“Drop the charges, hoss.” Frank could see the clenched motion in the sheriff’s shoulders from his seat in back. Lucy just watched things going by. There was a long silence from Darryl, not a sound. The sheriff looked at Frank. Frank would think about that gaze for a long time. He seemed to be taking in the long way Frank had fallen.
Lucy, Frank and Darryl got into Darryl’s truck. First, they went to Lucy’s house. She got out and in shame, rage or both, walked straight to her door without a word to either Frank or Darryl.
“I think she’s sore,” said Frank. He was getting depressed.
“Yeah.” Darryl looked depressed too. They sat for a moment in front of Lucy’s house, the truly ghastly colors of a new day rising behind the tall ash trees along the street, jerky bird movements among the branches.
Darryl said, “I wonder if there’s anything we could have said.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. The whole thing is a bad deal.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Frank.
“Well, it wasn’t her fault.”
“Let’s get you your new truck. Maybe if I take a good hammering on that I’ll feel a little better. I’m almost suicidal.”
“You’re just sobering up.”
“There are a couple of other things.”
“They call it self-pity.”
“Okay, Darryl, I’ve got it coming.”
Darryl put it in gear and headed up the street to Frank’s house to get his checkbook. “I’ll just be a sec,” Frank said, and went in the house. He pulled out half the drawers in the kitchen before he found what he was looking for. He could have waited a bit and stopped at the office, but he knew Eileen was so demoralized that his appearance would have put her away. He also knew he couldn’t bring himself to break in a new secretary. But now he had the checkbook and went back outside.
Darryl was gone and a note fluttered on the sidewalk gate: “Forget it.”
35
He sat with his fishing tackle at the great corrugated base of a black cottonwood tree whose broad and leafy branches shaded an undercut run. He rolled over on his back and watched the big white clouds, barely moving toward the east, drifting on in a unit against the insistent deep blue of the sky. This seemed to him to be a grand and wholly acceptable arcade where his various sins were simply booths to be revisited with amusement. He wondered how Dante had failed to perfect one of his circles for the philandering sportsman: ravaged by his own hounds, flogged with his own fishing poles, dancing over his own buckshot. He joyously felt himself idling, an unreflective mood in which water was water, sky was sky, breeze was breeze. He knew it couldn’t last.
He got up and strung his rod together and in a minute he was in the river with a box of flies in his shirt pocket. He could barely sense his business behind him, spinning toward failure. He didn’t even have waders but was comfortable in the summer flow. The river was low and the gravel bars were prominent. He moved along until he could find some fish feeding. There was nothing going on where he had slept, in the deep run, though surely there were fish there. Nothing in the sparkling tail-out below the next big pool. But in a slender side channel he saw a string of fish feeding on flying ants.
Did he have a flying ant imitation in his fly box? He looked and yes, he did. He tied it on and made a very cautious presentation to the most downstream fish. The fish took in a silver swirl that faintly betrayed the colors of its flanks. Frank gave it some slack; the fish dropped back where it couldn’t scare its fellows and in a minute was in hand, an East Slope cutthroat, a rare bird on this river. He let that one go and eased up on the next and caught it, a little butterball brown trout that jumped four times. He hooked the next one; he could see it was a brown trout by the yellow flash as it took his fly down. A smart fish, it moved up through the others, scared them off, bolted and broke the fine leader.
Two hours had gone by. Frank crawled up on the bank, pushing his rod ahead of himself, and when on dry land, rolled over to face the sun and dry off. A slight shadow went through his mind as he reflected that this was Wednesday, conventionally viewed as a workday. But this soon passed. Work? The question chilled him. He’d better figure that out fast. He’d better work for something or quit taking up room. Though what was wrong with taking up room? He hadn’t asked to be put in this position. He was a byproduct of his parents’ sex life unless, given those austere times, he was the entire product. Hard to picture from the current carnival.
The worst was that he had been “meant” for someone and now he was not “meant” for anyone. His fear was that if he was not meant for anyone, then it might follow that he wasn’t meant for anything. He wasn’t a scientist or an artist. He was just a businessman, really. Still, he believed that he asked the big questions. He knew that scientists and artists believed that only they asked the big questions. They believed it was their job to ask the questions the answers to which the general population required for their well-being, but never asked themselves. Why? Because, it would seem to follow, the general population was too fucking stupid. This belief was behind the impression that artists and scientists often made among ordinary people, of being blowhards, or assholes. He admitted loving his bouts of brainlessness: the fish tight against the rod, the strange woman smiling across the corridor as the light from the Coke machine shone on her lipstick, the dog barking beyond the railroad tracks. When you analyzed something, it owned you. You ought, as the Bible suggested, to watch, and wait. Frank smiled at his own thoughts, rolled onto his stomach and watched the river.
By the time he got to the office, several things had changed. First, he had certainly come to realize that he was going to have to take hold of practical matters while he could. He pretended that his emotional hegira had been a kind of renewal, but his body and the vague feeling of being stunned denied that. He had evidently recovered his old abstracted yet purposeful self because his secretary had lost her sardonic aura and fell right in behind the renewal of his routines. There was a mausoleum tidiness about his desk that implied absence and neglect of business.
Second, he was coming down with something. Eileen told him it was going around. He felt shaky, and there was the sense that sweats were not far away. Aspirin was wearing off about every two hours but work had to be done. He began to look at his activities: his antagonizing the renters at the clinic, his gross failure to track the cattle market, his open boredom when talking about the fate of the family ranch. He felt he was awakening from hypnosis. What in God’s name could I have had in mind? he wondered.
And finally, he had learned in a phone call from his daughter, marked by a coolness he had never experienced from her before and which was so baffling to him that it had the effect of overshadowing the information it conveyed, that Gracie had returned to town and would be living on Third Street with her friend Edward. She, Holly, would be down for a visit, and to accompany Lane at one of his Brandings.
This made things neither better nor worse. Gracie had left him and the finality of that blow could not, he was sure, be increased by her being in town. At least he didn’t think so. There would be the pain of running into her. But how often did he run into anyone by accident? There would be a powerful temptation to slip over to her place at night and see what was going on. But he was going to stop all that, or if he didn’t stop, he would resume his observation of conventional families pursuing a long-shared idea in our country, one he had lost.
“Eileen, have you been following the fortunes of this Centennial Wolf Pack?”