Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

“You want to lock the door and get it on?” he inquired.

“No, Paul, there’s a time and a place for that.”

He couldn’t imagine what he would’ve done had she said yes. But she sure knew how to turn a guy off. There’s a time and a place . Obviously, once you’re a bureaucrat you start losing all your vital juices and you turn into a cactus . “Would you say that you’ve behaved like a professional in handling my case?”

“Paul, I must have said something to offend you.” She smiled a little and raised her eyebrows.

He chuckled. “I’ve got to go,” he said, “but please don’t torment yourself that I haven’t enjoyed myself here. I know I’m not the easiest case you’ve got. I’ve mired myself in the Seven Deadly Sins.” He got up and Geraldine too thought she would rise and see him off. It was clear now that she had made a big mistake with Paul, and in admitting to herself that she’d been had, she remembered how something about him had captivated her against all her best judgment, not just his very good looks, his compact physique and fine features, the particular way his black hair was combed in a kind of 1930s look, and his quickness of mind. There was really something infernal about Paul, but it was only this very sulfurousness that made her act so out of character and believe that they were entitled to a harmless good time together. The last time they’d made love and she’d asked him if she was “good,” he’d replied that it was the thought that counted, adding, as he finished dressing, “Feets, don’t fail me now.” It was clear to her that Paul’s contempt for her was based on his belief that she had fallen from grace and was now somehow on his level. He was wrong about that.

Following their appointment, Paul drove no more than five blocks and stopped to buy an ice cream. Across the street, a Little League game spun along, two squads of uniformed children and a small group of towering grown-ups, strangely inconsequential looking against the small squads of activists. Paul licked his cone avidly and watched each successive batter, dense with sporting affectations, swing at the ball with surprising vehemence. One angel-faced boy hit a stand-up double, and Paul observed both the pitcher’s nearly operatic despair and the disgusted whirl of his coach. The hitter stood on second base with the detachment of a broadly successful person, doing a few stretches, presumably for the final sprint to home plate, but generally taking in the benevolence of Indian summer in the mountains. This was so much like the baseball-stopped time of his own childhood, when he had been such an utterly different human being that he could, tongue against the ice cream, ponder this in curious stupefaction.

Paul did not want to eat the remainder of the dry cone now, but since two little athletes were watching him, he couldn’t very well throw it on the ground and was forced to cram it into his mouth.

Crossing a country road, Paul saw numerous nearly identical new homes gnawed through old grain fields toward the Bridger Mountains, one after the other like a caterpillar. A combine made its way while holding up homebound suburban traffic, exasperation in every direction, the guilt of the farmer evident in his slouch and his avoidance of all eye contact, his deafness to horns and abrupt passings. The sign in front of a new subdivision invited the buyer to “select from over eighteen models.”

Paul pulled into Stuart and Natalie’s driveway, parking directly behind Stuart’s well-kept Fairlane and Natalie’s Mustang with its MSTNG SLLY vanity plates, a car Paul thought too young for her. Stuart came around the house operating a leaf blower and wearing ear protection. When Stuart saw him, he turned off his blower with an amiable smile, propped it against the house with his ear protectors slung over its handle, swept the grass clippings from his trousers and came toward Paul with a pigeon-toed lurch. Paul watched his approach with raised eyebrows. He actually liked Stuart’s personality for its lack of surprises, for the rolled-up sleeves of his shirts and for the shoes that had been nursed through several changes of style by careful care. The ones he wore today resembled the ones you saw in portraits of the Pilgrims. He knew as well that Stuart was sometimes rather hard done by in his relations with Natalie. He’d once arrived unexpectedly and found Natalie, arms stiff at her sides, shouting at Stuart, “ Please don’t say ‘davenport’! Just this once for me, say ‘ sofa ’!” Sometimes, Paul had got the disquieting feeling that Stuart was watching him. If Paul was to take over the life of the family, he wasn’t going to be keen on having this feeling.

“Paul, hey, what’s up?”

“Not much. Just grabbed an ice cream. Been watching Little League.”

Stuart glanced at his watch. “They’re nearly done. Ace Hardware wins today and they clinch a playoff slot.”

“Where’s Nat?”

“She’s at her mother’s. The cruise is only a couple of days away.”

“Yeah, I bought Mother Whitelaw a little going-away present.”

Stuart seemed to flinch. “I wonder if I should’ve gotten something. I didn’t even think about it.”

“Trade beads.”

“Oh, Paul.”

Paul caught a whiff of Stuart’s appraisal in his self-discounting body language. In prison you look for every trace of these things so some babyface doesn’t push a sharpened utensil through your liver. It was one thing to be observant and quite another to be absolutely awake. That’s where Paul had gotten by dint of long effort, and that’s where he intended to stay. Certain conflicts lay inevitably ahead. Just now it was time to lay some assurance and bon voyage on the old lady, the holdout being a certain warm feeling that might beguile the rest of them.

“I’m just glad Alice is getting away, Stu. She’ll learn some real changes.”

“I wish I were so sure,” Stuart said.

“You can’t believe how adaptable women are. They’re like chameleons. Match the color of any background, including plaid.”

“You can’t say that about Natalie.”

“Nat’s the exception that proves the rule. The others just wear themselves out trying.”

Stuart turned to resume his work, ending the conversation. Paul wasn’t sure there wasn’t a message here. He frowned slightly and called, “Catch you later,” thinking that if Stuart were any measure, Paul’s vow upon release from prison — of not settling for being less than larger than life — was coming true. He drove across town to his mother-in-law’s house, which Sunny Jim, in an access of imperial ego, had named “Whitelaw.” After consideration, he declined to knock upon the brass and varnish surface of the door, smelling the heat on the russet brick and thinking, Alaska, that’s a good one, and simply strolled in, in order to see Mrs. Whitelaw off, the former Alice Nyoka Smoot, and give her something to trade with the Eskimos. But no, it turned out a little traveler’s portfolio was more like it. Thinking about what she might appreciate and training his mind away from chilblain cures, folklore of the Gold Rush, et cetera, he felt an odd affection for the old bag who’d had a hard time of it in her brutish marriage. It was rumored that, at fifteen, she had been flung from her white-trash household to fend for herself. When she received her gift, he recited, “There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun” while thinking, How thin her hair has become!

Discovering Natalie in eavesdropping range by the pantry offered little in the way of surprise; she faded from view and was next seen gathered around Mother Whitelaw’s rather good Georgian tea service, which when Paul was in jail had represented, in his mind, if not the good life, then the unconfined life; and once he’d heard it appraised in the spinning portrait of value called “the estate,” he immediately concluded it would be even handsomer in cash form than it had been during its two hundred years on an Edinburgh sideboard before Sunny Jim swept it to the Rockies on the wings of his credit card. When in unlamented down-and-out days Paul had suggested to Evelyn that she possibly gather it unto him, she cried “Never!” and thus differentiated herself from her own sister, who at the behest of a discomposed main man would’ve jogged off with the whole kit and kaboodle.