Black Angus (13 page)

“Oh.”

“C'mon. Let's load the salt mix. And I want to check that field he's cutting.”

After they had loaded a half-dozen bags of the salt-and-mineral mix, Blanchard drove the pickup from one pasture to another, with Tommy hopping out at each feeder they came to and hurriedly, clumsily, picking up one of the fifty-pound bags and waddling with it to the feeder, sometimes dropping it and then having to wrestle it up into the bunk before laboriously slitting one end of the bag and pouring its contents in with the old and mixing them. Blanchard was always amazed at how physically weak his brother was, how his damaged brain somehow had managed to impose a commensurate weakness on his body, which appeared normal in every other way. But the work gave him such an obvious sense of accomplishment and pleasure that Blanchard was glad to pay the price, to sit there in the truck smoking and waiting and drumming his fingers.

Finally the job was finished and they drove on to the hay-field, seventy acres of bottomland running along a stream that eventually fed into Sweet Creek. Clarence had already made
three rounds and was moving toward them on a fourth. Next to the distant tractor the tall thick fescue grass fell with a fearsome precision as the sickle bar sliced through it. Blanchard picked up a handful of the cut grass and examined it, the texture and color of the stems, the fullness of the seedheads. In the past, fescue was almost never cut so early in the year, ranchers naturally assuming that the riper it was, the better hay it would make. But agronomy experts now were saying that late May was the best time for putting up fescue hay, because the grass was richest in protein then. For Clarence the whole idea was so much “pig shit,” professors and book farmers once again demonstrating their unbounded stupidity, cutting hay before it was ripe. He went along, however. It was not his grass, not his cows. And in addition it gave him something more to grouse about.

Coming abreast of them, he raised the sickle bar and cut the engine.

“Shore is green,” he said. “Like cuttin' weeds, that's what it is.”

“Any problems with the mower?”

“Not so far. How'd it go for you, at the bank?”

Blanchard was often surprised at how much Clarence knew about his affairs, considering that he seldom told him anything. The only explanation seemed to be Susan's observation that the county was basically one large extended family, with everyone related in some way to everyone else, and most of them gossiping most of the time, including doctors, lawyers, and bankers.

“Went all right,” he said.

Clarence spat. “I bet it did.”

“What about the crew in the morning?” Blanchard asked.

“Don't worry, they be here. I talked to Russell last night. If the weather holds, they be here by ten o'clock. We should be balin' by then.”

“Let's hope so.”

“What about the Bang's?” Clarence asked. “You call the vet?”

“Not yet.”

“Puttin' it off won't change a thing. If it turns out they's all Bangers, then they's Bangers. That's all there is to it.”

Blanchard nodded wearily. “I plan to call him tonight.”

Clarence looked out over the field and spat again. “And if they's Bangers, we sure gonna have a lotta hay to eat.”

Blanchard got back into the pickup. “I'll start raking in the morning. Be dry enough by nine, don't you think?”

“Lessen it's still too wet,” Clarence said.

At that, Blanchard drove off, shaking his head and laughing finally. “Yeah, he sure is a sweetheart, old Clarence.”

And Tommy laughed with him, as he always did. “Clarence sure is a sweetheart,” he said.

When they reached the farmyard, Blanchard parked and told Tommy to stay with him in the truck a few moments, there was something he wanted to talk to him about. Then he tried to explain to him about Ronda. He said she would be coming over for supper that night and she was a friend of his, like Shea, that was all. She was not coming over to take Susan's place or anything like that. She was just a friend, nothing more. But she was a very nice girl and Tommy should try to be nice to her, make her feel welcome.

Tommy was frowning and nodding. “Is she purty?” he asked.

“I guess so.”

“I be nice,” Tommy promised.

“Good. You're a sweetheart.” Again the brothers laughed.

Shea had already put away a six-pack of Budweiser by the time Ronda arrived, but that did not keep him from devouring half the “family” bucket of fried chicken she brought with her. As usual, however, his gluttony did not seem all that
flagrant, possibly because he did most of the talking as well as the eating, so one did not notice the steady filling and emptying of his plate, unless, as with chicken, there was a residue, in this case a pile of bones that looked almost sinister in its mounded plenitude.

