The Cadence of Grass Read online

  “Why were you going so fast?” Sunny Jim asked reasonably.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You were.”

  Sunny Jim slowed down to concentrate on the talk. “I’m not following you,” he said.

  “You were driving,” said Paul. “You killed the motorcyclist.”

  As Sunny Jim pulled over, the hiss of pavement changed to gravel popping under the tires. He was silent.

  “I dragged you over to the passenger’s side and sat at the wheel till the Highway Patrol arrived.”

  Sunny Jim studied every pore on Paul’s face.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why? Because you have more to lose than me and you’re too old to go to prison, which is where I’m undoubtedly headed.”

  Sunny Jim turned the engine off and let traffic flash past behind him. He seemed far away. Paul was thinking of an old country song, “Wreck on the Highway,” and its chorus, “I didn’t hear nobody pray.” This was a special moment, and Paul hoped that over the long haul it would pay like a slot machine.

  “I won’t forget this, Paul,” said Sunny Jim, a faint vibration stirring his accustomed baritone. “I’ll never forget what you’ve done.”

  Paul was now due for his weekly appointment with Geraldine, his parole officer. He was fascinated by the atmosphere of the office itself, which, with a stern receptionist in front and offices on either side, was somewhat like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. There were usually several parolees in attendance, including a few “short leashes” as Geraldine called them, who went to the farthest office on the right, which handled electronic monitoring and chemical castration.

  He did not want to suggest to her—at all!—that he was taking advantage of the intimacy that had grown between them. Paul was well dressed, straight from work, transformed from ex-con to CEO in a matter of a few short blocks. He was on top of the situation in terms of heading off any clever remarks he might make on impulse. But she was glad to see him and greeted him with real warmth, right in front of her secretary, whom Paul had already checked out and scratched for the bench knees she so unwisely revealed below her skirt. Geraldine even held the door for him! When they sat down, she behind her desk, he in a small, disadvantageous chair so deep he felt he was gazing out over his own pelvis, she moved to the corner of her desk to make him more comfortable. Geraldine was a big-boned, good-looking girl whose slightly out-of-date teased hair put her at risk in Paul’s eyes. When he’d pointed her out to Natalie late one night, she’d said, “Baby, let’s kiss those seventies good-bye!”

  “I think I can update these forms almost without talking to you.”

  “Well, I haven’t been anywhere, just working.”

  “But things have changed, Paul.”

  “Yeah, and like I’m rolling in it.”

  “You got a bit of training, I guess, under your former father-in-law . . . ?”

  “Uh-huh, he was sure grateful I did the time.”

  “Well, it looks to me that this is all a fairly happy outcome.”

  “You mean, I’m getting the time back?”

  “You’ll have to talk to God about that,” said Geraldine with an alarming laugh.

  Paul wasn’t having it. “Is that who you work for?” he said with a hard, level gaze.

  “Sorry, Paul, my powers are more limited. I just work for the State of Montana.” At length, Geraldine continued, her eyes on an empty portion of her desk. “I enjoyed our evening together, Paul.”

  He was still smarting over the flippant reference to his lost years, and his previous resolutions were dust. Let her get away with this piece of nauseating sentiment and she’d be asking, “But what about us?”

  He waited for her to look up, then said, “You know something, Geraldine? You look great on your back. It’s your best side.”

  She began to write on forms from the file folder in front of her. “I have only myself to blame.”

  “Oh? Well, when they locked me away, I didn’t know who to blame.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  Geraldine looked contrite, even a little shaken. Paul saw that she actually cared for him and wondered where he could go with this, only he wasn’t interested. Instead, he resolved never to see her again, or not to see her in that way, even though she was pretty good at it and put plenty into her work; but if she couldn’t behave like a real professional, there was no point in acting lively and objective when you got within ten feet of a desk. He was going to be keeping these appointments for a while and had to make a binding resolution with the State of Montana Parole Board; he didn’t need her half-goofy on the far side of his file folder.

  “I don’t think there’s anything new for you,” he said, indicating the forms. “My work situation, as discussed, is much improved. I’m still in my apartment, but I’m looking at houses. I’m looking at a new car. When the conditions of my parole so allow, I plan to travel the Pacific Rim which, as far as I’m concerned, is where it’s at, but not until I am so allowed. I would like to go to New York for some threads—” he smiled “—but only with your permission.”

  “And your domestic situation?” She abruptly flipped several pages over.

  Paul smiled at this little diversion. “Under the terms of my father-in-law’s will, there is considerable motivation for me to reconcile with my wife.” He declined to add that as sex-sherpa to the Whitelaw sisters he would no longer have time for her.

  “You know, I’ve never actually—”

  “But I don’t see that as a real possibility.”

  “—seen her, though I know she lives right around here.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “What?”

  “She’s beautiful. Inside and out. Yeah, she lives around here. Her deal is cows, et cetera, her horse.”

