Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  “I don’t have too good a sense of humor today, Joe.”

  They drove on, and Billy was a careful driver. They took the road that went around to the south, which eventually connected to the ranch. “Am I the biggest problem you’ve got, Joe?” They both followed with their eyes a big band of antelope the truck had scared, all quick-moving does except for one big pronghorn buck who rocked along behind in their dust cloud.

  “Not really.”

  Billy sighed. Joe looked out the windshield but saw nothing. Joe remembered one time he and Astrid were dancing to the radio and she called him “sweetheart.” She had never called him that before and never did again. Everything takes place in time, Joe thought, wondering why that always seemed like such a heartbreaking discovery.

  Suddenly, Joe wanted to talk. “My old man used to say, ‘If you ain’t the lead horse, the scenery never changes.’ Now it looks like I might lose the place. I need to get out front with that lead horse. I feel like I’ve been living in a graveyard.”

  Billy looked at him. Joe watched Billy deeply consider whether or not the fraternization was appropriate. It was clear that there was insufficient malice in the air to warrant this drive on any other basis. What a day we’re having here, thought Joe.

  After a resigned sigh, Billy started to talk: “When I come home, I pretty much come home to nothing. Except that we already had a kid. And then we got married. Old man Overstreet never let me forget I come into the deal empty-handed, just had my little house. He always introduces me, ‘This here’s my son-in-law Billy. He runs a few head of chickens over on the Mission Creek road about two and a half miles past the airport on the flat out there.’ Never will let me forget. And I ought to punch you but I can’t really. Life used to be so simple.”

  It was a long way around. It seemed as if the mountains toward Wyoming stayed the same size ahead of them, sharp shapes that curved off toward the Stillwater. You could be under traveling clouds and off toward the mountains the clouds would seem stopped. And the mountains looked like a place you’d never reach. On top of that, nobody seemed to want to get there much anyway. Billy must have felt Joe look over because he turned on the radio only to get the feverish accordion of Buckwheat Zydeco shouting out the bright nights of New Orleans. He turned it off and said, “I want to go back to work.”

  It seemed to Joe to be the most glowing of all thoughts. It went with the day and it went with their situation.

  “I don’t seem to understand what it means to have something,” Joe said. “I don’t seem to get what I ought to out of it. I feel like that place still belongs to my dad.”

  “It ought to belong to whoever’s been working on it.”

  “Which is you, I suppose.”

  “It was when Overstreet had it leased. When you took it back, I had to go up to the house. That was when me and Ellen started to have such a wreck. We ain’t over it yet. We may never get over it. She was raised up to think I ought to have something, and I don’t.” Joe remembered long ago when Billy had punched him out at the railroad station, and he thought he might have understood even then how the dispossessed are quick with their fists. But now Billy seemed to have lost even that capability. Joe thought that at the narrow crossroads in which Billy Kelton lived, the use of his hands had been cruelly confined to a kind of unchosen service. Lack of his own ground indentured him to people smaller than himself.

  “That place of mine,” Joe said, “has got serious debt against it but a man who wanted to stay and fight it ought to be able to hang on to it.” He stared at the beautiful prairie and wondered if anyone had ever owned it. “I don’t want to stay and fight it. That’s just not me.”

  Billy slowed the truck. “Have you seen my father-in-law’s map?”

  “The one with the missing piece?”

  “Do you have any idea what it would mean if I had that little chunk of the puzzle? Even for five minutes?”

  “I probably don’t,” said Joe. “But we’re all so different.”

  35

  Joe had dinner with Lureen at her house. She didn’t feel like cooking, so Joe stopped off for some chicken, a carton of cole slaw, and some soft drinks. She greeted him in the doorway, then went right back inside and sat under the kitchen window with her hands in her lap. Looking at her, Joe wondered if it wouldn’t be the kindest thing he could do to burn her house down.

  Joe walked around opening cupboards, looking for dishes and utensils and glasses, then set the kitchen table for the two of them. He got Lureen to come over and they sat down to eat. She didn’t seem to want to eat much. Joe bit into a drumstick, then watched her over the top of it while he chewed. He tried the cole slaw. It was sweet and creamy like a dessert.

  “Good chicken,” he said.

  “Delicious.”

  “You haven’t tasted it yet.”

  “I will. Thank you for bringing it.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Joe. “It’s not beef! Ha-ha!” She took it in listlessly. A bird hit the window and they both looked up.

  “It’s all right,” said Joe. “Didn’t hit that hard.”

  Then he noticed Lureen’s tears falling in the cole slaw.

  “You must have foreseen this,” he said.

  “I didn’t, Joe.”

  He chewed on the drumstick, trying to have a perception.

  “But didn’t it ring kind of a bell after it happened?”

  “No.”

  “It was a bit of a crooked scheme for all parties concerned,” Joe pointed out, actually enjoying this store chicken.

