The Cadence of Grass (15 page)

She was heartened by the surge of her Mustang as it pulled inexorably through the snow in front of her house, while a westbound train called through the storm. An old man with earflaps on his hat came down the sidewalk towing a sled with two bags of groceries beneath the bony outlines of snow-laden trees. A hundred fifteen thousand miles, and the Mustang still pulled like a Georgia mule. The weather report on the radio revealed a desperate picture from across Montana and through the Dakotas, sweeping south beyond Medicine Bow and threatening the faux-Indian village of the Denver airport; fatal strandings lay ahead, chained-up ghost ships on the interstate, and Natalie felt a commensurate desperation to be around people instead of standing at the kitchen window and watching the birdbath in her backyard turn into a colossal ice cream cone. With considerable irritation, she pictured Evelyn’s insouciance out there on the ranch, soldiering on when the shit hit the fan. That much virtue could choke a hog.

She pulled up in front of Just the Two of Us and parked between a motorcycle and a florist’s van, its ice-plastered corsage rapidly disappearing in the blast. The day her father died, Natalie had been busted for shoplifting a tortoiseshell comb in Jan’s, the in spot for out-of-towners, faculty wives and bureaucrats; the news made the papers, but her mortification failed to preclude visits to other shops, despite Jan’s small-scale but successful prosecution. Never done it before. Now she stole entirely from Just the Two of Us and because she was also a good “paying” customer, she felt a complex emotional game of cat-and-mouse whenever she prowled their aisles. She had had several allusive chats with Violet and Claire, leaving them with a somewhat cloudy view of her as an interesting person suffering an illness, and this, combined with normal competitive feelings, made them hate “the old sluts” at Jan’s for being too stiff to accommodate her small awkwardness. Plus, Natalie was a
nice person
. Never did she suggest to Violet or Claire that they were wasting the best years of their lives showing the wives of yokels how to accessorize or how to avoid looking a fright when Mr. Right appeared on the horizon. Nevertheless, Natalie thought that Evelyn rather overrated this duo simply because they’d grown up on ranches.

All of which seemed beside the point as Natalie entrusted herself to the store, knocking snow from her sleeves and breathing this perfumed comfort beyond the cold solace of the hearth, amid the scents and soaps and bibelots, under the beautiful tin ceiling of a former Dodge Garage which threw a gentle light on the stacks of blouses, sweaters, scarves and hosiery.

“Don’t say anything nice about this weather,” Natalie cautioned the two proprietors who stood shoulder to shoulder at this challenging appearance.

“We won’t,” said one or the other. These were mountain geishas, indistinguishable but for Violet’s hatchet jaw and Claire’s close-set eyes, which showed equal concern when listening or sorting rubber bands.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Natalie, “I’m just going to poke around.” The exchange of glances at the level of supper-club theater gave Natalie the sense the jig was up, and she cast a longing glance at the sensuous rows of merchandise.

Remembering dear, dopey Stuart coming to the police station to pick her up, she had the teeniest frisson that an involuntary joyride awaited her; but the tolerance of the shopgirls had the effect of tempering desire. She knew that wrong numbers floated from the murk of troubled selves.

“Girls, stick with me while I shop. I don’t want to have a slip.” And she didn’t. Violet and Claire, too, were disappointed at this lapse in Natalie’s dark wishes, reducing them all to spectators in a mountain storm. Now they went to the front window and commented on pedestrians. The motorcyclist was beating the snow from the seat of his machine with his hat. Across the street, ice fog had created rows of bodiless faces. All you could read of the movie marquee was a fragment—
FESTI
—and a steady, throbbing light was the little that showed of what perhaps was an arrest in progress.

“Come on in and buy something!” Claire shouted through the glass.

“You look like an asshole!” Violet cried out to a bundled-up passerby.

“This is like being locked in an elevator,” said Natalie quite sensibly.

“No shit,” Claire commented sadly. “Why don’t you steal something.”

“I’m not in the mood. You steal something.”

“We can’t; they do inventory.”

“Then steal from the cash register.”

“You’re pretty naive,” said Violet, looking at Claire. Both ignored the ringing phone and Natalie suddenly felt anxious. She thought of the bulbs of perennials asleep in her garden, wondering how they were doing in this terrible cold. She thought next of Stuart’s unwavering sense of duty and loyalty. Then she thought she might cry but elected to postpone it.

