“Why don’t I show you your room,” said Lureen, “and we can get caught up on our rest.” Because it had become ridiculous to let this pass without remark, she lowered her voice to say that “everyone,” meaning Smitty, had problems which Joe couldn’t be expected to understand because he hadn’t been around. Smitty stood right there and listened blithely.
“Taking this all in?” Joe asked Smitty quietly.
“Mm-hm.”
“You know,” Lureen mused desperately, “Duffy’s Fourth of July at Flathead Lake was a hundred years ago.” Joe had no idea what to do with that one other than take it as an obscure family reference intended to restore the intimacy she had withdrawn. Duffy’s Fourth of July at Flathead Lake. What was that?
“Joe doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” sang Smitty. Then he turned to Joe. “You are among friends,” he said gravely. “Think of it: your own flesh and blood.” He leaned his weight in the pockets of his robe like an old trainer watching his racehorses at daybreak. All his gestures seemed similarly detached from his surroundings. Smitty walked up to the barometer and gave the glass a tap. This seemed to give him his next idea. “I think I’ll head for my quarters now,” he said. “The artillery has begun to subside. Another day tomorrow. One more colorful than the other.”
When Smitty left the room, humming “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” a queer tension set in. Joe knew now his arrival was an invasion, his presence abusive. He thought of making up alarming lies about the space program, ones he could deliver tearfully, accounts of loyal Americans shredded by titanium and lasers. If some sort of guilt based on an unimpeachable national purpose could be held over Lureen, possibly this miserable tone could be altered. “I delivered the little things to the space shuttle that made it a home, the nail clippers, the moisturizers, the paperbacks, the tampons …”
But the tension didn’t last. He went back into the kitchen and helped her clean up the broken glass. Lureen held the dustpan. Joe tried to sweep carefully without letting the straws of the broom spring and scatter bits of crystal. He wanted to ask Lureen why she stood for it, but he didn’t. They swept all around the great gas stove. As Joe knelt to hold the dustpan, he saw that its pipes had been disconnected. It was a dummy, a front for the mean little microwave next to the toaster.
“A service for twenty,” Lureen said, referring to the broken crystal. “Who in this day and age needs a service for twenty?” A laugh of astonishment. Who indeed! My mother needed it, Joe thought. From each window of the kitchen, each except the one that opened on the tiny yard, could be seen the clapboard walls of the neighboring houses, the shadows of clotheslines just out of sight above, duplexes that used to be family homes. A service for twenty! They laughed desperately. How totally out of date! And finally, how removed from the space program! I don’t feel so good, he thought.
“Joe, Smitty and I have made not such a bad life for ourselves here,” Lureen said after they finished cleaning up. “We never have gotten used to the winters. And you know what we talk about? Hawaii. It’s funny how those things start. Arthur Godfrey used to have a broadcast from Honolulu. He had a Hawaiian gal named Holly Loki on the show. Smitty and I used to listen. We kind of formed a picture. Someday, we thought … Hawaii! Well, Joe, let’s really do call it a day.” Lureen led him up the narrow wood stairs to the second floor. Joe tried to think of surf, a ukulele calling to him from the night-shrouded side of a sacred volcano, of outrigger canoes. He tried to put Smitty and Lureen in this scene and he just couldn’t. Nothing could uproot them from their unhappy home. Not even a no-holds-barred luau.
Joe’s old room looked onto a narrow rolling street. Lureen wanted him to spend the night before going back to the ranch in the morning. You could make out the railroad bridge and the big rapid river beyond. There was a stand next to his door with a pitcher of water on it. Joe’s bed had been turned back. The room was sparely furnished with a small desk where Lureen stored her things: paper clips, Chapsticks, pencils. Joe pulled open the drawer as he’d loved to do thirty years before to smell the camphor from the Chapsticks. The pencils were in hard yellow bundles, the paper clips in small green cardboard boxes. The train went over the bridge like a comet, the little faces in the lighted windows racing through their lives. Joe’s father had been raised here; his uncles had gone to two world wars from here; educations and paper routes and bar examinations had been prepared for in the kitchen here. Everyone rushing for the end like the people on the train. Smitty came home from the war after a booby trap had killed his best friend and stayed drunk for two years in the very room he occupied now. Joe’s father used to say, “I went over too.” And Smitty would say, “You didn’t go over where I went over.”
“Good night,” said Lureen. Family business had worn her out. Instead of acknowledging her exhaustion, she had nominated Hawaii, whose blue-green seas would wash her all clean.
“Good night, Aunt Lureen,” Joe sang out with love.
Joe stretched out in the dark, under the covers of the squeaking iron bed. He had slept here off and on his whole life. But now he felt like someone trying to hold a tarp down in the wind. He smoked in the dark. It was perfect. Smoking meant so much more now that he knew what it did to him. But in the dark it was perfect. He could see the cloud of his smoke rise like a ghost.
He must have fallen asleep because when he heard Smitty’s voice, it was its emphasis that startled him; he had not heard what had gone on before. “For God’s sake, Lureen, we’re in a brownout! Keep the shade drawn.”
Joe struck a match and looked at the dial of the loud clock ticking away beside him. It was after midnight. A husky laugh from Smitty rang through the upstairs, a man-of-action laugh. Joe had to have a look.
Lureen’s room at the end of the hall was well lighted. Smitty and Lureen stood in its doorway like figures on a bandstand. Smitty wore his lieutenant’s uniform and impatiently flipped his forage cap against his thigh. “We move at daybreak,” he said.
“The bars closed an hour ago,” said Lureen wearily.
“We pour right in behind the tanks and stay there until we get to Belgium,” he insisted.
“Smitty,” said Lureen, “I heard the radio! Truman said it’s over!”
Smitty scrutinized his sister’s features. “Can you trust a man who never earned the job? Harry The Haberdasher never-earned-the-job.”
“You can trust the radio!” Lureen cried. Smitty stared back.
“I should have listened, Lureen. I should have listened to you. The nation has probably taken to the streets. Am I still welcome?” Their figures wavered in the sprawling light.
“The most welcome thing in the world,” said Lureen in a voice that astonished Joe with its feeling. Smitty gave her a hug. Joe watched and tried to understand and was choked by the beauty of their embrace. He wondered why he was so moved by something he couldn’t understand.
11
This sale yard was a place ranchers took batches of cattle too small to haul to the public yard in Billings. You didn’t go here in a cattle truck; you went in the short-range stock truck in all the clothes you owned because the cab heater went out ten years ago. Some went pulling a gooseneck trailer behind the pickup. You could unload either at one of the elevated chutes or at the ground-level Powder River Gate, which opened straight into a holding pen where the yard men, usually older ranchers who had gone broke or were semiretired, sorted and classed the cattle for that day’s sale. Joe stopped and looked back out into the pens to get an idea of the flow of cattle. It looked pretty thin and there was a cold rain blowing over everything. The yard men leaned on their long prods and stared out across the pens into nowhere.