Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

By the time all two hundred had gone up the aluminum ramps into various chambers against the roar of the cows and the steady rumble of diesels, Evelyn was covered with manure and had a heavy heart. The truckers stripped off their coveralls and climbed into their cabs in clean clothes. The dark wall that had been ascending in the western sky had overtaken them and it began to snow. Bill paid the brand inspector for his services and, holding the weight tickets between his fingers, raised his leathery face to Evelyn, studied her for a moment and said, “We had a good year.”

The bawling of the cattle made conversation impossible. Evelyn tipped her head toward the noise, her excuse for cutting it short. Bill bumped her on the shoulder with an open hand, then turned to make his round of gates and latches, to nail up stray planks on the alleyway that led to the squeeze chute where tomorrow it would be determined which cows had started a new calf for next year. The old dry cows with numerous calves behind them over the long years would be slaughtered. Evelyn was going dancing tonight; tonight she would dance this all away.

She drove off in her little car, its floor a jumble of vaccine bottles, paper coffee cups, baler twine and hair elastics. She drove down the mountain foothills and then, still north of the modest skyline of the city, she turned east toward the stockyards. She followed a semi loaded with round bales until she’d passed the corrals, then parked in front of the café, an encouraging place where cattlemen and hippies could be found sitting at the Formica counter listening to Otis Redding under a sign for Black Cat Stove Polish. Various bits of advice were posted, including No promises about eggs “over” or “scrambled .” And If you have a fork, you don’t need a spoon to stir your coffee . And one really caught her attention: Kill or remove ants on counter . Here was a spot for Red Wolf, she thought, then added, Now I’m doing it. A young man tried unsuccessfully to catch her glance, but without returning it she realized the time for such things was not so far away.

She saw how hard it was snowing and tried to imagine that the calves were better off in the trucks. She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you. The snow was blowing up against the front of a travel agency, obscuring the words “holiday” and “foreign currency” on its sign.

With an almost military sense of purpose she made her way through several shortcuts, from which occasional pedestrians appeared or disappeared, coats and scarves drawn across their faces. Her friends Violet and Claire, ambitious beauties, had a small shop on Main Street, Just the Two of Us, that, despite its high prices, Evelyn loved for its rarified sense of exotic couture right next door to an old saddle shop whose owner was their landlord. Evelyn doted on the interior of this silly boutique with its endless chalk white walls and racks of clothes in an arrangement impossible to understand. The owners looked out over their treasures in conspicuous separation from the big old-fashioned cash register to which they hoped to repair often enough to avoid eviction by the saddle maker, who, at the first of the month, came sniffing around for his check. Claire — lips pursed and breathing through her nose in concentration — held a dress abstractly to Evelyn’s shoulders. “Thank goodness,” Violet said in her surprisingly deep voice, “you don’t have a big bosom. Big bosoms make good clothes look stupid. Big bosoms are basically rural .”

Evelyn stood in manure-covered boots, the dress hand-pinned to the shoulders of her ripped, blue-plaid, snap-button cowboy shirt.

“I hadn’t heard that,” she said, spotting something else entirely, a black dress whose cut in back Evelyn thought might moderate her overly defined shoulder muscles, something about its little straps, their closeness to the neck, the perfect seams curving toward the hips like arrows, the detailing! She pointed. “That one, I think, if it fits.”

“There goes my suggestion,” Claire said with a pretended pout, letting the dress she’d held against Evelyn fall over her arm.

“I just have hunches.” Evelyn held the weightless thing at arm’s length before her. After cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, it looked exciting. “I could get somewhere in this,” she said. Claire and Violet stared at this odd remark as Evelyn took the dress back to the changing room. What kind of coat would it take in weather like this? Certainly her Carhartt stockman’s coat, stained with veterinary products, was not it. Tonight, she’d find out. A bearded man in a stadium coat was watching Violet and Claire present various items — scarves, a chain purse, a makeup kit, blouses, a beaded top — with ferocious coquetry and a stream of commentary as to their merits. Evelyn changed into the pretty black dress and by bouncing on the balls of her feet made it fall down over herself and into place with reassuring emphasis. Admiring herself in the mirror, she drew the dress up high on her thighs and said to the mirror, and its imaginary occupant, “Will that do?” Tonight she would dance in feral vigilance. She’d find some guy and forget the poor calves, went the plan.

Claire turned to Evelyn, her blue eyes piercing beneath her peachy eye shadow and a new no-nonsense look. She said, “And?”

“I like it,” said Evelyn.

The bearded man seized this opportunity to slip away, the door to the street swinging shut behind him.

“You should. So killer.” Claire started replacing the goods that were evidently wasted on the departed shopper. “I love the big cough as he goes, like ill health prevented his buying something…. What’d the calves weigh?”

“They weighed like lead.”

“Turn any back?”

“We locoed eight.”

Claire made a clucking sound and said, “You can feed ’em out of that, but it takes a couple of months. I had twenty one year and by April they looked like show calves. We took them to Billings Livestock and sold the shit out of them.”

Together they moved to the ornate cash register, which stood in nostalgic disuse next to the electronic box for processing credit cards. Violet, despite her blazing makeup and avant-garde clothes, managed to sound wistful. “When the federal government let the meatpackers concentrate, they ruined it for the little producer. That’s why we moved into town. P.S. I don’t miss the wind. But Evelyn, I wish you would let your nails grow.” Her brow was furrowed.

“There’s no time to grow my nails. I’ve got to get me a little tonight . I haven’t had it in such a long time.”

Violet looked worried.

“I see a lot of guys, Evelyn. You want a loaner?”

“Uh, no. You miss a bunch if you don’t find ’em yourself.”

The bar was beyond the city limits, in an industrial-looking building, where a large number of cars and pickup trucks were parked in the snow with little sign of life around them except a desultory shoving match between two bearded men wearing baseball caps. Nothing came of it beyond flattening a circle of snow beneath their feet.

Evelyn was soon inside dancing and tossing down drinks between partners, amidst shouts of “Party hearty! It’s beer thirty!” She danced with a ponytailed man wearing hospital scrubs who wouldn’t speak to her, then a college student in a lumberjack shirt and with a smooth empty face, then a rather clean-cut youngster in khaki pants and a blue chambray shirt who described himself, with startling precision, as “a Reno-trained slot machine consultant.” Apart from the disorienting blaze of lights and electrified music, and the disturbing spectacle of the lead singer’s stalking movements up and down the stage at either end of which were snow-filled windows, there was a rather peaceful anonymity, and the black dress continued to thrill her.