Gracie was unwarmed by these genial maunderings. “I wouldn’t know. I’m the bimbo who tried to sell Creole cuisine to the locals, remember?”
“You just fell down on your market research. Trail mix is the local soul food.”
Frank kept on watching Gracie hang her wash. Did this mean she didn’t own a dryer? Maybe Edward liked the smell of fresh air in his linens. These days people would do such things out of a vision of a simpler America.
Frank was looking at the clothespins, wondering how much longer they would last. He watched Gracie with endless appreciation of her concentration, her standing on tiptoes and, almost unbearably, the way, when she finally finished what she was doing, she used her thumbs to move her hair back behind her ears; that, or the way she saw him noticing. There was a momentary sense of everything else having stopped, a kind of silence, breathlessness.
Then it all came back: who he thought he was, who he thought she was, who she thought she was, who she thought he was; how, in the best case, it might well be mostly behind them, the flat earth on which much is irrevocable. Even the bad years, he thought, even the years of psychobabble and attacking each other with the previous night’s dreams. He had despised all those poetic nature books she read with topics like “impromptu clamming” as a spiritual exercise. And she had said he had no values, not even hippie values, that he came from the world of Grain Belt beer, novelty sex and car worship, from a hick town in a hick state. We are not people, he thought, we are envoys. Seek a postponement.
Yet, when she was in front of him, close, close enough to touch, she asked him, without raising her eyes to his, “Frank, if I asked you to do something, would you consider it?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Anything?”
Frank felt his heart lock. “Anything,” he said. Gracie lifted her face and looked into his eyes. Anything, he thought.
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Wait a minute, what do you want me to do?”
“You already said you would.”
“But what is it?”
“Frank, I want you to meet with Edward. I think you need to fill in all the blanks. I think you’re losing it, Frank. I think you better find out what’s what and go from there. You already gave me your reply,” said Gracie with a little curtsey. “Bye for now.” She went into the house, stopping in the doorway to say, “Remember what a good sport I’ve been about you fucking that sorry whore in my old spindle bed.”
Frank was going to speak but the door was now closed. Instead of an arch that embowered their conversation, it was now the bald front of a house. And the road to finality was clear as daylight.
The Kid Royale Hotel and chicken farm was being picketed by the Preservation League. It was a beautiful day for picketing, with a bright sky filled with bright nimbus clouds and a gentle breeze from the west that carried a smell of lawns, a superb day for protest. Frank had known it was only a matter of time until they got here. One young woman walked up and down in front of the hotel in a sandwich board while she read a book. The sign said:
STOP FRANK COPENHAVER
FROM BURYING OUR PAST
IN CHICKEN DROPPINGS
“I’m Frank Copenhaver,” he said as he passed her by. “Why don’t you put a group together and buy me out? I could use the money.”
“Yeah, right. You’re a tycoon, mister.”
“I was getting there all right, but my bank says I’ve failed. Now I want to join you in the granola underworld.”
Without looking up from her book, she said, “This is harassment. Another word and I’ll turn your ass in.”
A blast of odor greeted Frank when he opened the door. He held it open long enough so that he could picture the invisible progress of the smell onto the sidewalk. There were few pedestrians but they reacted physically to its arrival with shrinking movements and rapid gaits. Here comes your regional heritage, Frank thought, on the wings of a dove. The picketers might well decide to do their work in the form of meditative petitions issued from fern-filled quarters in another part of town.
Frank was thrilled to step into the lobby and hear the racket of Orville Conway and his family, two tall boys and his big freckled wife with a scarf tied over her head. They greeted him and kept working; as he wandered through the building, he saw them nailing up chicken wire, running PVC pipe in the hallways to water the birds, rigging doors and corner roosts. One boy was hauling chicken feed and oyster shells in heavy sacks that hung from his broad shoulders while his mother guided a push broom down the corridors. The younger boy, wearing a Walkman, ran a nail gun as he secured the wire with lath strips. Over the din of their work, a cultivated voice chanted outside through a bullhorn a rhyme about it being no mystery what chickens do to history. The second floor, meanwhile, was completely up and running. Orville took Frank down the chicken-wired, doorless rooms filled with genial chickens greeting Frank with a wave of complaisant clucks. Orville looked upon them with admiration, a few strands of blond hair spilling from his wide head.
“I believe we’re to where we can see it might work,” he said.
“I’m excited about this, Orville.”
“The wife and I, we was hoping.”
“You’re all working so hard, I’m just glad to be in partners with you.”
“Them folks in front ain’t no bother. They’ll get tired pretty quick. We used to sell them organic chickens at the farmers’ market. One old gal pulled this dressed chicken’s legs apart and give it a sniff and told the missus it wasn’t fresh. The missus said, ‘Hell lady, Marilyn Monroe couldn’t pass that test.’ Us, we don’t get tired. Me, Shirl, nor them boys. We call them folks out front died-again Christians.”
Frank wandered around and tried to convey his enthusiasm to the Conway family and walked back outside through the picketers.
“It’s a changing world,” said one wise male picketer in long dreadlocks.
Frank told him, “It’s a fact, Jack.”
Then he got in his car and drove out to the town of Impact to pick up his scale receipts for his yearlings. He never had gotten them and it looked as if he’d need a mountain of paper to slow that bank down. On the narrow paved road, he passed a small buck that had been hit by a car, its head angled back sharply; its antlers lay on the pavement about fifteen feet away. There were several vertical, ribbed white clouds in the blue sky that looked like the afterimages of spinning tops. A truck went by with a license plate that read, “44 MAG.”
He picked up his receipts from the woman who ran the general store. He bought the Sun because of its interesting headline, BABY STOLEN FROM MOM’S WOMB WHILE SHE SLEEPS, and the Enquirer, which reported that Bill Cosby was working on his own test tube baby, and which revealed that Sonny Bono’s memoirs stated several important things about Cher: A, she was a lousy lover; B, she was so stupid she thought the moon was part of the sun; and C, she had been unfaithful with certain members of his band.
Frank remembered being out here long ago, grossly loaded, having to follow “Lewis and Clark Trail” signs the state had erected just to get home. He drove through the low, undulating hills covered with sagebrush and serviceberry bushes. Lightnin’ Hopkins sang on the radio, “You know my little woman ain’t no Mexican…,” making Frank daydream of his own true love, now connected to him by a thread. His mind was in ribbons thinking of all their trials on this lonesome road. White hair in five minutes.