“Look at the back of the bills,” said Uncle Tam. “You’ll see.”
One side of the third bill was covered with writing in red ink, very hard to read, but Bob made out most of it. It was a will.
I worked dam hard for this but have not got children or airs of any kind so this is for you, whoever comes into posesion of this Holy Book, you are my lawful air, god bless.
It was signed “Floyd Lollar, Colorado Spgs 9–30–56.”
“So,” said Uncle Tam. “It made me think about my situation here. I’ve about decided to put the shop up for sale, find a new location.”
“My God, that’s a big step. Like move to New York? Take a vacation or do something you like?”
“No. New York is not a good place for me. And sometimes it’s not a question of doing what you like. I know your generation puts a lot of value on that, but for most of us it’s a matter of doing the best we can with what we’ve got and who we are.”
“I know, I know,” said Bob, bracing for the responsibility lecture. But it did not come. To fill the awkward silence he began to describe the brooch Freda Beautyrooms had worn at the quilting bee, sketching it out on the back of an envelope. Uncle Tam smote his brow with the heel of his hand and moaned.
“Why not here? Why Texas?”
29
RIBEYE CLUKE’S OFFICE
Bob slept in his old bed and in the morning he walked down to the bakery and bought brioche and Danish pastries and jelly doughnuts and both papers. He would look for an apartment near a bakery if he moved back to Denver. He and Uncle Tam sat companionably dunking pastries in their coffee and reading bits of news to each other.
“That brooch you described to me last night, it might be French—anyway European. The French took plastic quite seriously and made some beautiful jewelry. I’m guessing it might be a French Art Deco piece from the twenties—the pearlized celluloid and those rhinestone zigzags. See if you can’t buy it for me.”
“I’ll try,” said Bob. “But she’s rich and headstrong and bold. Quite a few of the others at that quilting bee had nice things too,” and he tried to draw the pendant necklace he remembered seeing around Rella Nooncaster’s neck, saying, “This is nile green, this is black.”
“Oh my,” said Uncle Tam. “How I wish I could make her an offer. I wish you’d try for me.”
“I will,” said Bob.
“I found a few things myself while you were gone,” said his uncle. “A pair of Beth Levine acrylic shoes. And I got my eye on some crazy flatware from the thirties, yellow with red polka dots. Trouble is the owner wants four hundred dollars. If that Sweepstakes money comes through—”
“You could spend some of the Bible money.”
“Oh yeah, I could, but—I might have to use it for something else.” He was silent for a moment and then added in a rush, “I might take that trip to New York and see what Wayne is up to. Now, what do you say we go to the Mayan and catch a movie this afternoon?”
On Monday morning Bob luxuriated in the hot shower, though he missed having his coffee on the bunkhouse porch. He dressed in his good grey suit hanging in the closet, knotted the tie his mother had painted of the sinking Titanic. In the kitchen he opened the window near the table onto an exquisite early summer day, robins shouting their endless “Shut up! Shut up!” Uncle Tam came in saying “Top a the marnin to ye” in a stagey Irish brogue. At 7:30 Bob went downstairs to the Saturn and drove to the Denver offices of Global Pork Rind. He could have taken the bus but thought Mr. Cluke might ask him to turn in the Saturn’s keys on the spot.
Mr. Ragsdale from the Tokyo office was an unusually good-looking human being. Although he was in his fifties his chiseled jaw and regular features, his broad shoulders and athletic frame, his supple movements, deep tan and manicured hands combined with the Armani suit to say, “Here is a man to whom all good things come,” but Bob thought to himself, So how come you work for a pork company? In actuality he said “How do you do, sir?”
“Sit down, Bob,” said Ribeye Cluke, pointing at the lime-green metallic-toned aluminum chair across from his desk. Mr. Ragsdale sat in a leather chair off to one side, a chair exactly like Ribeye’s own. Bob thought that perhaps Global Pork Rind bought them in large lots for their executives.
“Well, sir, Bob,” said Ribeye. “I wonder if you know how close you are to being let go?” He frowned at Bob.
