Keep the Change (11 page)

“Well, this just kind of floors me. And well, Ellen, what about you? What happened to your plans?”

“I teach. I teach at Clarendon Creek.”

“That’s where I went! That’s where my Aunt Lureen taught.”

“The first four grades.”

Joe could smell the sweat pouring through his shirt. He felt like he was burning up. He felt as if the rickety logic of his new life had just disappeared.

“I would like to see her,” Joe said. “Any arrangement that you would like suits me.”

“I just wanted to find out if you were interested,” she said in the same musical voice. “I’ll be in touch!”

An old man named Alvie Butterfield who irrigated for the Overstreets came through the ranch yard to change the water in his head gate. He had with him the border collie Joe had used as his cattle came in. Alvie was on a small battered Japanese motorcycle wearing his hip boots. He had his shovel fastened down with bungee cord and his blue heeler balanced on the passenger seat. Joe was walking to the truck with a load of outgoing mail and stopped to talk. They ended up talking about Zane Grey. Alvie’s old face wrinkled and his eyes looked off to unknown distances. He said, “I believe everything in them books. When them cowboys are in the desert, I’m hot. When they’re caught in a blizzard I send the old lady for another blanket. When they run out of food, I tear down to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich.” Even recalling these moments with his nose in Zane Grey caused rapturous transformation in Alvie, and the reality of a life directing muddy water downhill was made tolerable.

“I’m supposed to put out new salt,” said Alvie, “but I’m too
goddamn tired. You wouldn’t think about doing that for me, would you?”

“Sure I would,” Joe said.

“You can still find your way around up there, can’t you?”

“I think so,” said Joe.

“I’m mighty grateful,” Alvie said. “Like I say, I’m wore out.”

Alvie wandered up the creek and Joe loaded the truck with blocks of salt. He drove up through the basin, got out to lock the hubs, put it in four-wheel drive and climbed into the clouds, passing the Indian caves and the homesteaders’ coal mine, before he tipped over into the summer pasture. There were cattle scattered out on the hills in all directions. He could just make out the three small white structures of the salt houses in the blue distance. A velvet-horned mule deer ambled out through the deep grass ahead of him and bluebirds paused on the cedar fenceposts. The only sign of human life was an old sheep shearing engine abandoned half a century ago and looking in the dry air as though it would still run. It was vanity to think about owning this sort of thing. Joe could not exactly understand property. We want things when others want the same things. Still, looking out at pastures that ran to threadlike rivers at eye level, Joe could feel his bones blowing in the wind of the future, and it was a cheerful feeling. All his feelings were currently askew because of Ellen’s call, but this was still a good one.

He loaded all the salt out and checked the two main springs. One was reduced in volume because of the winter’s low snow-pack at the heads of the coulees, but the cattle were still using it. The northern fence line was barely standing, held up by the sagebrush through which it ran, but it held all right and nothing seemed to be going through it. Joe had built that fence. When cattle got out, they just drifted into space and
it was an easy thing to get them back in. There was grass everywhere, even on top of the wind-blown ridges where he and Otis had dynamited fencepost holes so long ago. He remembered now what a good gaining pasture it was and how his father, who was a grass man, used to say, Just take care of it and it will take care of you.

He left the truck and walked. The pasture lay in three broadly defined planes that tilted separately and disappeared into the sky. He walked toward a tall rock formation that had once figured in a dream of his boyhood, a dream he had never quite figured out as to all its sources and details and implied perils. But this dream had left him with a high degree of respect for the operations of the subconscious.

In his twenties, many years after the rock episode, he had eaten peyote and had the pleasure of a long conversation with thousands of irises, tulips, and roses at a commercial flower garden. He could
still
remember their nodding concern at each of his questions, their earnest weaving around on the ends of their stalks. As ridiculous as this experience came to seem, it enlarged his respect for flowers; and he sometimes found himself entering someone’s property with a sidelong and deferential nod to the garden.

