“Ray, you awake?”
“I might be. What d’you want, asshole?”
“I just have something I want to get off my chest.”
“Make it quick, I need my z’s.”
“Sure, Ray, try this one on for size: the gun’s a toy.”
“The gun’s a what?”
“A fake. And, Ray, looks to me like you might be one, too.”
“Where’s the fuckin’ light switch? I’m not taking this shit.”
“Careful you don’t stub your toe jumping off the bed like that.”
“Might be time to clip your wings, sonny.”
“Ray, I’m here for you. But I’m not an idiot. Just take a moment so we can agree about your so-called gun, and then we can have some straight talk.”
Ray found the lamp and paced the squeaking floorboards. “I gotta take a leak,” he said, heading out to the porch. “Be right back.” Dave wondered whether he’d been too harsh, sensing defeat in Ray’s parting remark. Dave could see him silhouetted in the moonlight in the doorway, a silver arc splashing onto the lawn, head thrown back in what Dave took to be a posture of despair. Surely, he could squeeze this guy for something.
By the time Ray walked back in he was already confessing … an appraiser in Modesto, California, where I was raised. I did some community theater there, played Prince Oh-So-True in a children’s production of The Cave of Inky Blackness, and thought I was going places. Next came Twelve Angry Men—I was one of them — which is where the pistol came from. Then I was the hangman in Motherlode. Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star who was working a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the Dom Pérignon. I’d had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Eventually, I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head, just rowed me to shore in a dinghy. I hiked all the way to the crater, where I used the restroom to clean up and got some chow off the lunch wagon before catching a tour bus into Honolulu. I tried to sell the celebrity-drug-fueled-orgy story to a local paper, but that went nowhere because of the thing I’d signed. Everything I sign costs me money. About this time, my wife’s uncle’s walnut farm went bust. He took a loan out on the real estate, and I sold my car, a rust-free ’78 Trans Am, handling package, W72 performance motor, solar gold with a Martinique-blue interior — we’re talking mint. We bought a bunch of FEMA trailers off the Katrina deal and hauled them to California. But of course we lost our asses. So the uncle gases himself in his garage, and my wife throws me out. I moved into a hotel for migrants and started using the computers at the Stanislaus County Library, sleeping at the McHenry Mansion, where one of the tour guides was someone I used to fuck in high school. She slipped me into one of the canopy beds for naps. Online is where I met Morsel. We shared about our lives. I shared I had fallen on hard times. She shared she was coining it selling bootleg OxyContin in the Bakken oil field. It was a long shot: Montana. Fresh start. New me. But, hey. I took the bus to Billings and thumbed the rest of the way. By the time I made it to Jordan I had nothing left. The clerk at that fleabag almost wouldn’t let me have a room. I told him I was there for the comets. I don’t know where I come up with that. I had to make a move. Well, now you know. So, what happens next? You bust me with Morsel? You turn me in? I can’t marry her anyway. I don’t need bigamy on my sheet.”
“You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” Dave asked with surprising coldness. He could see things going his way.
“A hundred percent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already being in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there with stakes like this.”
“Like what kind of risk?”
“Death threats, the usual. Heard them all my life. But think about it, Dave. I’m not in if you’re not. You really want to return to what you were doing? We’d both be back in that hotel with the comets.”
Ray was soon snoring. Dave was intrigued that these revelations, not to mention the matter of the “gun,” had failed to disturb Ray’s sleep. Dave meanwhile was wide awake, and he began to realize why: the nagging awareness of his own life. So many risks! He felt that Ray was a success despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. What had Dave accomplished? High school. What could have been more painful? Yet, he suffered no more than anyone else. So even in that he was unexceptional. There was only generic anguish, persecution, and lockdown. He didn’t have sex with a mansion tour guide. His experience came on the promise of marriage to a fat girl. Then there was the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. A commanding officer who told the recruits that “the president of the United States is a pencil-wristed twat.” Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Black Hawks. “Human resource” assistant. Praying for deployment against worldwide towelheads. Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. Meaner, too. Threatening him with a baby. And he was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop who was his dealer in eighth grade. Never enough money and coveralls with so much cow shit he had to change Laundromats every two weeks.
It was perhaps surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he did: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. Dave took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside (would have been more fun in Ray’s Trans Am) with a special skill set, detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records, all easily learnable; and Dave brought art to it. Though he had no idea where that gift had come from, he was a genius preg tester. Straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proved in spring calves, was renowned. His excitement began as soon as he put on the coveralls, pulled on the glove lubed up with OB goo, before even approaching the chute. With the tail held high in his left hand, he’d push his right all the way in against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveling out the manure to clear the way, over the cervix before grasping the uterus, now that he was in nearly up to his shoulder. Dave could detect a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He liked the compliments that came from being able to tell the rancher how far along the cow was, anywhere from two to seven months, according to Dave’s informal system: mouse, rat, cat, fat cat, raccoon, Chihuahua, beagle. He’d continue until he’d gone through the whole herd or until his arm was exhausted. Then he had only to toss the glove, write up the invoice, and look for food and a room.
Perfect. Except for the dough.
Morsel made breakfast for the men — eggs with biscuits and gravy. At the table, Dave was still assessing Ray’s claim of reaching his last dime back at Jordan, which didn’t square with the rolls of bills in his pack. And Dave was watching Weldon watching Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove. “Anyone want to go to Billings Saturday and see the cage fights?” she said at last, moving from the stove to the table with a dish towel. Dave alone looked up and smiled; no one answered her. Ray was probing the food with his fork, still under Weldon’s scrutiny. The salt-encrusted sweat stain on Weldon’s black Stetson went halfway up the crown. It was downright unappetizing in Dave’s view and definitely not befitting any customer for topdrawer bull semen. Nor did he look like a man whose daughter was selling dope at the Bakken, either.
At last Weldon spoke as though calling out to his livestock.
“What’d you say your name was?”
“Ray.”
“Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”