“Yes sir, I had that feeling,” said Bob. “But I really do have some good prospects lined up.” And he told them about Tater Crouch and Jim Skin. “And Mr. Crouch, sir, asked me what kind of money we could offer for his place. Of course I couldn’t give him a figure, but I’d like to be able to set up a time for the Money Offer Person to come down soon and look at it. I had him right there and I couldn’t go any farther because I couldn’t give him a figure. And I’ve been thinking, sir,” he went on, “that there’s a subsidiary business Global Pork Rind could develop.” Bob launched into his argument for luxury home properties, describing the Beautyrooms ranch in some detail but omitting the price Waldo Beautyrooms had floated.
“Great Scott!” boomed Bill Ragsdale. “We’ve actually got a site scout who thinks!”
“He is smart, Mr. Ragsdale,” said Ribeye Cluke in a fawning tone.
“It’s common sense,” said Bob, his heart beating.
“I’ll discuss it with Mr. Goliath,” said Ragsdale. “Who knows? He might like it. And it’s true that handsome properties do come to the attention of site scouts, but until now they have all rejected them as too upscale—unfit for a hog farm—and that’s been the end of the matter. Of course we have to consider the bottom line. Can you have upscale properties in a region where confined animal farm operations take place? And, of course, it would necessitate an extensive infusion of capital.”
“Sir, actually it wouldn’t. Site scouts see nice properties all the time doing their regular work. So there’d be no need for extra people or anything.”
Mr. Ragsdale smiled knowingly and lowered his eyelids.
Ribeye Cluke picked up another thread. “Bob, about Mr. Crouch’s property. We will get a Money Offer Person down there. In fact we have a very good site scout in the region already and she has just been promoted to money offer status. She could size the place up and give Mr. Crouch a figure.”
“Please, Mr. Cluke, not Evelyn Chine.”
“What! You’ve met Evelyn Chine?”
“Sir, she’s been after my prospects all along. She’s here, she’s there, she’s everywhere. She’s tried to cut in on me several times. Mr. Cluke, I don’t care for Evelyn Chine. Neither does Tater Crouch. He’s one of them she’s tried to get away from me. He told me he didn’t like her and wouldn’t sell to her. Now what is he going to think when I bring her in to make the money offer?”
“That’s a good point, Bob. I’ll see who else we’ve got in the region who could help you out. I’ll let you know in a few days.”
“Thank you. Anybody but Evelyn Chine. And she’s having an affair with a local married man. She’s a real snake.”
“That is malicious gossip, Bob. We don’t do that.”
“Oh?” said Bob then, recklessly, “but it’s all right to lie about what I’m doing down there, right?”
Ribeye Cluke gave Bob a terrible look. “Watch it, Bob. You are not out of the woods yet. We are going to give you one more month to make good. You will sew up two properties in that time or you are out on your bumpus. And I see, Bob”—his tone was menacing—“that you are still wearing those brown oxfords. Did I not tell you to wear cowboy boots?”
“Sir, I do wear them all the time, but today, being in Denver I thought I would wear these. They go better with my suit,” said Bob. “Mr. Cluke, people complain about the smell. The hog farm smell. It’s really pretty awful downwind.”
“That’s the country, Bob. That’s rural life. Feedlots smell too. Stock smell is a natural accompaniment of living in the country. The panhandle—in fact everywhere we put our hog farms—is rural, low-pop
ulation country. Anyway, only a very few supersensitive souls are bothered. Most people are not affected.”
“Well, they say other things too. They say the animals are confined in those buildings, that they suffer and live unnatural lives.”
Ribeye Cluke turned to Mr. Ragsdale. “I can’t believe I am having this conversation. I believe Bob wants me to fire him.” Then he switched back to Bob, speaking in a sarcastically patient voice as though to a mental deficient. “We don’t think of hogs as ‘animals,’ Bob, not in the same way as cats and dogs and deer and squirrels. We say ‘pork units.’ What they are, Bob, is ‘pork units’—a crop, like corn or beans.” There followed a long lecture on free enterprise and the American Way, the importance of economic opportunity and the value of entrepreneurship to the general good and the well-being of America.
Bill Ragsdale spoke in his sonorous, well-modulated voice. “Not only America, Bob, but the whole world.”
“But people down there in the panhandle feel like if they own property they have some say in what happens on it and next to it.”
“You will find, Bob, as you mature, that lip service to the rights of the property owner is just that—lip service. What rules the world is utility—general usefulness. What serves the greater good will prevail. You know that highway departments can take property against the ‘owner’s’ will to widen the thoroughfare for the general good. It’s a similar situation. And if it were put to a general vote, time and again it has been shown that the public supports such moves because they benefit the greater community.”
