Thomas Mcguane - Keep the Change

“You know something?” she said in an admiring tone. “That’s really funny, it really is. Are you all right?” Calmness began to pass over him, slowly, then it took hold. They agreed. It was funny. He was covered with sweat. He staggered to his feet, coming back to the world from an enormous distance. He could take her hand with simplicity. They could agree on going into her place.

“Here I fuck her brains out!” came the thought and he was on his stomach again.

“Joe, the neighbors are going to think you’ve flipped.” He kept laughing. I’d just like to get me a little, was his final thought, recited in the decade-old voice of Slater as she stepped over his convulsed body and went back to work.

He didn’t really want to think about the source of these hysterics. He knew down inside it was Astrid. She was using that santería on him from afar, that Cuban voodoo. She had left her prints in his mind and they weren’t to be removed that easily. He did feel foolish. He felt that way for a week. He didn’t try to see anyone. He didn’t want to overdo his certainty about the cause of all this inadequacy. Then Ellen came on Saturday and took him touring. They went west for a couple of hours, with the sun behind them, in her car. She pretty much took the situation in hand; she got the room and they made love very happily. She didn’t come across to him as starved or needy but a strong appetite was very evident. He was more used to the intricacies of staging and circumstance.

They were driving home in a distinct aftermath. Joe turned onto the main highway, bearing his palm down on the wheel and giving it a stylish whirl.

“Is this a good time to talk about Clara?” Joe asked.

“No, it is not.”

The weather vacillated between blowing rain and infrequent openings of the sky to a higher world. Along the lower Madison, the hills angled toward the southeast were reared up into the oncoming weather and the wet clouds hung over the lower mesas and plateaus near the channels of the river. A cement truck labored along the frontage road.

Then the sun came out and in a short time there was not a cloud in the sky. But the road was still soaking wet and the car filled with the smell of rain and summer.

“I just can’t understand why I did that,” said Ellen, “when I’m trying to make a sincere effort to save my marriage.”

They drove on for a while. Joe turned on the radio but it immediately seemed offensive and he shut it off. There was a great long bench at the south end of the Crazy Mountains that looked like a partly opened scallop shell. You could see all the blue of haze and sage and ditch-burning from here and minute sparkles of runoff from a distance, water carrying everything downward.

“Stop someplace,” Ellen said, “I want to do it again.” Joe took the first ranch exit and spiraled up above the interstate until he could see out in all directions for miles. The wind had the grass laid flat and a band of antelope drifted like a shadow of clouds. They undid each other’s clothes and Joe slid toward her away from the wheel. She straddled him and pulled him into herself. “Jesus,” she said, “I can’t seem to stop.” There was a delicious grotesquery as she pounded into him. He could see his hair and forehead in the rearview mirror jarring with her motion. He was being levitated. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the sky, the distance, out of his memories. “Watch my face,” she said. Her eyes seemed to close and sink as he joined her. He felt a wet circle of bone and sinew stretch down over him. Her mouth fell open and a groan of despair arose from far inside her.

When they got onto the highway again, she said in an exhausted voice, “Just drive.”

This was enough to set Joe on a kind of dream in which the details of the road, the steadily expanding immediate memories, the cornucopia of bright new prospects all flowed together in a sort of narcosis. Joe pictured, in an extremely vague setting, a kind of life with Ellen and Clara. There seemed to be a convenient flow of pavement from the interstate to their exit and from their exit to Ellen’s street. Indeed, they were nearly to the house when she cried, “Stop!” in a voice so startling that Joe slammed on the brakes. “It’s my husband,” she said. Joe expected a sinking feeling but got none. He was actually excited to get a look at Billy again.

But then the car in front of Ellen’s house pulled out.

“I guess we’re safe,” Joe said. “He’s leaving.”

“Follow him,” said Ellen.

“Follow him?”

“You heard me.”

This last seemed so peremptory that Joe started after the car, a Plymouth Valiant, in a very uncertain state. They went down past the city park and turned toward the river. They left the older, prim homes of the town and entered a district of split levels and unfinished wood, of newly sodded lawns with dark green seams where the strips met the day lawn arrived. Billy’s car stopped and Joe stopped, perhaps a half block behind. Ellen was slumped to dash level.

“He’s after that bitch again,” she hissed. “And look how he’s dressed!”

Billy Kelton threw his legs out, then unreeled himself from the car. He was still the striking-looking, lanky cowboy Joe remembered, and he looked as capable as ever of giving Joe a good thrashing. Joe couldn’t see anything abnormal in the way he was dressed. He loped to the house. He had no chance to knock on the door: a slender arm thrust it open and he vanished without any change in his stride. Ellen unlatched the door to Joe’s car.

“I’ve had it up to here,” she said. “Can’t thank you enough.”

Ellen got out of the car, walked up in front of the house as forthright as a hostess and got into Billy’s car. She started the engine and blew the horn. In a moment, Billy emerged from the house and walked over, eyes downcast. He lifted the straw hat from his head, wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve, and replaced the hat. He stood by the car. He talked without raising his eyes. He rested the tips of his fingers on the side of the car and his eyes started to elevate. Some relief was in sight. He bent slightly and looked inside. He smiled suddenly. He leaned inside for a kiss. Then there was a bit of distress. Ellen had evidently rolled his head up in the electric window. The car pulled forward and Billy was dragged a few yards. Then the car stopped for more negotiation. He was dragged once more and released. Rubbing his neck and turning his head to one side, he walked around to the passenger’s door and got in. As they drove away together, Joe watched the car intensely, certain that it would stop again, and Ellen would get out. But it just didn’t happen. At least, Billy hadn’t spotted him.

That night, Joe reflected on all this as he watched the Miss Universe contest. Miss Chile won. As the other contestants, in their terrible feigned happiness at her victory, covered Miss Chile with kisses, leaving red marks like wounds, her tiara was knocked askew. The camera caught the brief instant in which Miss Chile looked like a buffoon, a moment deftly corrected when Bob Barker rearranged the tiara with a self-deprecating shrug and grin, and with the nonchalance of one who adjusted ten thousand tiaras a day. It was late and Joe was tired.

Ralph of Ralph’s Repair died. Joe couldn’t exactly remember him but evidently he’d repaired some things for him in the past. Lureen called and said that she and Smitty had legal business in Billings and would Joe be kind enough to represent the family at the funeral. Ralph was cremated and an old couple in almost matching light blue pantsuits came out from Yakima for the jar. “Do you know those people?” asked Mary Lynn Anderson, the piano teacher from Rapelje. Mary Lynn had recently been dried out at the Rimrock Foundation in Billings and she had this maddening energy, a real born-again quality that was entirely trained on making up for lost time. She wore a cotton checked shirt of pale green that set off her tanned arms. She used to look religious when she was drinking, spiritually enraptured, but dried out she looked oversexed.