“Make a long story short,” said Joe.
“It’s inherently a long story.”
“Try your best.”
His mother drank some of her iced tea. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing her head back to look up in the sky. She made a single click on the picnic table with an enameled fingernail. “Dad is going to have to be dried out. He has had serious problems with his diverticulitis which surgery would cure, but surgery is out of the question because he will go into the DTs before he can recover.”
Joe thought for a moment. “Maybe he should just go through the DTs and deal with the rest of it afterwards.”
“At his age and in his state, I am assured that he will shake himself to death if he goes into the DTs unless he does it in a clinic.”
“Can he live with the diverticulitis?”
“No.”
Beyond the orchard, the beavers had dammed a small stream and the cattails had grown up. A dense flock of redwing blackbirds shot out, followed by a goshawk in tight pursuit. The goshawk flared off into a cottonwood and watched the blackbirds scatter back among the cattails. At a certain point, it would start again.
“I have a feeling you can make this story shorter than you’re letting on.”
“This part I can condense. You have the best chance of getting Dad into the clinic.”
Joe leaned one elbow on the table and rested his face on his hand. “Does he even like me, Mother?”
“Not particularly.”
“In that case, maybe I do have a chance,” he said, as though elated at a glimmer of light. In fact, he was quite wounded. And in the end it was to no purpose.
That summer, Joe’s father went bankrupt in Minnesota. But he saw it coming and signed his ranch over to his sister Lureen to protect it from receivers. Speaking directly to Lureen, confirming that conversation in a letter and sending a copy of the letter to Joe, he expressed his intention to one day take the ranch back and finally to leave it to his son Joe. But he never got the chance: He died driving his car to bankruptcy court, a black four-door Buick coasting through Northfield, Minnesota, with a corpse at the wheel. This ghastly scene dominated the local news for a month.
His father had played around with his wills so often that none of them was binding and for all practical purposes, he died intestate. The property in Minnesota went to Joe’s mother, and sufficient investments had withstood bankruptcy proceedings that she was able to live comfortably. Lureen never offered to give her the ranch back. She made it clear that she was holding it for Joe. She and Joe’s mother had known each other since the days in the two-room Clarendon Creek schoolhouse when they were both girls. They never liked each other. Joe’s mother said, “Lureen has been a wallflower and a cornball since kindergarten.” Lureen said Joe’s mother had “enjoyed all the benefits of prostitution without the health risks and the forced early retirement.” It was the sharpest statement Lureen made in a long, quiet life; and it had so tremendously amused Joe’s father that he had repeated it to Joe with delight. To this day, Joe didn’t know what to make of it, or know why it had delighted his father, the banker and former cowboy. A year after his father died, his mother died — connected events.
Joe and Lureen had never failed to communicate with perfect clarity on the matter of the ranch. Lease payments were made to her; she deposited them and sent a check on to Joe. A separate account was opened to compensate Lureen for her increased taxes as well as a management fee for discussing arrangements with the Overstreets once a year. Lureen lived on her teacher’s retirement money and on social security. She owned her home and lived in it simply and comfortably. Joe offered to help out with her needs. She didn’t seem to want that, and often remarked that she saw it as her mission to properly attend to the business which Joe’s father had placed in her hands. At some point, the matter of transferring it into Joe’s name would be taken care of; and that would be that. Unfortunately, Smitty developed pride of ownership.
After a couple of years in New York, Joe moved to Florida where it was always warm, and soon he met Astrid, riding the front of a 1935 Rolls-Royce, wearing nothing but gold spray paint. She was going to a costume party as a hood ornament. When they danced, he got gold paint on his clothes. This much he could remember about their first kiss: the instant it was over, she said, “You’re driving me crazy.” He had been dating a girl he’d met when he delivered a specimen for his annual physical, a big-voiced Hoosier girl whose tidy apartment was decorated with Guatemalan molas and posters from gangster movies. She didn’t stand a chance against Astrid, who went everywhere with a train of dazed men who hated themselves for being so drawn to her. Astrid scalded them with her Cuban laugh or sent them on demeaning errands.
Not long after the costume parade, Joe and Astrid spent an entire evening making death masks and Joe propped his next to his place at the dinner table, and then so did Astrid. She said, “You look incredibly old in your death mask.” He had been uncomfortable breathing through a straw.
Joe said, “Yours doesn’t look so good itself.” He stuck his tongue through the mouth hole of her death mask. “The other thing is, I’ve got an empty feeling,” he said.
After they began living together, Astrid used to ask him why he didn’t paint. He asked her, “Paint what?”
After a few years, she quit asking.
To make a living, Joe became a freelance illustrator of operation manuals. This attainment, through his perfect draftsmanship, had at the beginning peculiar satisfactions. He went to work for his old school friend, Ivan Slater, now a successful businessman. Ivan was not interested in art; Ivan was interested in making others understand how things ran. Ivan would tell them how things ran and Joe would show them. He felt he was selling something real. He had nothing more neurotic to concern himself with than meeting deadlines and his vision of people he hadn’t met operating diverse gadgets. The big catch with this work was that it always involved Ivan Slater, Joe’s most annoying friend, who had failed upward to a considerable personal fortune. Joe wasn’t the least bit jealous and was even flattered that Ivan construed it an act of friendship to try to lure him away from what he considered his fairly dopey earlier life.
The first thing Joe showed Americans how to run was a battery-powered folding hair dryer. The former landscapist made the instrument jump out at you, its operating features so vivid as to be immediately understood. On the bright curve of the instrument’s side, Joe let the outer world suggest itself in a little glint. Joe poured his heart into the glint. The glint contained tiny details of his ranch in Montana and gave the impression that the hair dryer was right at home in fairly remote circumstances. It made him happy and it in no way impeded the new owner from acquiring knowledge of drying his or her hair. The company comptroller cut Joe a check. Joe went on with his life. The grazing lease allowed him some selection in the jobs he took. Astrid blamed the lease payments for his not painting; she called them his food stamps.
Joe showed people how to operate an electric lazy susan, a garage door opener, an automatic cat feeder, a board game based on geopolitics, a portable telephone so small it could be pinned to one’s clothing, a radar detector for cars, and a gas-powered fire log. For a long time, Joe built up his interest in these projects by imagining that he was working for a single prosperous family, five painfully stupid yet happy people who wanted to be able to run this worthless shit they’d paid good money for.