Black Angus (20 page)

“She
owns
them,” Blanchard said. “As far as the stockyard is concerned, she owns them. And she gets the money for them. That's the way it is.”

Little thought about it. He lit a cigarette and dragged deeply, sighing as he exhaled. “I guess it's you don't trust us,” he said. “You think we'd just pocket the money and take off, is that it?”

Blanchard shook his head. “No, that's not it. Shea's my best friend, so of course I trust him. But I don't think either one of you'd be believable as owners of the cattle. They'd ask you questions you just wouldn't be able to answer, like how old the bulls are and what their bloodlines are, and when the cows were bred—information they need to have, and that only the owner can give them. And if he isn't there—with a shipment this big—well, it just might look a little fishy. So instead his wife goes in his place—with a list from him, containing all the facts. It will seem legitimate.”

Little sighed again, but in resignation now. “Okay, all right—I'm workin' for my little sister.”

“For Mrs. C. C. Whitehead, that's right. I call the stockyards Tuesday and tell them the shipment will be in early Wednesday, for auction that same day—two hundred and some cattle in four trucks—and that my wife will be there to handle the transaction. I'll tell them you truckers have been
paid in advance, because the cattle broker usually pays the trucker himself, by check, out of the seller's gross—which we don't want. We don't want any more canceled checks floating around than necessary. Just the one, which I'll tell them to make out to my wife, supposedly so she can bank it in Kansas City. But all she'll do is cash it there and then all three of you will head back. You drop off the trucks, pick up Shea's car, and come on back to Ronda's trailer, where we'll meet that night. I pay you off, and that will be that.”

Shea was grinning. “My, my, Robert, I think you have found your
metier
at last.”

“His what?” Ronda asked.

“His calling. His true vocation.”

“Then why didn't you say that?”

“Snobbery, sweetheart. Only snobbery.”

By whatever name, Blanchard did manage over the next hour to cover the operation in detail. He explained further the reasons for using Ronda's married name throughout, that though the stockyards would not likely require any I.D. from her, the bank where she ultimately cashed the check undoubtedly would, but only to make sure they were paying the money to the right party, which meant they would not bother to record the numbers on her driver's license and credit cards as they would normally do if she were cashing her own check or some out-of-town check rather than that of the stockyards, which naturally would be known to them as a local institution with solid credit. So the use of the Whitehead name and identity was simply insurance, bona fides they might have to show somewhere or other during the operation. To frustrate tracing anything back to her, Ronda was to point out to anyone who checked her I.D. that the address on the cards was an old one, that her husband's new address was Route I, Sarcoxie, Missouri 64862—an address that would lead nowhere.

Blanchard told them that he was going to have to let his hired man go the next morning, on the all-too-credible pretext that he could no longer afford to pay him. Clarence would yell bloody murder, Blanchard said, but it would make no difference. The old man was simply too nosy and too smart and too talkative to be kept on the scene. Once he was gone—by noon tomorrow, Blanchard said—they would move all the cattle except the blacks to the north pasture, where they would load them Tuesday evening, from the old corral in the far corner of the pasture. He said that he planned to phone a custom herbicide sprayer the next day and contract for spraying brush in the vacated fields, which would serve as a legitimate reason for his having moved the cattle out of those fields and into the north pasture, for he imagined that was a question that would come up, once the police and insurance investigators started looking into the “theft” of the cattle.

Little asked him about the Bang's and what would happen if any of the cattle tested positive at the stockyards—would the whole herd be impounded and their sale canceled? Blanchard explained that he had not put his infected bull, the Angus, on any of his cows except the small group of blacks, which he would not be shipping. So it was unlikely that any cows in the main herd could have contracted the disease. Blanchard then asked Little about the trucks, whether he and Shea would have any trouble driving them, and Little said that he had driven eighteen-wheelers many times and that he and Shea would go to Jack's early on Tuesday to give Shea some practice time before they went out onto the highway.

