When Clevis started to work for me I moved him into the house in much the same way that my dad had done with his crony Ellis Burns in the 1920s. We had the place to ourselves: my mother by that time had already spread herself into that new brick home in town with the rose carpets and the flowered coach. After a two-weeks’ honeymoon at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver she had come back to Holt and had begun her continuing tenure as Mrs. Cox, allowing Wilbur to go on shaking hands with folks at his life-insurance office and to drink coffee with the boys when he felt thirsty, but he damn well better be home by six o’clock every evening and squire her to church every Sunday. That apparently was satisfactory with Wilbur, and things were not unsatisfactory for Clevis and me. We worked pretty steady at keeping the ranch going and at making a profit for Edith. By the end of the first year, though, we had something of a problem: the house looked and smelled like a buffalo wallow, and there were enough empty beer cans accumulated at the back door to tin at least three sides of a big barn.
“By God,” Clevis said one morning. He was standing in the kitchen doorway holding his boots in one hand, looking like a great big sleepy kid who had just wakened from a dream that made him mad. “Listen,” he said. “Now this here is getting serious.”
“What is?” I said.
“This.” He held his boots up. “I can’t even find my goddamn dirty socks that I took off last night. Are you wearing them?”
“Hell, no. They wouldn’t fit me.”
“Well, by God, something’s got to be done about this. I can’t work without no socks.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Yeah,” he said. “One.”
Clevis’s one idea was Twyla Thompson. Twyla was a local girl with a happy red face. She worked seasons at the grain elevator beside the railroad tracks, and the men driving trucks loaded with wheat or corn took their time when they arrived at the elevator to dump the trucks, because Twyla had full breasts and skin like cream and she was always cheerful. She was built to last too, being as broad and muscular across the hips and shoulders as Clevis himself was, though she stood a good head shorter. The idea for Twyla was for her to move in with us, and I don’t know how Clevis did it, but somehow by striking the right chords or by pulling the proper strings he managed to persuade her to do that, to come out here and be a live-in maid, and it was like her that when she saw the advanced state of things in the house she gave us only a medium lecture and called us big filthy pigs. The maggots in the kitchen sink and the sour piles of clothes in the corners didn’t seem to phase her. In two days’ time she had the place in order again: there were white sheets on the beds, green vegetables on the table for the first time in nine months, and the beer cans were smashed flat and hauled to the dump. She was not a girl who was afraid of work. Between the two of us we took turns paying her monthly salary. She slept in the guest room with Clevis, though, so he was the only one who was exercising that other kind of option that went with her living here singly with two men. Not that I would have minded it myself, you understand — but Clevis had made the arrangement, and for a long time I tried to respect that.
Then I stopped respecting it. We had gone along well enough for four or five years. There were a few rocky spots, of course, but for the most part we had settled into an ordinary routine of working hard all week and then partying all night on the weekend, the three of us always together in the house and about the place and then still together those Saturday nights, with often another girl along to drink with us and to keep it balanced and occasionally to come home with me and not to go back until Sunday afternoon. But at first the work had been the primary thing. We managed in the beginning to maintain the level my dad had achieved. That’s true — we worked the ranch and the quarters of wheat and also the extras at Edith’s, all of that — but gradually it got to be more important and damn sure more fun to stay out at night, not just on Saturdays when everyone drank and danced and played cards and shot pool, but during the week too, even if we had to go out of town to locate people to party with, and then we weren’t getting up in the morning at five o’clock anymore, nor at six or seven either, and things were not getting done. It was all sliding; we were drifting. Instead of making four or five passes with the disk over the fallow ground, the summer fallow, now maybe two passes were enough and pretty soon one seemed like a good plenty. Sure, and it got so it was a good idea to buy a new red pickup so we could tour Denver on Tuesday. That’s right, and it became the thing to do to buy a barroom full of people all the drinks they wanted, never mind if you never saw them before and would never see them again. We were all friends, weren’t we? Of course, and mainly — why what harm could there be? — it got so it was perfectly all right to go to bed with Twyla. Both of us, I mean. Like we were still just taking turns paying her salary.
Only she wasn’t any whore. Far from it. She was Twyla Thompson, born and raised in Holt, Colorado. She was one of us, don’t you see? — a local girl with a fine red face who before she was persuaded to come out here to this ranch had worked cheerfully at the grain elevator amongst the clouds of wheat and corn dust. She was not the sort of woman to somehow shut off her emotions, her warm full feelings, while still leaving her legs open. So it began to take a toll on her. Christ yes, it had to do some harm. I remember that she learned finally to keep her own large supply of gin in the kitchen cupboard, that toward the end she was always at least half drunk by suppertime. We would sit down at the table to eat, the three of us, and her eyes would be too bright, like glass. Then she might spill some coffee, knock over the salt shaker. Once I remember she slopped some hot soup onto Clevis’s hand and she took his red hand up and kissed it and held it with tears in her eyes.
And that was the worst goddamn hell of it: all that time she was in love with him. Do you understand what I’m saying? I knew she loved him. She was good to him, good for him, that big sloppy open-faced Clevis Stouffer, with his flour-bag stomach and his flapping shirttails and his dirty socks. He was what she wanted, needed. They made a pair, the two of them together, like a couple of plain solid blocks of mineral salt. And on his part, though he never said so or even showed it much, I believe he was at least half in love with her. He certainly deserved something good in his life, and Twyla was that all right; she was good.
Only here I was — that’s what I mean — I was here, too. Things might have been all right if it had been only two of us, or if Clevis and Twyla had lived in town, or even if they had rented some nearby vacant farmhouse or just bought a trailer and put in electricity. But none of that happened; that wasn’t the way it was. It was always three of us, here, in this house. We had our routine, our little family arrangement, and what made it possible, the thing that allowed it to continue, to go on and on regardless, was that in some ways they were both dependent on me: I owned the ranch, didn’t I? I was the hotshot, the rotten dowel pin. The bank account was in my name. And I played on all of that to prevent things from changing. I knew we were on a dangerous ride, but I still didn’t want to end it even if I had known how. It was too much of a good thing, a heedless, continuous, romping jig and party— when I could keep from thinking. Not thinking, refusing to think, got to be a steady habit for me.
I remember sending Clevis out for the afternoon to swathe hay, for example, or to buy baler parts in Sterling sixty miles northwest of Holt, while I stayed home. And he’d stare at me and say, “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”