When he reached the great banded rock chimney, something went through him with a signifying interior chime as powerful as looking at an empty bed where a parent once died. A cloud of birds set forth into the wind. Joe sat down and let himself go back.

Joe’s nearest neighbor of his own age had been Billy Kelton, already a great big strong boy who was, in those days long before the family moved to Minnesota, Joe’s best friend. Billy’s father owned the Hawkwood Store. The two boys both had part-time jobs during the school year and ranch jobs in the
summer. One day, when they were both thirteen, Billy had come to visit Joe and they got into an argument pitching horseshoes. Joe’s father came out and said, “You’d better settle this like men.” Joe didn’t think he had a chance, and while he stalled Billy sensed not only the opportunity but the peculiar energy coming to him from Joe’s father. He landed a roundhouse blow in Joe’s face that bloodied him and brought him to his knees. Joe’s father ordered Joe to his feet, but when he stood Billy flattened him with a blow to his right ear that sent pain and shame scalding across his vision. A roaring noise seemed to come up around him. Through it all, he could hear his father cheering Billy on. He looked up and saw his father’s incredible animation as he shoved the suddenly reluctant Billy toward his son’s collapsed form. Even now the memory was terrible.

Joe’s father had said, “You’ll think about this for a long time. You’ll think about what people are really like. That wasn’t your enemy that did that to you. That was supposed to be your friend. You think about that just as hard as you can.”

Joe ran away that day just long enough to climb to this pasture. He came straight to the banded rock chimney where he sat down and wept for his defeat, wept for his father’s collusion in his defeat, wept for the loss of a friend, and the feeling which he never quite ever again escaped that life had as one of its constant characteristics a strain of unbearable loneliness.

As far as he was from the house, he still felt too exposed to the world that day. He touched the altered shapes of his face with his fingertips. Beneath the striped rock was a deep fissure, like a small cave, and Joe crawled into it and lay down in the cool dark. Peace came over him and, as he began to sleep, he plummeted into a dreamy abyss.

Indians poured out of the base of the rock and Joe was one of them. They were anonymous in paint and dyed porcupine quills and trade bead chokers, behind shields illuminated with the shapes of eternity. They moved like a school of fish and swarmed up on their horses. Concentric red circles of ochre were painted around the eyes of Joe’s horse and its body was covered by the outlines of human hands. He rested his lance against the horse’s neck. The raven feather tied at the base of its point fluttered against the shaft as they galloped over the rims to the small valley below where the white people had built their cabins. Though it was his family’s home, Joe could not even remember it in the dream. A man and a woman ran out to meet them, to try to talk; they were blurred unrecognizably by the direct glare of the sun. It was too late for talk. The Indians rode right over the white people in a sudden tension of bows and sailing of arrows and lances. The dust from the horses settled slowly on their absence. The buildings burned as sudden as phosphorus, sparkled and were gone. Everything was gone. Even the stony white of foundations and bones was gone. The wild grass resumed its old cadence.

Joe’s mother watched closely over the days it took for the swelling to subside in his face. She let this concern speak for itself and carefully avoided any discussion of the event. Joe said nothing either, though whatever was in the air seemed strong enough. Finally, when only the greenish shadow of a bruise at his temple remained, she asked without seeming to expect an answer, “Your father has made a pretty big mistake with you, hasn’t he?”

He didn’t answer. He just stared in silence and let her work her way through her changed allegiance.

His first free afternoon, Joe stopped by the Clarendon Creek school. Ellen stood on the edge of the small clearing that served as a playground, her sweater tied around her waist and wearing a pair of tennis shoes so that she could double as a physical education instructor. She was urging four tiny children in running laps out around a two-story boulder and back. Their books and papers were weighted with stones next to the lilacs.

“Hi there,” Ellen said with an enormous smile.

“What do you know about this?”

“It’s pretty wild,” she said.

“I couldn’t wait.”

“You’re looking well, Joe.”

“Thanks. And you.”

“Do you mean it?”

“I do.”

“How’s your painting?”

“I’m in the space program actually.”