In the opinion of his father-in-law, whose greatest praise for anyone was “reminds me of myself at that age,” Paul was a ball of fire. For years, he had barreled around the State of Montana in a white Ford Crown Victoria, dry cleaning hanging in the backseat, calling on every conceivable customer of their bottled products. And he bragged to his own father-in-law that the towns he visited were chock-full of cheating housewives.

“But where is your
expense
report?” Sunny Jim demanded.

“My
what
?”

“Your
expense
report. You must submit an
expense
report complete with receipts, after every trip. Where is it?”

“Mr. Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away.”

“What in the hell’s the matter with you, son?”

“I hate it when you’re sore. You’ve got a face that could stop a clock.”

This appealed to Sunny Jim Whitelaw but not at first.

It was Paul’s capacity for unstinting companionship that endeared him to Sunny Jim Whitelaw, whose business acumen and family leadership were matched by another life entirely, that of an unwearying old goat. For this, he needed company, and it illustrated his remarkable ingenuity that he chose Paul to accompany his carousals.

On one such jaunt, before Paul had hit on the bright idea of trading jail time for corporate glory, he had traveled with Whitelaw to Las Vegas for a bottlers’ convention, evidence of which, in the form of brochures and industry newsletters, was strewn in Mother Whitelaw’s path. Paul had long acted as beard to Whitelaw’s secret life, a simple enough arrangement except that he increasingly associated his confidentiality with raises to which he felt entitled, an association Whitelaw indulgently called blackmail while plotting, without so revealing, a severe reprisal. For this secret reason, Sunny Jim had invited a guest on this trip, a business acquaintance named C. R. Majub, whom he described as a “very, very, very old friend.”

At first, they saw little of Majub; he was ailing and he was also a hockey fan. If any sort of game at all was on television, Majub was absent; if the Montreal Canadiens were playing, he took the phone off the hook, piled pillows under his door to remove extraneous noise and drank Crown Royal from a bathroom glass. “You can’t believe a towelhead could love hockey so much!” Whitelaw exclaimed, then added, more thoughtfully, “but he’ll show you how to get rich, so long as you don’t care how you make it.” From the beginning, Majub cheerfully exuded mystery and secret knowledge, and he was one of the few people whom Paul had ever instinctively feared. Majub’s attentiveness was like the savoring of a cannibal.

Sundown seemed prolonged on the eve of their arrival, and it was not quite dark by the time Sunny Jim attached a mercenary showgirl named JoAnne to his arm, a high-kicking hooker with muscular hands. Paul, straggling along like a remora following an old shark, tried to make small talk, citing Evelyn’s love of her horses and cows, and causing JoAnne to moan tragically at the recollection of her North Dakota yesteryears. For obvious reasons, the two men kept separate rooms, the latter a suite where Whitelaw could entertain. Indeed, he entertained so many that Paul began to wonder just what demons drove his father-in-law; it was hardly a moral judgment, since Paul sometimes did some entertaining himself. At such occasions C. R. Majub often appeared, a precise and well-dressed man of forty with a flat midwestern voice. Majub, it developed, was an Ohio Bengali, and too ill to entirely indulge the technical investment questions in speculations as to “where our economy is headed” that so absorbed Whitelaw. Majub seemed to be in Las Vegas looking for a cure, though when Paul asked if it was to see a doctor, Whitelaw said, “Not exactly!” and laughed uproariously. Majub saw no humor in this and continued sizing Paul up. Whitelaw beamed upon his sick friend. Trying to curry his favor, Paul told him, once Whitelaw had left the room, “His teeth are loose but he still wants sex.”

Whitelaw enjoyed Paul’s prying nature and was willing to feed him tidbits about Majub on the rare occasions when the whores were elsewhere. He was, it seemed, a successful broker of businesses who’d helped Sunny Jim acquire, with leverage, several—“semi-mom-and-pop”—going concerns in the Midwest, including a sign company, a foundry and a Dunkin’ Donuts. During a steep and unforeseen downturn, in which the offspring threatened to eat the parent company, Majub saved Whitelaw’s bacon by “spinning the subsidiaries
way
offshore.”