And so it went. Blanchard covered every aspect of the operation he could think of, while the others added their comments now and then. Little came on straight and eager for a time, then more cocky as the evening wore on. Ronda said almost nothing and Shea predictably treated the affair as if it were a fraternity lark. And all the while the ranks of empty beer cans
grew steadily at his elbow, on the marble top of one of Susan's tables. He went through the last of the popcorn and moved on to a box of Ritz crackers and Swiss cheese, devouring all of it.

Finally Blanchard said that he was finished and that the meeting was over as far as he was concerned. Little drained the last of a can of beer and got up, very slowly, as if he were a seven-footer. He said goodnight to Shea and “my sweet little sister over there too,” then winked cryptically at Blanchard and gave him a mock punch in the arm, as if he shared with him an intimacy not enjoyed by the other two. Then he left.

“What a creep,” Ronda said, getting up.

Shea clucked his tongue at her. “Remember Saint Francis's words,” he said.

“What words?”

“I've sinned against my brother the ass.”

Ronda looked over at Blanchard, and if she had cried or laughed he would not have been surprised. Instead she turned and headed for the stairs.

“I'm going to bed,” she said.

As she disappeared up the stairs, Shea got up too. “She makes herself to home real nice,” he said, playing hillbilly again.

“I asked her to stay.”

“I don't blame you.”

“No reason you should.”

Shea shook his head dolefully. “I'm getting awful tired of sleeping alone, you know that? One of these days I think my mama's little boy's peepee is gonna shrivel up and fall off.”

“Well, after Wednesday you'll be rich. You'll be able to pick up some cute young thing and be her sugar daddy.”

Shea laughed at him. “
Sugar daddy?
Where'd you come up with that one?”

“From the past.”

“I can believe it.” Shea looked over at the stairs. “Well, I guess it's about time I repair to my cell, and my trusty jar of Vaseline.”

Now Blanchard laughed. “You won't mind if I don't look in on you.”

“Coward.”

Blanchard did not follow Ronda to bed immediately. Worried and restless, he tried to watch television for a while, and then he raided the refrigerator and had coffee out on the porch in the dark, sat there thinking for over an hour, stewing in the juices of all his problems and plans. Finally he went inside and turned off the lights and trudged up to bed, his own bed instead of Whit's this night, Ronda having already lost her compunction about sleeping in what she called
her
bed, Susan's bed.

He was relieved to find her asleep, for he did not want to talk. Nor did he want sex. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sleep, for days if he could. But it was a long time before he dropped off, and even then the sleep did not last. He woke hours before dawn, the kind of waking he would not even have known about in the past, because he simply would have rolled over and gone back to sleep, without a thought. Not this night, however. Sleep, he recalled from high school English Lit, was for the innocent. Well, it was also for the solvent, he decided, for them more than anybody. It was the poor who murdered sleep, or at least the incipient poor.

For a time he did not move. He lay there under the sheet he unconsciously had pulled off Ronda sometime during the night, and he looked at her lying naked on her side in the reflected light of the moon. He looked at the way the light fell on the swell of her hip and he looked at the sharp tuck at her waistline and the way her breasts nestled against each other, their nipples small and roseate in the shadowed light. He saw
the curve of her neck where it joined her shoulder and the slight, almost invisible sickle of fat under her navel, softening the flatness of her belly as it narrowed into her pubis, the dark heart of her beauty. And it struck him how strange and fortunate it was that a woman's body could be for a man an object of the purest, most joyful beauty and yet at the same time fill him with the most physical of needs.

But a woman was also more than that, more than a body, more than beauty. And that was the problem. He thought of how it had been in the afternoon in Ronda's trailer, no longer just sex but something more now, something he had not wanted, something he did not need. After coming, lying in his arms, she had cried again, silently, and he had asked her what was wrong. Nothing, she had said. Nothing was wrong except that she loved him. And for some reason unknown to him he had said the same words to her then, like a teenager, a child, a fool.
I love you too
. She had had more sense than he, though, more honesty.

“No, you don't. But it doesn't matter. Just so you don't back out, that's all. Just so we get out of here together. I'll be good for you. I promise.”

