The Cadence of Grass (24 page)

“Girls,” said Majub to the women gathered to see him at Natalie’s house, “do you know why I am here?” The balls of his fingers rested on a book of celebrity photographs by Annie Liebovitz.

Natalie smiled. “We think so.”

“Not sure,” Evelyn said.

“I’m here to make the bottle plant go away.” He smiled at Evelyn.

“Altogether?” she asked.

“Not altogether, but into something smaller we call money. Unlike the bottling plant, you can carry it in your little purses.”

“Where will the plant itself go?”

“Several possibilities, but I’m thinking primarily of an assisted living group out of Texas. They’ve got the wherewithal and I will show them the need.”

Natalie mused on how attractive an Indian man could be: refined features, eyes just like a cocker spaniel’s! But Evelyn found his act of being one jump ahead of everybody to be slightly irritating. She also thought that, while justified by the weather, the British clothes somewhat overwhelmed him. Later when he showed them his picture sea bathing at St. Barts in a little bathing suit he called a “banana hammock,” he revealed that he was far from inflexible in dress.

“How will you convey the need to own a family business to this Texas firm?” she asked.

“Not just Texas! Fort Worth—where the Basses live!—Evelyn, here’s how: I crawl over the portfolio till I find the missing tooth.”

Natalie brought out some pastries and coffee while Majub flipped through the celebrity photographs. When he got to Yoko Ono with John Lennon curled up next to her in the fetal position, he cried out in delight, “She’ll have him for dinner!” After thumbing furiously through the rest of the book and finding the attention lavished upon subjects he didn’t recognize maddening, he pushed the book away and settled down.

“In order to sell this company I have to find its value, which under present management is falling rapidly. I can rough it in by using a multiple of earnings, but there is a trend here and I don’t want to risk an opinion and have our sale overturned by a probate court. We’ll get a reputable appraiser, maybe even find one in a cowboy hat.”

“How did
you
find us?” Evelyn demanded.

“Your father found me. Did you not read the trust instrument? I’m the third codicil.”

Evelyn and Natalie turned to each other again. They had thought it morbid to study the estate information too closely; their mother read it in its entirety and her reports had seemed sufficient to the girls.

“Your father and I had a long association. He didn’t like to invest in the stock market, and looked to me to find alternatives. He felt he had no influence over companies in which he merely invested. He wanted to own whole companies, and I helped him find them.”

“Where are they now?” Natalie wished to know.

“Come and gone, mostly lost money. He really only knew how to run this one business, I’m sorry to say, but it has done nicely until now. Your father was not in the best of health. He never exercised, and he’d been eating those same big marbled steaks from Kansas City all his life. He once told me he’d eaten more beef than you see in the stampede scene in John Wayne’s
Red River,
but that he’d reached the age and state where he couldn’t eat another herd of that size. It was his intimation of mortality. His hope was that the bottling plant would remain as a monument to, well, to him. But he was a realist. He thought that your husband—”

“Estranged husband.”

“Of course. That
Paul
had the best chance of holding the asset together.” He turned to Natalie. “Whereas I thought
your
husband—”

“Soon-to-be used-to-be,” said Natalie. “I just gave him the news.”

“Anyway, I considered Stuart the steadier man. However, your father somehow thought he owed it to Paul, and so Paul it was. Frankly, he has been a nonstarter because the fortunes of this company are dropping like a rock. As far as I’m concerned, Paul is out of runway. I mean, you girls can look after yourselves, but I don’t want to see your mother sleeping in her car.”

“Has my mother heard this?” Evelyn asked.

“The doctor is with her now.” After giving the remark plenty of time to settle in, he continued. “But look, relax. I will get this fixed, you have my word. And when I’m done you’ll see a little security, a little income. You’ll need to work, of course, but you’ll have some latitude as to the job, not just flipping burritos at Taco Bell.”

“How much income?” said Natalie.

“Too soon to tell. And Stuart—”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“He’s a stakeholder.” He turned to Evelyn. “You’re different: you become a landowner. And, more importantly, when the plant goes away, Paul goes away. His claim to fame was to do a good job, and the job he accomplished was sabotage. You’re lucky the old man put me in place, or this thing would be an oil slick. And you can thank me for figuring a way to park your marriage until we liquidate.”

“Are you being paid?” asked Evelyn.

“I was paid a long time ago. I’ll spare you the details.”

On the fifteenth of February, the snow stopped and the sun came out. People begin to act crazy. They washed their cars, kissed in public; several suspicions of fire turned out to be barbecues, meat grilling in the shadows of snowdrifts. When the plows finished the town’s streets, a pair of hot-rod roadsters drag-raced ten blocks straight east, before being forced to the side of the road by a Montana Highway Patrol car. Both men qualified for senior discounts and had built the cars themselves, starting back in high-school shop class forty years earlier. One driver, wall-eyed with adrenaline, was quoted in the paper as saying, “Officer, you’re lucky you ever caught us in that lead sled of yours. These cars are freaky-fast, wind-in-your-hair, point-and-shoot hot rods. They are not for the faint of heart.”

The Whitelaw family would have been hard pressed to demonstrate quite such jubilation as they stood and watched a crane lower the
WHITELAW BOTTLING
sign and replace it with the shorter and graphically more up-to-date
ECO FIZZ
. It would in time be a memorable gathering—Alice Whitelaw (openly weeping), Natalie Whitelaw (patience rewarded), Bill Champion (out-of-place), Paul Crusoe (ironic leer), Evelyn Whitelaw (uncomfortable), Stuart Cross (nostalgic). Paul’s dog stood between the family and the spectacle and alone seemed free of uncertainty. One of the new owners gazed around the neighborhood and asked of nobody in particular, “Whose idea was it to build a town here?”

