Black Angus (3 page)

Shea slept in what Clarence called the “h'ard man's” room, a narrow dormered cubicle on the third floor of the old wood farmhouse. Frigid in the winter and a cauldron in summer, about all it offered was quiet and privacy, enough for a man to
sleep through the day as well as the night if he was so inclined, which Shea was.

At the top of the single flight of stairs leading to the room Blanchard knocked on the door. Getting no response, he went on inside, where he found what appeared to be a hairy white whale beached on the small bed, a whale with a hard-on that looked sadly miniscule in comparison with the mountain of flesh from which it sprang. Blanchard picked the sheet off the floor and tossed it over his friend, knowing Shea was somewhat sensitive about this single touch of moderation in his person. Then he kicked him awake, lightly but firmly, and Shea's baby face gradually opened in terror. Where was he?
Who
was he?

“Rise and shine,” Blanchard said.

“What's the matter? What's up?”

“Nothing. It's almost noon, that's all. I could've used you this morning.”

In point of fact, Shea was one of the few men nature had equipped for handling bulls, for he stood four inches over six feet and weighed close to three hundred pounds, not much of it fat either. He could have been a pro football lineman except that in his mind he was a pixie, a kid in manly drag. On a football field he would have died laughing.

Blanchard opened the windows wider. “It stinks in here,” he said. “Couldn't you piss away some of your beer? Do you have to sweat it all?”

Shea slowly sat up on the bed, bowing it like a hammock. “Oh God, I feel awful,” he said, mauling his face. “I wanna die.”

“Again.”

The big man reached for the sides of his head, as though to keep it from exploding. “Oh boy, here she comes.”

“Maybe you ought to try life sober.”

“I already did.”

Just looking at Shea, at the huge cherub's face and body ashen with hangover, made Blanchard feel a touch of nausea himself. “You better give it up,” he said. “You better go back to Evelyn and the kids.”

“Up yours.”

“Just a suggestion.”

Shea slowly pulled on a pair of jockey shorts and got up. Trying his morning legs, he shuffled unsteadily to the window, then turned away from it, from the brightness. “This can't be hangover,” he lamented.

“What then?”

“Fear and trembling.”

“The old angst, huh?”

“Old Angst. Sounds like a beer. Wonder if I could sell it.”

“Why not?”

Standing there, trying to smile, Shea suddenly had tears in his eyes. “When's it end, huh, Bob? When's it turn around? Or is it once you hit the skids, at my weight anyway, there just ain't no stopping? You just go straight on down the tube, like a turd in the plumbing.”

“You ought to write.” Blanchard was pretending he could not see.

“Yeah, I know. Got a million just like it.”

“How about get-up-and-go? Got any of that?”

Sagging onto the bed again, Shea lit a cigarette, with two hands. “Oh, you bet, coach. You bet. You just send me in there and watch me do my stuff.”

“Clarence misses you.”

“Naturally.”

“Me too. Had a real interesting morning. But then there's still afternoon, if you'd care to join us. Maybe we could sweat some of that stuff out of you.”

“And maybe not.”

“It's up to you.”

The cigarette seemed to have eased Shea's pain, for suddenly he was grinning. “You should've been there last night,” he said.

“Great time, huh?”

“Well, I wouldn't exactly call it that. Let's say instructive. I mean these people are something else. Far as they're concerned, it's still eighteen-eighty, you know that? Firewater, shootin'-arns, and unabashed machismo.”

“I told you not to go there alone.”

“No problem. I had the cock-of-the-walk taking care of me, Ronda's big brother Little, no less.”

“I thought he was in prison.”

“Well, he's out—all four and a half feet, one hundred pounds of him. He comes over and says he's Ronda's brother and he hears I'm a friend of her new boyfriend, and would I care to bend a few elbows with him.”

“Which you did.”

“Naturally. I'm not fussy.”

“Well, I'm happy for the two of you. Hope it works out. But right now I got other matters. I wanted to warn you—stay clear of Susan today, all right? I mean make your own breakfast, don't use all the hot water, and above all don't plug the toilet.”

