Black Angus (7 page)

“That was some performance,” Little said to him.

Shea smiled wryly. “Yeah, wasn't it? And I don't even like dogs.”

But Little would not have it denigrated. “Listen, that was beautiful, man. For a minute there I thought you was going to bring the whole building down on our head, just like Samson done.”

“Maybe if I hadn't had a haircut.”

Blanchard asked Shea if he could drive.

“On occasion.”

“I mean, are you sober enough?”

Shea held out his hands, making them shake as if they were palsied. “Look at that. Steady as a rock.”

Again Little stepped in. “Hey, I always wanted to drive a Mark Four. What d'ya say, big man?”

Shea got out his keys and tossed them to him. “Where he drives me, I will follow.”

Blanchard told Little to take Shea back to the ranch, but Little had other ideas.

“Aw, he'll be okay. We'll drive around some and then maybe have coffee and eggs at home, at Grandma's—she's always in bed by now. Hey, why don't you two come on over later?”

Blanchard thanked him but declined. There was nothing he wanted less to do.

As the Continental roared off, spewing gravel, Blanchard and Ronda got into his pickup. Normally she would have driven her own car, a Vega, and he would have followed her. But this night Reagan had given her a lift to work, so she was
free to go with Blanchard. For a change they could have talked on the way to her place, they could have necked. But all Ronda did was move close to him and lay her head against his shoulder.

“I think I'm scared,” she said. “I think those two scare me.”

Blanchard first met Ronda at the Sweet Creek two months before, on a weeknight so cold and slow she had joined him right at his table, evidently intrigued by strangers who sat drinking alone and looking as if they had lost their last dollar on earth, which in fact he almost had, then as well as now. Though he was not looking for sex or another woman, he had gone home with her that same night, and probably a dozen times since. And each time had been so much like the others, so casual and impersonal, that until recently he had assumed he was not the only man sharing her bed. Now he was not so sure, for even though she made no claim one way or the other, there was never any evidence of another man. Nevertheless she seemed committed to keeping the relationship strictly sexual, like a one-night stand repeated over and over. And this was exactly what he wanted it to be,
all
he wanted it to be. For there was still Susan. There were still Whit and Tommy.

But even if it had not been for his family, he knew that he and Ronda made an unlikely pair. He was thirty-eight and she was only twenty-two. He was a college graduate and she had not finished high school. He knew a good deal about the world and she knew only this small corner of it and a strip of bars and go-go joints in Kansas City. In addition, she read almost nothing, watched television indifferently, and in general troubled her head with little except the lyrics of country-and-western music, which droned from the radio and stereo in her mobile home almost constantly. Yet she was anything but stupid. Blanchard in fact was often amazed at the disparity between her obvious intelligence—her sure, quick grasp of
the world around her—and yet her woeful ignorance in other matters that did not interest her, as on the night when there was a news item on the radio about President Carter and the senate, and she had turned to Blanchard and asked, “Just what the hell
is
a senate anyway?”

Like most of the hill people—college graduates the same as grade-school dropouts—she gave no thought to the rules of grammar and pronunciation, preferring instead the same twang and slang and solecisms that served everyone else. And though the idiosyncratic spelling of her first name was her mother's doing and not her own, she carried on the tradition to an extent every time she printed the name, forming the middle letter backwards, as и, a mistake so pervasive in the Ozarks that it even showed up on local television commercials.

Despite her stated indifference to the past, her own as well as the rest of the world's, Blanchard had managed to draw out of her a rough idea of what her life had been. Her mother, he understood, had been something of a child bride, bearing Little in her early teens and Ronda a couple of years later, each of them by different fathers, both of whom quickly disappeared, to be followed finally by the mother herself. After that the children were raised by their widowed grandmother, whom Ronda described as “deaf and dead,” a prematurely old woman who was almost never without a New Testament clutched in her hand, even as she sat rocking and watching television all day, every day, turned up so loud one could hear it driving past her small native stone cottage, which was situated across the river road from Ronda's place.

