Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  Joe and Astrid were asleep.

  29

  Joe wondered what brought these tranquil eras on. There hadn’t been many of them. He’d once had one that lasted a whole winter in the Hotel Dixie in New York. He’d been painting; he’d had a nice plant, girlfriends, no vices, clients, tickets to fights and shows, surprising acquaintances. Then homesickness struck. The plant which had seemed so companionable turned into a vile hothouse puke overnight. Suddenly, he was stoned day after day. The girlfriends were reptiles. When they made love, all he noticed was their frightening shadows on the ceiling from the streetlight outside the window. The fights, shows, and companions were maddeningly predictable. Some of his work seemed senseless no matter how much it was accepted. He even tried to capture the white hills. The era of tranquillity dissolved and his wanderings began anew. He hoped the present state wouldn’t disappear the same way.

  The cattle looked so fine scattered out on the grass and the springs were flowing at such a good rate, that Joe, out of pride, gave Lureen a tour, driving through the pastures in the truck and noting the atmosphere of renewed prosperity. She peered peakedly out at the ranch, her face low in the window of the truck.

  “How much are they going to make us?” Lureen wanted to know.

  “We’ll find out when we get to the sale yard.”

  “But they always used to tell me ahead of time. I could just call that nice Mr. Overstreet and he’d tell me.”

  “That was a lease, Lureen. We didn’t own the cattle. And Mr. Overstreet isn’t what you think he is.”

  “I just don’t know,” she said. They drove on past the sheep-herders’ monument to the low breaks that looked off toward the Crazies. Some cattle were brushed up in the midday and a coyote angled away from them, stopping every few yards to look back. The truck labored in first gear and Lureen held on to her seat with both hands. There were two short-eared owls coursing over the sagebrush for mice and one distant hill had the outline of a band of antelope serrated on its crest. What am I saying by this, Joe wondered. That it is mine? The owls curved on around toward the truck, their pale, flat faces cupped toward the ground. Their wings beat steadily and they moved at the speed of a man walking.

  “I could have done without this,” said Lureen. “Your father pushed me around when he put it in my hands. In a way, I never wanted it. I worked all my life. I didn’t want to be pushed around. Then Smitty had so much bad luck. The war hurt him. The war all but killed Smitty. And I had to help him, more than I could have without this.”

  “Does Smitty realize the war is over?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “What does he want, Aunt Lureen?”

  She thought. She looked out through the windshield at the country Joe liked so much. The country seemed to wither as she looked at it, the springs stopping and the steady wind carrying the life out of everything.

  “I think Smitty would prefer to be somewhere where he could be warmer. He thinks a lot about falling on the ice.”

  That would be about right, Joe thought.

  “Do you see how fat those yearlings look?” he asked.

  She looked blank. Fat cattle were the local religion. They were the glow, the index of this place. If one didn’t care about fat cattle, this was not the place to be. It should not have been necessary to find words for it. It was annoying to find yourself trying to communicate the glow of a particular country to someone with a blank look on her face.

  Lureen kept looking out the window and trying to be interested. She put a finger to her cheek when they passed a few yearlings standing alongside the road and said, “Mmm!” like someone tasting a candy bar in a commercial.

  When he got back from dropping Lureen off, a bundle of steel posts and barbed wire in the back, Astrid was down alongside the creek looking into a pool. “I can see the fish!” she called. Joe parked and walked down beside her. They sat on a sun-warmed boulder. “This is pretty nice,” Astrid said. “The birds shoot back and forth across the creek. It’s like there are two bird countries and they visit each other. There’s also one that walks down the bank and disappears under water. Am I hallucinating?”

  “It’s a dipper.”

  “Well, no one lives quite like the dipper. Give me a hug.”

  Joe squeezed her. She slid down from the rock and stood embracing him, her face turned sideways on his chest. She held him that way for a moment then pulled her dress over her hips and pressed against him. “Here?” he said.

