Bad Company (8 page)

“Yes,” said Stover, “we were at the institute together.” Like there was only one institute in the world.

“Was Edna expecting a visit from you?” Sally inquired.

Stover gave her a look that asked what business it was of hers. “As a matter of fact, no. I don’t have a fixed itinerary, so I can’t commit to being anyplace in particular at any given time. But as it happened, a California colleague I’ve been planning to hook up with is here this week, so I thought I’d drop in. Edna told me in Princeton that I should look her up if I ever got out West. When I called and the girl asked if I’d be willing to fill in as house-sitter, it just seemed like it was meant to be.”

Weird. “So it doesn’t matter to you whether Edna’s here or not?”

“Naturally,” said Stover, “I’d like to see her. I was hoping to talk with her about my current project.”

Now Sally was supposed to ask him about his work. “Your project?” she inquired obligingly.

“I’m an experimental ethnographer,” he said, as if he were saying, “I’m a farmer.”

“I’m part of the Insurgency.”

First an institute; now an insurgency. “Yes?” Sally prodded.

“Surely you’ve heard of the Insurgency?”

“Something to do with Central American revolutions?” Sally tried.

Stover chuckled maddeningly. “Only as intellectual fellow traveling,” he said, illuminating nothing and obviously talking for his own benefit. He looked as if he didn’t think she understood a word he said, and cared not a bit whether she did. “This summer I’m developing a concept that will destroy, once and for all, the confining canons of ethnographic fieldwork.”

“Destroying the canons?” Sally asked. With guys like Sheldon Stover, you could appear to make conversation simply by repeating combinations of words they’d just said, but phrasing them as questions. The tactic had gotten her through more academic cocktail parties than she cared to remember. Edna too was a master of getting through cocktail parties, but she wasn’t known for her easy sufferance of blockheads. Sheldon Stover could not actually be a friend of hers.

“Exactly,” said Stover, shifting into lecture mode. “Consider the phrase ‘ethnographic fieldwork.’ ‘Ethno’— having to do with a folk or tribe or culture, all terms we’ve come to hold in disrepute. ‘Graphic’—asking questions and writing down answers and observations about folk life or culture. But as postmodernists have proven, nobody ever gives answers to questions that the questioner can really understand. And writing down oral traditions, or trying to describe visual or material symbols or objects, simply deadens living things. ‘Field’—it implies that there’s something ‘out there,’ as opposed to the observer’s perspective. A highly suspect notion. And, of course, ‘work.’ Here in the modern, industrialized world, we’ve divided the undifferentiated flux of experience into artificial categories—‘work’ and ‘play’ for example.”

“Or day and night,” Sally offered.

“Yes, that’s right,” Stover nodded indulgently. “Stark dichotomies. Utterly Western and arbitrary. My summer project is to reveal the subjectivities at work in all these canonical notions.”

Was he knave as well as fool? “So, if I get this straight, this summer you’re just rambling around wherever and whenever you please, not observing, not asking questions, not writing, and above all, not working. Very insurgent.”

“Why yes,” said Stover. “Have you read Roland Barthes?”

Sally’d had enough. “How long are you planning to stay?” she asked, knowing and dreading the answer.

Stover looked skyward, his patience taxed. “I guess you don’t really get it.”

“Get this,” said Sally. “I am hereby asserting my authority as Wyoming agent for Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood, who own what we literal-minded souls would refer to as ‘this house.’ I could kick you out. In fact, I probably should kick you out. But by now every motel between Cheyenne and Rawlins is probably booked solid. Maybe you should just ease on down the road, huh?”

“Actually,” said Stover, “I need to be in town a few more days. It’s not just that I want to see this colleague. I’m having my last fellowship check forwarded to general delivery in Laramie.”

“You’re broke?” Sally asked, unnecessarily.

“Just a little cash flow problem,” Stover explained cheerfully. “I’m sure it’ll be solved shortly.”

Uh-huh. Sally sighed. “All right. You can stay, for the moment. I’ll email Edna and let her know you’re here, but if I don’t hear from her by this weekend indicating otherwise, I’ll expect you to leave. And you stay only on the conditions that you keep the place clean, water the yard, and don’t have any guests of your own.”

She put the potsherds down on Edna’s desk, found a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote down her phone number. “Call me if you need anything, and be sure to let me know before you take off. I’ll drop by from time to time, just to make sure things are going okay. And you leave absolutely no later than Sunday, unless Edna writes and tells me to let you stay. Understand, Mr. Stover?”

