The Cadence of Grass (19 page)

“Don’t be naive, Evelyn, not now. We need to speak with her, and above all we need to know when, exactly, she’s returning.”

“Why?”

“Because Mr. Majub isn’t going to wait around forever.”

“What’s this Mr. Majub have to do with it?”

“Mr. Majub has offered to meet with the whole family to see if he has a mandate to open this trust and liquidate the business.”

“It’s just so depressing.”

“We’ll get through all this,” said Natalie fixedly. “We’re going to be well off, you and me.”

“Oh, good.”

“At first I thought about moving to a better climate, but I’m not sure about starting over someplace where people don’t understand my problems. The idea of being no spring chicken under some palm tree, I just wonder. Plus, with the bottling plant we had status.” Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “We might not notice it until it’s gone. But now that you’ve called off the divorce Paul’s got Majub involved.”

Evelyn’s eyes widened. “I had reached the point where I thought it was time to write off our losses.”

“I know,” said Natalie. “And, Evie, I realize that wasn’t easy.” She looked vaguely around the room. “Who are these people?”

“They’re our fellow Americans,” said Evelyn.

“I’m starting to get like old lady Crusoe. This looks like an invasion to me. How’s our friend Bill getting along?”

“He’s fine, looking after the mares. Cows have a ton of feed where the hay froze before he could get to it. He had to go to Ekalaka for another funeral—a cousin, I think.”

“What becomes of him when Mr. Majub sorts out the estate?”

Evelyn declined to comment on what she took to be arrant wishful thinking, Instead she said, “Bill stays.”

“Evelyn dear, I hope we’ll come into a bundle. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to buy my way out of.”

“You think that works?”

“I sure do. It’s pathetic when they say the rich aren’t happy—”

“Paul’s going to haunt us even
if
this Majub succeeds in getting us liquidated.”

“I know,” said Natalie, suddenly wide-eyed. “I’m scared shitless. I realize it’s sick that I need to be comfortably off. But tell me, Evie: we’re for sure coming into a bundle, aren’t we?”

Natalie’s great faith in serendipity seemed confirmed when Alice Whitelaw returned with no more fanfare than a call indicating when she would arrive at the airport. She’d had to overnight in Denver, she explained over the phone, where all her belongings went astray in an automatic baggage handling system that sent both of her huge Samsonites back to the South Pacific via Los Angeles. If she hadn’t had such a helpful companion, she said, she would have lost her mind.

“
What
companion?” hollered Natalie as she and Evelyn pulled up to the curb.

In the crepuscular afternoon light the little airfield, mysterious in descending snow, looked like an outpost. They went inside, pulling off their mittens as they did so and unbuttoning their coats.

“I don’t know what companion,” said Evelyn, peevishly.

Looking everywhere but at her sister, Natalie said, “I dislike surprises.”

From a glass-enclosed corridor, it was possible to watch the arriving passengers come out of the jetway and into the boarding area, then pass through security into the lobby. From here they hoped to get a preview before greeting their mother, for whom they had several questions. Alice was not among the first to file out, as these consisted almost entirely of hurtling recreationists already attired for skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing, a surprising amount of Texas and southern accents. Finally, they saw the top of their mother’s head, reasonably sedate but not quite natural blond, the shearling collar of her black coat, the new tan! It was impossible to determine much about the companion at her side as he was wearing a hat with enough brim to suggest a convinced cow man. It was not impossible that they already resented the spring in her step. There was little for them to do now but face the swarm and wait.

What they laid eyes on—and what Natalie later claimed in the most sanguine tones to have foreseen—was their mother beaming through her embarrassment and, at her side, tall, tan, hard-eyed and not remotely uncomfortable, Bill Champion.

Geraldine knew something was changing, though she was unaware that Paul had gotten his wife to call off the divorce. She wasn’t happy when he insisted that she must never act as if she knew him, because having a parole officer at all was “incriminating.” She sympathized with several of Paul’s fears, even if she didn’t entirely agree with them, because of the years of mistreatment he’d received at the hands of his wife, who clearly had never understood him or how he’d been maligned and wronged by the system, and who could use a swift kick in the rear of her excessively tight Wranglers. Sometimes Geraldine imagined a fulfilling scene wherein she gangster-slapped Evelyn until she whimpered for mercy.

As she was well short of recognizing that her heart was being broken, Geraldine was reduced to examining her own reports on Paul and was fascinated by how rapidly they evolved from the first, which compliantly reflected the alarming view of the prison officials who believed without any proof that Paul had planned a violent and murderous uprising among the inmates. No one with such small charges against him had ever been accused of so much. She by now had decided that his role in unlocking the secured wing, so the most violent prisoners could get at the snitches, was fabricated in the fevered minds of the guards whose professionalism was thereby placed in doubt, and whose pride was impaired by having been barricaded in the showers for two days. Geraldine alone had come to understand how Paul had been swept up in a maelstrom exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the facility. Her letter to the prison board elaborating this view nearly cost her her job; they couldn’t know how scrupulously she’d reached her conclusions, discounting much of what she’d learned while she and Paul were drinking or in bed or both at once. If he’d had a few failures, they were pure products of guilelessness. When the prison board cited his wearing a T-shirt illustrated with a Glock handgun and the phrase “Snitches, A Dying Breed” as evidence of his lack of rehabilitation, she was thunderstruck by their gullibility. She had actually forced them to settle for the tepid notation that Paul Crusoe was “a lightning rod for evil.”

