Bad Company (12 page)

“I suppose it might be possible. I don’t particularly wish to live here to watch them build condominiums on my creek,” she said, aiming one of her schoolmarm looks at Brit. “In any case, the offer that the California investors have put forward is for the whole ranch, conditional on the swap. Nattie tells me that they want an answer by this weekend. My kids say I should think about it. So I’m thinking about it.”

But Sally was thinking about all those websites blowing up on a wing and a prayer. Hadn’t she read somewhere that most of them operated on three or four days’ cash reserves? Maybe Alice’s Restaurant was one of those undercapitalized high flyers, and Alice Wood needed the dough more than she was letting on, for boarding school tuitions and summer camps and lawyers. And what about Nattie and Dwayne’s investors? Sally wanted to know a lot more about what they were offering, and why. The idea of Nattie Lang-ham and Marsh Carhart out there on one side of the deal almost made her hope that Jonathan Edwards, the minister, had been right about what happened to sinners when they ticked the Big Guy off.

Chapter 10
You Can Get Anything You Want

“This is driving me nuts!” Sally said at last, as they headed back to Laramie.

“Huh?” said Hawk, who’d been silent the whole way, keeping his own company. Delice had been ready to leave just when Molly got out the map to show Hawk. Sally had stayed and ridden back with him, thinking thoughts of her own.

But thinking had led her along a picaresque path, as so often it did. “I can’t get the song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ out of my head.” She sang a couple of bars.

“Thanks a lot,” said Hawk. “Now you’ve given it to me.”

“The only antidote,” Sally declared, “is to get another song in there immediately.”

“But the cure can be even worse,” Hawk allowed. “Consider ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.’ ”

Sally shuddered as the toxic song slithered into her brain. “Give me some help here. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

It took him a minute. He darted a quick glance at her as they rounded a curve by a tree-shaded house where Sally had always been amused to see horses wearing sweaters, nearly to West Laramie.

“I’ve been thinking about that land up at Happy Jack,” he said, trouble in his eyes. “I’ve been giving some consideration to heading up there this week and walking around.”

“Up to the Laramies?” she squeaked.

“Come on, Sal. You can’t declare a whole mountain range off-limits. That property is miles from the Devil’s Playground. There’s absolutely nothing connecting the two places, so don’t worry. I’m just not sure whether I should go up there or not.”

“Why not?” Sally asked.

“Because I’ve got plenty of work of my own to do. Because Molly Wood’s affairs are none of my goddamn business.” Hawk snapped off the words.

“What do you mean? I bet Molly would value your opinion.” He and Molly had pored over the topo map of the property for a good half hour. She’d pointed out nearby private areas in the national forest (all far enough away to be reassuring), shown him where she’d had good birding, located the beaver pond.

“My opinion? Sure. I guess you think everybody ought to solicit quickie impressions on life-changing decisions from people they just met. Not everybody operates that way,” Hawk sneered.

What was up here? “Hey Groucho, chill out,” she said. “After all, she did open up to us, and I had the distinct impression that one reason she was so forthcoming was because she took a liking to you.”

Hawk kept his face blank. “She’s got a beautiful spread. What she does with it is no nevermind to me.”

“Right. Like you’re completely indifferent to seeing that ranch busted up and sold off, with her shut up in the trees, listening to the wind howl while her kids siphon off the ill-gotten gains. Anybody could tell it’ll break her heart. You ought to watch it, Hawk. Your white knight is showing.”

“I don’t give a damn,” he muttered.

“No? You never let
anyone
call you Josiah.”

“Hmph,” he said.

“Well, at least somebody who knows something about the country might want to check out the acreage Nattie and Dwayne’s people want to trade. I mean, of course Marsh Carhart will offer his expert and impartial evaluation . . .”

Hawk glared at her.

“Look, sweetheart. I know that part of what’s bugging you is that you think you have to keep an eye on me. But I’ll be okay. I promise not to do anything stupid,” she assured him. That is, nothing stupider than talking to a few more people about Monette, asking some questions here and there, bugging Dickie Langham and Scotty Atkins, stuff like that. And maybe, just for the diversion of sticking her own nose into Molly Wood’s business, doing a little web surfing in the area of personal services. Whoops—she was in danger of getting that song stuck again. “If you do decide to check things out up at Happy Jack,” she said, controlling the urge to smirk at him, “I’d be so impressed with your chivalry, I’d probably be inspired to nibble on your knees.”

“My knees?” he said.

“Or perhaps you’d prefer higher ground,” she said.

“Possibly.” Now he was working on a straight face. “Over the years I’ve been pretty partial to the higher elevations.” He paused. “So, would you like to come along?”