Though over the years it was Little who kept winding up in reformatories and prison, in the old woman's eyes Ronda was the true sinner, the one who dressed like a Jezebel and toiled in a tavern, serving the devil's own brew in a house that once had been the Lord's. And this was only the most recent of the girl's transgressions. At fifteen she had gotten herself
pregnant and the old woman had promptly shipped her off to a Kansas City home for unwed mothers. After having the baby and giving it up for adoption, she entered a three-year period as a cocktail waitress and topless dancer in a series of Kansas City dives, until she met an older man named C. C. Whitehead, a stolid, solvent trucker able to give her security, leisure, and a degree of luxury in the form of a brand-new sixty-foot mobile home, which he brought back to Rock County and parked on her grandmother's place. Unfortunately he was not also able to give the girl excitement, and as the marriage degenerated, so did Whitehead, drinking and brooding and finally jackknifing his eighteen-wheeler on Interstate 44 in a Christmas-week ice storm, losing twelve thousand frying chickens and his own life, uninsured. After the funeral Ronda found herself with nothing but a small equity in the mobile home, enough however to have kept her in the area through the rest of the winter and spring in the hope of selling the trailer for enough money so she could move to California and have a little of what she called “the sweet life.” But to date no offers had even covered what she owed on the home. So she had taken the job at the Sweet Creek.

For the Ozarks, it was not all that unusual a life, Blanchard knew, probably no more blighted and impoverished than most. Yet all he had to do was look at her to see the fearful cost of it, in the paradox that while all her parts were beautiful, the sum of her was plain. She had a dancer's leggy, sinuous body. She had thick auburn hair and a nice face with large green eyes and a sensuous mouth. But she seldom let any light into those eyes and she almost never smiled. Her habitual expression in fact was a cross between boredom and contempt, as if she were forever waiting on a table of slobs. It was true that lately she had begun to smile more when she was alone with Blanchard. And their last time together, as she laughed at some
thing he had said, he had been struck by her beauty, more than ever appalled at how life had abused her.

Unhappily, that abuse showed up in the bedroom too. Despite her background as a topless dancer, he found her sexually inhibited, exhibiting none of the verve and inventive abandon he had come to expect in a woman, even one as cool and cerebral as Susan. The minute the two of them would enter her trailer, she would draw the drapes and go into the bathroom and lock the door, then take a very long and very silent bath, never saying anything to him through the paper-thin walls, never singing or humming. Blanchard meanwhile would go back to her bedroom and undress and lie there waiting for her, some of the longest minutes of his life, for when she finally did come out, naked, her hair curlier from the bath steam, her body gleaming clean, firm as Carrara marble, he would almost swoon with lust. But then she would just go about her business, dutifully returning his kisses, dutifully going down on him, dutifully submitting as he mounted her finally. And he was convinced that on a few occasions, especially during their first few times together, she had faked her orgasms, for they had seemed slight and theatrical compared to her response more recently. But even with this improvement, he still found her inhibited. There was no play between them, either before or after they climaxed. Nor was there any fun or laughter. She would just come into her tiny bedroom and go to work, as if she were stepping up on a runway to dance topless for a certain length of time.

This night, however, Ronda was not at all indifferent. And when they were finished he discovered that her eyes had teared, which for some reason moved him unexpectedly. For a time they kissed and embraced like lovers, but finally she pulled away from him and lay on her side, watching him.
And Blanchard did not miss the new thing in her eyes, almost the aggrieved look of the victim.

“I've got to get out of here,” she said.

“Out of bed?”

“Don't be funny. Here. This goddamn backwoods.”

“No answer on your ad yet?” She had recently started running a classified ad for her mobile home in a Springfield newspaper.

“Nothing,” she said. “Pretty soon I'm just gonna pick up and leave anyway. Give the damn thing to the finance company. The devil with my credit rating.”

“I'll miss you.”

“You'll get by.”

“It's so bad here?”

