Another thing he could tell was that they were waiting for him to say something they could really get their teeth into. They needed him to get this all out in the air. Standing next to the relaxed and handsome businessman in a house filled with a kind of pearly twilight from its small windows, Bill Champion was able to escape his pain in a feeling of injustice and relief in his contempt. Suddenly hungry, he opened the refrigerator and ate a big green apple so fast that Alice and Whitelaw just stared at him. There were dizzying columns of flies at the screen, and the distant bawling of a calf that had got on the wrong side of the fence from its mother.
Bill finished the apple and thumbed the small black seeds onto the floor. He looked up and thought, The hell with these two, then walked over to the door that opened between the pie safe and the Frigidaire and went into the children’s bedroom. He stared in at the two babies, Natalie and Evelyn, two small lumps under the same blanket. “What about these guys?”
“One step at a time,” said Whitelaw. “One step at a time.”
Bill agreed that this was an ungovernable question. He looked over at Alice, but instead of pain, he saw a kind of blank. Though he couldn’t blame her, this look of being stumped on a quiz show was disturbing. He feared that he was going crazy and about to sleepwalk through something terrible.
Just as abruptly, he was tired. Apple pulp filled the spaces between his teeth. He felt the individual weight of his eyes. The flies had gotten worse. When he looked at Whitelaw’s nice clothes, all he could think of was moths. And when he thought about the ranch, he knew it wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. He’d gotten the beautiful bit from her. He had come to believe that the cattle of America were like a big shareholders’ company, and that he had a little share and was part of it. But before Alice, he hadn’t seen any beauty. His mother had had him during a blue norther while his father jugged an old cow by lantern light in a path of red osier willows where the critter had gone to die. He thought of his own birth as equivalent to the poor beast’s bloody struggle. And then Alice filled him in on the true beauty of birth by having the two girls.
“You’re really being damned decent,” said Jim Whitelaw, beating his own thigh with his motoring cap.
Bill followed the hat around with his eyes.
“I’m just stumped,” he said.
“That’s true,” said Alice. “He’s like this when he can’t see what to do.” Bill never quite got over this remark, even after trying for thirty years, but on the day itself, the whole situation seemed to be drifting away from him. For one thing, Jim Whitelaw lost his looks. He wanted conflict, and these two were still in love; it made his face look lumpy. He was going to take the girls, all right, but from then on he would be subject to wondering what it was he got.
Nevertheless, the marriage was ruined, and Whitelaw and Alice were united in a much-photographed wedding. But on that day the marriage had a few minutes left, and once Whitelaw drove away, Bill Champion turned back to Alice Champion and, through a world of pain, rubbed his hands together and said, “Let’s wake the kids. You get Natalie and I’ll get Evelyn.”
When they came out of the children’s room, Alice cradled Natalie like a real baby and Bill had sleepy little Evelyn under the arms, her bare feet dangling. Bill leaned his face in until the end of his nose touched the end of the little girl’s nose.
“Do you want to hear how Daddy put the bees to sleep?”
Natalie glowed with happiness to learn that Sunny Jim wasn’t her father. Not that Bill made much sense to her. His taciturnity so annoyed her that she once angrily offered to send him to charm school. Still, this was a profound liberation, and Natalie looked transformed. “Bill, what did you do then?”
“Kept ranching.”
“So hard,” said Evelyn. “For everyone.”
“Bill,” Natalie said, “don’t worry your little head. We can handle this kind of information. We’re happy with it.”
Bill was still looking downward.
“I doubt it,” he said. “It should never have been this way.”
There was no penetrating the gloom that had settled upon him. It was only a matter of a very short time when the cattle demanded his attention, and he left the house. Afterward, the sisters tried to make an evening of it, but with new biographies their capacity for casual conversation was impaired. Natalie was virtually ebullient. “I never thought I’d get out from under Dad’s shadow,” she said, “and it’s going to take a while. Basically, I don’t get Bill like you do.”
“Bill lives the life he was born into. It’s his gift.”
“I’m sure you’re right. It just looks like he’s in a rut to me.”
“He’s not in a rut.” Evelyn quickly recognized that this conversation could go wrong as she was already in a disturbed state. She did not want Sunny Jim eradicated entirely. The admiring degree of separation from Bill was gone and, in its place, bafflement that Sunny Jim had so insisted on her spending time here. By the time she’d understood her real relationship to Bill, she’d been around him a long time. Who arranged that?
One effect of this perturbance was that Evelyn suddenly needed to know about Geraldine. She was so compelled to see her, it was as if the wind drove her across the town. Geraldine was wide-eyed with alarm when Evelyn burst into her office. At first, she refused to discuss Paul. Instead she talked about her nephew having rolled her car, speaking to Evelyn with an odd, frantic intimacy.
“Shane’s fine, but I wish they’d just totaled the car. Honda Civic. These days, if there’s anything left at all, they fix ’em. I went over there and watched the estimator fill five single-spaced sheets. Every body panel is toast. Frame’s okay, we think, and he says the unibody looks all right. But they had to pull the dash, and that gets to be a mess with the AC, the mounts for the steering column, the wipers, the CD changer, and the fan housing is just hanging in midair. And nobody knows about the electronics, because of this secret chip that’s in there.”
Evelyn thought she was going to jump out of her skin. Then, from some kind of subdued rage that also meant to indict Geraldine’s professionalism, she demanded to know if reviewing Paul’s record was what had attracted her to him.
“Is this a joke?” asked Geraldine.
“I assure you it is not,” Evelyn heard herself say.
“Let me tell you something, lady. When I read the prison reports on this guy, I was afraid to be in the same building with him.”
Evelyn reluctantly noted the woman’s prettiness, and furthermore disliked being addressed as “lady.” She also thought that in making Paul seem so fearsome on the basis of some in-house files and reports, this bitch was acting as both judge and jury. Moreover, Evelyn’s heart went out to Paul, who must have felt imprisoned by these attempts by state wage slaves to malign him. “What exactly did these reports say?”
“Well, one of them implied he’d taken the fall for your father, and that had made him pretty bitter.”
Evelyn recalled that Sunny Jim made numerous general remarks about Paul, the strongest being that he was “incomplete.” Evelyn found this a very troubling observation about her husband. When she finally found the nerve to ask him to elaborate, Sunny Jim looked grim and then stated that while Paul had the prettiest swing since Bobby Jones, his short game left much to be desired.