Black Angus Read online

  But even that was not the full measure of their failure. As badly as they had misjudged the economy, they had fared no better when it came to understanding the nature of the Ozark people, the hillbillies of popular legend. For some reason it had never even occurred to Blanchard or Susan that the local people would be truly different from others they had known, people in Saint Louis and New York and in the suburbs and college towns where they had lived, in all the places they had traveled over the years. Oh, they knew the locals would speak differently, with a twang and all. And they expected many of the hillfolk to be more religious and less tolerant than city dwellers. But this after all was late in the twentieth century. The ranch was only a few hundred miles from Saint Louis, a few hundred from Tulsa, half that from Little Rock, and there were cars and telephones as well as television, the great leveler, Susan’s very own medium which for over a quarter century had been turning the world into McLuhan’s global village. So the two of them, with Whit, came innocent and unprepared, like Victorian English tourists expecting the Hottentots to serve afternoon tea. Well, they did not. Nor did they relate to big-city communicators turning to the soil for God knew what crackbrained reason.

  For almost a year Susan had tried, forcing herself to attend their Tupperware parties and PTA meetings and saying hello at the country grocery and the stores in town. But the result was always the same: stout, prim, corseted women in beehive hairdos not even giving her the backhand of civility, just the dull flat-out glare of contempt and even hatred, as an outsider, a city fool who talked uppity and wore pants all the time and did nothing with her hair, and above all, did not go to church.

  So, in time, Susan had given up. And getting lunch for Blanchard was a part of that giving up, a small part. Daily, in all the things left undone and unsaid, and now even in the bedroom, she made it clear that she would no longer participate in the charade, that the noble experiment was over and done and that their life together would not really resume until he gave in, until he quit and sold out and returned to the city. Somehow she was unable or unwilling to understand that it was not just money he was fighting for, but his life, his life as a man.

  Over an hour later Blanchard and Clarence were trying to dig the split railroad tie out of the ground so they could replace it with a new one and then rehang the headgate the bull had torn off. Unfortunately they had done too good a job putting the tie into the ground three years before, sinking it a yard deep and pouring around it a cement footing that measured over twelve inches in radius, which left them with a sizable hole to dig before they could hope to pull the post with a tractor. As usual in the hills, the going was rough, as much rock-breaking as digging, and they were soon sweat-drenched and silent except for the racket of their breathing. Also, as usual, they had an audience, Tommy squatting a few feet away anxiously waiting for Blanchard to ask for a new tool—shovel, pick, iron bar—which he would then quickly hand to him. In exchange Blanchard would give him a wink or smile and his brother’s clouded eyes would flare like a match in darkness.

  Blanchard only wished that he himself could have felt a similar happiness. It was not the kind of work any normal man would have enjoyed—it was too hard and too uncomfortable for that—but in addition he suffered the average American male’s anxiety about the soundness and reliability of his heart muscle. He had spent his prime decade, from his early twenties to early thirties, at a series of desk jobs interrupted by long martini lunches and occasional hiatuses of equally sedentary travel. He had smoked cigarettes since the age of sixteen. He drank vodka or scotch almost every day of his life. And ranch work was just not the same as keeping fit with regular daily exercise. The truly hard work came in fits and starts and in between a man often took it easy in the sure knowledge that his luck would not hold. If anything, the work made for toughness more than fitness, a willingness to live with pain and danger. But right now Blanchard was finding the living hard. His body was heavy with exhaustion, sweat burned his eyes, and he could feel the steady unnerving sprint of his heart.

  So when he saw Shea coming toward them from the house he felt almost grateful, knowing he would be able to take a break without initiating it, which usually meant having to listen to Clarence’s unsubtle gloating: You mean you tuckered already, a young feller like you?

  Shea looked reborn from the ruin in the “h’ard man’s” room, testimony to what a shave and shower and breakfast could do. His light curly hair was wet-combed and he was wearing his customary T-shirt, chinos, and sneakers. In the week he had been staying with Blanchard he had made a number of enemies, of whom Clarence was not the least. And he moved quickly now to reaffirm that enmity.