  “I think so,” she said. As they made love, he felt with his fingertips where the warm granite was pressed against her flesh. Later they dressed and followed the stream up for a couple of miles. There were teal in the backwaters and they saw a young mink darting in and out of the exposed cottonwood roots along the bank. Joe told Astrid what it was and she wanted to know how many it took to make a coat.

  “Have you noticed something?” Astrid asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I did notice that!”

  The Butterfields down the road past the Overstreets had a siege of dust emphysema go through their calves, and everyone chipped in to doctor. Joe helped move cattle down the alley to the chute, and afterward he spent a few hours hunting arrowheads. Joe remembered the time he fell down a hole, knocked himself in the head, and dreamed that he was an Indian attacking his own home. When he looked for arrowheads, it was with a ticklish feeling that he was searching for part of his own earlier life. He stopped at eighty-year-old Alvie Butterfield’s little house to ask permission to hunt in his recently spaded-up garden. Alvie’s garden happened to be a camp where Indians had dropped projectiles from Folsom points all the way up to Winchester cartridges from the Victorian age, continuous occupancy for thousands of years. It was just a garden to Alvie, who was getting ready to join those warriors in what the Indians called “the other side camp.” Standing reedily in a baseball cap, Alvie Butterfield waited for the end.

  “I left ’em all for you,” said Alvie.

  “Attaboy.”

  “You got a TV?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Joe.

  “What’s it supposed to do?”

  “Rain by Wednesday.”

  “Good.”

  “You need anything, Alvie?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Joe went out to Alvie’s garden spot. There were the weed-less hand-spaded rows. There were the curves of earth where the shovel had left them in the ancient camp. Many a rare plan was laid here. The new sun was sucking the moisture from around the eloquent flints. Joe began to walk the rows like a stoop worker at a lettuce farm. Each row unraveled beneath his eyes slowly, the approximate straight lines of Alvie’s shovel converted to amazing canyons, the clay banding the loam wherever it fell, numerous rocks. Joe had never much cared for rocks. They were merely the increasingly magnifying context of what man had not made. Too many rocks were annoying. Joe had been dutiful about going around with a field geology guide but it had not taken. The rocks and soil were just the old land as received. His mind filled with their tumbled shapes as he made his slow way up and down the rows with intermittent hopes over stones that had accidentally split. A circle of warmth expanded between his shoulders. Alvie’s radio played from afar. A band of birds went through the air like a cluster of buckshot. He found places where Alvie in his weariness had rested on the shovel, the blade penetrating without lifting. For a long time, Joe felt himself to be in a place in the earth where no one had ever lived; a few flakes of brighter, prizeable stone like a thin pulse began to turn up and suddenly life surged: an arrowhead. Joe picked it up and blew the grains of dirt off of it, a bird point, notched, shaped, a little weight in the palm, something he wanted to close his hand around to feel the life in it. He was as possessive as the man who had lost it. It was just a moment, as if they could feel each other through the stone.

  Then some of Joe’s cattle got through the fence and traveled a couple of miles to the bottom of a big coulee where
they loafed in the ruins of an old homestead. Joe tried to bring them back but ended up having to get Freddy Mathias and one of the Lovells’ high school kids to help him. It made a nice day horseback, whooping and riding through the rough country, the yearlings running erratically in front of them with their tails straight up in alarm. The southern migration of birds of prey had begun and there was an archival assortment of hawks on the crooked cedar posts. A golden eagle towered over the ranch, slipping from lift to lift till he went through the roof of heaven. The high school boy took a header at a gallop, a burst of dust; the tough kid scrambled to run down his horse and remount. Freddy went past Joe at a conservative trot and, when he saw the youngster snatch up his horse, said, “Oh, to be young again!”

  When they pushed the yearlings back through the gap in the fence, the cattle quit running so hard and seemed to admit they knew they were back where they were supposed to be. Joe looked around. They were only a few thousand feet above the old homestead but it seemed like the roof of the world. He could look off not so far and see the granite verticals, the permanent snow. The world here seemed like a real planet and not just the physical excrescence of civilization.

