Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

“I realize.”

“And puhleeze don’t pretend you miss him.”

“I did respect him though, Paul.”

Paul clenched his forearms to his rib cage. “ I bet you got a million more where that one came from.”

Now Stuart was rising from his seat, shaky and undefiant. Paul found his search for an appropriate facial expression semi-risible; it was like Stuart came in a shoebox full of spare parts. With a slight frown of ostensible concern, Paul urged him to pull himself together.

“I can’t, Paul,” Stuart said. “I never expected to be treated this way. I should’ve prepared myself better.”

He didn’t know how he found her here, nor how he managed to get her to share a bench with him, though she maintained a certain distance by pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her winter coat and withdrawing her neck into its collar so that the only actual flesh of Evelyn on display was the bridge of her nose, her eyes and the portion of forehead that showed below her Irish wool cap. Paul — coat open, gloveless — seemed warmed by his not inconsiderable charm. “Why don’t you just call off the divorce? That satisfies everything.”

“God knows there’s plenty of pressure on me. Why can’t you at least get a bit of money out to my mother?” Her eyes still followed the dogs, the Frisbees. “And Nat could use a boost.”

“I don’t make those choices. These distributions are based on profits.”

“What happened to the profits?”

“They’re going down,” said Paul glumly.

“Why? Don’t you know how to run the place?”

“Of course I do. But there are market forces I can’t control, and our sector is getting hammered everywhere.”

“ Sector ? Paul, you just make stuff up. What if I did stay married to you — let’s just say I did — all that happens is I inherit Dad’s equity in the ranch. In other words, no difference. You keep appealing to my greed, and it’s not working. Why be so tiresome?”

“You may not get any money, but it would enable us to sell the company and cash out your mother and your sister. Your mother and your sister .” Evelyn decided not to comment on this appeal to family values. “I don’t see Bill living forever, and that land’s worth a fortune. Someday you’ll sell it and— ta da —you’re in San Juan Capistrano shaded up under a California oak, a margarita in one hand, a Palm Pilot with stock quotes in the other, just waiting for the fucking swallows to return.”

“You make a romantic case for liquidation, but in my version Bill gets to a hundred and I live in peace out there at least until menopause, at which point your plan might start making sense. But say all this happens. Where are you?”

“The usual place, trying to get back into your good graces. Natalie says I can use the spare bedroom once Stuart gathers up his sea boots and boogies. Then I’d have to look around for something to do, pretty good at selling myself.”

“You’ll need a fresh audience.”

“Could be, but what’s for you to think about is this company, which, despite its quantifiable value to others, seems to be caught in bad undertow. And, frankly, are you selling enough cows to support your mother? Not to mention the various treatment bills lying ahead for Natalie, given her deepening despondency — i.e., more than pissed and gone back to stealing, just for instance?”

After a moment’s thought, Evelyn said, “This is an absolute curse.”

“Maybe so, but I didn’t put it on you. Your father did. Remember, I’m not the devil.”

“You just work for him.”

“Really? I wonder why. The pay sucks.”

The doors were all closing. Paul’s mother called her that same night, undoubtedly tipped off by him to some perceived weakening. And knowing he would report to her probably kept Paul from going crazy. She claimed to be correcting papers but was, in fact, stinking drunk. “You’re not sufficiently aware of the value of continuity,” Mrs. Crusoe began in general garrulity, “or other long-run values that make your apparent need for some dreamed-of bliss shrink by comparison. Marriage is like the devoted study of a long, sacred document. Think of the Bible! Think of the Koran! What’s that other one? Where all parties are raised to sacramental heights by the dedication of their lives.” Evelyn’s attempts to interrupt were unavailing. She actually put the phone aside for as long as it took to put a few dishes in the sink. When she picked it up again, Mrs. Crusoe was winding down and growing confused. Finally, she demanded, “Who is this? With whom am I speaking?”

Natalie stood outside fastening her coat and determining if she’d left any lights on. The wind cut into her cheek while she took in the tidiness of the bungalow with both faint distaste and some alertness to maintenance issues. She recalled putting its little rectangle of a garden to bed as though it had been an act of complicity with seasonal forces that wished to make her colorless. She understood that she had to work this particular fear. She knew it was not reasonable when Stuart asked if they could move the boat from Canyon Ferry to Flathead Lake, and she’d replied that it made her want to kill herself. And it mattered less than it should have when Stuart made his little puzzle-face and tried to cheer her by describing the huckleberries west of the Continental Divide and the summer theater and shopping opportunities around Bigfork. Foolishness of this sort had once landed her in a karaoke joint lip-synching Tammy Wynette to gales of laughter and a booby-prize free pizza. Natalie was a Vassar graduate, and at the time this had seemed a very long fall indeed.

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.