Sally told herself to ease up. No need to feel like screaming at the thought of going back up there. It’s wasn’t like she was planning a trip to the scene of the crime to look for bloodstains or lipstick messages or something. “Maybe,” she heard herself say. “When do you want to go?”

Hawk thought about it. “Too late this afternoon— you still want to go to the rodeo tonight, right? Tomorrow’s a possibility. After the memorial service.”

“Let’s see what happens there,” said Sally. “There could be things to do for the parade on Saturday. I might have to go buy a case of crepe paper or something.” Or see if old Dickie, or, er, old Scotty had time for lunch. But she wasn’t mentioning that. How many ways could she actually be a chickenshit at once? This was really terrible.

She decided not to brood on it, so to speak. They had to get Molly Wood’s things unloaded. Delice had persuaded the fire department (more precisely, the fire chief, a sometime boyfriend) to donate some garage space for the white elephants, so they stopped off, unpacked the goods, and went on home.

Where, just to screw things up a little more, Sheldon Stover was sitting on their front stoop.

Sally leaped out of Hawk’s truck and showed Stover why some people believed that in Wyoming, there was some confusion between “hospitality” and “hostility.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I don’t recall giving you my address.”

“Edna’s Rolodex,” he said cheerfully. “You said to get in touch if there were any problems. I called and left a bunch of messages on your machine, but after a while I decided to go out and figured I’d just stop by here and wait until you got home. There seems to be some trouble with the plumbing.”

“What kind of trouble?” Hawk asked, coming up behind. “Who the hell is this?”

“This is Sheldon Stover,” said Sally. “The one who’s over at Edna and Tom’s. He’s the experimental ethnographer.”

“That does sound like trouble,” Hawk observed.

Stover chuckled. “You’d be surprised,” he said, cheerfully oblivious to the insult. “But the problem is that the drains at the house have backed up. It’s getting yucky. I figured you’d want to come over and clean up and call a plumber.”

“Sheldon,” Sally was really trying to be patient, “I thought we’d cleared up the misunderstanding about me being the cleaning lady.”

“Oh. Oh yeah,” he said. “But I thought you were kind of in charge of the place. And really, somebody ought to do something about the mess, and get the pipes cleared out. It’s not very pleasant.”

Sally could easily imagine. “Here’s a crazy idea,” she said. “What if
you
got out a mop and a bucket, and took a stab at it?”

“Me?” Stover inquired. “Why?”

“Well, Sheldon, while you’re waiting for that check in the mail, you’re supposed to be house-sitting, aren’t you? And it’s just barely possible you had something to do with clogging up Edna’s plumbing, isn’t it?”

Stover thought it over. “I guess you could see it that way. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Could this guy possibly be this clueless? Sally was ready to put him to the test by blasting his ass to Nebraska, but Hawk evidently decided the conversation wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll come take a look at it,” he said. He went in the house and before Sally knew it, returned with a plunger, a bottle of Drano, and a plumber’s snake. “Let’s go,” he said.

The kitchen sink spilled over with dirty dishes and slimy water. In the downstairs bathroom, the toilet had overflowed, and there were two inches of definitely yucky liquid in the tub. While Sheldon Stover stood staring (now Sally knew where the word “dumbfounded” had come from), Sally found some towels to soak up the water on the floors. Hawk went to work emptying the dishes out of the sink, sending the snake down the drain, and finally pouring in the Drano. As the water began to bubble, and at last to recede, he looked around and saw the scummy frying pan, sitting on the stove. “So . . . what’d you do, Stover? Put bacon grease down the sink and bung up the whole house?”

Stover had disappeared. They found him in the backyard, seated at Edna’s picnic table, eating pâté de foie gras straight out of a tin Edna had brought back from Zabar’s, last time she was in New York, and had been saving, Sally knew, for a special occasion. Happy Plumbing Day.

“You’re unclogged,” Hawk said. “Now go clean up.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Stover, globs of goose liver sticking in the crevices between his teeth.

“Here’s your equipment,” said Sally, brandishing a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Mr. Clean. “I’ll explain the procedure. You squirt some Mr. Clean in the bucket, then you fill it with hot water. You scrub out the bathtub, and then you mop the kitchen and bathroom floors. I did the dishes in the kitchen and put the dirty towels in the washing machine. When the washer’s done, you put them in the dryer and turn it on.” She thought a minute. Back in the distant past, she’d lived in communal houses with men so ignorant of housekeeping that they sat in their bedrooms and threw their beer cans in the hallway, believing that the beer can fairy would make them disappear. Best to be explicit. “That is to say, push the button that says ‘dry.’ ”

“Dry,” he repeated carefully.

Hawk squinted at him. “Do you have a nanny or something?”