Now she lay in the moonlight, without a cover, without tears or words or complexity, more beautiful than he had ever seen her, so beautiful he almost wished she would never wake, never open her eyes and see him whole. But then he drew back, rising to his own defense. He reminded himself that he had never really lied to her, because he did love her, in a way. And he had never really promised her anything, in fact had told her that he could
not
make any promises.

But there in the dark, awake, mocked by her beauty, his casuistries were a wintry consolation.

As he was about to get out of bed he heard the attic stairs creaking and then he saw the massive silhouette of Shea pass
by his door. He spread the sheet back over Ronda and got out of bed. He put on his pants and followed Shea downstairs, out onto the front porch.

“Couldn't sleep either?” he said.

Shea was lighting a cigarette. “You noticed.”

“Yeah, I'm sharp that way. Give me one.”

Shea handed him his cigarettes and a book of matches. “Truth is I ran out of Vaseline,” he said.

“Your own little energy crisis, huh?”

“Some kind of crisis anyway.”

“Midlife.”

“That's what this is—life?”

“That's what I hear.”

“A rumor, I think.”

“Could be.”

Shea shook his head. “Tonight, though,” he said, “now that was really something. Really fantastic. Really unreal, as Armpit would have said. There we are, the two of us sitting down with a couple of hillbillies, and laying plans not for some ad campaign, mind you, but for
stealing cattle
. For the commission of a
felony
.”

“Unreal, huh?”

“And more.”

“Comical?”

“Of course. But also disillusioning.”

“Illusions? I didn't know you had any.”

“About me, maybe not. But now you, that's another matter—old clean-cut Bobby Blanchard, the straightest arrow at Darling. Why, I remember one time I was at the typing pool trying to make out as usual, and you came up with something you wanted the girls to type, and as you left, this one girl says, ‘There's the nicest guy in the whole place.' And I say, well, for an atheistic sodomist, I guess he's okay. But she knew better. She knew a straight arrow when she saw one.”

“God, I'm sorry,” Blanchard said. “Destroying your illusions this way. But as I recall, you were the one who pushed this thing from the beginning.”

“Well, I recommend muff-diving too, but it does have its disadvantages, doesn't it? Its fallout, you might say.”

“You want to back out?”

“Not at all. No, I need the bread. And I guess maybe that's what really irritates me about the whole thing—it's so goddamn tacky, you know? Stealing a bunch of lousy cows, and
your own
cows on top of it. Now if we were planning a Vesco-type job, say hustling a couple of thousand investors out of a couple hundred million dollars, well then I think I could live with my disillusionment a little better, probably even still be asleep.”

“You've got a point.”

Shea dropped his cigarette onto the porch floor and stepped on it, then sagged onto the wicker couch. He yawned, sighed, shook his head. “And then there's me, old buddy,” he went on. “I guess I got to confess to a slight feeling of comedown there, too. But then that's something of a habit with me, isn't it? In fact you might say I'm a veritable titan of consistency in that regard.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh yes, that is so. Verily, it is. For instance I remember at college I used to get my sleeping bag and go up on one of the cliffs above the lake—high above Cayuga's waters, I believe the phrase is—and I'd just stretch out there under the stars, no beer, no girl, no nothing except me and my destiny. And you have no idea how great it was gonna be, how totally and absolutely convinced I was that I would be great and famous. Oh, I didn't know exactly at what, but that didn't matter, because I
knew
, you see, I knew I had it. I knew I was one of the chosen, that I simply couldn't lose, no way. So every now and then I'd just go up there and lie under the stars and revel
in my future. It was just great. And then five years later, when I was at Y and R, I get this call from one of the new bunch at Welles Rich Greene and he invites me to lunch at Twenty-One, no less. He knows my work, he says, and he makes me an offer—to be a copy star at Welles Rich instead of just one of the herd at Y and R. Well, that was just great, was it not? Nevertheless—it was also a comedown. It wasn't quite what I had seen in the stars at Ithaca. And then another five years go by and I'm sitting in my office at Darling looking out through the Arch at the Mississippi sliding past and East Saint Louis beyond, all that hip misery and hatred—and I keep writing my little ads about dog food. And now—well, now I sit here sweating in the Ozarks and look forward to stealing some cows.”