  “I know!” Lureen wailed, throwing herself back in her chair.

  “Long ago, my father, your brother, your other brother, told me never to take my eyes off Smitty.”

  “It’s going to be hard to watch him in Hawaii,” Lureen sniveled with an extraordinary, crumpled misery that Joe had not only never seen before in her but never seen in anyone of her age.

  The phone rang and Joe answered it. The lovely and cultivated voice of a young woman explained that he, as the head of the household, was a finalist in a multi-million-dollar sweepstake. Joe cut her off. “I’m not the head of a household,” Joe said and went back to Lureen.

  “Wrong number,” he said.

  “Was it those sweepstakes people?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re used to speaking with Smitty,” she said and began to cry again. Joe’s heart ached to see his poor little aunt in this condition even if she had brought it upon herself. He could see a tulip glow from the setting sun high in the kitchen windows. And then the perception came.

  “Lureen, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen carefully.” She stared at him like a child. “You know our Smitty,” he said and she nodded her head up and down in a jittery fashion. “He’ll spend all that money. You know that and I know that.” He let this sink in. “And it won’t take long.” The nodding stopped. She was listening raptly. Joe was now ready to drop the panacea. “And then he’ll be back.”

  Lureen stopped all motion. She looked at Joe’s face with extraordinary concentration.

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it won’t take that long?”

  “Not that long at all.”

  “I ask myself if he’s really secure in Honolulu. You read from time to time of racial problems there. The Hawaiians are quick to throw a punch and they are absolutely enormous.”

  And it’s unrealistic to expect another thorough bombing by the Japanese, Joe thought. Lureen picked up a wing and seemed to admire it. “You’re one hundred percent right about his inability to handle his finances,” Lureen observed in a comparatively lusty voice. “I might just as well start resigning myself to the reappearance of his little face at the screen.”

  “Not a moment to lose,” said Joe tonelessly. “Start resigning yourself today.” He gave her a confirming gesture with his bare drumstick which was reminiscent of the heads of corporations Ivan admired so, th
e ones who promoted their own products on television. Then he looked up to the band of sky in the window. He had seen that band when his grandfather died and he had asked his grandmother if he’d left him any gold.

  As the principal lien-holder, Darryl took in hand the matter of working out the closing, the ritual exchange of a dollar bill so crumpled it took two paper clips to attach it to the documents. Joe accepted that the substitution of a born-to-the-soil type like Billy Kelton for a drifter like himself was equal in favorable impact to keeping it out of the hands of an opportunistic schemer like Overstreet who never borrowed from banks anyway. The picture of this hard-working cowboy with an honorable service record holding a gun to Overstreet’s head would be applauded throughout the community and give them something to discuss other than the Dead End sign the state had put up on the road into the cemetery. Overstreet paid Joe one visit, waving a checkbook and making one or two ritual threats which were windier than his usual succinct style. It had been years since Joe had heard the phrase “rue the day” and he mulled it over until the words dissolved into nonsense.

  The mineral rights were briefly a hitch. Joe couldn’t at first face that his father had long ago placed them in trust for a caddies’ college fund in Minnesota. But when he realized this, he knew finally that his father had really said goodbye to the place even before his soul left his body in that four-door Buick. He borrowed Darryl’s phone at the bank while the principals still sat around the contracts in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and called Astrid to explain his latest theory, that they could work it out. Astrid’s reply was typical, almost vintage, Astrid.

  He drove toward the ranch that was no longer his. It was hard not to keep noticing the terrific blue of the autumn sky. The huge cottonwoods along the river had turned purest yellow, and since no wind had come up to disturb the dying leaves, the great trees stood in chandelier brilliance along the watercourses that veined the hills. Joe had to stop the truck to try to take in all this light.

  •

  The branches were heavy with early wet snow. Joe looked out from his kitchen window and felt his unshaven face. The light on the snow-edged world was dazzling. He used to feel this way a lot, almost breathless. He quickly started a pot of coffee and returned to the window to look at the snow starting to shrink in the morning sun. There was a soft mound of it on his woodpile, and on the ends of the logs he could see that water from snow melt had sunk into the wood. A sudden memory came back across the years: his father cleaning grouse at the sink in the ranch kitchen, a raft of feathers on darkened water. “I wish I was a vegetarian,” he’d laughed. “You never have to pick number-eight shot out of a tomato!” The sky was blue and the air coming from under the slightly opened window so cool and clean that he admitted to himself that his spirits were starting to soar. He thought he’d begin to get his things together. He stood in the window a moment more and looked out at the beautiful white hills.

  What Astrid had said, more or less, was that they would pretty much have to see.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano, which won the Hilda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Ninety-two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Panama; Nobody’s Angel; Something to Be Desired; To Skin a Cat, a collection of short stories; and An Outside Chance, a collection of essays on sport. His books have been published in seven languages. He lives in Sweet Grass County, Montana.