  “Well, it’s so nice that . . . she’s beautiful,” said Geraldine. “I like horses myself.”

  “You know, Geraldine, beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone.” Paul considered this and enjoyed watching her squirm. People are so hard nowadays that you can’t buy a good squirm if you try. But he decided to let her off the hook.

  “Evelyn always smells like the animals. That’s sort of a turnoff. She really smells when they’ve been worming cattle, with this gross stuff they dump on their backs. Maybe there’s some things I do miss but that doesn’t include having a fridge full of cattle vaccine.” Paul thought you could cut the air in here with a knife. Geraldine didn’t seem to know what to do with her face, and her imitations of casual interest in this information were repellent. This would be a good time to get her off the hot seat by pouring his heart out.

  “Look, unless Evelyn and I get back together, I can’t sell that bottle plant, okay? Unless we get back together, the plant can’t be houses in other countries, okay? Or the beach. I’m not so twisted I don’t want to live on the beach. I was down in San Diego once with a friend. We drove along the houses and I mean upscale all the way and he like kept his thumb on the garage door opener until he found the one that was his home. How cool is that? I liked it down there because it was so blue and futuristic and you’re walking around with thirty-five SPF sunblock all over you just checking everything out. It was way different than prison, I can tell you, with these creeps that look like they fell out of a bad dream.” Paul remembered when those creeps had suddenly become his friends, once he’d turned on the snitches and they’d invented a board game they’d named Where the Fuck Is Carmen Santiago. He’d never achieved such popularity anywhere.

  “You want to lock the door and get it on?” he inquired.

  “No, Paul, there’s a time and a place for that.”

  He couldn’t imagine what he would’ve done had she said yes. But she sure knew how to turn a guy off. There’s a time and a place. Obviously, once you’re a bureaucrat you start losing all your vital juices and you turn into a cactus. “Would you say that you’ve behaved like a profess
ional in handling my case?”

  “Paul, I must have said something to offend you.” She smiled a little and raised her eyebrows.

  He chuckled. “I’ve got to go,” he said, “but please don’t torment yourself that I haven’t enjoyed myself here. I know I’m not the easiest case you’ve got. I’ve mired myself in the Seven Deadly Sins.” He got up and Geraldine too thought she would rise and see him off. It was clear now that she had made a big mistake with Paul, and in admitting to herself that she’d been had, she remembered how something about him had captivated her against all her best judgment, not just his very good looks, his compact physique and fine features, the particular way his black hair was combed in a kind of 1930s look, and his quickness of mind. There was really something infernal about Paul, but it was only this very sulfurousness that made her act so out of character and believe that they were entitled to a harmless good time together. The last time they’d made love and she’d asked him if she was “good,” he’d replied that it was the thought that counted, adding, as he finished dressing, “Feets, don’t fail me now.” It was clear to her that Paul’s contempt for her was based on his belief that she had fallen from grace and was now somehow on his level. He was wrong about that.

  Following their appointment, Paul drove no more than five blocks and stopped to buy an ice cream. Across the street, a Little League game spun along, two squads of uniformed children and a small group of towering grown-ups, strangely inconsequential looking against the small squads of activists. Paul licked his cone avidly and watched each successive batter, dense with sporting affectations, swing at the ball with surprising vehemence. One angel-faced boy hit a stand-up double, and Paul observed both the pitcher’s nearly operatic despair and the disgusted whirl of his coach. The hitter stood on second base with the detachment of a broadly successful person, doing a few stretches, presumably for the final sprint to home plate, but generally taking in the benevolence of Indian summer in the mountains. This was so much like the baseball-stopped time of his own childhood, when he had been such an utterly different human being that he could, tongue against the ice cream, ponder this in curious stupefaction.

  Paul did not want to eat the remainder of the dry cone now, but since two little athletes were watching him, he couldn’t very well throw it on the ground and was forced to cram it into his mouth.

  Crossing a country road, Paul saw numerous nearly identical new homes gnawed through old grain fields toward the Bridger Mountains, one after the other like a caterpillar. A combine made its way while holding up homebound suburban traffic, exasperation in every direction, the guilt of the farmer evident in his slouch and his avoidance of all eye contact, his deafness to horns and abrupt passings. The sign in front of a new subdivision invited the buyer to “select from over eighteen models.”

  Paul pulled into Stuart and Natalie’s driveway, parking directly behind Stuart’s well-kept Fairlane and Natalie’s Mustang with its MSTNG SLLY vanity plates, a car Paul thought too young for her. Stuart came around the house operating a leaf blower and wearing ear protection. When Stuart saw him, he turned off his blower with an amiable smile, propped it against the house with his ear protectors slung over its handle, swept the grass clippings from his trousers and came toward Paul with a pigeon-toed lurch. Paul watched his approach with raised eyebrows. He actually liked Stuart’s personality for its lack of surprises, for the rolled-up sleeves of his shirts and for the shoes that had been nursed through several changes of style by careful care. The ones he wore today resembled the ones you saw in portraits of the Pilgrims. He knew as well that Stuart was sometimes rather hard done by in his relations with Natalie. He’d once arrived unexpectedly and found Natalie, arms stiff at her sides, shouting at Stuart, “Please don’t say ‘davenport’! Just this once for me, say ‘sofa’!” Sometimes, Paul had got the disquieting feeling that Stuart was watching him. If Paul was to take over the life of the family, he wasn’t going to be keen on having this feeling.