Ronda on the other hand barely touched her food. She seemed more interested in her new surroundings and in Tommy and especially in Blanchard, whose eyes she kept searching as if for clues to the truth of what he had told her, again, upon her arrival: that Susan had gone on a trip with Whit, that was all, and that he had wanted to see her but had not wanted to leave his brother alone again.

Tommy also ate very little. He was too busy looking at Ronda. In fact, the only time he seemed able to take his eyes off her was when she would look over at him and smile as she caught his moonstruck stare. Then he would look down and swallow and blush before slowly glancing up at Blanchard as if for rescue. And Blanchard understood. He thought Ronda looked better than he had ever seen her before, possibly because she smiled often, for once seemed more shy than cynical. And in addition she was wearing faded skintight jeans and a tiedyed T-shirt under which she was braless, her small high breasts the cynosure of all their eyes.

Normally Blanchard would not have liked the idea of Tommy being infatuated with a girl, and especially Ronda, but in this instance he was almost grateful for the development, for it seemed to have taken his brother's mind off Shea and his wounds and how he had gotten them. Blanchard still could not understand why Shea had told Tommy the truth about what had happened to him. He felt that Shea must have had some idea what a problem violence was for Tommy, how it both frightened and fascinated him, how even the sight of a simulated brawl on television would cause him to sit transfixed on the floor, unable to move or even breathe until the battle
was over and the threat to him gone. And yet Shea
had
told him, apparently even embellishing the story, if that was possible. Blanchard could only chalk it up to the same sense of recklessness that had brought on the beating in the first place, in fact had brought on all of Shea's misfortunes. Like some great fat moth he was forever flying straight at his destruction. But even considering this recklessness, this cavalier courting of disaster, Blanchard was surprised at Shea's manner during the meal and after, as they sat drinking the last of the beer. He seemed totally himself, no different from any other evening, as if nothing unusual had happened to him the night before. One would have thought his wounds were mosquito bites.

Somehow the conversation worked around to Darling and Shea's last days at the agency, which, predictably, involved two of his favorite bêtes noires, both vice presidents at the agency then as well as when Blanchard had worked there. And in truth Blanchard had to admit the two men were flaky characters, almost as comically absurd as they were uncomically powerful. The one, Mack Donald, had been a group vice president over the account service section in which Blanchard himself had worked. As such, Donald had the final say on anything and everything pertaining to those accounts, including not only the work of the account executives under him, like Blanchard, but also all the creative work produced for those accounts by art directors and copywriters like Shea. Though he encouraged everyone to call him Mack, and liked to refer to himself as the Old Man, as if he were a tough but beloved young war commander, unfortunately he had had to make do with other monikers when Shea was around, such as “Little Mack” and especially “the Mad Bomber,” this last both for his unparalleled talent for sinking promising ad campaigns and for his vast office collection of photos and paintings and mounted miniatures of U.S. warplanes commemorating his
strictly stateside service in the Air Force during the Korean War.

Blanchard remembered one large meeting involving Donald and one of his pet projects, a public service ad campaign designed ostensibly to promote the idea of a new mass transit system for the city of Saint Louis but which in reality was simply one of many such public service boondoggles that in the end promoted little except Darling and Donald—or D. and D., drunk and disorderly, as Shea referred to them. And he, like Blanchard, was among the fifteen or twenty workers there, all sitting around the conference table listening to their leader expatiate on the impending momentous arrival in Saint Louis of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, who was going to cut the ribbon over a new stretch of freeway and then pay a visit to the Darling Agency to acknowledge the ad campaign, which had won many awards, and which Shea had conceived and written. This last fact however was not mentioned at the meeting, nor was any other except how D. and D. were going to milk the glorious occasion. In fact, so glorious was it that Donald kept referring to himself in the third person, as if he were a monarch: “Donald will be at the airport with the Mayor when the Secretary arrives” ... “We will want publicity shots of Donald and the Secretary at every opportunity” ... “At the agency Donald will give a speech.” And on he went, until finally Shea pushed back his chair and noisily got up. As he walked out, he announced his mission.

“Shea has to shit,” he said.

