Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

Smithwick’s father, Neville Senior, had hired Dulcie to do away with his son’s virginity on the pretext of Neville Junior’s interviewing her for a job, during which exchange Junior was meant to succumb to her erotic overtures. This scheme Neville Junior absorbed but dimly. Rather than be frustrated by his obtuseness, Dulcie quite sensibly went about her day, with Neville in tow so that, should the project collapse, she’d at least get a few errands out of the way.

When she introduced Neville to her father, her father said in a not particularly friendly, half-joshing way, “I may have to give Neville a haircut.”

“You and what army?” said Neville.

Orval seemed to sober up. He was pushing sixty but still wore pointed underslung cowboy boots that aggravated his arthritic gait. The snap buttons on his polyester Western shirt were undone around the melon of his small, protruding stomach, the underside of which was cut into by the large old buckle he’d won snowmobiling. He gave off an intense tobacco smell, and his gaze seemed to bounce off Neville to a row of trees in the distance.

“Well. Come in and set, then. If you get hungry, I’ll bet you Dulcie’d cook something up.”

“I don’t eat anything with a central nervous system.”

“You what?”

Mr. Jones twisted the front doorknob and kneed the door over its high spot as they went indoors. Dulcie was pleased to have caught her father early. It was only a matter of time before he would begin asking, “Will this day never end?”

Orval brought Neville a Grain Belt and Neville thanked him politely. “You seem like a well-brought-up feller,” said Orval Jones.

“I’m a virgin,” said Neville. This remarkable statement was true. But Neville had developed expectations, based on some exceedingly provocative suggestions by Dulcie, which were not so completely lost on him as Dulcie had imagined. From his vast store of secondhand information, he had concluded that he was about to hit pay dirt—3D adult programming. In fact, she told him he’d need a condom and, in the resulting confusion, stopped at Roundup to help him pick one. But, once inside the drugstore, he embarrassed her by asking if they were one-size-fits-all, like a baseball hat, and then balked when the clerk explained he had to buy them as a three pack. Neville told him that the thought made him light-headed.

Orval was on the sofa and seemed defeated by Neville’s very existence. Nevertheless, he made a wan attempt at conversation. His jeans had ridden up over the top of his boots to reveal spindly white legs that seemed to take up little room in the boots, just sticks is all they were. The terrible bags under his eyes gave the impression that he could see beyond the present situation.

“Neville, you say you come from a banking background.”

“Foreground.”

“Ha-ha. You’ve got a point. And do you — uh, actually work at the bank too?”

“Hell, no.”

“Hell, no. I see. And what do you do?”

“TV.”

“TV sales?”

“I watch TV. Ever heard of it?”

“I suppose that should’ve been my first guess.”

“Uh, yeah. ”

Neville had learned from television that remorseless repartee was the basis of genial relations with the public. He really meant no harm, but not having any friends might have alerted him to the dangers of this approach. The appearance of harmlessness disguised the violence he had inside him and would save him from ever being held accountable for its consequences, when he quite soon gave it such full expression. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Neville Senior managed the Southeast and Central Montana Bank; he was a genuinely upright and conventional individual who worked hard and played golf. His wife had died some years ago, so he had had charge of Neville Junior from early on. In the winter, he went once a month to St. George, Utah, fighting Mormons for tee times, and returned refreshed for work. He was a happy, well-balanced, thoughtful man who had accepted the work ethic he’d been raised with and which caused him to spend too little time with his only child. Their prosperous life was such that there were no duties that his son could be assigned that would instill the father’s decent values. And he didn’t want him on the golf course with his various hairdos. Walking down North 27th in Billings with his tax attorney, he once passed a youth with pink, blue, and green hair not so different from Neville Junior’s. “When I was in the navy,” the attorney said, “I had sex with a parrot. Could that be my child?”

Neville Junior worried him. The boy had been raised by a television set, as his father readily admitted. It was bad enough that his language and attitudes came directly from shows he’d seen; he seemed to have found sufficient like-minded companions to keep him from questioning his way of life. What was unsettling was that long after his age would have made it appropriate, Neville Junior had failed to show any interest in girls. As the nice-looking son of a bank president, he should have been cutting a wide swath. Girls liked him and came around to watch TV with him; girls that sent his father’s mind meandering in ways inappropriate to his age and state. His frequent attempts to catch his son in flagrante delicto resulted only in an invitation to join the couple innocently watching the late movie. It was not so many years ago that he himself had boogied under the strobes of big cow-town discos where today’s dowagers once wriggled in precopulatory abandon.

For a banker, Neville Senior was remarkably free of malice, and his great wish was to overcome the gap of loneliness that lay between him and his heir. It’s possible that he imagined that bringing Neville Junior into the randy orbit that seemed to include everyone but Neville Junior would have the effect of giving the two some ordinary common ground upon which they could begin to talk like a couple of guys. Boning up on TV Guide, as he had once done, proved futile. Real watchers like Neville Junior had a subtle language not easily penetrated by poseurs. He just stared when his father asked if there was anything good on tonight.

“Neville,” said the father, “two things: I wish I’d been a better parent.”

“You’ve been all right. Don’t sweat it. What’s the second?”

“Sex,” barked Senior. “Why aren’t you interested in sex?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dad. Virginity is no disgrace. At least it keeps you from weighing sixty pounds and being covered with giant sores.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“It only has to be that way once, and you can count me out.”

“It should be seen as a gift, a gift of love and joy that perpetuates the race.”

“Perpetuates the race? Are people still in favor of that?”

“I don’t know how you’ve become so cynical at your age.”

“You can’t accept that I’m happy, can you?”

“Are you?”

“Considering the cards I’ve been dealt.”

“Have they been such bad cards?”

“You tell me.”

“I guess I can’t.”

“Just because you named me after yourself doesn’t mean I have to turn out like you.”

“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be any good.”

“I’m not saying that. Different isn’t good or bad. It’s different is all it is. Get it?”

“You could change your name. I’d understand.”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve never thought of myself as Neville.”

“What have you thought of yourself as?”

“Karl.”

“With a C?”

“With a K.”

Much later, when Neville Senior had decided that life was not worth living, he would give this Karl-with-a-K idea a final thought.

From his suite at the Northern Hotel, as a summer sun descended on city streets blue with heat, pressed in upon by angular store-fronts and shade-hunting pedestrians, Neville Senior called an escort service. Given that the city police had been recruiting undercover officers lately to nab concupiscent johns, this was risky business, but Neville Senior believed the scrutiny was directed at streetwalkers and so he felt relatively safe, if a bit frightened. Anyway, when it came to your own flesh and blood, risk was unavoidable. He had cash, plenty of it, and he intended to buy Neville Junior out of his dubious virginity and joyless view of things. More than that, he wanted to buy him the high road to the human race, which in his view was bound together more by fornication than anything else. In his life, courtship was fornication, life was fornication, and grief revealed but one road back to the light of day and that was fornication. The only answer to life’s complexity: fornication.