Black Angus (2 page)

“Wasn't as big as he thought, was he?” Clarence crowed.

Blanchard took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. He was surprised to see, amid the sweat, another smear of blood.

“Big enough,” he said.

Back at the corral Tommy was waiting for him, anxiously clutching with one hand the bulging United Air Lines tote bag he was seldom without, while the other smeared the tears still running down his face and into his whiskers. Blanchard shaved him only once a week.

“Blackie all right?” he asked. “You didn't hurt him, did you?”

Blanchard could not help smiling at that. “Naw, he's fine, Tommy. You couldn't hurt old Blackie with an ax.”

“Spot, he run away. And Kitty too. They all got scared and run away.”

“They'll be back. They're okay.”

It was one of life's more mischievous ironies that the pets Tommy loved so much, and which he invariably tagged with one of his Dick-and-Jane storybook names, would have almost nothing to do with him, probably sensing in his unrelenting devotion a flawed humanity, a lack of true anthropic arrogance. With the bull, whose real name was not Blackie but Emulous Prince of Moorland, the indifference was predictable, a function of its nature. But with the dogs and cats it seemed a matter of choice: they were forever running off and hiding from Tommy's smothering embrace.

“Let's go look for 'em,” he said now.

“You look, Tommy. I still have things to do.”

Doc Parnell, having pried open the battered door of his pickup, placed the bull's blood sample with the others, in a rack of crimson vials.

“I sure hope he don't turn out a Banger,” he said. “When a bull gets it, sometimes you lose a whole herd.”

Blanchard smiled ruefully. “Thanks for the thought, Doc. That's all I need.”

“I just want you to know what to expect, that's all. If him or any of the females turn out reactors, then we gotta test the whole herd every month. And every reactor you gotta ship for slaughter, it's that simple.”

“It's simple, all right.”

“Well, Bang's just ain't something you can fool with, Bob. If the government didn't quarantine and slaughter—”

“I know—the disease would be everywhere.”

Parnell nodded gravely. “But that don't make it any easier, I guess. If I was you, though, I wouldn't worry too much. This is just a referral case. You're probably clean.”

“I hope so.”

Blanchard already knew from the state vet all he wanted to know about Bang's—or brucellosis. One of the most feared of all bovine diseases, it caused infected cows to fail to breed or to abort their fetuses. And it was highly contagious, able to sweep through whole herds and even neighboring herds in a short time. So wherever it was diagnosed the cattle were quarantined by the government and bloodtested every thirty days until they showed clean four consecutive times. All reactors were immediately destroyed, sold as marked-down meat. And every cattleman who had bought animals from the infected herd, or sold animals into it, he too had to have his herd tested. That was how Blanchard had come under quarantine, simply because of the bull he had bought, ironically the most expensive animal he had, and the only registered one, bought from the famed Moorland Ranch in Texas. But famed or not, the Moorland herd somehow had contracted Bang's, and passed it on—possibly to Blanchard. Within three or four days he would know.

He shook Parnell's hand now and thanked him for coming. “Sorry about your truck,” he added. “I'll call my insurance agent about it.”

“Never mind that now. Let me check that back of yours.”

Blanchard obliged, turning away from him. The initial searing pain was gone, but he could feel blood trickling down his spine still, soiling his underwear and jeans.

Parnell gently pulled the shirt away from the wound. “Yeah, just a nasty abrasion,” he said. “Gonna be hell to keep a scab on it, though, unless you lay on your belly for a week. Could you do that?”

“I'll ask my wife.”

Laughing, the vet got a tube of salve out of his kit and gave it to him. “Have her clean the wound good. Then smear it with this ointment. It don't work for pinkeye, so maybe it'll work for this.”

Clarence and young Parnell were coming up now. Both had their lariats back.

“Critter stepped right out of the rope,” the old man announced. “Jist like I knowed he would.”

Cattle could never get ahead of Clarence. He always knew exactly what they were going to do and why, though he often withheld this information until after the fact.

“You finish up here,” Blanchard told him. “I'm going in and get this bandaged.”

The old man made a face. “Hell, I wouldn't bother, little old scratch like that. Jist let it be. It'll heal up before ya know it.”

Blanchard made no reply. Four years ago he would have said something, tried to get through: Humor me, I'm a tenderfoot. Or one man's scratch is another's surgery. But he knew better now. There was no getting through. You didn't argue with Clarence any more than you did with cattle.

All the way to the house Tommy loped along beside him, commiserating over his wound, which he had not noticed until the vet looked at it. Now it filled his world.

“Does it hurt, Bob? Does it hurt? You be all right? You think you be all right?”

“It's okay,” Blanchard assured him. “I'm fine, Tommy. You go find Spot, okay?”

At the back door Tommy finally let go of his arm, probably anticipating the way Susan's gaze would fall to his muddy boots inside and stop him in his tracks, like some futuristic ray gun, rendering him speechless and immobile. Only Blanchard—and sometimes Whit—would be able to get him started again, helping him off with his boots and prompting him on into the house, into the bracing air of Susan's sanctum santorum. Four years earlier he had been her very special love and concern, poor retarded Tommy, one more aspect of the
true and beautiful lives they were all going to live here in the hills, away from the sickness of cities and commerce. Somehow, somewhere, Tommy too had lost his specialness.