Bob suddenly remembered Bromo reading a paragraph from his ongoing essay, “This Land Is NOT Your Land,” describing democracy as the duped handmaid of utility. He opened his mouth to say something but both men stood up. It was over.
Ribeye Cluke nodded at Bob. “Go nail down some properties,” he said.
“Good to meet you, Bob,” said Mr. Ragsdale smoothly. He nodded toward Ribeye and added, “You’re well-guided by Mr. Cluke,” and Bob knew the man was not going to discuss a luxury house property subsidiary with Mr. Goliath, whoever that Pork Rind giant might be. Hog farms were for the general good.
30
QUICK CHANGE
On the return trip he spent Tuesday night in Grandma’s Comfy Motel in La Junta, and though bone tired, turned on the television set hoping for a good movie. The selection was peculiar: Brother, The Good Brother, The Brother-in-Law, Uncle Vladya’s Brother. He fell asleep watching two angry peasants shout at each other in Russian, too tired to read the subtitles.
He crossed the Texas line early Wednesday morning, moving past the square shapes of cows, heads down, always eating. The new book from Bromo lay on the seat beside him—Broken Hand, a biography of the mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick, who had been with Abert on the trip across the panhandle. It was Broken Hand who had warned the lieutenant never to tie his mules to shrubbery.
The cropland lay spread out like viridian bolts of corduroy seamed with pale roads. Thinking of the Front Range that frilled Denver, such flatness struck him as an anomaly. His eye traveled over the fields. Houses looked as temporarily there as items on the grocery counter. He passed an abandoned farm familiar to him now from his travels. In back were a few old-fashioned pig huts, hemispheres of galvanized metal tipped and crushed in weedy corners, for no one raised backyard pigs now.
In Woolybucket again, he drove past the grain elevators, their roofs crowded with pigeons who, although they could not get at the rich abundance below, were irresistibly drawn to it. They could not get it, but it was there.
At noon he was back at the Busted Star. Nothing different, another terrifically hot day, the sun pounding the earth with its hammer, LaVon’s car was parked in a scrap of shade curled like old shoe leather. He knocked on the kitchen door, then opened it and put his head in.
“LaVon? You here?”
She came out of her office space, holding a rolled-up paper, large enough to be the map of Texas.
“Well, Bob, I guess you did not get fired. But you have missed all the excitement,” she said. “Anyway, welcome home.”
“What did I miss? I drove through Woolybucket and it looked the same.” He felt a stir at her use of the word “home,” for it seemed maybe he was home, a feeling that had not come when he walked into Uncle Tam’s place. He got a quick shot of Uncle Tam in the panhandle, but that image blacked out immediately.
“Hah. It’s all different. There’s so much goin on I can’t hardly say. Freda Beautyrooms had a stroke Saturday mornin. She died. Well, she needed a go on. Her son Waldo come up for a weekend visit and found her half under the bed. He thinks she was lookin for a slipper or a piece a jewelry. She had all that junk jewelry. I can’t abide that stuff clankin and danglin. A woman in Amarilla I heard about wore these big dangly earrings and she was peelin potatoes at her sink one day and one a the earrings went into the disposal and threw up a little chunk and it went in her eye and blinded her. But Freda is sure goin a be missed. She was in everthing. She was the official head a the Barbwire Festival Committee. Course, old as she was, she didn’t do much, just a position a honor, but they need somebody. On Sunday they called and asked me if I’d take over, seein the festival is so close. But it’s more than just showin up on the day and smilin around and sayin hello, which is all Freda ever done. It’s still a lot a work has to be done. Like put these posters up.”
She unrolled a large four-color poster showing a dancing couple togged out in western dress with strands of antique barbwire emanating from a spinning roll beneath their feet.
WOOLYBUCKET BARBWIRE FESTIVAL
DANCE •BARBECUE •QUILT
RAFFLE •RODEO
COLLECTORS MART & EXCHANGE
She let it roll up again with a snap. “Waldo Beautyrooms come over here lookin for you. He wants a talk with you. He’s back in Houston now—they had the funeral Monday—but he left a number for you to call him up. I didn’t think you was comin back so I probly lost it somewhere in the mess a papers.”
