He got the loan, and in the wild fluctuations of the cattle market it was a dangerous loan. They were happy to walk it through when they thought it might blow up in your face. Despite his bold speech to the banker, it cost Frank a lien on the clinic.
The yearlings arrived in nine bunches, from Choteau, Camas Prairie, Sumatra, Sedan, Wise River, White Sulphur Springs, Ekalaka, Cat Creek and Geraldine. Frank stayed at the Graves, in Harlowton, and met each load with his summer cowboy, a very competent twenty-eight-year-old nephew of Bob named John Jones. When Frank sat down in the café of the Graves with Jones to do his W-4 form, he found that this bright young man could neither read nor write. For some reason, as he helped Jones, whose face blazed with shame, he felt like a transubstantiated version of his father, a patient and unambiguous man who would see Jones’s illiteracy as just a small impediment in getting the yearlings onto the grass in an orderly way, where they could begin to gain weight and be worth more money. To Frank’s father, every animal had a dollar meter on its back and the needle was always in motion. Sometimes it was going down. If you ran a thousand head, you had a thousand meters and you had to keep those needles going up.
Frank wondered what his father would have thought at a time when big calves were going for five hundred dollars a round and that quarter-million-dollar note was dragging its ass at nine and a half percent, compound interest all summer long, rain or shine, secured by a note on a medical clinic! He would have made money, Frank concluded, for the simple reason that his father never saw any romance in cattle. There’s a little money in cattle, he used to say, not much, and no romance. A hundred years ago there was big romance in cattle because there was big money in it. There is no big romance combined with small money. Period. Frank’s uncle Rusty once said: The lady doesn’t marry the carpenter unless he’s got a second home in Santa Monica or a two-foot dick.
6
Frank Copenhaver tapped a hard-boiled egg on the counter, slightly crushing the shell to keep it from rolling. Two old men next to him were lamenting conditions in the range livestock industry.
“Why does the Lord want me to serve him in this way?” inquired a leathery sixty-year-old with a short cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. Frank spread the Wall Street Journal out onto his part of the counter and ordered a pork chop sandwich from the waitress, who took orders and refilled coffee in one efficient trip down the counter. The old man slowly stirred a cream substitute into his coffee and Frank listened attentively. “Why, it’s not as if we had nice childhoods, home alone sewing up prolapsed cows with hog rings and shoelaces — I’m sure you done that. Or digging a dead calf out of a cow by yourself when it’s twelve below and you’re twelve years old.”
Frank looked up from the Journal into midair. It’s quite unimaginable that they would secretly look into someone’s bedroom window, he thought, and I have done it without remorse and, really, without having been driven to do it. Unless Lucy’s being Gracie’s oldest friend in Montana drove me to do it.
The old man’s companion, a bit younger and with a distinctive furze of reddish silver hair around his scalp and the genial, unspecific face of an apprentice barber, said, “I was born broke and I’m broke now.”
The waitress caught Frank’s eye on this one and smiled at him. She wouldn’t have smiled if she really knew about me, he thought.
“If steamboats was selling for a nickel,” said the older man, “all I could do is run up and down the dock and yell, ‘Ain’t that cheap!’ ”
On the way in for lunch, Frank had been held up behind a crew of house movers who were taking a drive-in movie screen right down the interstate. He had stopped to talk to the sharecropper on his grain farm, then got behind the movers, and now he was cornered at the counter during the luncheon rush, something he usually avoided. He sat in the drifting cigarette smoke and waited to eat. This eavesdropping was irresistible and very much like looking in Lucy’s window.
“I spent two years’ days on an irrigated Indian lease,” declared the older man next to Frank. “If I survived that, I can survive eighty-cent calves.”
“We’ll survive it,” said the other, “and then they put us in the home.” Frank was listening closely. He and his brother Mike had put their mother in a rest home and felt guilty about it. He always perked up for talk about “home,” as the word was so charged with meaning, dread and guilt.
“I ain’t goin’ to no home.”
“We’re all going to a home.”
“Kiss my ass, I ain’t goin’ to no home.”
“Have it your way.”
“By the way,” the older man said, relighting the cigarette stub, “I believe my dog is superstitious. This morning he wouldn’t go up to that green stock truck belonging to Vanderhooven. Do you recall Joker ever being run over by anything green or anything which was owned by Vanderhooven?”
“Joker’s been around a long time. He’s had plenty of time to think.”
“Let’s go. They need these places for lunch.” The two left a dollar for their coffee and, pushing off the counter to get to their feet, went out. The waitress placed the pork chop sandwich right on top of the Wall Street Journal. Frank was still thinking about having put his mother in a rest home, thinking about the anticipatory dread of the two old ranchers. They were right, of course, but what could you do without these old folks’ homes? You were not in a position to change the diapers yourself. Still, it was a wonder the roofs of those places were not adorned with vultures.
He had taken his mother to Fort Myers as a last try some years before, got her a little house; then a bar opened across the street with a nightly wet panty contest and a sign in front that said, “Guys, come as you are! If you worked in it, you can party in it!” So, he took her back to Montana, got her one more house which did for a year, then into the home. In Fort Myers, all the white-haired people with brick red faces, plus the tones of mayhem at night from the workingmen at the wet panty contest, had frightened her more, late in life, than anything up to then. Yardboy drug dealers stalked the sidewalks in pump-up basketball shoes as wailing police cruisers shot through the humidity. As if his poor old mother were to be allowed to miss no modern nightmare, a man in the airport had a condom full of smuggled cocaine burst inside him, producing a howling seizure in front of a booth that shipped oranges and coconuts to the folks up north. She huddled by the ticket counter and stared at the departure screen and the word “Denver,” which was where she changed planes to come home.
The waitress was talking to the cook: “Dad, he wants to go to Searchlight. Mom, she wants to go to Elko. So, they stay home. I was going to get some peace.”
The pork chop sandwich was delicious, juice sopping deep into thick homemade bread. A cowgirl grandmother took the seat next to Frank, big owl-frame blue glasses, hair teased up in a bottle blond pile, buck-stitched cowgirl boots, little radiating lines around her mouth, looked mean as a snake. She too ordered the pork chop sandwich, a house specialty, then gazed at Frank appraisingly while she slowly lit a cigarette. Frank said nothing. Before his wife left, he had been a classic never-met-a-stranger type, but now he spoke mainly when spoken to. He kind of wanted to talk to this mean cowgirl grandma but he had lost his fluency in these matters, and had become an eavesdropper.