“It’s Dr. Stover, but you can call me Sheldon, Susie,” he said. “I don’t believe in hierarchical designations of rank.”

“It’s Sally, but you can call me Dr. Alder,” she said. “I do.”

Chapter 7
Busted Breaks and Bad Rhythm

Sally left Edna and Tom’s and stopped by the house to pick up her guitar, leaving Mr. Skittles to explore the inside of her Mustang and assuring herself that he wouldn’t pee on the floor. Then she headed over to Delice’s in the hope that Jerry Jeff would be there. JJ was in some regards a typically feckless teenage boy, but he was known to be a sucker for animals. Sally figured that by the time Delice got home from work, Mr. Skittles would be fully installed as JJ’s buddy. She found Jerry Jeff out front with his lariat, roping the mailbox, and as she’d predicted, he was happy to help out a cat in need. She said she’d return with some food for the critter.

Then she’d gone downtown to a florist, where she’d spent more than an hour trying to figure out what kind of flowers to send Mary. Nearly brainless by now, she went to Albertson’s (couldn’t face the Lifeway, not so soon again), spent several minutes baffled by the array of choices in animal feed, and settled, finally, on Little Friskies. When she caught herself thinking that the tunaflavored kibble sounded pretty good, it dawned on her that all she’d had to eat that day was four pieces of fruit. She might be a little smarter if she ingested some calories, but she couldn’t handle cooking for herself. Hawk wasn’t due home until nine or ten, so she decided that she’d just grab dinner somewhere. She took the cat food back to Jerry Jeff, and after vacillating over which of Laramie’s fine dining establishments she would patronize, driving all over town, and deciding she didn’t feel like sitting in some restaurant and eating by herself, she’d ended up, uninspired, grabbing a burrito at Taco John’s.

By now self-pity was kicking in hard. Nobody should have to cope with Nattie Langham, Bone Bandy, Sheldon Stover,
and
fast food in a single Tuesday.

The burrito did seem to wake up a few brain cells. With some hope of improving her spirits, she’d gone by the Wrangler and spent another hour drinking iced tea and listening to a happy hour act called “Horse Sense” (a fiddler and guitarist who sang and played old-time cowboy songs), watching the place fill up with cowboys and tourists and local folks. Delice was rushing around, bossing the employees, caught up in the frenzy. The fiddler had a sweet tenor voice and an even sweeter face, but the party mood still eluded Sally.

By the time she got to Dwayne and Nattie’s huge, hideous house in a fifteen-year-old, windswept suburb of similar outsize, ostentatious domiciles, Sally was in the kind of foul humor that had once inspired Delice to ask, “So who shot your dog, hagbody?” She figured she was entitled to her shitty mood, and the pretentious setting wasn’t helping. In a mammoth “great room” faced with flagstone on one wall, nothing but glass on another, and a couple dozen badly executed cowboy-and-Indian paintings on the other two, the band and all its gear, including drums and amps, took up scarcely a corner.

The drummer, fiddler, and guitarist-bass player gave her a wave and went back to talking about some disaster movie Sally hadn’t and would never see. Dwayne Lang-ham, seated behind his pedal steel guitar, was tuning the instrument. Wearing hiking shorts, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Teva sandals, he’d made the transition from pillar of the community to vehicle of musical divinity. In her life, Sally had known many adequate, and several very good, but only a few terrific musicians. Dwayne was one. Though he was as bland as Pillsbury dough in his banker life, angels and demons seemed to swirl around him when he stepped onto a stage. He could play pretty much anything, but in the Millionaires, he alternated between bass and steel.

Sam Branch, the Realtor, a man with whom Sally had played a lot of music and been unwise several times, years ago, was tuning up his electric guitar, chatting with Dwayne. Sam nodded, heavy-lidded, as he saw her come in. They weren’t pals, exactly, and that bothered her. Sally liked to think she was the kind of higher life form who knew how to stay friendly with old lovers. In some cases, often involving men of the guitar-playing persuasion, the best she’d been able to do was turn sex into music.

Well, what could you do with Sam Branch? There had been a time when Sam and Dickie Langham, between them, conducted most of the traffic in smokable and snortable substances in the town, but like Dickie, Sam had gotten into a putatively straight racket. Unlike Dickie, there was something permanently reprobate about Sam. Sometimes Sally enjoyed that. Sometimes she didn’t.

