Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

Dulcie was at the station house turning in her expense receipts, principally gas, motel, along with film, when they brought Neville Senior in for booking. He stared at her as they tugged him past. The cop at the desk didn’t even look up as he stapled her chits to a large sheet. So Dulcie in effect spoke to no one when she said, “He bonds out, he settles, the beat goes on.”

When Neville Senior dragged himself through the front door that night, Neville Junior was there to console him, having heard all about what had happened to his father on the local news. They fell into each other’s arms. Senior’s heart was overflowing, while Junior felt he was in a school play in which he had memorized the lines without knowing what he was saying.

Finally, Senior spoke. “I was lonely.”

“Mom’s dead,” said Junior, in his odd blank way.

Neville’s father explained his scheme so that his son at least would know that he hadn’t been on some unseemly quest for his own carnal pleasure.

He had offered Neville Junior numerous pets in the years since his mother’s death, hoping that greater familiarity with animals might help him understand his father’s urges — and expenses! — but that had come to nothing, as Neville Junior found animals to be little more than a stream of unpredictable images and therefore unsettling. The dog was given away, the cat was given away, and the hamster bit an extension cord and was electrocuted.

“That Dulcie sure is mean!” he now cried. “It’s just not right, Dad. I’m going to pay her back.”

When the newspaper published his name as a patron of whores, Neville Senior lost his job at the bank. We’ve all been there, his friends and former colleagues told him, but they hadn’t, nor had they forfeited their homes to their own bank as he had, though he was allowed to keep the rather fussy furniture his late wife had chosen. In time, that too would be sold and the funds applied to a rental house on the south side of town, where the homeless walking on their battered patch of lawn reminded the Smithwicks of just what might be next.

Senior’s friends had got him a job as assistant greenskeeper at his old golf club, where the summer heat frequently laid him low as he tried to perform work for which he had little training. He was one of eighteen assistants, and when the chief learned the bunker crew on which he’d placed Neville Senior was ridiculing him with requests for car loans or mortgages, he reassigned him to moisture sampling, which allowed Senior to wander the golf course alone with probe and notebook under a hard prairie sun. The greenskeeper himself took subtle pleasure in lording it over someone who had fallen through the invisible ceiling that had separated them for so many years. A former caddie replaced by electric carts, he understood perhaps better than Neville Senior ever had how perilous is all employment, though as a working-man it was unlikely society would bother to take away his job for consorting with prostitutes, as there wasn’t enough class separation to produce a stirring fall. In many places, whores were now “sex workers” moving freely between golf courses and no-tell motels like any other independent contractors.

Neville Junior’s habits remained little changed, except that because of the danger of muggings his former acquaintances were reluctant to visit him. Since his father had not shared his plan to commit suicide, there was no reason for Neville Junior to imagine a time when the television would be shut off and he would have to bestir himself should he wish to eat or be sheltered from the weather. His father’s decision was based equally on his failed career and his now-accepted inability to communicate with his son at any level.

He made his departure as uneventful as possible. For two straight days he watched shows with his only child, including uplifting sitcoms, sitcom reruns, and sitcom pilots that were seeing the light of day that very night. An agnostic, he retained a faint hope, magnified by overpowering loneliness, of meeting his late wife and that gave him the courage — indeed, a certain merry determination — to gas himself in the garage. Before he went there to seal the windows and start the car, he needed final confirmation and so he returned to the living room, whose shabbiness was emphasized by the prissy furniture. The back of Neville Junior’s head was outlined against the square of light of the television. “Tomorrow, I’ll be gone,” he said, but his son didn’t hear him. “Goodbye, Karl.” The consequences began: the discovery of the body, the unattended funeral, the eviction of Neville Junior, and the loss of all things familiar to him, including those he cared for most: the smell of lilacs and spring perennials filling the air, the sounds of pickup baseball in the park a few blocks away, and television.

Dulcie Jones’s days were numbered.

On the Fourth of July, four months after the passing of Neville Senior, Orval looked up the dirt road in front of his house toward the Cheyenne car garden, the crooked line of telephone poles, the mud puddles mirroring blue sky and thundercloud silhouettes, the watchful hawk in the chokecherry thicket, and saw a willowy man in old clothes coming toward him, a man whose still-dark beard and bounding gait marked him as younger than his apparent circumstances might have suggested. Orval sensed he was coming to see him, and indeed he was. There was no reason for him to know that this was Neville Junior, or to know what brought young Neville to his ranch.

He removed his hat rather formally on arrival at Orval’s porch, the hair under it looking wet and plastered down close around his small skull, while Orval eyed him suspiciously from his rocking chair. Neville’s well-cared-for teeth gleamed through his beard, whose black bristles falsely suggested a hard life. “Mister,” he said, “I’m in a bad way. Throwed a rod here a mile or two back and didn’t have the do-re-mi to get it fixed. I need a job.” Neville had the Appalachian accent routinely heard in Westerns down pat.

“Not hiring.”

“A little sumpin’ to eat, place to sleep, and a TV; wouldn’t have to pay me.”

“Wouldn’t have to pay you? What exactly is it you want to do for free gratis?”

“I’d work, but like I say you’d need to train me.”

“But not pay you?”

“You heard right, mister. Just those things I mentioned.”

The two swept out the old milk house, which had a two-stage concrete floor and a place for the creek to run through, though the creek had been diverted long ago and the room was dry enough. Then they assembled an iron bed and rolled out a thin mattress, which they beat until the room filled with dust. “No telling what’s been living in here,” said Orval, with an ingratiating smile. Neville threw up his hands in wonder. “But I guess that’ll do you. Gon’ have to.”

“TV.”

“What’s that?”

“I said TV.”

“I hadn’t got but one and it’s up to my house.”

“I told you when we started in on this,” hissed Neville, “that I’d require a TV.”

The reception was exceptionally poor in the milk house, but by adding aluminum foil to the rabbit ears they were able to get two channels, one all snowy with Greer Garson. The tension seemed to go out of Neville’s body as he told Orval to call him for supper and then settled down on the pipe bed for some viewing, ignoring the dust that continued to rise and the perhaps-too-vigorous closing of the door by Orval.

In the morning, Orval was determined to see if he could get his money’s worth out of this man, who had introduced himself as Karl “with a K.” He could tell right away that Karl meant to stay, as he hurled himself into shoveling out the calving shed, a job requiring no experience whatsoever but a strong tolerance for grueling repetition. At one point, he went at this with such demonic energy that it caused Orval to tell him whoa-up, he had all day. Neville wiped his forehead, leaned on the shovel, and asked Orval if he had any family, smiling as he heard about Dulcie as though for the first time. Today he’d parted his hair in the middle, and with the dark beard he had the appearance of an old-time preacher, someone who could talk about Jesus with plausible familiarity. Orval thought he’d have to find him some other clothes if he worked out, something brighter, because he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the preacher look. There was always one going up the road with a Bible in the glove box supposedly to convert the dump bears but probably to check out the little squaws.