Thomas Mcguane - Keep the Change

Well, thought Joe, at least it’s a beginning; we’ll gradually move old Smitty into position and then do the right thing. He watched Smitty and tried to get to the bottom of the combined helplessness and guile, without much luck. The signals of an old boozer like Smitty, thrown off by the cheesy deliquescence of the brain itself, were seldom instructive.

The glow of Astrid’s cigarette in the twilight of her room looked as cheerful as a Cub Scout campfire to Joe as he finished telling her the whole story. He leaned over from his straightback metal chair and lifted the cigarette from her lips. He hadn’t had a cigarette in almost a month. He was tempted to take a drag and told Astrid so. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s so hard to quit.” He could feel her easy thought. “God,” she said, “that’s a wonderful story. But you must have such complicated feelings about all this.”

“I’m working on it.”

Astrid began laughing. She was really laughing too hard. He leaned over and gripped her shoulders to steady her. The laughter made him nervous and he took her cigarette. He had to stick her cigarette way out in the corner of his own mouth to keep the smoke out of his eyes. Then her face began to glisten with tears. Anyway, she wasn’t laughing anymore. Joe sat off to one side, holding her cigarette for her.

“One of these days,” he said, “it’s going to get cold. And that beautiful white snow is going to come floating down.”

Joe arranged to buy an old iron woodstove from a rancher up toward the Musselshell River. It was in one of the livestock papers and he bought it very inexpensively, but he had to haul it himself. He took the flatbed truck and drove up through a vast expanse of bluish sage-covered hills. He went through two isolated hamlets, huddled with their Snow Cats and hay sleds piled outside in the heat. One little town had a bar the size of a single-car garage and a log post office that seemed dwarfed by its wind-whipped flag. He drove up to the edge of a stand of lodgepole pines bordered by a big buffalo grass pasture. Someone was burning ditches and high above the column of smoke a blue heron soared, trailing its legs, looking for its accustomed lowlands. Old black automobile tires hung on the fenceposts, painted Keep Out as a small log house was approached. The house sat low and defensive behind a field of discarded machinery: old iron wheels, wooden spokes, and last year’s winter kill dragged out among the disarray — hides over skeletons, decomposing calves.

An old man answered the door, a glass of whiskey in one hand, his stomach hanging over the top of his pants and chew dribbling out the corners of his mouth. He had hairy nostrils and small, crinkled eyes. “Here for the stove?”

“Yeah, I am.” Joe got the money out of his shirt and reached it to him.

“Thank you much,” said the old man.

“There’s a Farmhand on the Minneapolis-Moline. You load that thing on your own?”

“You bet.”

The old man narrowed the doorway. He scrutinized Joe. “Sonny Starling wouldn’t be your daddy, would he?”

“Yes, sir, that he was,” Joe said. The old man nodded and thought.

“He was a hand, really what you’d call a pretty hand.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” said Joe.

“But the bank took all the pretty out of your old man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He come in and ruint me in ’fifty-six. I never made her back. That bank just took Sonny and made him into an entirely different feller.”

Joe had heard this sort of thing before.

“Well, let me get loaded out of here,” he said.

“That’s a hell of a way to get ahead in the world.”

“Maybe,” said Joe, “but anyway, he’s dead.”

“Good,” said the old man.

Joe threw himself into loading the stove. He lowered it onto the flatbed with the Farmhand and boomed it down with some chain he had brought along for the purpose. Evidently the old man didn’t need it anymore. He had a better one or he’d gone to electric or gas. Joe started back. When he was nearly home, he saw a pickup truck pulled off the interstate next to the barbed wire. A man stood next to a horse whose head hung close to the ground. The man looked quite helpless and Joe sensed the horse was at the end of the line. It was at this point that his eyes finally filled with tears.

Joe drove to Billings on Tuesday to meet with an attorney for the Continental Divide Insurance Company. He dressed in a coat and tie and parked the old flatbed far enough away to dissolve association with it by the time he reached the office. He was early.

He walked into the Hart-Albin store to use up a few minutes and collect his thoughts. He strolled through the toiletries section, admiring the beautiful young women who sold perfumes and intimate soaps, and who tried the delicate atomizers on one another. He sprayed some sample cologne on himself. The glass display cases revealed an Arabic world of indulgence. He tried more cologne. He invented biographies for the salesladies. Reared on hog farms or in the families of railroad mechanics, each greeted her discovery by the perfume manager with an effulgent blossoming. He politely tested one last cologne with a sweaty squeeze of the bulb. A musky, faraway penumbra engulfed him, quite startling in its power.

Time to go to the lawyer. He crossed the street, walked half a block north, and entered the offices. He announced himself to the secretary and immediately the lawyer, Gene Bowen, appeared at his door and gestured Joe inside with a handful of papers. Bowen was a lean, harried-looking man, plainly bright and short of time.

Bowen moved around behind his desk. Joe sat in a comfortable chair in front of it. Bowen rested his chin on his hands and let Joe begin. “My Uncle Smitty, Smith Starling—”

“Yes,” said Bowen decisively, suddenly wrinkling his nose. Joe was astonished at the lawyer’s reaction to the mention of Smitty’s name. “Is that you? What is that?” Then Joe understood Bowen’s reaction.

“Canoe.”

“You what?”

“Canoe. It’s a cologne. And a couple of others. Musk was one.”

“Very well. Go ahead. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“My Uncle Smitty—”

“Would you be offended if I opened a window?”

“Not at all.”

Bowen got up and struggled with the window behind his desk without freeing it. “I’m gonna end up with a fucking hernia—”

“Here, let me help.”

They got on either side of the window and heaved upward as hard as they could. Bowen pulled his face to one side and wrinkled his nose fiercely. “It’s not as if it was some kind of animal droppings,” Joe said.

The bottom of the window casement tore free; wood fragments and dried putty flew across Bowen’s desk. His finger was bleeding. He walked around and opened his door. “Let that air out while I get a Band-Aid.”

The secretary poked her head in. “What’s going on in here?”

“We had a little trouble with the window.”

“I’d better ring up maintenance.” Turning to Joe, she asked, “May I ask what you’re wearing?”

Joe was getting angry. “I mixed a few scents, trying them out. But socially speaking, I’ve had better luck shitting my pants.”

Bowen returned and went straight to his desk. “Leave that open, Mildred,” he said to the secretary, pointing at the door. “Let’s try to bear down and get through this as fast as we can. Okay, ‘Smitty’ is your uncle. Smitty’s got his tail in a crack. You want to help Smitty. Why?”

“I have an aunt who I like very much. She depends on him. They are like a little couple.”

“They are.”

“Yes.”

“And what does she do?”