“Yeah, it's so bad. Especially the Sweet Crick. Another week in that dump and I'm gonna go bananas. What a bunch of animals.”

“That include Shea?”

She laughed listlessly. “Well, what would you call him?”

“Big,” Blanchard said. “A big kid.”

“Kid, my foot. I never saw Pat Reagan back down from anyone before, let alone a kid. But he did tonight.”

“You've got a point.”

She was silent for a time. “I still can't figure him,” she said finally. “Shea, I mean. I can't figure what he's doing here.”

Blanchard had already tried to explain him to her last week, when Shea turned up at the ranch and of course promptly found the Sweet Creek. Blanchard had told her about the years the two of them and Susan had spent at the Darling Agency in Saint Louis and what a gifted advertising writer and idea man Shea had been, both there and in New York, where he had earned big money and had won many national awards, and how none of it had mattered for him, how even after he had reached thirty he had not been able to resist treating his career
as a lark, once even showing up for work in a rented Nazi Gestapo uniform when the management said they wanted to see more esprit de corps. Blanchard had told her about Shea finally getting fired, over two years after Blanchard himself had left the company, and he had told her about Shea's half-hearted search for another job since then, his problems at home, and of course his drinking. But then, as now, Blanchard had no real answers for her, because he did not know any better than she did what Shea was doing in the area, what he was
after
. He could only guess.

“My guess is he's just running.”

“From what?”

“I doubt if even he knows.”

“You can't run from something unless you know what it is.”

“Sure you can. You don't run from the dark, you run from what you think might be in it.”

“Still, you must have some idea.”

“What he's running from?”

“Yeah.”

“Nineteen eighty-four,” he said, for no good reason.

“Why? What happens then?”

“It's already happening.”

She moved closer to him, resting her chin on his chest. “I don't think I like you tonight. You're kind of smartassy.”

“In what way?” he asked, though he knew.

“Forget it. Just tell me this—how come he's hanging around Little? What are they up to?”

“I've got no idea.”

“All Little's ever done is use people, get all he could out of them. He must figure there's some way he can use Shea.”

“Maybe they're both trying to use each other.”

“Could be. But I don't know. Shea's different. The way he's always on stage. It's like he can't help himself.”

“Compulsive.”

She nodded. “He reminds me of this manager we had in one of the clubs in Kansas City. He found out he had cancer, and overnight he changed. He just started talking and he couldn't stop. He didn't make any sense after a while, but it didn't make any difference to him. He'd just keep right on talking like he was afraid that if he stopped, his life would stop. The cancer would get him.”

Blanchard looked over at her, impressed. “I think you're right—you can do better than the Sweet Crick.”

“Who couldn't? You know they were both there this afternoon? Him and Little? I didn't want to sit with them because of Little, but Shea kept pressuring me.”

“So you sat.”

She nodded. “Yeah. And Shea did all the talking.”

“About what?”

“You, mostly.”

“What'd he say?”

“Mostly stuff I already know, like your money problems and your wife hating it here and all. And he said maybe you got Bang's now too.”

“It's nice to have friends.”

“Oh, he wasn't putting you down. He just said you haven't got no way out and that maybe we could figure out some way to help.”

Blanchard laughed at that, a despairing laugh. “Jesus, he is beyond belief. Don't tell me, let me guess—he said Little could rustle my cattle, sell them, split with me, and I'd get the insurance, pay off the bank, and live happily ever after.”

Ronda managed a smile. “Something like that.”

But Blanchard did not consider it funny. In fact it infuriated him, the idea that Shea—his old buddy, his uninvited house-guest—was not only discussing Blanchard's personal and business problems in public but was also proposing their solution,
through crime
. The fact that Shea was drinking at the time, that he was playing his usual games—none of it lessened Blanchard's anger. At the same time he knew Ronda was in no way to blame, deserved no part of his anger. So he said nothing. He lit a cigarette and waited, blowing smoke at the low, flocked ceiling above them.