  “Hey, Clarence, my main man!”

  “I ain’t yer man or nobody else’s.”

  “What you doing down in that hole, boy?”

  “And I ain’t no boy neither, damn yer ass. And what’s it look like I’m doin’ here, for God sake!”

  “Exercising,” Shea said. “You’re keeping fit, right?”

  “He talks and talks and never says nothin’,” Clarence complained to Blanchard. “I never know what the hell he’s talkin’ about.”

  Shea’s lower lip puckered and trembled, as if he were an infant about to bawl. “Is that any way to talk to a pal?” he asked.

  “Pal, my ass!” Clarence wagged his head and spat tobacco juice.

  “All right, Shea,” Blanchard interrupted. “What can we do for you?”

  “I just wanted you to know, I had to raid your dresser. Your wallet. I needed a ten for gas.”

  “You got it out of my wallet?”

  Shea nodded. “Me and Willie Sutton, we go where the money is.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen, you remember that snotnose Pipkin who was at Darling with us? An art director on a couple of industrial accounts? You were there then.”

  Blanchard said he remembered the man.

  “Well, I hear he’s a partner in some small shop in Little Rock now. I thought I’d drive down and hit him for a few bills.”

  “Suppose he doesn’t hit so good?”

  “I’ll give him a choice, the bills or me.”

  “It might work at that.”

  “You bet it will.” Shea smiled oversweetly at Clarence. “Well, ta-ta, Clarence—I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “Aw, goddamn!”

  Smiling in spite of himself, Blanchard sat there in the halfdug hole watching as Shea lumbered off, toward the farmyard and his maroon Mark IV Continental, the one thing he had not left with Evelyn, probably because the finance company would have repossessed it by now. Next to Blanchard, Clarence had started to dig again, furiously.

  “You shore can pick ’em, mister,” he said. “That’s a crazy man, gittin’ money right out of yer wallet. Only a crazy man’d do that.”

  Blanchard had to agree. “Yeah, that’s going a bit far.”

  “And if he’s spongin’ off ya, how come he don’t work any, a big horse like that? He too good to work?”

  “I don’t imagine he’s ever done it, this kind of work.”

  “Jist make up words in advertisings, huh, that’s all he’s good fer?”

  A few days earlier Blanchard had explained to Clarence what kind of work Shea did. “No, he could do other things,” he said now. “He’s got a good education. He’s a college graduate.”

  “Then how come that’s all he does, make up advertisings?”

  “It’s interesting work. Pays good. And he’s good at it.”

  “Then how come he ain’t doing it?”

  “I don’t know, I guess he’d rather drink. And he doesn’t take the work seriously. Which bosses don’t like. They like to think what they do is important.”

  “Well, it’s their money, ain’t it?”

  “Not always.”

  “How long he been outa work?”

  “About a year and a half.”

  That made Clarence hoot. “Year and a half—by God, if that don’t beat
all! Why there’s all kinda jobs in the paper.”

  “Not his kind.”

  “Yeah, I bet not. He’s already got the kind he wants.”

  Clarence seemed satisfied with that final shot and renewed his digging. Blanchard had hit a shelf of rock and signaled Tommy for the iron bar, which he put to use as a kind of spear, plunging its sharp point down into the limestone to break it up. The work was harder than digging, was in fact about as hard as work could get. Nevertheless he kept at it and in time they had dug all the way around the cement base of the railroad tie. Clarence got the big John Deere and a log chain and they pulled the split tie out of the hole and dumped it. Instead of cementing a new one in—Blanchard did not have the money for extra touches like that now—they filled the hole around the tie with dirt and broken rock and tamped it solid. While they worked, Blanchard asked Clarence about Little Smith.

  “What you wanta know about him?”

  “You know his sister Ronda?”

  “Some.”

  “She’s a friend of mine.”

  “So I heard.”

