Thomas Mcguane: The Cadence of Grass

“Good afternoon, Natalie.”

“Paul.” She seemed unable to fathom his warm and admiring gaze. Alice Whitelaw got up to fill the teapot, trailing a cloud of Joy perfume behind her. When the spring-loaded door to the kitchen quit flashing, Paul said to Natalie, “Stop by later and I’ll throw a good one into you.”

“Give it a rest, Paul.”

Paul parted the drapes absentmindedly. “Around eightish would be good.” Then, to Alice, who’d just returned with the exaggerated difficulty meant to highlight her hospitality, “I hope you’ve packed plenty of warm things, Mrs. Whitelaw!”

“Nice black English breakfast,” said Alice Whitelaw. “Yes, I have, Paul, all I’ll need.”

“You’re going to Alaska, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Icebergs, igloos, killer whales with the big fin.” He sailed on, completely twisted in Natalie’s view but merely baffling in her mother’s. “In a ship with a casino, four ballrooms, six restaurants and a putting green, you will be insulated from the very worst of the people who wish to take such a trip.” And hopefully all memories of Papa in his final days, the dribbling fuckwit who’d once ruled them with such might and incomprehension.

“I don’t know about that. I wish to be on this trip. Paul, I hope to be dis or iented by comfort and services. I don’t want to suffer, but I don’t want to be around here before I can make sense of things.”

“What do you mean ‘sense of things’?”

“Just what I said. We’re not having the easiest time of this, Paul. And we hear quite frequently from the employees. Maybe you can see our point of view.”

Paul was aware of the discontent but thought, I’m going to kick ass and take names. “Of course I can,” said Paul with surprising mildness. “I find it very awkward, and I hope that by running things profitably and intelligently that I will win your confidence.”

“As a businessman,” Alice Whitelaw said, “you already have it.”

Paul was not about to go digging around about what other areas might lie in Ma Whitelaw’s omissions when it was far better to pour tincture on her remark and treat it like blanket approval. At all events the bottom line was the bucks.

While Natalie watched in amazement, he beamed like Howdy Doody and stated his gratitude. He said nothing whatsoever about what it was to be chained to the bottling plant for as far into the future as he could see, or to go through life as an ex-convict in a Paul Stuart Canadian twill suit and a hundred-dollar shantung tie. What chance was there of persuading her that he had a stain which no money could reach, and which was perhaps not entirely visible to someone heading for an Alaskan cruise in a haze of thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume?

Aware of their gazes crossing somewhere in front of him, Paul felt rather hemmed in and took a geographer’s note of the form and movement of altocumulus clouds through the garden window, some starting to stream in from the north. He knew perfectly well that he would forever feel the gust of his predatory urges. To stay the course, he wasn’t anxious to dance with the devil; he wanted to find smaller, more efficient bottling plants, to hog the franchises, the relationships, the new containers, to get both the kids and the tavern rats, to score with the celebrities who visited each summer, big Hollywood guys who were willing to put their name on some pork-and-bean microbrewery just to be part of things in the West. And all for what? So Mother Whitelaw can see a hundred and give him a watch? He didn’t think so. Even this house, which he now wanted out of fast, was deader than a federal correctional facility, where life, after a fashion, ran riot. At least there you could sleep and not fear waking up crazy in the way that marked his first days of freedom, a fear that ended only when fortune gave him a going concern and the family that depended upon it. There was some poetry here.

He rattled off a few hopes for plant expansion, alluding to a simple and remunerative harvest of opportunity, and had managed to create an atmosphere of fiscal security by the time he bade Mrs. Whitelaw good-bye. Natalie silently raised a hand in sardonic farewell, and Paul drove to the bottling plant, noting with satisfaction that his name had been applied to his parking space. When he got out of the car, he could smell the fresh paint; he looked up at his factory and smiled.

On Monday, freed from the mood of resentment surrounding Mrs. Whitelaw and Natalie — a true horn dog! — he felt entirely relieved and happier still as he walked around the plant among his workers. He found his erstwhile brother-in-law, the “vice president of sales,” as per Paul’s spontaneous invention, talking with the maintenance supervisor, Herman Schmitz, who wiped his hands on his shop apron in the unlikely event that the boss wanted to shake hands. “Herman,” said Paul, stepping back a bit, “I am very aware that the one thing we don’t bottle around here is water.” He said “water” with an aspect of astonishing sourness. He had been raised by a mother for whom water was almost the only subject. Amidst the violent tinklings and forklift rumbles of the thriving bottle plant, Herman seemed unable to reply, and so Stuart butted right in.

“Well, Paul, we have such good water in our area. Even at that, we treat it with ferrous sulfate, hydrated lime and chlorine, then run it back through the filters. It’s crystal pure.”

“Our area” is what particularly stuck in Paul’s craw, the very idea of drinking water without the messages, interactions and fairly binding deals that ensued once you got the stuff into a bottle. “It may be that we have good water, but thinking like that drives no business. We are encircled by a very remunerative world of designer water, Stuart. So, anyway: floor space.”

“How’s this?”

“ Floor space . Do we have the space for a small plant?”

“We cou—”

“One simple complex for washing, filling, capping and conveying at, let’s say, four thousand bottles an hour. But it takes floor space .”

“Maybe we could find a few hundred square f—”

“Get me some quotes.”

“The onl—”

“And make sure it’s a stand-alone in case the thing goes tits up. We should be looking at some bigger containers too, with, you know, tamper-evident snap closures, leak-proof low-density polyethylene. And I mean, make it thick! Like thirty-eight millimeters, which is the industry standard. Stuart, you and Herman both look like you fell out of your high chairs.”

Herman tried to contribute. “Maybe the tamper thing with plain water—”

“Tampering? Tampering is on the way. That’s all we have in America: tampering .”

At four, Paul went for a smoke behind the buildings. Guys from other plants were in the alleyway smoking too. Smoke in back, talk in your car, relieve yourself in the john; it was always something. Someday, all you’d do in these buildings would be work. But it was nice to get some air and see the sky at the top of the alley and enjoy the quiet glee he’d always felt, yes, even in prison where the patterned movements of the men were broken by hot spells of peril that had been, with some awful exceptions, an adventure.

He kept walking, soaking in the pleasures of what peered at him in the form of nature: mushrooms at the base of steel bins, an effulgent cloudscape way down toward the RV lot, children playing in front of a very run-down day care center, children soon to grow old, wave after wave of them in a town as ordinary as the flat earth, waxing, waning, pushing each other off the edge into the abyss and no God to care. But in the meanwhile, a rather rich and detailed picture! All of this, thought Paul, is why we must hunt down the wherewithal that held irritation at bay, not that it saved so much as an ant from oblivion, but for its anesthetic properties in a phenomenally bleak deal handed down to the human race by the Joker. However, money was another thing: Money brings us closer to nature.