“That’s O.K. I think I have it anyhow. It sounds like a pretty upsetting weekend.”
“Oh, that’s not all. There’s more. Francis Scott Keister—he’s a rancher, you probly don’t know him—and some woman went to the Hi-Lo Motel in Liberal for hanky panky and Francis Scott’s wife, Thomasina—they call her Tazzy—followed them and shot through the window five times. Francis Scott was killed dead and the woman is in the hospital over in Amarilla. They say she might not make it. And Tazzy is in the county jail. Her mother is takin care a the kids.”
“Good Lord,” said Bob. “By any chance was the woman with Francis Scott Keister named Evelyn Chine?”
“That’s the name. She don’t come from around here. I saved the copy of The Bummer. They put out a special edition. Here it is. Look at that. They got a picture a that darn snake-face sheriff on the front page draggin poor Tazzy to the county car. She didn’t want a go. You can see she got her heels braced. They almost had a carry her, I heard. They say the woman was workin for one a them big hog farm corporations. That’s why Tazzy Keister shot her—she’d got Francis Scott ready to throw up to the hog companies and sell out. A lot a people think Tazzy ought a have a medal. And that’s not all. Some lady over in Roberts County got attacked in her own home by a escaped convict. She’d left the door unlocked for her husband. She wasn’t killed but she was—you know what.”
While Bob read the shooting story LaVon reheated the coffee.
“Thing that worries me is that’s two deaths. And they come in threes. So we don’t know who is goin a be next. We don’t know what more is goin a happen. Somethin else, Bob. See, I didn’t know if you was comin back—you said you didn’t think so and I didn’t hear different. So Coolbroth has moved into the bunkhouse. He used a stay there before he went off to school, and he wanted to get back into the place and do his skolpin. He’s got ambitions now. This whole thing with Tazzy has got him on fire. He’s fightin the hog companies and got a bunch a people in on it, mee
tins ever night. ‘Artists Against Hogs’ they call themselves. But in case you did come back, I asked around and there’s a lady over on the Coppedge Road will accommodate you. Mrs. Jaelene Shattle. They’ve got a nice house with a little apartment at the back—telphone, electric, telvision and—here’s the best part—there’s a whirlpool bath. Her mother used a stay there before she died. She had terrible artharitis and the whirlpool helped her. Jaelene only wants fifty a month, same as here, even with all those amenities. I can call her up right now and tell her you are on your way, if you want?”
“Thanks, LaVon. I appreciate your trouble. It sounds great. But I’ll sure miss the bunkhouse. Just where is Coppedge Road, anyway?” It sounded vaguely familiar, but in his wandering drives he couldn’t recall that he had ever hit on it.
“It’s over by Tater Crouch’s ranch. About a mile west. You go over toward Tater’s but bear left where his road forks off, keep on about two mile as the road winds around, and after you cross the bridge it’s the white house on the right. You can’t miss it.”
It was not until he turned onto Coppedge Road that the location hit him. The big King Karolina hog farm that so affected Tater Crouch was on Coppedge Road. In fact, he realized with sinking heart, Jaelene Shattle’s house was the place west of Tater Crouch and must be right beside the hog farm. No wonder the woman was only asking fifty a month. Then his spirits revived. Maybe she would sell out too. But in a few minutes his spirits sagged again. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe he would never get a hog site sale clinched. Depression, like a smell of skunk, filled the car. He felt he wasn’t going to fall into anything fortunate, not a hog farm sale, not a dimpled, curly-headed girl. He did not want to lie but seemed unable to stop doing so. Yet he could not just quit and go back to Denver and look for another lightbulb job. He had taken up a responsibility—to find sites for hog farms and persuade elderly farmers and ranchers to sell out their decades of labor to the silent rows of Hog World—and he would not put it aside. That would be too much like his parents dumping him and haring off to Alaska. The words “Hog World” floated past again and he imagined a hog theme park where the entrance gate was an enormous hog replica and cars drove between the massive pink legs, a Disneyland of pork where the rides would be replicas of giant boars or intelligent piglets, a petting sty where children could feed carrots and apples to real swine, a place where the food kiosks would offer barbecued ribs and Black Forest hams, smokehouse bacon, sausages dangling from a dark and smoky wursthaus ceiling.