“A fart plugs that toilet.”

“Then don't fart.”

“Okay, I'll mind my manners. But what gives? What's happened?”

“She's just uptight, that's all. Her father's after her to come back to Saint Louis again, her and Whit.”

Struggling into his bathrobe, a maroon silk tent, Shea shook his head wonderingly. “I don't know about you, kid. If I was getting ass as righteous as Ronda, I wouldn't care who left me, including Susan.”

“I thought she was too glum for your tastes.”

“That was before last night. I tell you, you spend six hours watching her carry beer pitchers back and forth, and that keester of hers gets downright hypnotic.”

“You like it, huh?”

“Like it? Listen, I'd give up Evelyn and the three kids and our dog too—”

“You already have.”

He did not break stride. “Well, I'd do it again, and throw in you and Susan and Clarence even—toss over the whole bunch if I could just push my nose in there and leave it for about a week, let it turn nice and brown.”

“It'd never satisfy her.”

“Oh, that'd be just the first step. I'd get around to her front in time. I just wouldn't be in any hurry, that's all.”

“I'll be sure to tell her.”

“I already have.”

“I believe you.” Blanchard was at the door, about to leave. “Remember what I said about Susan, okay?” As he started down the stairs, Shea followed him to the doorway.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I got the solution to all your troubles. You know what Little was doing time for?”

Blanchard, at the bottom of the stairs, shook his head.

“Cattle rustling.”

The idea made Blanchard grin. Even as a joke, a typical Shea inspiration, it did have a certain appeal.

“Okay,” he said. “You set it up. But meanwhile, don't plug the toilet.”

Downstairs in the kitchen Blanchard started to get himself some lunch. He ate his noon meal alone, Clarence having volunteered almost a year before that he did not care to sit at the table and watch “a growed man rustlin' up his own eats.” So Clarence ate in the barn now, feasting from a brown paper bag that bulged with meat sandwiches and fresh fruit and slices of
homemade pie and cake and thermos jugs of hot soup and coffee, a daily repast that added not a pound to his stringy frame. Not for him the kind of “meal” Blanchard threw together, a lunchmeat sandwich with canned peaches and instant coffee and Oreo cookies. Clarence had not bothered to articulate the second and implicit part of his criticism, that while the “growed man” rustled his own food, his growed woman sat reading a book in the other room. But Blanchard had no doubt that was his hired man's real objection, the true heresy in his rheumy old eyes. And it was an objection Blanchard had no ready answer for. Somehow it seemed inadequate to explain that Susan was not a housewife like other women but a professional, a Stephens College graduate with a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a successful ten-year career in advertising, first as a copywriter and then a television commercial producer and finally as a broadcast department executive earning thirty-five thousand dollars a year, which had been very good money in the Saint Louis market and embarrassingly more than Blanchard himself had earned as an account executive on his nickel-and-dime farm products accounts. Nevertheless she had been every bit as dissatisfied and restless as he, just as eager to take the unexpected inheritance from his mother's estate and plow it and everything else they could lay their hands on into the ranch, into this new and totally different, totally
real
life they had envisioned here on the Ozark plateau. That it had not worked out, in fact had become a sinkhole of hope and treasure, was not her fault any more than it was his. He believed that. No, he
knew
it. He knew that the basic problem simply had been one of timing, that in a world of ever more rigorously organized power blocs, the cattleman still went his own sweet way, independent and powerless, and for the last four years, uncompensated. Ironically the year preceding this period, the year Blanchard had bought the ranch and started his herd, had been
the best in history, with cattle and dressed beef selling at the highest prices ever. The cows he had bought then—ninety head—had averaged close to five hundred dollars each, over twice what they would bring now. Just as bad, the calves they produced consistently sold under forty cents a pound, far below his break-even point. So with every animal he produced, every steer and heifer, every pound of red meat, he lost money. And he had been doing just that for over four years.