“This guy knows from loyal,” Sunny Jim said. “He’s on the business end of loyal. P.S. I owe him.” As he almost never acknowledged debt, Paul figured this was merely a figure of speech.

Paul’s only private exposure consisted of a single drink at the hotel bar where Majub acknowledged that he was not well; but when Paul asked what he was doing about it, he merely shrugged and said, “Waiting.” The brown rascal’s Perrier made Paul’s Budweiser seem the epitome of vice, and Paul was further discomfited by the silence of Majub, a quality that—being unattainable by Paul—he always rather admired. At length, Majub turned to him wearily and said, “Sunny Jim isn’t going to be around forever,” then handed Paul a card that read
C. J. Majub, broker
and, after finishing his Perrier at a swallow, added, “I make companies get bigger or I make them get smaller. Best of all, I make them go away.”

That night, chatting blearily with his father-in-law in the latter’s suite, Paul showed him his latest plan for a promotion, which consisted of a fistful of Polaroids with which the girl from North Dakota had provided him for five cool century notes. Whitelaw didn’t show a bit of annoyance at the connection between these pictures and his son-in-law’s economic well-being, and Paul could hardly have known that he himself was about to go on the black market. Sunny Jim took possession of the Polaroids with inexplicable gratitude and, resting a heavy paw on Paul’s shoulder, said, “I just like getting my ashes hauled.” Then he announced he was tired and wished to go to sleep. But for a nightcap, he recommended the Capitol, in Henderson, where Paul could use his credit by just identifying himself as his son-in-law. After giving him directions and begging Paul’s indulgence, the old fellow rolled over and closed his eyes.

The Capitol was next door to Seizer’s Palace, an agency specializing in repossessing unpaid-for goods. Its motto, emblazoned on poured concrete walls, reminded Paul of a book he’d once read. “Render unto Seizer, that which is Seizer’s.” The cabby who’d dropped him there said the women wouldn’t be prostitutes, but they’d be close. The Capitol had white columns fastened directly to its stucco facade and its discreet entrance promised high jinks. Overhead, the sound of arriving and departing airliners was constant; the night air smelled of jet fuel, and desert clouds were lit repeatedly, at heartbeat intervals, by strobes and beacons from the city. The persistence of odd-hour life gave the town a kind of fluorescent alpenglow.

Late as it was, it was early for this bar. A few people were drinking, their belongings scattered in front of them, purses, wallets, cigarettes. When Paul established his relationship with Whitelaw to the bartender, he was rewarded with a significant nod. Down at the end of the bar, two women were talking to each other in a manner that disinvited interruption, yet they perked after this exchange. Their dress suggested that they were on their way home from work rather than out for the evening, but before Paul could even order a drink, he found himself accompanied by one of them, a young, dark-eyed, humorous-looking girl with mid-length auburn hair parted casually at the middle. “Next, I buy you a drink,” said Paul.

“As you wish. I can afford it.”

“Really? Then why don’t you buy
me
a drink?”

“You got credit here, sport.”

“How’d you know that?”

“A little birdy told me.”

Not long afterward, when things seemed to have slowed to a crawl, Paul asked a question whose answer he was not destined to hear. “What’s there to fucking
do
in this town?”

He woke up in a bathtub full of ice, a row of new stitches like a parade of ants across his abdomen; on a chair beside him, a portable phone rested atop a note:
“Call 911 for post-operative care. And remember, your health comes first!”
Even before the immediate pain of surgery, he was aware of an odd, sweeping tingling that soon turned into horror. Looking at the faintly puckered slit across his stomach, the neat dimpling of the stitches, he pounced on an oversight of his abductors: Since he didn’t
know
where he was, how could he tell Emergency? His clothes were neatly folded and the hopsacking jacket, whose wheaty hue had seemed so lighthearted and summery in the Vegas night, was draped carefully on a hanger embossed with
“Courtesy Hotel
.
”
Paul climbed out of the tub and dried and dressed himself, sitting down several times in a recliner by the window where he tried to form some impression from his view of telephone wires and languorous side-street traffic. He was on the second floor, he concluded, of an out-of-the-way hotel perhaps called the Courtesy, and, judging by the traffic, well away from any significant artery. Still, there was some reassurance in daylight, but it was short-lived and Paul found himself in misery again. The clock radio went off and Latino music filled the room.