“A vagrant,” he said sharply, as if defining a highly evolved category.
“And there was a little group of you.”
“They was three or four little groups of us.”
“With a counselor.”
“Yeah.”
Sanders was freezing up, so Paul hoisted his empty. “Spare another cold one?”
“Yeah,” Sanders said, watching closely and getting to his feet.
“Gotta keep the li’l buzz goin’.”
“Right.”
Once they were resupplied, Paul said, “I actually went to school down there. Had a history prof name of Crusoe, Edith Crusoe, did some of this counseling you’re talking about. Ever run up onto her?”
“What’d she look like?”
“Tall.”
“Real wild, kinky hair?”
“Yes, at that time.”
“She have humongous tits?”
“Well…”
“If we’re talking about the same professor, she had some bodacious knockers on her. What’s the matter with you? You smell somethin’ bad?”
“No honestly, Richard, I’m a big fan of humongous knockers myself.” Paul’s upper lip pressed fretfully into the lower, and he acquired something close to a look of prissiness. “Yes, Professor Crusoe was substantially endowed.”
“Well, spit it out, son. Is it too hot for you in here? I can turn it down.”
“No, no, more than comfortable. But thank you, Richard, I—”
“Anyway, back to them knockers: I knowed ’em good. I was just a kid, but when I spotted them I was harder than Chinese arithmetic, know what I’m saying?”
“Ha, ha!” said Paul, but the laugh was so ghastly it gave Sanders pause. “Got you a little, did you?” croaked Paul.
“You bet your life! I got plenty!”
“Where on earth did you find to go?”
Paul, so close to his moment now, feared that so much as the sound of a fly landing would send Sanders out of his grasp forever, and he urgently wanted to be present at his own beginning.
“We was in her office. She went into the coat closet. I kept hearing the hangers fallin’ on the floor. Then she more or less ordered me in there.”
“In the closet.”
“Yes.”
“And you, what?”
“Piled on.”
“Piled on. Ha ha! That’s great,” Paul cried from a twisted face. Perhaps, he wasn’t enjoying his own conception as much as he’d hoped.
“Hangers just everywhere.”
“Whoa, that’s too much! What a scene!”
“Yup, them was the days, wettin’ the old wick. Big pile of hangers, but I got ’er in all right. Got ’er plumb home.”
“Whooee,” said Paul, from behind his hand.
Doc Sanders scrutinized him. There was something definitely not right here.
Evelyn met Natalie at Prairie Coffee, where young people in stocking caps were getting coffee to take out and a more sedate group, coatless and hatless, were drinking their coffee over back issues of the Hungry Horse Times. The two women took their mugs to a broken-down sofa in front of the gas log fireplace and talked over the happy, inchoate chatter of voices occasionally joined by frigid drafts of air from the front door tainted slightly by exhaust fumes.
“I called the ship,” said Natalie ominously.
“And?”
“No reply.”
“I guess she just changed her mind, I mean, it’s her vacation.”
“Don’t be naive, Evelyn, not now. We need to speak with her, and above all we need to know when, exactly, she’s returning.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Majub isn’t going to wait around forever.”
“What’s this Mr. Majub have to do with it?”
“Mr. Majub has offered to meet with the whole family to see if he has a mandate to open this trust and liquidate the business.”
“It’s just so depressing.”
“We’ll get through all this,” said Natalie fixedly. “We’re going to be well off, you and me.”
“Oh, good.”
“At first I thought about moving to a better climate, but I’m not sure about starting over someplace where people don’t understand my problems. The idea of being no spring chicken under some palm tree, I just wonder. Plus, with the bottling plant we had status.” Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “We might not notice it until it’s gone. But now that you’ve called off the divorce Paul’s got Majub involved.”
Evelyn’s eyes widened. “I had reached the point where I thought it was time to write off our losses.”
“I know,” said Natalie. “And, Evie, I realize that wasn’t easy.” She looked vaguely around the room. “Who are these people?”
“They’re our fellow Americans,” said Evelyn.
“I’m starting to get like old lady Crusoe. This looks like an invasion to me. How’s our friend Bill getting along?”
“He’s fine, looking after the mares. Cows have a ton of feed where the hay froze before he could get to it. He had to go to Ekalaka for another funeral — a cousin, I think.”
“What becomes of him when Mr. Majub sorts out the estate?”
Evelyn declined to comment on what she took to be arrant wishful thinking, Instead she said, “Bill stays.”
“Evelyn dear, I hope we’ll come into a bundle. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to buy my way out of.”
“You think that works?”
“I sure do. It’s pathetic when they say the rich aren’t happy—”
“Paul’s going to haunt us even if this Majub succeeds in getting us liquidated.”
“I know,” said Natalie, suddenly wide-eyed. “I’m scared shitless. I realize it’s sick that I need to be comfortably off. But tell me, Evie: we’re for sure coming into a bundle, aren’t we?”
Natalie’s great faith in serendipity seemed confirmed when Alice Whitelaw returned with no more fanfare than a call indicating when she would arrive at the airport. She’d had to overnight in Denver, she explained over the phone, where all her belongings went astray in an automatic baggage handling system that sent both of her huge Samsonites back to the South Pacific via Los Angeles. If she hadn’t had such a helpful companion, she said, she would have lost her mind.
“What companion?” hollered Natalie as she and Evelyn pulled up to the curb.
In the crepuscular afternoon light the little airfield, mysterious in descending snow, looked like an outpost. They went inside, pulling off their mittens as they did so and unbuttoning their coats.
“I don’t know what companion,” said Evelyn, peevishly.
Looking everywhere but at her sister, Natalie said, “I dislike surprises.”
From a glass-enclosed corridor, it was possible to watch the arriving passengers come out of the jetway and into the boarding area, then pass through security into the lobby. From here they hoped to get a preview before greeting their mother, for whom they had several questions. Alice was not among the first to file out, as these consisted almost entirely of hurtling recreationists already attired for skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing, a surprising amount of Texas and southern accents. Finally, they saw the top of their mother’s head, reasonably sedate but not quite natural blond, the shearling collar of her black coat, the new tan! It was impossible to determine much about the companion at her side as he was wearing a hat with enough brim to suggest a convinced cow man. It was not impossible that they already resented the spring in her step. There was little for them to do now but face the swarm and wait.
What they laid eyes on — and what Natalie later claimed in the most sanguine tones to have foreseen — was their mother beaming through her embarrassment and, at her side, tall, tan, hard-eyed and not remotely uncomfortable, Bill Champion.