“I’ve had two lives, really,” C. R. Majub said to Paul, “before my illness and after. In the first I was born, raised in my little town on Lake Erie and educated at Ohio State University. Then the happy days as I built my business. Those are the happiest days. I had no family other than my business, which consisted of me and a secretary, a weary old empty-nester I saw between trips and to whom I unloaded my brain like a cargo ship. Then, during a trip to Taiwan to sell a ball-cap monogramming business, I contracted hepatitis. I don’t know how, but it resulted in complete renal failure, and very abruptly I began to lose my kidneys and went onto a waiting list for a transplant.” Paul felt himself grow queasy and alert.
“Nobody came forward in my little town to give me one of theirs. An old neighbor said he didn’t think a white man’s kidney would work anyway. At that time, the Whitelaw bottling plant happened to be in trouble. I had done a lot of business with Sunny Jim, but he got himself into this mess without my help. Besides, he had created so many enemies that he was forced to turn to me for the jumbo loan he needed to survive. I was going from dialysis to dialysis and I could barely concentrate when Sunny Jim said, ‘Come to Vegas. Bring the check. I think I can help you out.’”
“You sonofabitch, I can’t believe you’re telling me this.” Paul’s stomach had turned.
“There’s a reason. I never knew where Sunny Jim got it. I mean, I assumed it was on the black market. But I didn’t know who the… donor was until I sat down with him to help with his will. At first, I was shocked. I thought, People don’t do this. Then he explained to me how you’d crossed him and I could at least partly understand. In the end, he was remorseful. He told me, ‘Majub, you’ve got to do right by Paul. You’ve got to make it up to him. You owe Paul your life; not me, him.’”
Paul followed her out to the ranch. There were black strings of cattle on huge snowfields, and bare trees mobbed with sharptail grouse hoping for a ray of sunshine. Even with snow tires, Evelyn was having a hard time staying on the road. And the silence—the silence—inside the car was more than a slight problem. What could she possibly say? Yet she must be prepared to confront the question of whose idea this was, and by the time Paul followed her into the ranch house, waiting diffidently while she undid the latch, she was brilliantly prepared to answer his first question, “What do you want, Evelyn?”
“I want you to give it to me all night long,” she said, having elected the shorter version.
“I’m taking this with a grain of salt,” he said, a response that conveyed his entire appeal with perfect economy, and they began to laugh like old times, with Paul in his sparkling role as collaborator and demon. Evelyn was reminding herself to keep it light and have a good time. Life was short, et cetera. Amid limbs tangling she made out his voice—“we’ve got contact”—and despite her alarm at his detached gaze, Evelyn was startled at how quickly she began coming, a long, ashamed experience of relief not unlike wetting the bed. Then she couldn’t shut it off and it seemed over and over again that he went well beyond necessity, her own voice sounding unfamiliar and as if from afar. She looked across at the mirror on the dresser and saw a moving image that must’ve been Paul, though it was too distorted to make out and looked mostly like a black leaf endlessly unfolding, like something terrible.
When Paul and Evelyn were first married, Evelyn had hoped to interest him in the ranch and the land itself. Paul was interested, all right, spotting home sites everywhere and what he called “viewsheds.” Paul seemed genuinely puzzled that Bill was unaware of viewsheds, while Bill was baffled by virtually every detail of Paul. Paul’s were the first bluejeans Bill had ever seen with a crease. When Paul lurched around on their gentlest horse, Evelyn asked Bill privately if he thought they’d ever make a horseman of Paul. “Never,” said Bill undiplomatically. He noted that Paul was “very manicured” and that he “would do well to butter his own toast.”
Realizing that Bill was not warming to his idea of home sites, Paul had perversely pressed it. “What’s wrong with my idea?” he said. “Not everyone can have a ranch. Should the unlucky ones be cut off from nature altogether?” He tried to push his hands thoughtfully into the pockets of his leather vest, but they were either sewn shut or were not actual pockets.
“They got plenty of houses,” said Bill.
“Maybe not the ones they want. Maybe they want different ones.”
“Says in Isaiah, ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’”
“I guess you can find support for just about anything in the Bible. The big thing here, though, is that Evelyn never wanted to ranch at all. She just wants to be here.”
Evelyn interrupted in order to ease the tension for her beloved. “These aren’t choices that concern us, Paul. This is Bill’s ranch.”
“I got that part,” Paul went on, “but this is a beautiful piece of land, and, unless I miss my guess, it isn’t doing one percent of its capital value by running cows on it. That’s like sitting on an egg that never hatches, know what I mean?”
Now things were even more dire. She looked out the windows made oval by encroaching ice and giving onto an increasingly featureless snowscape. She could see the tracks where Paul had driven away, but light snow drifting in the wind was slowly filling them.
She got up, put on her coveralls and found Bill down in the old sheep shed where he was pouring out grain and medication for the small bunch of locoed calves who’d followed close behind and were trying to upend his bucket. Bill was slow to acknowledge her arrival, and she felt it. Mortified, she turned her attention to the calves who had begun to outgrow the dwarfish faces the poison weed and its alkaloids had given them. They’d become tame with all this hand-feeding, but in the end they’d go on the truck with the others.
Evelyn’s father had devised many ways of turning her into Bill’s hired hand — for reasons best known to him — and had similarly resolved that Bill would never fail no matter how many small ranchers were devastated by the steadily failing cattle economy. They would call it a partnership. To spare Bill an excessive awareness of his financial plight, he appointed Evelyn as bookkeeper, and she regularly went to her father seeking financial assistance for the ranch. Evelyn began to wonder about her father’s generosity. For a time she believed he was trying to acquire the place, which proved not to be the case. Instead, Sunny Jim required Bill to do some estate planning. “You’re over seventy,” he said. “Let me help you draw up a will.” When they finished, they put the document in a safe-deposit box in Harlowtown with Bill’s high-school diploma, his grandfather’s spurs and a pair of moccasins alleged to have belonged to Gall. Despite that she had been entrusted with the key and had good reason to suspect the ranch would one day be hers, Evelyn never once considered looking.
Today there was an evasive bustle in Bill’s movements as he hung the grain bucket on a nail and headed into the corral with the cows closest to calving, giving Evelyn a good view of the back of his coat.
“Scram’s got a wire cut,” he noted with unusual indifference as he and Evelyn crossed the barnyard to the corral where the horse stood by himself, with a back foot tipped up. Having already been scrutinized once, a thing not every horse likes, Scram watched warily as Evelyn came up for another inspection. She picked up his back foot and rested it heel-up between her knees, the old blood rough between her hands. It was quite a slice, showing white inside, but since it didn’t seem there were cords cut, it wasn’t crippling. She led him to the hydrant, washed out the wound with water and then poured hydrogen peroxide into it. The bubbling of the wound made him jerk his foot. Then Evelyn wiped it clear, smeared in some Furazin and wrapped it.