“What a shame. You used to write to me from school, remember?
About your painting. You were going to be a new Charlie Russell. I saw one of your paintings finally. I really couldn’t understand it, Joe. It looked kind of like custard. Next to a house, sort of.”

“That happens to belong to one of the Rockefellers,” Joe said defensively, but the name, he saw, didn’t ring a bell.

“Let me make it quick. I’ve got to go back inside. Clara is with her dad this month.”

“On the same old Kelton place?” Joe asked, feeling awkward.

“Yes, but don’t go there. I’ll try to work something out. And look, please be discreet. Billy is a wonderful father and I don’t want to disturb that.”

“How about dinner?”

“You what?”

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.

“Your face is red!”

“Nevertheless, the invitation stands.”

“Yes!” The four children completed their lap and Ellen drifted toward the schoolhouse with them. “Call!” she said. “For directions. We can have a scandal!”

He recognized that there was an unworthy basis to his extreme present happiness. His life was taking a turn that would help push Astrid out once and for all. He already felt the freshness and the simplicity of Ellen as an antidote, though he semi-admitted to himself that that was not what people were for.

He picked Ellen up at six, at her apartment. The length of day had advanced so that it seemed the middle of the afternoon. She came down the outside stairway, skittering to the ground level, looking as fresh as though it were first thing in the morning, in a dark blue summer dress with minute white
stars. She had braided her mahogany-colored hair and pinned it up.

“I’m starving,” she said, inside the car. “I got so wound up talking to the children about Lewis and Clark I must have burned a lot of calories. I had fun trying to make them see the part of the expedition that went up the Missouri. I tried to make them realize that for Lewis and Clark it was like going into space. I told them the Missouri was the great highway for the Indians and all the tributaries were neighborhoods with different languages and different histories. The little turkeys would really rather hear about war but the unknown gives them a shiver too. Or what they all call ‘the olden days.’ I’m going to split the difference with them. I’ll show them Clark’s camp on the Yellowstone and then take them over near Greycliff to the graves where the Blackfeet massacred Reverend Thomas and his nephew. By the way, I’m learning to play golf. I’m going through a difficult time and about a hundred people have recommended golf. I’m glad they did. By the second lesson, I preferred golf to marriage!”

Joe looked at her as long as he thought he could. What a feeling this was giving him! He was driving through a nice neighborhood. In one yard, a man shot around his lawn on a riding mower in high gear. At the next house, an old gent stood in the opening of a well-kept garage with its carefully hung collection of lawn tools on the wall behind him. On most lawns, a tiny white newspaper lay like a seed. American flags cracked from the porches. On the last lawn before Main Street, a rabbit sat between two solemn children.

They walked into the lobby of the old Bellwood Hotel. The bar off to the left was full of after-work customers. Two cowboys came out with their drinks to have a look at Ellen while they
waited for their table. “Yes?” she said in her best schoolteacher’s manner. They shot back inside.

“I’ll have the sixteen-ounce rib-eye,” said Ellen before she’d had a look at the menu. The waitress came and took their drink orders: a draft beer for Joe, Jim Beam on the rocks for Ellen. Joe decided on some pan-fried chicken and ordered for both of them. The dining room was half full. A schoolteacher was kind of a celebrity in a small town like this, so they got a few glances. It was too soon for anyone to have put much else together.

Joe was trying hard to relate the present confident Ellen to the early version he had known. He felt he had to do it quickly because the present Ellen would soon eradicate the one he remembered.

“Someone told me you people were getting ready to lose the place,” said Ellen. “Dad keeps trying to figure out how to get it. He’s only been doing that for forty years.”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Although I don’t know what good a ranch is anymore. My dad has been getting jailbirds to help put up hay because they’re the only people desperate enough to work. To get somebody to fence you have to find an alky who wants to be in the hills to dry out. Plus the grasshoppers and Mormon crickets are about half ridiculous. I think my dad might just go to town. I don’t blame him.”

Joe listened intently. It gave him a chance to stare at her without having to talk. He knew Overstreet would never go to town.