It was one of the great moments in the agency's history, one that undoubtedly would live in legend. And Blanchard would never forget Donald's look. Normally bulbous-eyed and slackjawed anyway, he became even more so in those memorable seconds following Shea's departure.

Shea's other black beast, Armfield, was more likable than
Donald but in the end probably no less ridiculous. Armpit, as Shea called him, was a group creative director, a job he held less through any special creative expertise than through his simple ability to
sell
, to take any effort no matter how schlock it was and jam it down the account executive's throat and then down the client's too, and leave them happy for the experience. And, oddly, he managed this in spite of his appearance, which was startlingly simian, short, hairy, and ugly, a dockworker's dockworker, not the sort of man one expected to find treading the carpeted corridors of an advertising agency. And on top of it, he was a devout Catholic, never missing morning mass and prone to the display of large liberal gestures: Unable to have children of his own, he and his wife over the years had adopted a small United Nations, one of each color and race and creed. At a party one night Shea had gone up to him and his wife like a drug pusher and whispered that he knew where they could pick up a Chicano baby cheap, and Armpit had laughed. And again, at an office Christmas party during which Shea as a temporary master of ceremonies had caustically introduced him—“What can I say about this man except that he is nasty, brutish, and short?”—Armpit had laughed. Over the years he had laughed and gone straight to the top. He had laughed and taken credit for other's work. He had laughed and fired friends.

And now Shea was recounting his final days at the agency and how Armpit and the Mad Bomber had figured in them, a tale that seemed to mystify Ronda as much as it did Tommy.

“It was the last meeting, kind of like a last supper without the bread and the wine, and with me of course as Judas. And here's old Armpit going out on a limb for a change, with his own work, stuff he made up all by himself. I know it's hard to believe, but it's true. I figure he must've been at mass when it hit him, kneeling there fumbling with his goddamn beads and whammo, there it was—how to land the Biff dogfood account,
which we'd been invited to pitch. Well, he does it all himself—ads, posters, TV storyboards, point-of-sale, the whole schmeer—and all of it is turned to the wall when we show up for the meeting. Must've been thirty, forty people there. And finally he pulls it on us—literally. He gets out this empty dog food can and puts his finger through a ring in the top of it and pulls out this string and lets it go—and the can
speaks
. It says, ‘
Biff speaks for itself
.' Well, by then old Armpit is standing there looking at us like a gorilla practicing anal retention—and everybody cheers. Honest to Christ! All these professionals, these sharpies, these Olympian shiteaters—they sit there and cheer and clap. And when they stop, Armpit is standing right over me. ‘What about you, Shea?' he says. ‘What do you think?' Well, all this time, all morning, my bowels have been rumbling with gas. So I try it on him. Like a kid I raise my little pinkie and say pull it, and so help me, he does it. He knows better, but he does it anyway—and I lay down about a seven-second beer fart. Well, nobody laughed. Nobody but Armpit. And I knew why.”

“What about Donald?”

“He was already after me by then, of course, me not calling him the Old Man and all. And, well, I was assigned one of his precious public service jobs, a campaign to warn niggers about high blood pressure. So I whack together a sweet little print series, the main one built around this picture I found in the photo morgue of a real tough-looking dude staring at the camera like it was white, you know? And the headline I used was
This Dude is Carrying a Bomb
. Well, Donald wouldn't hear of it, or Armpit either. Scared them shitless for some reason. So I sneak it by them and let the client see it, some ghetto agency, and they go ape over it. It sells. And finally it wins some goddamn national award, and first thing I know, the two of them, Armpit and Donald, with their wives and two other couples, are all down in New Orleans to accept the
award—for three days, all of them, on the old expense account. And naturally I wasn't invited, and didn't expect to be—I only made the goddamn series after all. Anyway, when I see it written up in the papers, I tear the story out and take a brush-pen and add my own headline to it and tack it up in my office:
The Mad Bomber Strikes Again
. Well, Donald sees it and actually tries to rip the thing off the wall. I have to pick him up and carry him outside. I take him across the hall and put him in the elevator, and all the while he's hitting me and screaming like Doris Day being manhandled by Rock Hudson. ‘
This is enough, Shea! Enough! Enough!
' And I guess it was. I sent him down to the basement.”