In the living room Whit did not look up from the television, which showed a fat woman leaping up and down like a manic kangaroo while the young game-show host with her tried valiantly to hold his shiteater's grin. Blanchard thought of saying something to the boy—“You should've been outside; the bull tore off the headgate”—but he did not want to see the feigned show of interest or the look of guilt that would quickly follow. Whit was twelve years old, a small male version of his mother, pale and blond and good-looking in a fine-boned, fragile sort of way, with the same cool gray eyes and the same look of listlessly concealed condescension. But in the boy's case there was also the guilt, for he was sickly, an asthmatic who seldom ventured from the house's conditioned air out into the swarming heat and pollen of the ranch. He rarely complained, however. In fact, he rarely even spoke except to Susan, and then usually in anger, both of them railing impotently at each other over such matters as his failure to throw his dirty clothes in the wash hamper. Blanchard often wondered why he was exempted from the boy's recriminations, for he after all was the author of most of their problems, the reason they were here, tied down in the Ozarks like exiles without passport.

As usual he found Susan reading in the sunroom. Showing her his wound, he asked if he could borrow her for a few moments.

She took off her glasses and put a placemark in her book. “What happened?”

“Bull broke out. The Angus.” He followed her upstairs.

“So what did you do, wrestle him to the ground?”

“Something like that.”

“And Clarence?”

“Banged up his leg. But I don't think he knows it.”

“Good old Clarence.”

In the bathroom, Blanchard took off his shirt and pants and boots.

“Your shorts too,” she said. “They're bloody in the back.”

As he slipped out of them she turned away and busied herself getting a clean washcloth and bandages. “Better get in the tub,” she told him. “No sense getting the floor dirty.”

He did as he was told.

Using the washcloth with warm water and soap, she cleaned and rinsed the wound, so roughly Blanchard had to look away to hide the tears of pain that came briefly to his eyes. But he said nothing. Finally she patted it dry, put on the ointment, and bandaged him.

As he got out of the tub she turned away from him again, from his nakedness, and put away the box of bandages. It had been almost a month since she had let him make love to her, and she would not talk about the problem, nor let him talk about it. It was as if they had lost a child. Almost without thinking, he wrapped a towel around himself.

“I don't know why you take such chances,” she said, “especially in a lost cause.”

“I don't consider it lost.”

“Realism never was your strong suit.”

“That's what I hear.” He had followed her into the bedroom, where she got clean underwear, workpants, and a shirt out of his dresser. Resignedly she handed them to him.

“You don't think I care if you get hurt?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You never say anything. You just hang on, like a bulldog.”

“The bull didn't think so.”

“Very funny.”

“Not if you were there.”

“You get more like Shea every day.”

“Bloody but unbowed.”

She was not amused. “That's a perfect example. You get more frivolous. More pathetic.”

“And Shea's the cause?”

“I said you get more like him, that's all. Maybe it's just natural mimicry. You bring a pig into your house, you get more piggish. It's probably a law.”

“Susan's law.”

She stood there looking at him with the cool, tough, level gaze he once had admired so much, because it was so unfeminine and guileless, so full of honest self-assertion and intelligence. Now, somehow, he found it only boring.

“Susan has no laws,” she said. “Nor any rights either, except to hang around and wait for her husband to face facts.”

“What facts are those?”

“As if you didn't know.”

Blanchard had tucked his shirt into his pants. He began to draw on his belt. “Getting back to Shea,” he said. “He give you any trouble this morning?”

“How could he? He's still in bed. Still sleeping it off.”

“Well, that's something anyway.”

“Yes. Our model houseguest.”

“You used to like him.”

“He used to be likable.”

“He used to be employed.”

“What does that mean? Because a man has a few bad breaks it's all right to just give up, leave your wife and kids, sponge off your friends?”

“He didn't leave Evelyn. She kicked him out.”

“So he told you.”

“That's right.”

“Then why's there a warrant out on him?”

“Ask her,” Blanchard said. “She's the one who called in the police. I guess it's just his money she wants, not his body.”

“What money?”

“His support, then.”

“Well, wouldn't you say she's got it coming—with three kids,
his
kids?”

“You can't get blood out of a turnip.”

“Or work out of a drunk.”

“Whatever.”

“I still think we should let Evelyn know he's here. She's probably worried sick.”

“The warrant, Susan. You keep forgetting that. She's got a warrant out for his arrest.”

“Which makes us accessories, I believe.”

Blanchard shrugged in defeat. “I think I'll get him up.”

“You do that.”

He started out of the room. But Susan had more for him.

“Dad called this morning.”

“Ah, the good doctor. And what did he have to say?”

“He asked about you. Asked me how the Marlboro man was doing.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Oh, doing just fine, I said. The cattle we can't pay for, on this ranch we can't pay for, are now in quarantine, I told him, unsalable.”

“And did he get a good laugh out of that?”

“Not really, no. What he did was ask if I wanted to come home for a while, with Whit. Sort of a return to civilization.”

“For how long?”

“Until you joined us.”

“That long.”

“Oh yes, I keep forgetting. Now that you have Shea as well as your new hillbilly friends, you don't really need us anymore, do you?”

Blanchard ignored that. “We've got money tied up here,
remember? The only way I can walk away from here is broke.”

“You're broke now.”

“Only if I quit.”

“You're going to borrow your way out of bankruptcy, is that it?”

“It's been done before.”

She said nothing for a few moments, just stood there looking at him, almost sadly, as if he were Tommy. “Even if you could do it,” she said finally, “even if you could bring it off, we'd still be
here
, Bob, here in this fucking, Bible-swilling, cow-ridden backwater.”

Blanchard smiled. When she wanted, his wife could trade invective with the best of them, including Shea, the old copywriter, the wizard of wind.

“And that won't do?” he asked.

She did not bother to answer. Abruptly changing the subject, she told him that she would be taking Whit to his allergist in Springfield that afternoon and that the two of them were going to stay in the city and have dinner at a restaurant before driving home. “We'll be back around nine,” she added. “Will you be here?”

She did not look at him as she asked this last, and Blanchard was grateful. He did not like to lie to her face, even when she expected it.

“I don't know,” he said. “I imagine so.”

“I'd like you to be here.”

Blanchard nodded, as if in agreement. Then he left.