  “She’s never said much about her brother, except he was in prison. And now he’s out, I hear. So I was just wondering.”

  Clarence took out his filthy red kerchief and mopped his face. In his eyes was a secret glee. “You was jist wonderin’, was ya?”

  “That’s right.”

  Lounging back against the tractor wheel, Clarence shot out a sliver of tobacco juice, then fastidiously licked a dribble at the corner of his mouth. “Well, I don’t know much about him,” he said, “except he’s bad news.”

  The boy never had anyone who could handle him, Clarence said, not his grandmother, who raised him, and not his teachers and not the law either. When he was “jist a sprout” the county had to take him away from the grandmother and place him with his cousins—why, Clarence never did know. And from then on “it was jist gangbusters.” Little got kicked out of grade school and never did bother to go on to high. Instead he started stealing cars, trucks, cattle, hogs—“whatever wasn’t nailed down.” The law kept arresting him and sending him away and he kept coming back and doing it all over again. And he was still in his teens when he showed his true colors, Clarence said. He and the Collins boy had been arrested for stealing a truck and loading it with cattle stolen from the sale barn, which they then sold in Springfield.

  “Well, old Harvey Crump, who worked at the sale barn, he was the sheriff’s only witness. He seen Little and this other kid do it, and he was gonna testify he did. Well, Little got out on bond—the Collinses wouldn’t lift a finger for their kid, said he needed a lesson, and he stayed in. But not Little. He got out and jist two days later, at the sale barn, we find old Harvey stripped naked, with his ass greased and sore and his head in a headgate—and git this—with a eartag, jist like a cow. Yessir, Little run that gizmo right through Harvey’s ear and tagged him.” Clarence wagged his head, wheezing laughter at the memory. “I was there. I seen him, old Harvey, buggered and eartagged. And, well, the sheriff couldn’t prove Little done it—his cousins alibied him and Harvey wouldn’t testify. He said someone passin’ through done it to him. So Little got off. But you know, Harvey jist couldn’t live with it, the shame, you know. It was too much. He hid out for a time, didn’t even show for work at the sale barn. And then one day he jist up and hung himself, right in his own barn. My brother Luke helped cut him down.”

  But that was about the only big thing Little had ever done, Clarence said. Other than that he had remained just a smalltime thief, that was all. Oh, there was a game warden who disappeared in the area and some folks said Little was the one who made him disappear. But Clarence doubted it.

  “He’d be too scared. One look at him and any fool can tell that. He’s just a gutless little thief, that’s all. I wouldn’t worry about him if I was you.”

  “I’m not,” Blanchard said. “I just asked, that’s all.”

  Clarence grinned. “Sure,” he said.

  They had finished with the post and were preparing to rehang the headgate when Blanchard saw Susan and Whit come out of the house, on their way to the doctor in Springfield. As he watched them cross the farmyard to the row of trees where the car was parked, he felt an odd and somehow irreversible sense of separation from them, as though they would not have heard him if he had called. Susan was wearing a short green dress and tan suede jacket with matching purse and shoes, a casual outfit she made seem elegant, like everything else about her, even her smooth, easy stride. But next to her Whit walked hunched over and tense, moving as if he were apologizing for something, possibly his existence. And Blanchard found himself wanting to drop what he was doing and run to Whit and tell him that it was not his fault, not any of it, and that it would all come right in the end, his father would see to that. But his father did not move.

  2

  That evening, after making them both a supper of hamburgers and fried potatoes, Blanchard treated Tommy to a shave and hair trim in the bathroom, always a big event in his brother’s life. Then he sat with him in the living room and watched a few hours of television, cop shows whose car chases invariably galvanized Tommy into imitation, causing him to get his tote bag and empty it onto the floor—all the Matchbox cars and tiny plastic men and guns, the thread spools and old toothbrushes and string and screws and rusty hinges and even walnuts and pecans left over from a past Christmas—picking through the clutter for the magical items that this time would fire his child’s mind and set him playing on the floor, creating his own drama in front of the forgotten one on television. Again like a child, only the commercials would distract him, claiming his attention for brief periods of instruction in the arts of treating bad breath and indigestion and rectal itch.

