They made love on an arrangement of their clothes. It was meant to happen in a slow, afternoonish way, but an unforeseen urgency arose from somewhere and they spent themselves abruptly. He wondered who on earth he was thinking of. But it had a good effect in restoring Natalie’s spirits. She said, “There’s no real reason for us to get dressed. We can keep walking without our clothes. It’s warm.”
“It’s a public place.”
“So, where’s the public?”
“They’re here in spirit.”
“I’m not bothered by the spirit of the public seeing my naked buns. It’s only the public in person that’s a problem.”
“Natalie, just get dressed.”
“I’m clogged.”
“Aw gee, Nat—”
“Stuart, Stuart.”
“Stuart who loves you.”
“Yes, I believe that. I always have, and shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t it be plenty?”
“It should be all we ever need, Nat. But we just think too damn much.”
“You mean I think too damn much, and I disagree. You heap simple feller, Stuart.” The cigar-store Indian had reappeared; she would have to get a grip on herself.
Stuart knew that this was headed straight to some version of the one-thing-led-to-another speech, in which from the moment they fell in love, they’d followed their weaknesses until they lived under the oligarchy of the bottling plant; and in which they’d failed to find the strength to resist the temptations thrown their way by Whitelaw.
Natalie sprawled on her back. “What were we doing with all our energy, smart Stuart, when we should have been planning our lives?”
Stuart didn’t answer, because now in their weariness they could have the time-filled lovemaking they’d desired. He embraced Natalie again and with some difficulty she managed to bestir herself. “I’m enjoying you,” she said once he’d begun. “I’m enjoying you now.” When they were finished, they lay back on the deep grass, and Natalie found herself really watching the clouds, seeing their passage and imagining their destinies. It was with a rare lightness of spirit that she resolved to stop seeing Paul at least until she could dump Stuart. It would be like the release of the white doves at the opening of the Olympics.
When Evelyn wondered how she had befouled herself with so unsuitable a marriage, she imagined it was her abrupt immersion in a carnal world. The widely experienced Paul hardly thought of anything else. She might have been moved as well by her father’s enthusiasm for Paul welded in business talk, duck blinds and the national rodeo finals, an annual trip that left the two under the weather for a week after their return. Evelyn and her mother never inquired even when one of these trips resulted in an amateurish attempt at blackmail by a phone voice named “Nancy.” She also reminded herself that Paul was not always as he was now; he’d had surgery on one of these Las Vegas trips and had come back changed. Still, those were good times to stay out at the ranch, and often her mother went too. Evelyn was only slightly baffled by the friendship that had grown between her mother and Bill. And she was amused at the curiously sharp views her mother had about how Bill should be running things, which she expressed to him with what Evelyn considered unseemly familiarity.
Evelyn’s freedom from Paul was expensive, as she reminded herself regularly. Natalie and Stuart said less and less, despite being financially chained to Paul and a business that was already declining in value. According to Melvin Blaylock, the lawyer who’d attended the funeral, the day would come when the bottling plant was worth nothing. “You really should sell it yesterday,” he said, his tiny features remarkably without animation under the warlike crown of his peculiar hair.
“But that requires that Paul and I reconcile,” Evelyn told him. “And we dislike each other.”
At this, Melvin Blaylock raised a finger. “It’s your money,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” she beamed.
Actually, Natalie did remark, once, “God, we would have a lot of money.”
Evelyn cringed at the force of the remark, and it rarely came up again.
Evelyn drove past the grain elevator and pulled in by the old wool dock to the feed store. She bought some sacked oats, a hundred pounds of birdseed and a half ton of cattle minerals, and headed toward home, the truck lower on its springs, listening once again to Townes Van Zandt on her CD player, thinking as she heard about the federales once again how much she would have liked to figure in some terrific myth like “Pancho and Lefty.” She didn’t even know what had become of her dream to move off into an unbounded grassland — a veldt! — where human life would arise and expire in the general great sweep of things like a spark that glows then dies. Maybe holding the ranch together with Bill Champion could be enough.
Clanging over the cattle guard, she passed Bill’s little frame house behind the orchard and saw his sleeping horses switching flies, and only shifting slightly at the passing of the truck, heads, rumps, prop work of legs, all asleep in the sunshine. Kingbirds spaced themselves along a stretch of barbed wire, while a crowd of young starlings raced the truck before swarming off into a chokecherry thicket whose leaves had curled from frost. When she passed the last hill on which their pinwheel brand was marked with white rocks, her house stood in an angle of warm shadow, an insignificant shape under the chambered upper stories of the black river cottonwoods. While the cooling engine ticked under its hood, she tried to take in her happiness and decided it might consist of nothing more than living by herself. Sometimes it was loneliness, sometimes freedom.
She quickly carried her groceries inside, throwing open a few windows, then resumed her trip to Bill’s house, made distant by his discards: metal drums he planned to cut up to hold stock salt and range minerals, tires, sprayer tanks, a set of bedsprings, defunct farm machinery, feed sacks, old batteries, a broken wheelbarrow and a camper top that had lost its windows. Evelyn stopped at Bill’s house, where even more of his horses — Who, Scram and Matador — observed her before going back to eating, pulling hay through the bars of a steel feeder, and she recalled her father’s frequent exclamation, “Good God, he’s got another horse!” Bill didn’t answer her calls, and so she assumed he would be down around the barn. She unloaded his groceries in the kitchen and started thinking about Paul again because a package of ground round had reminded her out of the blue that Paul’s hero was Ray M. Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. “Life is dog eat dog and rat eat rat” was his favorite Kroc quote, not exactly Emersonian in spirit. “If my competition was drowning, I’d put a hose in their mouth.” Paul used to say that hamburger was where the rubber met the road in the cattle business, and that Ray M. Kroc was the ultimate trail boss.
From the kitchen she could see her own unmade bed and loved the innocence of its disarray, rumpled on one side, taut on the other. She thought with near glee of waking early and alone, birdsong coming through the window and no reason to make the bed. She went back outside and walked toward the barn. This would be a fine day, one of the last, to work her young colt, Cree.
Standing in the bad light of the barn under the hay mow, with saddle stands back in between the disused draft horse stanchions, Evelyn searched through the bridles that seemed, in her view, to be festooned from too few pegs, so that in hunting through for the short shanked Kelly Brothers grazer, all she could find were snaffles, Argentine bits, a cable tie-down, offside billet straps, cinchas with broken strings, detached go-betweens, old steel stirrups that Bill said were cold enough in winter to “freeze the nuts off a riding plow,” a coppermouth John Israel, a gag bit, an Easy Stop, a knockoff of a Garcia spade, boot tops made into saddlebags and a chain twitch with a handle from a World War II foxhole shovel. Just when it seemed hopeless, Bill walked by and said, “That colt of yours has dug him quite a hole.” Pigeons flew out from under the roof of the barn, wings colliding with the eaves like broken fan belts.