’s lariat, and the boy’s mother, a silent, rawboned woman of fifty, applied the iron and gave shots to the ones with hoof rot or bad eyes. It went very smoothly in an increasing cloud of smoke. When they had all the cattle penned in one place, old man Overstreet, looking like an undertaker in his long tattered coat, started to go through the cattle with his cutting horse.

  Joe thanked his helpers and went back to the ranch to do the paperwork on the soil conservation cost-sharing application. There were black thunderheads up the valley and occasional sparks of lightning; the day could quickly get shortened. He cracked a beer and went out on the porch to watch the weather. This may be the principal use of a cattle ranch in these days, he thought: watching the weather. He daydreamed. Holding his cold can of beer, he remembered an old radio ad he had heard years ago in some city, an ad that was recited in a stylish, hip shout: “Jet Malt Liquor! Acts much quicker! It leaves you flying at thirty thousand feet!” Can’t ask more of a beer than that. And now came the butterflies, drifting across from the orchard, fritillaries, sulphurs. Little messages from above. A mixed blessing, an easy life. It seemed unbearable that Astrid didn’t enjoy this. A car surged past far across the fields on the highway, a big American flag streaming from its antenna.

  26

  There had been days down south, amazingly long and durable, the days of Joe and Astrid letting down their guards, that turned upon ordinariness. The wonderful times in the produce department of the supermarket, shopping for dinner; the same cheerful black woman sprayed mist on the bins of vegetables and it was like being on a pleasant, intensive truck farm. Or they sailed out to the swampy, uninhabited islands drifting past the bird-crowned mangroves, whose small white blossoms were aswarm with honey bees. They watched the tourists photograph the pelican. They watched the international white sea clouds arrive from Central America on southerly winds.

  Sometimes they had helped each other home from bars where a stunned, reflexive criminality disclosed itself in the hungry night life. To have no plan, in the serene near-darkness, amid papery flowers that emerged at sundown, seemed all that they could desire. He had wanted Astrid to understand him. It frightened him to think he might not hate her. This pain seemed quite physical. He had begun picturing Astrid day and night. He had begun to be terrified for her well-being. It was horrible. He resumed cigarettes.

  But the time came when it all seemed unhealthy. They withdrew to Green Turtle Cay. There they met a land surveyor from Ohio in a borrowed boat, who was thrown up on the beach by a gale. They sent the homemade local postcards to everyone they knew. They walked the beach at all hours and on Sunday stood in front of the local churches to hear the singing. From the telegraph hill, they could watch yachts move along the coast of Great Abaco, the passenger ferry’s regular plying and the periodic advent of the tomato boat. On Wednesday, it was possible to observe the fabulously grotesque scuba lessons behind the one popular resort hotel. Coconut or fruit trees which had proven reliable had steps nailed to their trunks. Each day, swimming became more important. Joe wanted to stay in the cottage and have sex, while Astrid wished to paddle out a few yards for purposes of gaining contact with the drop-off. Finally, it threatened to spoil their vacation and they went back.

  Joe made it a habit to ride through the yearlings every day. They were pretty well scattered out and it always took an entire morning. But he enjoyed saddling his horse in the dark and then to be rolling along as the day broke to count and check the cattle. Behind this was the knowledge that he really couldn’t afford any death loss. The country had had several dry years; cattle numbers were down across the state, and in the Midwest it was rumored that stored feed was at an all-time high. Unless somebody fooled around with it and the futures boys manipulated things out of all reason, Joe thought his cattle would be right valuable by fall.

  The great pleasure came from the grass, traveling through it horseback: the movement of the wind on its surface, the blaze of sunrise across its ocean curves. As the full warmth of day came on, the land took on a humming vitality of cows and grass and hawks, and antelope receded dimly like something caught in your eye. Joe always rode straight into at least one covey of partridges which roared up around his horse. After the first burst, the little brick and gray chickens cast down onto a hillside and resumed feeding. Joe’s horse watched hard, then went on traveling. Instead of being someplace where he waited for the breeze through a window, Joe had gone to where the breeze came from.

  One day, walking into a dell in search of the head of a small spring, he sensed something in the chest-high grass and serviceberry patches. He stopped to listen. He looked straight up into the brightness of the afternoon sun as something stirred. Suddenly, two cinnamon cubs sprang upright into the glitter, weaving to scent him. As Joe began to back out the way he’d come in, the mother bear rose on her haunches, swinging her muzzle in an arc. The sun behind her made the edge of her coat ignite in a silvery veil. The cubs hastened to their mother’s side and the three of them went up to the top of the spring and disappeared into the berry bushes. Joe was out of breath. He couldn’t believe his luck in receiving such a gift.

  The yearlings began to gain visibly. Joe cut back the chronic pinkeye and hoof-rot cattle until he had them cleaned up and returned to the herd. There was everything in this motley set of cheap cattle: blacks, black baldies, Herefords, Charolais, some Simmental crosses. It didn’t matter. He and Lureen had kept their costs down and if the deer flies and nose flies didn’t run the yearlings through the wire lat
er on, they ought to do all right.

  Most of the cattle were concentrated in the north-facing coulees where the snow had lingered late in the spring. Another mile toward the Yellowstone was the end of the property and the beginning of wild short-grass country, intersected by seasonal watercourses and cottonwood breaks. Here, three different times, Joe found his gate open, thrown defiantly out on the ground. He had a feeling Billy Kelton had passed this way. Luckily, the cattle never found the gap.

  Astrid got sick to her stomach and then the sickness just went on and on. They both got nervous about it and finally Joe suggested she go in and see a doctor at the hospital. She hadn’t been particularly healthy since she arrived. Nobody was on duty, so, in the end, she stayed at the hospital overnight.

  Joe slept poorly, imagining the worst. He picked her up first thing in the morning. She fluttered her fingers in the doorways of other patients she had become acquainted with. In one room, an old man danced around wildly with a smile on his face. “He’s on a natural high,” said Astrid as they passed the room. Another patient, a woman over eighty, had been parked in a wheelchair and left near the pay phone. She stared at a fixed place in front of her and her eyes never moved when people passed before her. There was no way to tell that she was still alive. “She’s so unjudgmental,” Astrid said as she made her way fixedly toward the sunlight. Joe held a hand at her elbow and walked her down the sidewalk along the little dotted plantings of potentilla in the cool yellow sun. “I just can’t tell you,” she said. Joe could feel the thrill of release in her tremulous sighs. “Wouldn’t it be something to go straight to the ocean? It was the last stop for some of those people. I felt it. I felt the time we’re wasting.”

  Joe had to navigate the truck intently. The sun shining through the windshield heated up the cab, and the windvane hissed over the country-Western station.

  “Have you been in touch with anybody?” Joe asked. There were a lot of phone calls on the bill when he checked Astrid out of the hospital.