She devoted her heart to trying to resolve the contradictions of their situation. This was difficult in the sense that Paul didn’t seem to want it resolved, seemed to prefer their love sealed in its own compartment. “Like a cured ham!” he’d said in a ghastly explanation she quickly forgave. The progress of their love was a boozy, twilit enterprise in motels along Interstate 90, with wheeling lights, air brakes and clamorous movement of snow-handling equipment the principal accompaniment to their intimacies. If Geraldine tried voicing her wish to take their place in a real community with daily, sunlit duties, he either drifted off absently or crudely groped her. When she overcame the worry that she was growing stupider by the minute, she saw this all as a kind of rough magic despite the occasional inkling that she might not get out of this nameless love with her health intact.

The best part was giving him a monthly grade and making it clear that it was code for his vigor in bed, overlooking the perpetually aggravated expression on his face. “I bet you didn’t know it had sides before you met me,” he said. After a particularly satisfying night, she described him in her report as “a miracle of rehabilitation,” adding the cautionary note she shared with him that it was “a game of inches.”

But things now were not going so well, and she’d begun to feel bereavement partly derived from a suspicion that she was being bamboozled. Making love, he told her, was “something women did while guys were hosing them.” It was in her own best interest to keep fooling herself, but perhaps now she had an eye out. Once she even caught herself dreaming pleasantly of Paul trussed up like a hog by her friends in the sheriff’s department. “Love,” he told her confidently, “is never having to say you’re indicted.”

Evelyn wanted to spend a bit of time with Natalie, because Evelyn was worried about her sister’s recent euphoria and unnecessarily high hopes about Mr. Majub. Evelyn could have used a little euphoria herself, but at the moment liquidation mainly meant she could trade in this Jap flivver for some stouter iron.

On the way to pick up her sister, she was stopped at the Northern Pacific crossing while a freight train, its sides obscured by a thousand miles of frozen Dakotan slush, crept behind the striped barriers and flashing lights, westbound on tracks disappearing into the icy switching yard. She listened to local Montana news on the radio, and it wasn’t helping: the move seemed to be to kill the buffalo that roamed out of Yellowstone, kill the wolves wherever found, lower water-quality standards, undermine the laws of the Indian reservations, strip mine the prairie, dry up rivers where pollution was too time-consuming, cut funding for education and health care, and make animal-control poisons more readily available. Evelyn slumped and sighed all at once.

The driver’s window of the car in front of her, a battered blue Plymouth Valiant, came down, and a cigarette glowed through the twilight to expire in the snow; the interior was dense with smoke, and the driver was beating out a rhythm on the back of the empty passenger seat. Evelyn turned the dial of her radio until she found the music that matched his tempo: “Achtung Baby.” An old woman crossed in front, scarf tied around her face, shin-high boots laced over baggy sweatpants, her arms around a brown paper IGA bag from the top of which projected a bunch of cold wilted celery and a glimpse of bright Wonder Bread packaging. The old woman adopted a sailor’s stance as she hobbled cautiously over the corrugations of snow and ice. The frigid air was heavy with exhaust fumes, and in the time it took the train to pass, the yellow lights of houses up on the hill grew hard in the advancing dark. In one front yard, miniature Dutch windmills protruded from the gray snow, a few with blades still twirling. Evelyn feared that when the train passed and the gates opened, she would lose some vital piece of continuity, just as a bubble of air is said to be able to stop the heart, and she would be unable to resume.

Finally the gates opened, and a long-haired brakeman hanging from the caboose looked back down the track from where he’d just come. As the train slowed into the switching yard, the groan of couplings filled the air, and Evelyn pulled across the track to begin ascending the hill. Old Christmas trees at the bottom of a ravine surrounded the remains of a snowmobile. For an instant, life seemed desperate. This year, I’m not going to watch that Super Bowl, she thought and laughed oddly.

When she got to the house, Natalie was ready to go and climbed into the car chattering happily. “I’ve been doing marriage counseling all morning, Evelyn, so let’s go to the pet shop. My friend Andrea, who owns that store, hired a young filmmaker to make a video of her wedding anniversary, and she ran off with him! Then, after she paid Rim Rock a considerable sum for his addiction problems, he lights out for Martha’s Vineyard with one of the patients! No, go right on Main Street; turn here. Anyway, he gave her this sob story about wanting to make features but being stuck with weddings and bar mitzvahs and documentaries about endangered species. So Andrea went back to her husband, but he said she’d been tainted by Hollywood! You love that, don’t you, Evelyn? The husband does a great job portraying Andrea as a tart in the eyes of Judge Tower, who has no use for dope fiends with video cameras. Long story short, Andrea got cleaned out, but she still hasn’t lost her sense of humor. She told me that the times had turned against good-hearted party girls.”

They had to park over behind the Baxter Hotel, and Evelyn found herself following her jaywalking sister into whiteouts on snowy sidewalks until they found themselves in the cedar-scented warmth of Pet City, where between rows of birdseed, cat and dog food they found wing-clipped, hand-fed cockatiels circulating in the bottom of a great tub, in beautiful desert colors and a hum of conversational bird voices. Natalie gathered them in handfuls, adorning Evelyn’s head and shoulders with birds before selecting some for herself. Three or four dodgey individuals, their crests erect with suspicion, remained in the tub, craning around to see the fate of their fellows.

“You’ve never looked better,” said Natalie.

“I’ve never
felt
better.”

“This is the pretty part. Next, an avalanche of birdshit if anyone startles them. They can’t fly, so they express themselves with a big number two.”

“Can you believe Mama and Bill Champion?” Evelyn said. The sisters faced each other like two caciques from the Orinoco, heads and shoulders covered with birds.

“No, and I can barely picture the implications.”

“Is this a romantic story?”

“I won’t be steamrollered by that if it is. We don’t have any idea who we are anymore if we’ve been so ignorant about our own mother, assuming she is our mother; or our father, assuming that was our father. Ouch! The little sonofabitch just bit me!”