  For some reason Tommy always kept a safe distance from the TV set, possibly because he believed that the figures he saw in it were real people who lived there in miniature, in all their fury and violence. In any case, he never touched the dials, never even asked to see a different show. So Blanchard could only assume that, alone, his brother maintained the same distance, playing in the same place or just sitting there and watching the shows until he fell asleep finally, curling up on the floor where Blanchard or Susan would find him later, when they returned from wherever they had been. The fact that he would have been alone in a creaky old house on a hill in the trees, almost a mile from any neighbor, never seemed to bother him. At least he never mentioned it. Still Blanchard felt uneasy about leaving him, worrying most about the possibility of a fire, and what he would do in such an emergency.

  So when Blanchard left finally, driving his pickup down the long hill and turning onto the blacktop, he felt more anger and guilt than he did relief or anticipation. He should have stayed at home, he knew, both because of Tommy and because Susan had asked him to be there when she and Whit returned. But there had never really been any choice for him, never a moment when he had seriously considered not going to the Sweet Creek—and Ronda. The thought of going to bed with her later in her frightful mobile home was attraction enough, but it was not the only thing that drew him this night. Just as important was the simple fact of getting away, getting off the ranch, which lately seemed more and more a crucible designed solely for the purpose of testing his will to survive. And he was getting tired of the test. This night even the prospect of drinking with Rock County men and listening to their whining country-and-western music had a certain appeal. So as he drove on, pushing his rattling pickup along the narrow blacktop, between the twin walls of oak and cedar, he began to lose the feeling of guilt, just as he had on so many other nights in recent months. Once again, debt and ranch and family—and now brucellosis too—all of it fell steadily behind.

  The Sweet Creek Inn, named for the stream that ran behind it, was located on a gravel road, almost ten miles from his ranch. Pronounced sweet crick by the locals, it was one of four taverns in the county and served only beer and setups, no hard liquor at all. Nevertheless it was easily the most notorious of the four, p
ossibly because the building it occupied once had been a Southern Baptist church, a small clapboard structure with a cemetery on one side and the creek behind, almost as wide and deep as a river at that point and thus ideal for the old-fashioned baptizing the tiny church had carried out over the generations, until the congregation built a new cement-block edifice close to Rockton. Now only drunks took the plunge, often carrying rifles and shotguns, and spraying the surrounding woods with random fire, just as many of them had done in Vietnam, in case someone happened to be out there.

  There were seldom more than a dozen cars and pickups parked in front, under the flashing Blatz Beer sign, and this night ran true to form. Among them was Shea’s Continental, which Blanchard was not overjoyed at seeing, for it meant that his friend probably had scored a few hundred from Pipkin in Little Rock, and that in turn meant that he would not likely be sober for some time to come.

  Inside, the Sweet Creek Inn still had something of the look of a poor holy-roller church, that kind of crude, jerry-built, naked-lightbulb ambience endemic to the Ozarks, where almost everyone was his own architect, his own carpenter and electrician and plumber. While Blanchard admired this trait, the nonchalant versatility of the people, at the same time he had to admit that the phenomenon had created an esthetic blight of sorts, an architecture in which wallboard and Masonite and corrugated tin prevailed, superseding the picturesque log cabins and Arkansas native stone dwellings of an earlier era. Susan in fact maintained that the mobile home was the penultimate Ozark art form, all those sixty-foot double-wides precariously hugging the rock hillsides against that inevitable day when a spring storm would scatter their stapled walls and dollhouse bordello furniture across a dozen sections. Just you wait, Susan would tell him. If he thought suburban Saint Louis was a monstrosity, he should wait until these country folk got enough money to make their dreams real. Then the hills would be alive with the sound of Muzak, and all would be Day-Glo plastic, chartreuse and pink and orange.