Looking at the new sign, Natalie feigned cheer as she pointed out to her heartbroken mother, “That’s the same lettering they use at Planet Hollywood.”

Having felt his gaze, Paul turned to look at Bill, whose cowboy boots were being inspected by Whitelaw, who had sensed Bill’s feelings about his master.

“Which planet?” said Alice as Bill looked at her protectively and the dog growled at his feet. Evelyn felt Paul’s eyes on her face but declined to turn to him. She shared her family’s exhaustion from the negotiations and sale and all the turbulence that went with them. The assisted-living people—born-again Christians, skiers and very tough business people—were openly contemptuous of the Whitelaws, whom they viewed as the dysfunctional family. During one tense moment their accountant said, “We need to wind this up and let this family crawl back under their log.”

Natalie and her mother stood shoulder to shoulder, holding the collars of their winter coats to their throats with the same left-handed gesture, and staring at the flashing Eco Fizz sign. Paul walked briskly toward the parked cars without recognizing any of the employees who’d begun to drift out coatless to see the new sign and smoke cigarettes, their expressions revealing their view that this was more management high jinks.

Evelyn’s eyes were on Paul when her sister said, “We’re going for a victory drink. Care to join us?” Momentarily despising Natalie, she said,
“No.”
Her own mother appeared to her to be a simpleton and an opportunist. Her eyes were on Paul, heading to his car. She wondered why she wasn’t happier to see him so utterly defeated.

“I’ve had two lives, really,” C. R. Majub said to Paul, “before my illness and after. In the first I was born, raised in my little town on Lake Erie and educated at Ohio State University. Then the happy days as I built my business. Those
are
the happiest days. I had no family other than my business, which consisted of me and a secretary, a weary old empty-nester I saw between trips and to whom I unloaded my brain like a cargo ship. Then, during a trip to Taiwan to sell a ball-cap monogramming business, I contracted hepatitis. I don’t know how, but it resulted in complete renal failure, and very abruptly I began to lose my kidneys and went onto a waiting list for a transplant.” Paul felt himself grow queasy and alert.

“Nobody came forward in my little town to give me one of theirs. An old neighbor said he didn’t think a white man’s kidney would work anyway. At that time, the Whitelaw bottling plant happened to be in trouble. I had done a lot of business with Sunny Jim, but he got himself into this mess without my help. Besides, he had created so many enemies that he was forced to turn to me for the jumbo loan he needed to survive. I was going from dialysis to dialysis and I could barely concentrate when Sunny Jim said, ‘Come to Vegas. Bring the check. I think I can help you out.’”

“You sonofabitch, I can’t believe you’re telling me this.” Paul’s stomach had turned.

“There’s a reason. I never knew where Sunny Jim got it. I mean, I assumed it was on the black market. But I didn’t know who the . . . donor was until I sat down with him to help with his will. At first, I was shocked. I thought, People don’t do this. Then he explained to me how you’d crossed him and I could at least partly understand. In the end, he was remorseful. He told me, ‘Majub, you’ve got to do right by Paul. You’ve got to make it up to him. You owe Paul your life; not me, him.’”

Paul followed her out to the ranch. There were black strings of cattle on huge snowfields, and bare trees mobbed with sharptail grouse hoping for a ray of sunshine. Even with snow tires, Evelyn was having a hard time staying on the road. And the silence—
the silence
—inside the car was more than a slight problem. What could she possibly say? Yet she must be prepared to confront the question of whose idea this was, and by the time Paul followed her into the ranch house, waiting diffidently while she undid the latch, she was brilliantly prepared to answer his first question, “What do you want, Evelyn?”

“I want you to give it to me all night long,” she said, having elected the shorter version.

“I’m taking this with a grain of salt,” he said, a response that conveyed his entire appeal with perfect economy, and they began to laugh like old times, with Paul in his sparkling role as collaborator and demon. Evelyn was reminding herself to keep it light and have a good time. Life was short, et cetera. Amid limbs tangling she made out his voice—“we’ve got contact”—and despite her alarm at his detached gaze, Evelyn was startled at how quickly she began coming, a long, ashamed experience of relief not unlike wetting the bed. Then she couldn’t shut it off and it seemed over and over again that he went well beyond necessity, her own voice sounding unfamiliar and as if from afar. She looked across at the mirror on the dresser and saw a moving image that must’ve been Paul, though it was too distorted to make out and looked mostly like a black leaf endlessly unfolding, like something terrible.

When Paul and Evelyn were first married, Evelyn had hoped to interest him in the ranch and the land itself. Paul was interested, all right, spotting home sites everywhere and what he called “viewsheds.” Paul seemed genuinely puzzled that Bill was unaware of viewsheds, while Bill was baffled by virtually every detail of Paul. Paul’s were the first bluejeans Bill had ever seen with a crease. When Paul lurched around on their gentlest horse, Evelyn asked Bill privately if he thought they’d ever make a horseman of Paul. “Never,” said Bill undiplomatically. He noted that Paul was “very manicured” and that he “would do well to butter his own toast.”

Realizing that Bill was not warming to his idea of home sites, Paul had perversely pressed it. “What’s wrong with my idea?” he said. “Not everyone can have a ranch. Should the unlucky ones be cut off from nature altogether?” He tried to push his hands thoughtfully into the pockets of his leather vest, but they were either sewn shut or were not actual pockets.

“They got plenty of houses,” said Bill.

“Maybe not the ones they want. Maybe they want different ones.”

“Says in Isaiah, ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’”

“I guess you can find support for just about anything in the Bible. The big thing here, though, is that Evelyn never wanted to ranch
at all
. She just wants to
be
here.”