He made his departure as uneventful as possible. For two straight days he watched shows with his only child, including uplifting sitcoms, sitcom reruns, and sitcom pilots that were seeing the light of day that very night. An agnostic, he retained a faint hope, magnified by overpowering loneliness, of meeting his late wife and that gave him the courage — indeed, a certain merry determination — to gas himself in the garage. Before he went there to seal the windows and start the car, he needed final confirmation and so he returned to the living room, whose shabbiness was emphasized by the prissy furniture. The back of Neville Junior’s head was outlined against the square of light of the television. “Tomorrow, I’ll be gone,” he said, but his son didn’t hear him. “Goodbye, Karl.” The consequences began: the discovery of the body, the unattended funeral, the eviction of Neville Junior, and the loss of all things familiar to him, including those he cared for most: the smell of lilacs and spring perennials filling the air, the sounds of pickup baseball in the park a few blocks away, and television.
Dulcie Jones’s days were numbered.
On the Fourth of July, four months after the passing of Neville Senior, Orval looked up the dirt road in front of his house toward the Cheyenne car garden, the crooked line of telephone poles, the mud puddles mirroring blue sky and thundercloud silhouettes, the watchful hawk in the chokecherry thicket, and saw a willowy man in old clothes coming toward him, a man whose still-dark beard and bounding gait marked him as younger than his apparent circumstances might have suggested. Orval sensed he was coming to see him, and indeed he was. There was no reason for him to know that this was Neville Junior, or to know what brought young Neville to his ranch.
He removed his hat rather formally on arrival at Orval’s porch, the hair under it looking wet and plastered down close around his small skull, while Orval eyed him suspiciously from his rocking chair. Neville’s well-cared-for teeth gleamed through his beard, whose black bristles falsely suggested a hard life. “Mister,” he said, “I’m in a bad way. Throwed a rod here a mile or two back and didn’t have the do-re-mi to get it fixed. I need a job.” Neville had the Appalachian accent routinely heard in Westerns down pat.
“Not hiring.”
“A little sumpin’ to eat, place to sleep, and a TV; wouldn’t have to pay me.”
“Wouldn’t have to pay you? What exactly is it you want to do for free gratis?”
“I’d work, but like I say you’d need to train me.”
“But not pay you?”
“You heard right, mister. Just those things I mentioned.”
The two swept out the old milk house, which had a two-stage concrete floor and a place for the creek to run through, though the creek had been diverted long ago and the room was dry enough. Then they assembled an iron bed and rolled out a thin mattress, which they beat until the room filled with dust. “No telling what’s been living in here,” said Orval, with an ingratiating smile. Neville threw up his hands in wonder. “But I guess that’ll do you. Gon’ have to.”
“TV.”
“What’s that?”
“I said TV.”
“I hadn’t got but one and it’s up to my house.”
“I told you when we started in on this,” hissed Neville, “that I’d require a TV.”
The reception was exceptionally poor in the milk house, but by adding aluminum foil to the rabbit ears they were able to get two channels, one all snowy with Greer Garson. The tension seemed to go out of Neville’s body as he told Orval to call him for supper and then settled down on the pipe bed for some viewing, ignoring the dust that continued to rise and the perhaps-too-vigorous closing of the door by Orval.
In the morning, Orval was determined to see if he could get his money’s worth out of this man, who had introduced himself as Karl “with a K.” He could tell right away that Karl meant to stay, as he hurled himself into shoveling out the calving shed, a job requiring no experience whatsoever but a strong tolerance for grueling repetition. At one point, he went at this with such demonic energy that it caused Orval to tell him whoa-up, he had all day. Neville wiped his forehead, leaned on the shovel, and asked Orval if he had any family, smiling as he heard about Dulcie as though for the first time. Today he’d parted his hair in the middle, and with the dark beard he had the appearance of an old-time preacher, someone who could talk about Jesus with plausible familiarity. Orval thought he’d have to find him some other clothes if he worked out, something brighter, because he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the preacher look. There was always one going up the road with a Bible in the glove box supposedly to convert the dump bears but probably to check out the little squaws.
This one was here for vengeance. “She ever get out to see you?”
“Just on weekends.”
“But that’s tomorrow.”
“The horse sees more of her than I do.”
“Could be, now you got a hired man, there’ll be more time for the two of you to visit.”
“I’m available!”
It seemed like he spent half of Saturday, the set on mute, listening to her gallop up and down the place, wondering when she’d get the curiosity to come over and say howdy. Poor old Orval was doing the vigil thing in his rocker, Saturday beer in hand, but Neville could tell he wasn’t getting much in the way of contact either — on a day made for family, a light breeze in the cottonwoods, the Cheyenne sleeping it off up the road, and the rare lowing of distant cattle. Springtime!
She knocked on the door.
Neville had a loose, gangly act ready for this, head tipped to one side, wire lightly wrapped around his left hand as he turned to let her in. Blue light from the silent television jerked around a room that smelled like concrete and once stored an ocean of purest milk. Dulcie wore jeans and tennis shoes, a snap-button Western shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had on sunglasses. He liked her firm arms, the lariats and roses that decorated the pink shirt. She gazed at him and, crossing her arms behind her back, leaned against the door she’d just closed. She raised her forefinger to slide the sunglasses down enough to look over their top.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“That’s more than I can say!” Neville called out.
“May I turn that thing off?”
“No!”
“Well, I am. I’m turning it off.”
Dulcie went past him and bent over the set, reaching for the controls. Neville had the wire on her in nothing flat, called her a lowdown escort service. Though there was a spell of tumult— more like a rerun than anything new — it was the moment when movement stopped that finally produced surprise, and Neville was swept by desire at last. Everything in his life had led to this ravishing stillness. He knew who to dedicate this one to.
Orval went on sitting in his rocker, stubbing out his cigarettes in a tomato juice can. Sooner or later, Dulcie would have to put the horse up and come have a few words with him. At the same time, his new hired man wandered down the darkening road away from the little ranch, away from the Cheyenne and their old cars, weeping at the innocence now beyond his grasp, never to be a virgin again. It was great to feel something so strongly. He hoped to weep forever. If only his father could have been there to see him with tears streaming down his face. It would have been a beginning, something good. He could just hear his voice.
“Well, son, I’ll be damned. You feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you?”