Sam leaned down and reached into the cooler at his feet, and pulled out a cold can of Budweiser, handing it to Sally. She popped the top, took a swig, set the can on top of an amplifier, and then got out her guitar and electronic tuner. As she tuned her instrument, she couldn’t help listening to Sam and Dwayne.

“So is the old lady getting cold feet?” Sam asked.

“No,” Dwayne answered. “I wouldn’t say that. She’s concerned that this be the right kind of deal for her. She’s a conservationist. We’re pretty sure we can avoid having to do a full-scale environmental impact statement, but we’ve had a consultant in here the last few days, looking things over, and he’ll write up a report for her, if that’s the hitch. Nattie thinks we should have the guy give it to her in person. Seems he’s the kind who can charm little old ladies out of big ranches.”

“Does that really happen anymore?” Sally didn’t really want them to know she’d been eavesdropping (and it wasn’t, she thought guiltily, the first time that day). But on the other hand, this was obviously a conversation about the Wood’s Hole land swap. The way they were going on about Mrs. Wood chapped her butt. “Little old ladies have big old lawyers these days.”

Dwayne chuckled. “’Course they do. But human nature’s human nature. This guy looks like Robert Redford’s younger brother. He’s got a killer résumé—he’s done ecological consulting for everybody from agribiz multinationals to the Vernal, Utah, Friends of Dinosaur Bones. I was at a Sierra Club picnic with him in Boulder last month, and by the time they were handing out the ice cream cones, he had half the people writing big checks to save the grizzly bear, and just about everybody palming his business card and promising to give him a call.”

“What’s this paragon’s name?” Sally asked, frowning at a high E string that had gone flatter than it ought have, cranking the tuning peg.

“Marsh Carhart,” said Dwayne, and the string snapped.

“Dwayne,” said Sally, digging in her case for a new E string, but not pausing to consider her words, “are you aware that this guy is one of the biggest pigs in the universe?”

Sam grinned. “I thought you only said that about me, darlin’,” he told her. “What’d he do—tell you that you give a lousy—”

“He wouldn’t have had any way of knowing,” Sally interrupted. “I knew him back when I was in grad school in Berkeley. He was getting a Ph.D. in biology and writing for
Evolved Earth Quarterly
. Leching after every little coed from San Jose to Santa Rosa.
And
half the high school girls. And claiming it was his duty to the species, as an ‘alpha male,’ to get his genes around as widely as possible.”

“Now there’s a line I’ve never thought of,” said Sam. “Why do I sense that it didn’t work on you?”

“Because I considered it my duty to the species to pray, every night, that his sperm motility was lower than worm squeezin’s,” Sally said. “He got a little bit famous recently—wrote a book called
Man, the Rapist
, made quite a stir. He was on
Larry King Live
and
Rush Limbaugh,
explaining how men are biologically programmed to rape, and women are designed to incite them to rape. Very scientific. What a shithead.”

“I don’t pay attention to controversy,” Dwayne said. “From what I hear, when it comes to ecological consulting, he’s good at his job.” As if that settled that.

“Dwayne,” she said, “this is a real big deal for you and Nattie, huh?”

“Could be,” Dwayne allowed, his face expressionless. “Let’s play some tunes.”

Sally had to admit, it wasn’t the Millionaires’ best practice. Frankly, it sucked. The drummer had clearly spent much of the afternoon down at the Buckhorn bar, celebrating Jubilee Days, and he was at the point where he couldn’t tell a twelve-bar shuffle from a Texas two-step. Sam’s cell phone kept ringing, and he kept answering it. Dwayne, whose performances ordinarily varied from rock-solid to brilliant, was on some other planet, and Sally’s own mind wasn’t on the music. Screwed-up solos, flat harmonies, busted breaks, and bad rhythm—a hell of a musical mess. If she’d been a rookie, she’d have thought they could never be ready for a Saturday night gig. But she’d done her time, and she knew that some nights, the gods of song were playing on the other side of town.

Finally Dwayne called a halt. “Boy,” he said. “We’re really bad tonight.”

“Maybe this gig isn’t meant to be,” said Sally. “Maybe we ought to cancel. After the murder and everything, I’m not feeling exactly inspired.”

“Nobody’s expecting inspiration,” said Sam. “Just do the job. Besides, didn’t you say Delice is going to donate the proceeds to the women’s shelter? That oughta fire you up.”

Could Sam Branch actually be showing some sensitivity? Implausible. He probably thought Delice ought to give the money to a shelter for real estate taxes.

“Look, I’ve gotta go,” Dwayne said. “I told this Carhart guy I’d meet him at the Wrangler ten minutes from now.”

