Evelyn stood in manure-covered boots, the dress hand-pinned to the shoulders of her ripped, blue-plaid, snap-button cowboy shirt.
“I hadn’t heard that,” she said, spotting something else entirely, a black dress whose cut in back Evelyn thought might moderate her overly defined shoulder muscles, something about its little straps, their closeness to the neck, the perfect seams curving toward the hips like arrows, the detailing! She pointed. “That one, I think, if it fits.”
“There goes my suggestion,” Claire said with a pretended pout, letting the dress she’d held against Evelyn fall over her arm.
“I just have hunches.” Evelyn held the weightless thing at arm’s length before her. After cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, it looked exciting. “I could get somewhere in this,” she said. Claire and Violet stared at this odd remark as Evelyn took the dress back to the changing room. What kind of coat would it take in weather like this? Certainly her Carhartt stockman’s coat, stained with veterinary products, was not it. Tonight, she’d find out. A bearded man in a stadium coat was watching Violet and Claire present various items — scarves, a chain purse, a makeup kit, blouses, a beaded top — with ferocious coquetry and a stream of commentary as to their merits. Evelyn changed into the pretty black dress and by bouncing on the balls of her feet made it fall down over herself and into place with reassuring emphasis. Admiring herself in the mirror, she drew the dress up high on her thighs and said to the mirror, and its imaginary occupant, “Will that do?” Tonight she would dance in feral vigilance. She’d find some guy and forget the poor calves, went the plan.
Claire turned to Evelyn, her blue eyes piercing beneath her peachy eye shadow and a new no-nonsense look. She said, “And?”
“I like it,” said Evelyn.
The bearded man seized this opportunity to slip away, the door to the street swinging shut behind him.
“You should. So killer.” Claire started replacing the goods that were evidently wasted on the departed shopper. “I love the big cough as he goes, like ill health prevented his buying something…. What’d the calves weigh?”
“They weighed like lead.”
“Turn any back?”
“We locoed eight.”
Claire made a clucking sound and said, “You can feed ’em out of that, but it takes a couple of months. I had twenty one year and by April they looked like show calves. We took them to Billings Livestock and sold the shit out of them.”
Together they moved to the ornate cash register, which stood in nostalgic disuse next to the electronic box for processing credit cards. Violet, despite her blazing makeup and avant-garde clothes, managed to sound wistful. “When the federal government let the meatpackers concentrate, they ruined it for the little producer. That’s why we moved into town. P.S. I don’t miss the wind. But Evelyn, I wish you would let your nails grow.” Her brow was furrowed.
“There’s no time to grow my nails. I’ve got to get me a little tonight. I haven’t had it in such a long time.”
Violet looked worried.
“I see a lot of guys, Evelyn. You want a loaner?”
“Uh, no. You miss a bunch if you don’t find ’em yourself.”
The bar was beyond the city limits, in an industrial-looking building, where a large number of cars and pickup trucks were parked in the snow with little sign of life around them except a desultory shoving match between two bearded men wearing baseball caps. Nothing came of it beyond flattening a circle of snow beneath their feet.
Evelyn was soon inside dancing and tossing down drinks between partners, amidst shouts of “Party hearty! It’s beer thirty!” She danced with a ponytailed man wearing hospital scrubs who wouldn’t speak to her, then a college student in a lumberjack shirt and with a smooth empty face, then a rather clean-cut youngster in khaki pants and a blue chambray shirt who described himself, with startling precision, as “a Reno-trained slot machine consultant.” Apart from the disorienting blaze of lights and electrified music, and the disturbing spectacle of the lead singer’s stalking movements up and down the stage at either end of which were snow-filled windows, there was a rather peaceful anonymity, and the black dress continued to thrill her.
She took note of her new partner with the detachment of an anthropologist, his nice quality of having no more than smoothed his blond hair back after his shower; she absolutely loved that he seemed afraid to speak to her. He was a handsome and perhaps uncomplicated unit. When humans are raised for meat, Kansas feedlots will give this guy all the grain he can eat. He had plunged his hands into his pockets in a particularly hopeless gesture when he asked her to dance, and yet he was very becoming. All Evelyn’s green lights were on as she hung round his strong young neck. “What is your name?” she asked.
“I’m Evan.”
She was mad for this shy politeness, incongruously coupled with his newly palpable arousal. This was getting good, though whether it would cure the dolor of the morning’s shipping remained to be seen. The waves of alcoholic euphoria were sure helping. Evelyn was determined, no matter how many drinks she had, not to tell him how attractive he was. That always blew up in your face. That made scumbags out of Boy Scouts!
“My name is quite close to yours, Evan. Mine is Evelyn.”
As she said this, she felt the room grow distant and time awkwardly slow. She couldn’t for the moment understand why saying her own name aloud made her loneliness so evident that it nearly choked her. Now all funny thoughts had fled. She looked at her young dance partner and wondered if he yet understood that all the cures for loneliness failed, that it was a chronic state and that anything used to anesthetize it turned into its own problem. Yes, she thought, we’ll spare Evan that.
The lead singer came rushing across the stage, bent back from the waist, madly waving a handkerchief, his mouth a distorted trumpet. A sort of codpiece slid halfway down one thigh as angry quarter notes from the guitarist drove him back to the microphone screeching, “Don’t need no, Don’t got no—!” while he raped the stand that held it up. This provided an awkward background that Evelyn suddenly thought was funny. At that same moment, when the front door opened and snow flew in, the singer took time out from his throes to actually frown at the weather.
That did it. Evelyn doubled in laughter. Indeed, Evan had to hold her up, even as she recognized this as hysteria and a ghastly form of release. But it was contagious: the dancing stopped. Right after the fraught singer had concluded several pacts with the devil, the air went out of the room. The lead guitarist peered through the lights furtively. The drummer’s blurred arms no longer seemed part of him as he stole furtive glances at the audience. Evelyn’s hysteria was a conquering force. The singer seemed strangely platitudinous when, so soon after his arrangements with Satan, he demanded of the crowd, “You want to try this? Anybody like to get up here and show us how good they are?” An unshaven brute in the audience, beer bottle brandished by its neck, his hat on backward, informed the singer that he was “crazier than a shithouse rat.”