“I’m not really into domesticity,” Stover said. “My needs are simple. I like to live lightly on the earth. Never stay in one place too long.”

Sally imagined a string of eviction notices bumping along behind Sheldon Stover like the cans and streamers on a “Just Married” car. “Where do you live?”

Stover stuck a finger in the pâté tin, pulled out a big fingerful, licked it off. Mr. Light Living. “I’ve moved around. Been mostly on soft money since I finished up at Harvard. Last year I was in Stuttgart studying consumerism and folk syncretism among immigrant Pakistani punk rockers. This fall I’ll be out in California on a fellowship at the Center for Postdisciplinarity.”

“That sounds right up your alley, Shel,” said Sally. “You wouldn’t want anybody to mistake you for a person who had retrograde attachments to discipline.”

“Exactly,” nodded Stover. “Discipline is over.”

Hawk couldn’t help asking, “What is it that you fellows do out there at that center?”

Stover blinked. “Look at the big picture,” he answered. “Engage in collective problem-solving process, although, of course, I’m skeptical that any problem could ever actually be, well, solved. But some of the fellows remain committed to certain forms of empiricism and pragmatism. The environmental consultants are especially task-oriented, I’d say. My colleague Marsh Carhart, for example, the guy I’m getting together with while I’m here. He was one of the founders. A very holistic dude.”

Holistic? Maybe if you thought of the word in terms of “hole.” Sally contained her surprise. “You’re connected to Marsh Carhart?”

Stover scooped up the last of the pâté, licking his lips.

“Sure. We’ve talked about the idea of me being hired as a consultant to his firm, on ethnographic issues.”

Sally had a hard time imagining that Marsh would pay good spot cash money for Sheldon Stover’s multisyllabic horseshit. Then again, a little horseshit here, a little horseshit there, and pretty soon you were looking at enough fertilizer to start a green revolution, of one kind or another. “Gosh, wouldn’t that mean you’d have to, like, do some actual work?” Sally inquired.

He thought it over. “I’d prefer to think of it in terms of offering my impressions of particular predicaments,” he said. “Which he could choose to take, or maybe not. Either way.”

“Either way,” Hawk echoed faintly, and then realized what Stover was saying. “Do you happen to be sharing impressions with Carhart on a particular parcel of land in the Laramie Range?”

“Not precisely as such,” said Stover.

Sally waited, vainly, for explanation. “Well, then, as what?”

Carhart thought it over some more. “As part of a more complex exchange, involving a traditional, or neo-traditional cultural grouping at a crossroads, with its customs, rituals, and subsistence practices buffeted by the forces of postmodern multinational capital.”

Hawk nodded slowly. “You mean, you’re here to see how ranchers handle it when somebody from out of town offers them a pile of money for their land.”

“In a reductive sense, I suppose so. But as I’ve tried to explain,” he continued with elaborate patience, “I try to operate at a greater level of both detail and abstraction, knowing that my presence modifies what goes on around me, but trying to minimize that effect as far as possible.”

“No point in falling victim to the curse of task orientation,” Hawk allowed.

“Actually, I do try to avoid that. It may strike you as— what shall we say—effete, but I’ve seen enough situations where scholars succumb to the temptation to influence the outcomes of their research. Bad things can happen, man.” Stover shook his head.

“What about Carhart?” Hawk pursued the matter. “Does he try to affect outcomes?”

Stover wagged his head from side to side, evidently moving thoughts around inside. “I don’t really know how to answer that. Marsh takes a different approach. As a sociobiologist, he’s not much concerned with action at the scale of most individual interventions. He’s more interested in the long-term, large-scale processes that determine human activity.”

“In other words,” said Sally, “no matter what he or anybody else does at any given moment, it’s not a question of choice, or even consciousness, or certainly not conscience. It’s all part of a larger process of natural selection.”

Stover did the head-wagging thing again, frowning. “I guess, on the highest plane. Not very appealing in some regards, huh?”

“Makes me not sorry to be down here on earth,” Sally said, thrusting the mop at him. “Offering you the choice of cleaning up Edna’s bathroom.”

On the way back home, Hawk started to laugh, and kept it up until the tears rolled down his face. “Soft money!” and “Postdisciplinarity!” and “T-t-t-t-t-task-oriented!” he exclaimed between gasps and guffaws. “Boy, whoever bankrolls that guy really gets what they pay for. On the other hand, why Carhart? He’s a jerk, but not a fool. He must have some use for that little twit. I’m damned if I can figure out what it is.” And now he was laughing again. “If it weren’t for academia,” he finally managed to say, “Sheldon Stover would have been dead years ago. It makes you wonder why we ever abandoned the survival of the fittest. The war of all against all. Nature red in tooth and claw . . .”