Sally was meeting Hawk there, er, ten minutes ago. And looking for Dickie, and for Delice. And for trouble, it would seem.

The Wrangler bar was packed and rocking. During Jubilee Days they had live music every night, and the band, imported from Austin, Texas, expressly for rodeo week, was doing a right lively cover of “Beyond These Walls,” one of Sally’s favorite tunes about love and jail. For the first time all day, she was off-duty.

She remembered how she’d come to love this time of year, the weather idyllic, the town full of people looking for a good time, the rodeo season bringing in the green for any musician good enough to get a gig. The cowboys and cowgirls hauled their rigs and their horses from town to town in search of fortune and enough fame to get laid on demand. It hadn’t been much different for the pickers and the singers, although they kept slightly different hours. Instead of having to get up mornings and tend to animals, the musicians stayed up nights and arose in the afternoon to minister to their own wasted carcasses.

Cowboys had their riding and roping, and God knew, that could beat up a body. But Sally’d had her own brutal schedule, sometimes doing as many as four performances a day—pancake breakfast jams, fairground tent nooners, happy hours, and then three or four sets, deep into the night. She’d done it for the money, and the exposure, and because she loved it.

Love, as the sainted Gram Parsons had pointed out, hurts. She recalled any number of afternoons, lounging around some motel pool in the darkest possible sunglasses, eating a plate of Tabasco-drenched eggs and swilling translucent coffee that never quite cut the fog. By happy hour she’d had to be ready to get up on some stage and do it all over again. It had taken her years to realize that there could be any other way to live.

But now she approached the Wrangler without having to sing for her supper. It felt good. Hawk was sitting at the bar, drinking a longneck Budweiser and chatting with Delice. Most of the people in the place were wearing cowboy hats, but Hawk was bareheaded. He had a battered, sweaty straw Resistol he wore in the field, and since he’d come straight to the bar after work, the hat was probably out in his truck. Refused to wear his hat in bars because, he said, it wasn’t polite. A fastidious man, Hawk Green.

“Hello, darlin’,” she said, kissing him and plopping down on the bar stool next to him, requesting a beer of her own. “Good day at the office?”

“About average,” he replied, leaving his hand in the middle of her back, producing a nice tingle. “We took two vehicles out of the university motor pool, and on the way out to the fossil sand dunes the grad student drivers managed to stick one in the ditch and get two flat tires on the other one. Cost us most of the day and half the evening. Maybe sometime we’ll get to do some geology. I ended up having dinner in the truck at Taco John’s.”

“I had the burrito,” Sally commiserated. “You must have just missed me there.”

By mutual consent, it seemed, neither of them asked how the other was feeling, one day after finding that body.

“Life’s a bitch,” said Delice, completely unsympathetic. “For one thing, somebody came over and foisted a cat off on my son this afternoon.”

Sally smiled brightly. “I know how Jerry Jeff loves animals. Mr. Skittles is such a cutie too.”

“Yeah. Thanks a lot. You can tell Edna McCaffrey she owes me one.”

“I’ll do that. And thank you for being a one-woman humane society,” Sally said.

“Don’t push it. It’s not that big a deal. What really ruined my day was that two of my waitresses quit. One said she didn’t like having cowboys hit on her, and the other said she did, and she could make more money at the Torch.”

“How so?” asked Sally.

“Let’s just say that the Wrangler isn’t the kind of place where the waitresses who are willing to let the ’pokes live up to their names can book their dance cards,” Delice explained. “The Torch is kind of their headquarters.”

Ah. One more way of cashing in on rodeo time. “You’re telling me you don’t hire hookers?” Hawk asked Delice.

She wiped down the bar, thinking about it. “Let’s just say I prefer to have my help focus on making money doing what I’m paying them to do. And let’s say I also like to know that when some asshole starts pawing one of my girls, and she objects, there’s no misunderstanding about what kind of business we’re in. We got enough problems with boys hassling the paying customers.”

“I tell you,” said Hawk, “Jubilee Days certainly does ring in a festive atmosphere.”

“Actually, Sal,” Delice said, “I’ve been thinking about the Jubilee Days thing, and about Monette and all.”

Sally drank a little beer, pondering. “I’m not sure what you’re driving at.”

“I believe there’s a way we can all have what we want.”

Delice was a businesswoman. People in business specialized in the idea that everyone got pretty much what they wanted, or at least what they deserved. “Which is?” Sally asked.