  When the youngster rode up, Joe said, “You break anything?”

  “Naw.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sonofabitch lit in a anthill.”

  Joe thanked them and everybody split up on their shortcuts home, the three horses quickly disappearing from each other in the back country. Joe returned to patch the hole in the fence and started back. The scent of ditch-burning was in the air, like burning leaves in small towns in the fall. The country just seemed to drop away from the horse in a pleasant way. Joe picked up the old wagon road for the last mile and a half, and jogged back down to the buildings, arriving at the moment the nighthawks swarmed into dusk.

  At Lureen’s request, he stopped in to see her in the blue house that lost more of its power to haunt him the longer he was home. The ghosts of cellar and attic were eclipsed by the need for repairs, and the oversize kitchen stove only emphasized Lureen’s paltry cooking talents. As he drove up to the house, he saw Smitty’s face briefly in the window. He knocked and Lureen came to the door.

  When Joe asked after Smitty, Lureen said he was in Wolf Point visiting Sioux and Assiniboine members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. They sat down to tea. Lureen wasn’t saying much but she looked scared. On a table next to the dining room door was a substantial pile of new clothes, men’s and women’s, curious because they were strictly for tropical wear. “Sale items,” said Lureen, seeing Joe look. He had never seen such colors in this house. It was as if the coconuts of the space program had come back to haunt him.

  “I have something for you,” Lureen said and left the room. While she was gone, Joe tried to guess what gruesome family memento would soon be his. He drank the tea he had never liked. He looked at walls which had first defined interior space to him, then had filled him with a lifetime’s claustrophobia. He looked out the high windows beside the kitchen door to the blue sky and felt all over again that freedom could very well be at hand.

  Lureen came back in and placed a file folder on the table. He suddenly knew what it was. It was the deed. In her own way, Lureen was making every cent count. She knew Smitty was going to take the check for the yearlings. Joe was filled with nervous excitement. Smitty and Lureen were going to Hawaii with the check. Between that and the money lost on Smitty’s seafood venture, the place would be bankrupt. And he held the deed in his hands. “The transfer is in there, and it’s been notarized.”

  “How can I thank you?” he asked. Slipping eye contact, a tremor crossing Lureen’s face, and the dissolute nephew receiving a family holding, in vacuity, with hands he hoped expressed as much sincerity as the praying hands on Christmas cards. All in their way were the last detectable tremors of the life of a family. Joe looked down at the empty document, thinking it might contain a single ounce of meaning or reality or possibility by way of naming or holding a place on earth, and he was suddenly and absurdly elated. He looked at Lureen, divested of the ranch, and he saw in her eyes a dream lighter and more ethereal than Hawaii itself. It was as if in this room where the hopes of generations had just collapsed, the roar of warm surf could be heard. He couldn’t keep the mad grin off his face, the goofy and vaguely celebratory grin that Lureen observed in astonishment.

  30

  It was just starting to get cold. The local weather forecasts were revised twice a day as the weathermen of three different channels strove against one another in explaining the Rorschach shapes of storms in the Gulf of Alaska. Joe concentrated on the fates of these storms as they threw themselves on the mountains of Washington and Idaho, and expired. One of these days soon, they were going to slide down through Alberta, catch the east side of the Rockies, and turn Joe’s world upside down.

  He took this time to cut firewood and spent days on end in the cottonwood groves taking out the standing dead and transporting the wood to a pile next to the house. The growth of this pile fascinated him. He sensed it was in his power to make a pile bigger than the house. He moved along the creek and cut up the trees the beavers had felled. While he worked, he could see trout on the redds, swirling after one another and fanning nests into the gravel. The eagles had started coming in from the north and were standing high in the bare trees along the stream. Their rapine, white-tailed, dark and monkish shapes showed from a quarter of a mile away.

