Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

“You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” Dave asked with surprising coldness. He could see things going his way.

“A hundred percent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already being in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there with stakes like this.”

“Like what kind of risk?”

“Death threats, the usual. Heard them all my life. But think about it, Dave. I’m not in if you’re not. You really want to return to what you were doing? We’d both be back in that hotel with the comets.”

Ray was soon snoring. Dave was intrigued that these revelations, not to mention the matter of the “gun,” had failed to disturb Ray’s sleep. Dave meanwhile was wide awake, and he began to realize why: the nagging awareness of his own life. So many risks! He felt that Ray was a success despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. What had Dave accomplished? High school. What could have been more painful? Yet, he suffered no more than anyone else. So even in that he was unexceptional. There was only generic anguish, persecution, and lockdown. He didn’t have sex with a mansion tour guide. His experience came on the promise of marriage to a fat girl. Then there was the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. A commanding officer who told the recruits that “the president of the United States is a pencil-wristed twat.” Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Black Hawks. “Human resource” assistant. Praying for deployment against worldwide towelheads. Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. Meaner, too. Threatening him with a baby. And he was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop who was his dealer in eighth grade. Never enough money and coveralls with so much cow shit he had to change Laundromats every two weeks.

It was perhaps surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he did: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. Dave took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside (would have been more fun in Ray’s Trans Am) with a special skill set, detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records, all easily learnable; and Dave brought art to it. Though he had no idea where that gift had come from, he was a genius preg tester. Straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proved in spring calves, was renowned. His excitement began as soon as he put on the coveralls, pulled on the glove lubed up with OB goo, before even approaching the chute. With the tail held high in his left hand, he’d push his right all the way in against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveling out the manure to clear the way, over the cervix before grasping the uterus, now that he was in nearly up to his shoulder. Dave could detect a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He liked the compliments that came from being able to tell the rancher how far along the cow was, anywhere from two to seven months, according to Dave’s informal system: mouse, rat, cat, fat cat, raccoon, Chihuahua, beagle. He’d continue until he’d gone through the whole herd or until his arm was exhausted. Then he had only to toss the glove, write up the invoice, and look for food and a room.

Perfect. Except for the dough.

Morsel made breakfast for the men — eggs with biscuits and gravy. At the table, Dave was still assessing Ray’s claim of reaching his last dime back at Jordan, which didn’t square with the rolls of bills in his pack. And Dave was watching Weldon watching Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove. “Anyone want to go to Billings Saturday and see the cage fights?” she said at last, moving from the stove to the table with a dish towel. Dave alone looked up and smiled; no one answered her. Ray was probing the food with his fork, still under Weldon’s scrutiny. The salt-encrusted sweat stain on Weldon’s black Stetson went halfway up the crown. It was downright unappetizing in Dave’s view and definitely not befitting any customer for topdrawer bull semen. Nor did he look like a man whose daughter was selling dope at the Bakken, either.

At last Weldon spoke as though calling out to his livestock.

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Ray.”

“Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”

“Daddy, leave Ray alone. There’ll be plenty of time to get acquainted and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”

Weldon continued to eat without seeming to hear Morsel. Meanwhile, Dave was making a hog of himself and hoping he could finish Ray’s breakfast, though Ray by now had seen the light and was eating the biscuits from which he had skimmed the gravy with the edge of his fork. He looked like he was under orders to clean his plate until Morsel brought him some canned pineapple slices. Ray looked up at her with what Dave thought was genuine affection. She said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment Dave stuck his fork back in the food, she raised a hand in his face and said, “I mean: that’s all you can eat!” and laughed. Dave noticed her cold blue eyes, and for the first time he thought he understood her.

She smiled at Ray and said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick.” Weldon ceased his rhythmic lip pursing.

“Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

“C’mon, Daddy, give you a dollar.”

“Okay Mor’, put on the music.” A huge sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool, Clear Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers. At first gently swaying to the mournful dehydration tune, Weldon seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began, luring a poor desert rat named Dan to an imaginary spring. Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and with sinuous movements balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record, when Dan the desert rat hallucinates green water and trees, whereupon the peanut dropped to the table, and Weldon just stared at it in disappointment. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and, dropping his napkin on his chair, left the room. For a moment it was quiet. Dave felt he’d never seen anything like it.

“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record. But,” she said glumly, thumbing hair off her forehead as she cleared the dishes and went into the living room to straighten up, “me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It ain’t pretty and it’s expensive.” Soon they heard Weldon’s airplane cranking up, and Morsel called from the living room, “Daddy’s always looking for them cows.”

Dave had taken care to copy the information in Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and stashed inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed to Billings for the cage fights. She’d left Dave directions to the Indian small-pox burials, in case he wanted to pass the time hunting for beads. But at this point, by failing to flee in his own car, Dave admitted to himself that he had become fully invested in Ray’s scheme. So he seized the chance to use his cell phone and 411 connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she presently claimed to be, his widow. It took two tries a couple of hours apart. On the first, he got her answering machine, “You know the drill: leave it at the beep.” On the second, he got Mrs. Ray. He had hardly identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service when she interrupted him to state in a voice firm, clear, and untouched by grief that Ray was dead. “That’s what I told the last guy, and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said he had been embezzling from a credit union before he left a suicide note and disappeared.