But even that was not the full measure of their failure. As badly as they had misjudged the economy, they had fared no better when it came to understanding the nature of the Ozark people, the hillbillies of popular legend. For some reason it had never even occurred to Blanchard or Susan that the local people would be truly different from others they had known, people in Saint Louis and New York and in the suburbs and college towns where they had lived, in all the places they had traveled over the years. Oh, they knew the locals would
speak
differently, with a twang and all. And they expected many of the hillfolk to be more religious and less tolerant than city dwellers. But this after all was late in the twentieth century. The ranch was only a few hundred miles from Saint Louis, a few hundred from Tulsa, half that from Little Rock, and there were cars and telephones as well as television, the great leveler, Susan's very own medium which for over a quarter century had been turning the world into McLuhan's global village. So the two of them, with Whit, came innocent and unprepared, like Victorian English tourists expecting the Hottentots to serve afternoon tea. Well, they did not. Nor did they relate to big-city communicators turning to the soil for God knew what crackbrained reason.

For almost a year Susan had tried, forcing herself to attend their Tupperware parties and PTA meetings and saying hello at the country grocery and the stores in town. But the result was always the same: stout, prim, corseted women in beehive
hairdos not even giving her the backhand of civility, just the dull flat-out glare of contempt and even hatred, as an outsider, a city fool who talked uppity and wore pants all the time and did nothing with her hair, and above all, did not go to church.

So, in time, Susan had given up. And getting lunch for Blanchard was a part of that giving up, a small part. Daily, in all the things left undone and unsaid, and now even in the bedroom, she made it clear that she would no longer participate in the charade, that the noble experiment was over and done and that their life together would not really resume until he gave in, until he quit and sold out and returned to the city. Somehow she was unable or unwilling to understand that it was not just money he was fighting for, but his life, his life as a man.

Over an hour later Blanchard and Clarence were trying to dig the split railroad tie out of the ground so they could replace it with a new one and then rehang the headgate the bull had torn off. Unfortunately they had done too good a job putting the tie into the ground three years before, sinking it a yard deep and pouring around it a cement footing that measured over twelve inches in radius, which left them with a sizable hole to dig before they could hope to pull the post with a tractor. As usual in the hills, the going was rough, as much rock-breaking as digging, and they were soon sweat-drenched and silent except for the racket of their breathing. Also, as usual, they had an audience, Tommy squatting a few feet away anxiously waiting for Blanchard to ask for a new tool—shovel, pick, iron bar—which he would then quickly hand to him. In exchange Blanchard would give him a wink or smile and his brother's clouded eyes would flare like a match in darkness.

Blanchard only wished that he himself could have felt a similar happiness. It was not the kind of work any normal man would have enjoyed—it was too hard and too uncomfortable
for that—but in addition he suffered the average American male's anxiety about the soundness and reliability of his heart muscle. He had spent his prime decade, from his early twenties to early thirties, at a series of desk jobs interrupted by long martini lunches and occasional hiatuses of equally sedentary travel. He had smoked cigarettes since the age of sixteen. He drank vodka or scotch almost every day of his life. And ranch work was just not the same as keeping fit with regular daily exercise. The truly hard work came in fits and starts and in between a man often took it easy in the sure knowledge that his luck would not hold. If anything, the work made for toughness more than fitness, a willingness to live with pain and danger. But right now Blanchard was finding the living hard. His body was heavy with exhaustion, sweat burned his eyes, and he could feel the steady unnerving sprint of his heart.

So when he saw Shea coming toward them from the house he felt almost grateful, knowing he would be able to take a break without initiating it, which usually meant having to listen to Clarence's unsubtle gloating:
You mean you tuckered already, a young feller like you?

Shea looked reborn from the ruin in the “h'ard man's” room, testimony to what a shave and shower and breakfast could do. His light curly hair was wet-combed and he was wearing his customary T-shirt, chinos, and sneakers. In the week he had been staying with Blanchard he had made a number of enemies, of whom Clarence was not the least. And he moved quickly now to reaffirm that enmity.