  “Paul, hey, what’s up?”

  “Not much. Just grabbed an ice cream. Been watching Little League.”

  Stuart glanced at his watch. “They’re nearly done. Ace Hardware wins today and they clinch a playoff slot.”

  “Where’s Nat?”

  “She’s at her mother’s. The cruise is only a couple of days away.”

  “Yeah, I bought Mother Whitelaw a little going-away present.”

  Stuart seemed to flinch. “I wonder if I should’ve gotten something. I didn’t even think about it.”

  “Trade beads.”

  “Oh, Paul.”

  Paul caught a whiff of Stuart’s appraisal in his self-discounting body language. In prison you look for every trace of these things so some babyface doesn’t push a sharpened utensil through your liver. It was one thing to be observant and quite another to be absolutely awake. That’s where Paul had gotten by dint of long effort, and that’s where he intended to stay. Certain conflicts lay inevitably ahead. Just now it was time to lay some assurance and bon voyage on the old lady, the holdout being a certain warm feeling that might beguile the rest of them.

  “I’m just glad Alice is getting away, Stu. She’ll learn some real changes.”

  “I wish I were so sure,” Stuart said.

  “You can’t believe how adaptable women are. They’re like chameleons. Match the color of any background, including plaid.”

  “You can’t say that about Natalie.”

  “Nat’s the exception that proves the rule. The others just wear themselves out trying.”

  Stuart turned to resume his work, ending the conversation. Paul wasn’t sure there wasn’t a message here. He frowned slightly and called, “Catch you later,” thinking that if Stuart were any measure, Paul’s vow upon release from prison—of not settling for being less than larger than life—was coming true. He drove across town to his mother-in-law’s house, which Sunny Jim, in an access of imperial ego, had named “Whitelaw.” After consideration, he declined to knock upon the brass and varnish surface of the door, smelling the heat on the russet brick and thinking, Alaska, that’s a good one, and simply strolled in, in order to see Mrs. Whitelaw off, the former Alice Nyoka Smoot, and give her something to trade with the Eskimos. But no, it turned out a little traveler’s portfolio was more like it. Thinking about what she might appreciate and training his mind away from chilblain cures, folklore of the Gold Rush, et cetera, he felt an odd affection for the old bag who’d had a hard time of it in her brutish marriage. It was rumored that, at fifteen, she had been flung from her white-trash household to fend for herself. When she received her gift, he recited, “There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun” while thinking, How thin her hair has become!

  Discovering Natalie in eavesdropping range by the pantry offered little in the way of surprise; she faded from view and was next seen gathered around Mother Whitelaw’s rather good Georgian tea service, which when Paul was in jail had represented, in his mind, if not the good life, then the unconfined life; and once he’d heard it appraised in the spinning portrait of value called “the estate,” he immediately concluded it would be even handsomer in cash form than it had been during its two hundred years on an Edinburgh sideboard before Sunny Jim swept it to the Rockies on the wings of his credit card. When in unlamented down-and-out days Paul had suggested to Evelyn that she possibly gather it unto him, she cried “Never!” and thus differentiated herself from her own sister, who at the behest of a discomposed main man would’ve jogged off with the whole kit and kaboodle.

  “Good afternoon, Natalie.”

  “Paul.” She seemed unable to fathom his warm and admiring gaze. Alice Whitelaw got up to fill the teapot, trailing a cloud of Joy perfume behind her. When the spring-loaded door to the kitchen quit flashing, Paul said to Natalie, “Stop by later and I’ll throw a good one into you.”

  “Give it a rest, Paul.”

  Paul parted the drapes absentmindedly. “Around eightish would be good.” Then, to Alice, who’d just
returned with the exaggerated difficulty meant to highlight her hospitality, “I hope you’ve packed plenty of warm things, Mrs. Whitelaw!”

  “Nice black English breakfast,” said Alice Whitelaw. “Yes, I have, Paul, all I’ll need.”

  “You’re going to Alaska, you know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Icebergs, igloos, killer whales with the big fin.” He sailed on, completely twisted in Natalie’s view but merely baffling in her mother’s. “In a ship with a casino, four ballrooms, six restaurants and a putting green, you will be insulated from the very worst of the people who wish to take such a trip.” And hopefully all memories of Papa in his final days, the dribbling fuckwit who’d once ruled them with such might and incomprehension.