He told him how in December Edith had sat there quiet, rocking herself and waiting, while over there across the room from her, Lyman, her brother, had lain on his cot asleep, snoring against the wall. Bud didn’t have to tell that. There was enough without any of that. It’s just a good thing the son of a bitch didn’t know about Lyman’s travel papers and pumpkin pie, because if he had, he’d have thrown them in too. Sure as hell.
Myself, the next afternoon when he came to me, I didn’t give him a thing.
THIS WAS EIGHT DAYS AGO. Saturday. First I hear the tires on the gravel grind, then the car door. It’s too early in the afternoon for it to be Mavis and Rena Pickett returning from town, so I look up from the squeeze chute where I’m doctoring cows, and, at the time, when I see the Denver plates, I still think it must be one of these state farm agents come out to talk fertilizer. Even when I see he’s wearing a tie and yellow pants I think it is, because nowadays some of your young farm agents are starting to dress like that, like they think at any minute they’re going to be called on to play Ping-Pong. Anyway, here he comes, walking over towards me away from his car. He gains the corral, finds the gate, fiddles with the bar latch, but then it looks as if he can’t figure out how to work it, because he starts climbing. It doesn’t do the hinges a lot of good. He climbs up on it anyway, and at the top, with the gate shaking back and forth underneath him, he swings both his legs over, then he drops down into the corral beside me.
“I’m looking,” he says, “for Sanders Roscoe.”
I turn back to the cow. I shoot her and she bawls, then I release the head catch on the chute and she goes out, already running, crow-hopping with her head down and kicking up fresh cow manure. A piece of it the size of a half dollar splats onto his shirtfront next to his tie.
“You found him,” I say.
He doesn’t look to be much more than a kid, but I haven’t seen a lot of his face yet. Right now he has his head ducked down, studying his shirtfront. Then, while I watch him, he takes an Eversharp pencil out of his shirt pocket and begins to flick with the point of it at that little splat of manure. When he’s got it all off pretty good, so that it appears as if maybe he’s just spilled him some brown gravy there, he clips the pencil back inside his pocket and sticks his hand out. His hand’s like that toilet paper they say on TV they don’t want you to squeeze. Soft.
“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “I’m Dick Harrington. With the Post.”
“That so?” I say. “I hope you’re not selling anything.”
“No,” he says. “The Denver Post. It’s a newspaper. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
“Sure. I’ve heard of it,” I say. “But we keep it out on the back porch where we scrape our boots, so we don’t have to track cow into the kitchen.” Then I throw my head back and laugh. “It saves throw rugs,” I tell him.
But he doesn’t think that’s real funny; he looks at me like How can I be so dumb and live? Guys like him think they drive the 150 miles out here due east from Denver and when they get here we don’t know anything. They think they have to educate us poor dumb country bastards. They think we don’t know what the Denver Post is. We know all right. We just don’t give a damn.
But now he’s busy with his hands again. It seems like his hands are always flat busy, like he can’t let them rest. He reaches behind him into the back pocket of his pants and removes his billfold, opens it, and fingers out a little white card. I study it. It has his newspaper’s design at the top and his name printed underneath that — only the card says Richard — with a phone number below his name to call him at his office if anybody wants to call him at his office. I hand it back to him.
“You can keep it,” he says.
“No,” I say. “It’d just get lost around here.”
“Well,” he says. “Well. .”
But then it’s like he doesn’t know how to go on. He looks over across the corral to where the three or four cows I’ve already doctored are pushing one another butt up against the fence, facing him with their eyes rolled back to white and looking like for two bits they’d either bust down the fence behind them, or, if that didn’t work, race him headlong across the corral to that gate he couldn’t figure out how to open, and escape that way. So, for about two minutes, those cows and him are watching one another, staring at one another across that thirty feet of corral space and fresh cow manure that separates them, until all of a sudden that one cow I haven’t doctored yet decides she has to bawl. And then it’s like he’s been jerked hard by the sleeve; he turns back in the other direction, quick, to face her. She’s still caught inside that narrow alley that leads into the chute; you can see her between the alley rails. Her eyes have got plenty of white showing, too, and she’s beginning to get a little antsy from being left by herself, but at least there’s that much — there’s that fence— separating him and her, and besides, crowded into the alley the way she is, she can’t back up enough to collect herself for a good jump, even if she wants to jump over in his direction. Which she surely doesn’t. Only I don’t believe he knows that.
“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “Isn’t there some place else we can talk?”
“Oh,” I tell him, motioning at the cows, “you’ll have to never mind them. They just haven’t seen many yellow pants before. Give them a little more time — they might get used to it.”
He looks doubtful over at the cows again. I have to admit they haven’t changed much. They still look like they flat want to run or fly or get loose somehow. They’re still facing him with their eyes rolled back and their butts jammed up against the fence as tight to it as they can get.
“Well,” he says, turning back to me, “if I can, I’d like to ask you some questions. Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Depends,” I say.
“On what?” he says.
“On what you’re asking.”
So then he asks me, and what he asks shows he’s not even a state farm agent, that he doesn’t even amount to that much. It shows too that yellow pants or no, the joke’s over. Because what he asks is:
“You’re a neighborly sort of man, aren’t you, Mr. Roscoe?”
“I can be,” I say, because I know what he’s driving at now; I know what’s coming.
“I mean,” he says, “you know all the neighbors around here.”
“Maybe. Some of them.”
“Edith and Lyman Goodnough, for instance?” he says. “People tell me you knew them better than anyone else did. That you did things for them. Is that true?”
So there it is. It hasn’t taken him long. And I say, “Didn’t all these people you say you talked to at least tell you how to say their name — while they were telling you the rest of it?”
“You mean it’s not Good-now?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
“Good-no.”
“Okay,” he says. “Suit yourself.”
Then he reaches behind him again to dig in his back pocket. He draws out a little spiral notebook and writes something into it with that Eversharp pencil he used a little while earlier to flick the cow manure off his shirt. When he’s done scribbling he says, “They used to live down the road from you, didn’t they?”
“It’s still theirs,” I say. “Nobody else has bought it from them yet.”