“I’ve been to the insurance people,” Joe said. “We’re going to have to settle with them.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll go to jail if they press charges. The insurance company still won’t pay. Lureen would be miserable without you. And it is not customary to serve cocktails in jail.”
“What do you think, Joe?”
“I think you’re guilty. Lureen’s your ace in the hole.”
“Yours too, Joe.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t you? Whose ranch is that?”
“Mine.”
“Really?” said Smitty. “Say, I knew your father very well and I don’t really buy all this. He didn’t like you much, my friend.” Smitty’s incredibly wrinkled, almost Eurasian face split into laughter. Joe thought of the word “dynamite” as it was used a few years ago. He thought that Smitty had a dynamite laugh, except that it made Joe want to dynamite Smitty. He was weary of trying to understand Smitty. He had just seen a child abusers’ support group on television. It seemed society didn’t understand their need to beat children. It was getting harder and harder to be understanding. It had always been a problem but now the problem was almost out of sight. Smitty was capable of love, he’d heard; but Smitty’s great drive was to get out of the rain. It was hard to understand Smitty completely and not hope his dynamite laugh blew up in his face.
“Let me ask you something, Smitty. Did you borrow the money for the shrimp against the ranch?”
“Yes I did,” he said smartly.
“And is there any left?”
“Not much!”
“I see.” It was going to have to be a great year for cattle. A century record.
“And I presume you’d just as soon concede that the insurance company has a point.”
“That’d be fine.”
Of course, thought Joe, let’s be honest. Smitty had challenged Joe’s claims to the ranch. He didn’t know whether or not he cared; but at least he knew he should care. Moreover, he’d be damned if it was Smitty’s to decide. On the other hand, as the booze hit Smitty and began its honeyed rush through his bloodstream, he slumped into vacancy and into the great mellow distances past judgment. Joe had been around alcoholism all his life but didn’t really understand it. Liquor was just a pleasant thing to him, possessed of no urgency; he would never have resisted Prohibition. It just didn’t matter to him as it did to his parents or to Smitty, who was bound for glory.
When Smitty resumed speech it was in a mellifluous tone. “I knew with the loss of the lease,” he said, “something had to be done. And you were the one to do it. I also knew that it was not necessary, technically, for you and Lureen to consult with me—”
“You were much occupied with the seafood business—”
“—but I am family, and I would like to be kept abreast of things.”
“You will be.”
“Our vital interests are now tied together, at least emotionally, and when you buy cattle with the ranch as collateral, I should be told.”
“Hereafter, you will be.”
“And when you sell those cattle—”
“Yes.”
“Just tell me.”
“We will.”
“I would like to accompany those cattle to the auction yard.”
“You may conduct the sale yourself,” Joe said feelingly at the sight of Smitty’s twitching face, the watery blue eyes seeming to plead for a stay of execution. “Once we bring those cattle down off that grass, I will have done all I could.”
Smitty rested the nail of his right forefinger on the rim of his glass. “Along about when?” It was only then that Joe suspected Smitty’s intentions exactly.
“October fifteenth,” said Joe. There was now no one else in the restaurant; the two sat in its streaming vacancy as though they were in a great train station on the edge of empty country. “Lureen and me,” said Smitty, musing. “I don’t know. Our mother was a saint, an uncrowned saint. And our father. Um. A short-fused man with a little white mark in his eye. Kind of blind in that one, he was. He used to whup your dad till he was black and blue. Supposed to have made a man out of him. What’s that mean, anyway?” Joe didn’t know. He wasn’t thinking of the question, really. He had just had a presentiment of disaster.
28
As Joe drove home, his mind wandered back a year or so and, as though for the first time, he could see Astrid, her very real beauty, the peculiar elegance of her every gesture, the air of mystery lent her by a gene pool across the Gulf Stream, the saddest river of them all, where some of the world’s most interesting races fell into the sugar kettle together. As he dodged the small cattle trucks on the way, he asked himself if he was remembering this right, about Astrid’s presence, if that was what it was, her aura, her allure, and if it was still there at all, through the intervening history.
When he drove into the yard, Astrid was knocking apples out of a tree with a stick. She stopped and leaned on the stick to watch him come in. He looked at her. It was still there.
Astrid felt good enough, it seemed. Joe had to take the position that the stress and colitis were gone and now she was better. She immediately made an attempt to fully inhabit the house, to rearrange it, and make it her own. This produced a pleasant feeling in Joe and he was happy to move furniture as instructed and even to dust the tops of tables and bureaus, and the surfaces of the Venetian blinds. Astrid had been raised in a conventional Cuban-exile household in Florida, had duly celebrated her quince in the tarted-up strumpet costumes that suggested the elders were putting their daughters on the open market. Her life until then had made a regular little wife-prospect of her, but an American high school and four years at Gainesville had flung her into the future. Astrid’s latinity became a romantic feature as she went from hippie spitfire to a goddess of the Florida night. Anglo girls in her company always seemed to feel both hygienic and anesthetized. Astrid liked that. She called them “white girls.” Now she was up on the sagebrush prairie getting over a broken heart. In a short while, they would both be on social security, trying to eat corn on the cob with ill-fitting dentures. If there is reincarnation, Joe thought, I want to come back as a no-see-um.
They sat down to dinner right after sunset. Coyotes came down close to the yard and howled back and forth. Astrid put the serving dishes on the table: black beans, yellow rice, chicken. Joe lit the candles. “That would be your coyotes?” Astrid asked, at the latest uproar outside the windows. Joe nodded. “You know,” she said, “I’m sort of beginning to appreciate this place.” She looked off. “Sort of.”
“Good,” said Joe, gazing in rapture at the tropical food.
“But this country, it’s the big romance in your life, isn’t it?”
“For what it’s worth.”
“The mountains?”
“I don’t particularly like the mountains,” said Joe.