  He sat down in the autumn forest, an old woodchopper with his hot orange chain saw. I am posing for eternity, he thought. He was desperate. He was desperate because the constant companionship of unanswered questions was affecting his nerves and suggesting that it was the absolute final and daily condition of living. He was no longer interested in remaining in the space program.

  The irrigation water stopped running and the springs were down to a bare minimum. He moved the yearlings every few days, an activity that took him to remote pastures on horseback. He enjoyed his horse’s sure-footedness. He could travel on breathtaking sidehills you could barely negotiate on your own feet in a kind of skywalking perfection as the cattle flew forward in coveys. In this motion and vastness, he could actually think about life, beginning and end, with equanimity, with cheer. Joe thought he was vaguely bigger than everything he saw and therefore it would be tragic and for all nations to weep over, if anything happened to him. But here in the hills, he would feed the prettiest birds. As promised by all religions, he would go up into the sky where his folks were.

  Joe felt the return of love and remorse, like a bubble of gas rising through crankcase residue. The slowness of the bubble’s traverse seemed to express the utter gallonage of his desire as well as the regret that made it something of a rich dish and gave this emotion its peculiar morning-after quality.

  “I think we’re missing something,” he said.

  After a moment, Astrid said, “I know what you mean.”

  She bit her thumbnail in thought and looked off. Joe examined some carpet. The white hills, the departing dream, the impending embarkation for Hawaii only illumined the plight. He had heard nothing from Ellen and felt she didn’t want him to see Clara. When you’re young and think you’ll live forever, it’s easy to think life means nothing.

  Astrid stood up and stretched, then stopped all motion to smile at Joe. She went to the door and opened it, letting in the clear, balsamic breath of foothills, of sage and juniper and prairie grass. She stood on tiptoes to stretch and inhale.

  “Joe,” she said deliberately, “this isn’t for me.”

  Joe didn’t hear her. He turned on the radio. First he got a semi-intellectual cornball on FM and then a wonderful song from 1944—what could that have been like!—about a cowboy going East to see the girl he loves best. “Graceful faceful” went the chorus, “such lovely hair! Oh, little choo-choo, please get me there!” It was sung in the kind of voice you’d use to call a dog in the dark when you really didn’t expect the dog to come. It disturbed Jo
e because it suggested that the Americans of the recent past were insane foreigners. Then an ad for a local car dealer filled with apparently living objects: “Cold weather is coming and your car doesn’t want to face it. You need a new one but your wallet says ‘No’!” Joe thought, Is anyone following this? Astrid was still in the doorway. What was it she’d said?

  There was no great problem in getting the criminal charges against Smitty dropped. Once Joe relieved the insurance company’s fears of damage claims, once those assurances were documented and in place, the ripple of society’s desire for retribution expired on the bench of the small, local courthouse. Nevertheless, a few motions had to be gone through. Joe drove Smitty to the hearing as though he were his child and had been involved in a minor scrape. There was only the judge, dressed in the plaid wool shirt in which he had been raking leaves, and his secretary. Smitty appeared in his uniform and stood at attention throughout the questioning. So great was the judge’s pity for this foolish person that he concluded his inquiry with the question “Can I count on you to avoid this kind of thing in the future, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir! You can, sir!”

  The judge gazed down at Smitty with a melancholy smile. “Smitty, Smitty, Smitty,” he said. “You’re kind of dumb like a fox, aren’t you?”

  “Possibly so, yes, sir.”

  “Thank your lucky stars, Smitty, that you live in a small town where we know you for what you are. Adjourned.”

  Driving along to his meeting at the bank, Joe remembered his happiest period as a painter. One summer, he had gone on the road to do portraits of Little Leaguers. He set up a table at ballgames all over Montana and saw the rise and ripening of the great mountain summer from a hundred smalltown diamonds. Instead of pumping gas or choking on dust behind a bale wagon, Joe turned out bright portraits of children in baseball uniforms. It was an opulent spell that Joe remembered now with a kind of agony.