Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

“Golly, I guess I just got used to it. I have other rewards. Maybe they’re known only to me. What was it Emerson said? ‘It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.’”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he knew better than that.”

“What do you mean, Nat? Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“I saw a special about him.”

“Really, about Emerson?”

“I think it was. I’d have to see it again. I never forget a face.”

“I can’t imagine them having a special on Emerson—”

“Well, maybe they didn’t, for Christ sake, Stuart. But whoever it was, it’s childish to expect people not to want credit for the things they do.”

“Sure, Nat.”

“Now what? We’re hurt?”

Stuart shook his head no and began to busy himself with small tasks around the house, while Natalie imagined how it might be after this fork in the road, given of course that Mr. Majub had the mother-wit to make good on his statements. Natalie decided to find some way of meeting with this Bengali.

A pillow doubled under her head, Evelyn watched the streaming night clouds outside her window, a cold new moon illuminating their apparent speed. She was thinking of girlhood stories wherein the dead inhabited a paradise beyond the stars; and later, near-death stories that seemed to validate this outward voyage her entire species longed for. Were they all there, Dante, Torquemada, Lincoln, even Elvis? She felt ill with worry that at the very end of her great escape into starry darkness, Paul would still be in full pursuit. Perhaps these thoughts were just precursors of sleep or part of a troubling enchantment. Her father was speaking. “My mother once told me, ‘They say if you break a mirror it’s seven years’ bad luck.’ She broke one on her wedding night and told me I was her first bad luck.” Why had she never forgotten this conversation?

“Evelyn,” he asked, “have you ever wondered if I was happy?”

“I suppose I must have.”

“Would you like to hear a surprise? I am. I’m happy.”

“Dad, you should show your happiness. You should smile more.”

“I’ve heard that all my life.”

“Mama says you smile in your sleep.”

“That’s gastric. People smile to get others to agree with them. It’s pitiful. If they had any guts or leadership, they wouldn’t care.”

Evelyn wondered why her father gave such awful advice.

“And Paul,” said Sunny Jim.

“Yes?”

“I like this guy.”

“I know you do.”

“I’ve been waiting for this guy.”

The light had not come on for Sunny Jim with her previous boyfriends, not Fred Casey, the Yale-educated forester; neither Drew Bolt, a doctor of remarkable innocence; nor Aaron Coulter, the star of the National Finals Rodeo and heir to the vast Diamond J southeast of Winifred; and obviously not the several jejune drips with whom she fornicated through her junior and senior years in college. This refraining light had come on in only one case and for a man some saw as a career criminal in the making, but whom Sunny Jim considered his ideal successor, this son of an eccentric history professor and a teenaged juvenile delinquent she was counseling under a university-sponsored community outreach program in Boulder. Only much later would Edith upgrade his biography to “arid-lands botanist.” By that time, Paul had decided to pay his father a visit.

Southern Rockies Investigative Services — once engaged by Whitelaw Bottling — had provided him with a street map of Gillette, Wyoming, and the address of Richard “Doc” Sanders, presently living on disability from Badlands Coal Company. Paul billed their somewhat expensive investigative services per prior arrangement to Whitelaw Bottling.

Paul knocked on the front door, peering inconspicuously into an interior lit only by quietly explosive flashes from a television that was out of sight. Backlit by this intermittent blue light, a figure emerged in the hallway, Paul thinking, “Oh God, this must be my old man .” He decided to begin with stroke after stroke of untruths and he felt an odd electrical sensation at his hairline.

“Yes?” Sanders said with thorough suspicion. He was short, and Paul quickly and gratefully calculated the genetics of height contributed by his mother. He was less excited by the thinning hair, and instinctively touched the crown of his own head. Doc Sanders’s teeth were blindingly white, and he was unrealistic about his figure, for Paul could see that the top of his newish pants were far from buttonable. Obviously Sanders viewed his own son as a Badlands detective and reached a hand to the small of his back with a helpless-looking wince.

“Mr. Sanders?”

“You’re lookin’ at him.”

“Paul Whitelaw, Badlands Coal. I come in?”

“I’m afraid the house is a mess.”

“You ought to see my place!” Meant to put his father at ease, his remark had the opposite effect. Doc Sanders apparently did not wish to imagine Paul’s place, and his lips were flattening with cold wrath.

“Pull my comp and you, me and the State of Wyoming are back in court!” he bayed from a face that was turning several new colors.

“No, sir, Mr. Sanders,” Paul blurted through the screen. “You have misunderstood me completely . I’m here to reconfirm for Badlands that one of our most cherished employees is getting along as well as can be hoped, given the sacrifice he has made to our corporation. We contribute to workmen’s compensation not because we have to but because, like all Wyoming coal companies, our employees are our first priority.”

Sanders’s look suggested that he’d never seen so much airborne shit in his life, a quick signal to Paul to dial it down ASAP. “Of course I’m kidding, aren’t I? You can see that, can’t you? Most coal companies are happiest when their people leave their blood in the pit, squeeze ’em till there’s not a drop left, right? We’re somewhat different, maybe not a lot. But we’re satisfied in your case, and frankly have no interest in disallowing your claim. We’ve got plenty of other workers we can crush in your absence.”

“We better get us a beer,” Sanders said. He left Paul standing in the small living room facing a soundless talk show on which a striding, vigorous woman with a microphone and furrowed brow faced a row of seated people, all of them crumpled, some weeping bitterly but with enough vitality to watch their hostess cautiously. In a moment, Doc was back with two cold cans of Grain Belt. Bending from the waist, he probed for the channel changer and the television screen shrank to a blue dot and disappeared.

“So, how’s the back?”

“Aw, I can hardly move.”

Holding up his beer, Paul said, “Badlands will support you for ever .” Sanders, bright-eyed as a ferret, weighed these welcome but not entirely trustworthy words. “We’re committed to our family of workers from the e rection to the res urrection.” Both men erupted with artificial laughter, and then Paul resumed his debriefing of Sanders, many of whose features he could reluctantly acknowledge from his many hours in the mirror. “When’d you come up from Colorado?”

“’Bout seventeen years ago. You found that out, eh? With Badlands all that time.”

Paul could see now that he’d confused weariness with age. Sanders wasn’t so old, and Paul imagined rejuvenating him, dress him up a little and put him in a BMfuckinW.

“We was old settlers in the Boulder area. The college pushed us out.”

Flannel jacket with an easy drape, pleats across the protruding belly, cuffless but with a break over oxblood loafers. Hardly know it was him. With chuckling complicity, Paul decided to introduce some family lore with his next inquiry. “Weren’t you some kind of juvenile delinquent?” This Paul could see was outside what might have been in the employee records of Badlands Coal, and a flash of confused suspicion crossed Sanders’s face.