Black Angus (9 page)

“He's had enough, can't you see that? You kill him, then you gotta kill all of us. Can you do that?”

It was a thought that evidently had not occurred to Jiggs, for it made him frown. Finally he nodded.

“Yeah, let's go, boys. I reckon that big ox has learned his lesson by now. If he ain't, he never will.”

The others gave in reluctantly, especially the dog, which continued to yelp at Shea's huddled and bloody figure. The goatroper with the holster pulled out his pistol and began firing at Ronda's polelight, which on the fourth shot flared brilliantly and then fell like silver rain into the darkness. The moment the youth turned, following Jiggs and the others to their pickup trucks, Blanchard ran to Shea and found that he had no idea what to do, whether to try to help him up or just leave him there and call a doctor. Ronda, at Blanchard's side now, was just as helpless.

“Oh Jesus, look at him,” she cried. “Look at him.”

Blood from a head cut was running down and spreading in the wetness from the bucket, forming a thin pinkish coating like makeup over his face. His nose was bleeding and his mouth was a lump of rising dough. He looked broken, crushed, dying. And Blanchard reached under his head to cradle it,
thinking it might help him somehow, let him die in comfort at least. But suddenly the battered head shook itself and spat blood and the huge body shuddered and pulled away from Blanchard, as though in contempt of his solicitousness, and then slowly, shakily,
stood
.

Jiggs, evidently loath to leave his scene of triumph, was standing outside his pickup still, sharing the last few pulls on a whisky pint with the others. But as he saw Shea get to his feet the bottle slipped from his hand and his mouth fell open. Shaking his head, he clambered into his truck and led the parade out of there, a goatroper parade, tires spinning in the grass and gravel and horns honking and pistol shots popping down the road, diminishing.

Blanchard and Ronda tried to help Shea, but he brushed them away and by himself staggered to the trailer, pulled himself up onto the porch, and went inside. Following, Blanchard found him at the kitchen sink, holding his head and face under the faucet.

“We better get you to a hospital,” he said.

Finding a towel, Shea made an attempt at drying himself. And he managed to shake his head. “No, just sleep,” he got out. “All I want is sleep.”

“You could have broken ribs,” Blanchard said. “Or internal injuries. I'll take you to Springfield, to a good hospital.”

Shea made no response. Taking the towel, he lurched down the corridor to the rear of the trailer and fell into the first bed he found, the one in the smaller bedroom. With Ronda's help, Blanchard got most of his clothes off him, for they were wet and soiled, and the two of them tried to get him under the covers, but he was too heavy to move and already asleep, deeply asleep, snoring. Ronda found some other blankets then and covered him, after Blanchard had rolled him onto his side, out of fear he might vomit in his sleep and strangle.

Blanchard put on his own shirt and shoes then and followed Ronda back to the kitchen. “I don't know what else to do,” he said. “You could never get a doctor out here.”

“He'll be okay. He seems okay, anyway.”

Blanchard nodded, hoping it was true. Ronda asked him if he still wanted coffee and he said no, that he had to leave.

“Don't call the police, okay?” she said. “It won't do no good. And it'd just get Jiggs and them bastards after
you
, then.”

He nodded agreement and she kept looking at him as if he were the one who had taken the beating. He started to turn away but she put her arms around him and buried her face against him.

“When will I see you?” she asked.

“I don't know. I'll call you.” He absently kissed her on the forehead. “You watch him, okay? Set your alarm and check him in a few hours. Wake him up, make sure he's okay.”

“I will. Don't worry.”

There were tears in her eyes and he could feel her body trembling against him. Nevertheless he let go of her. He told her to call him on the phone if Shea got sick during the night, and not to worry even if his wife answered, that this was more important. Then he kissed her again and left.

Outside, the world had changed, had become dark and quiet except for the sounds of night, the clamorous courtship of frogs and cicadas. The only light came from the moon and a dim polelight across the road at Ronda's grandmother's place, beyond which the rich bottomland stretched like shadow toward the black, serpentine shape of the creek. In the darkness Blanchard almost missed Little standing by Shea's car, leaning back against it and hugging himself as if he were freezing in the mild spring air.

“He gonna be all right?” he asked.

Blanchard said he didn't know. He said Shea was sleeping.

Little began to wag his head, like a child trying not to cry. “I couldn't help what I did,” he said. “I just couldn't help it. There was just too many of 'em.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What could I do?”

“What you did. About the same that I did.”

Little
was
crying now. “He wouldn't of though, would he, old Shea? He'd of walked right through 'em, walked right over 'em.”

Blanchard did not understand. “But he didn't,” he said.

“Because he was asleep,” Little explained. “Passed out in the car. I figure he didn't even know what was happenin'. They picked us up leavin' the Longview bar, followed us fifteen mile anyway.”

“Well, whatever—it's over. For now.” Blanchard started for his truck, then remembered something else that needed saying. “One other thing—whatever Shea told you about me and my problems and how to solve them, don't take him serious. He's just talking, that's all.”

Little smiled crookedly. “Hell, I know that. Don't sweat it.”

Blanchard nodded goodnight and went on to his truck. He backed it out of the driveway and started down the river road, driving slowly, noticing that his hands were steady on the steering wheel. And he thought he knew the reason for this, the same reason that had allowed Jiggs and the others to indulge in such heedless violence in the first place—cattle, and the almost constant violence that attended their raising. From the pulling of half-born calves and the castrating of day-old bulls, through vaccination and dehorning and eartagging and roundup and shipment, it was always the same, puny men prevailing daily over the beasts by tools and cunning and, above all, recklessness, that irrational sense of immortality that
somehow allowed a man to work, like a bullfighter, very close to the horns. So he became inured. Violence was daily bread. Guns might scare him shitless and root him in place, but afterward the memory of them was not enough to make one tremble, not enough to make one forget the truly important things.

As he drove, Blanchard thought of bed. He thought of sleep.

When he turned into his driveway, Blanchard could see far up the hill the lights burning all across the second story of his house, in Whit's room as well as in his own and Susan's, and he wondered what was wrong, whether Whit was having another of his increasingly frequent asthma attacks. Nothing gave Blanchard a greater feeling of helplessness than the sight of his son fighting for every breath, struggling and gasping as if the air around him were not air at all but rather a kind of poison, which in fact it was for him. Susan would give the boy his inhalant or some of the myriad mysterious pills the doctors were forever prescribing for him, and then she would sit next to him on the bed and gently rub his chest, sometimes for an hour or more, until finally his breathing would begin to return to normal again, and with it Blanchard's too, as the tension flowed out of him.

He hoped that was not the problem, almost anything but that. And yet he wondered what else it could be, to cause both Susan and the boy to be awake at so late an hour, almost one in the morning.

Normally he would have gone out to the main barn before turning in, checking whatever animals he had in the stalls, the sick calves or cows, or the bulls when it was not breeding season. But tonight he went straight into the house, stopping in the kitchen to rinse his mouth and splash water on his face before going on through the darkened living room and up the fine old curving stairway to the second floor. Passing Whit's room he saw neither the boy nor his mother, just open suitcases and boxes partially packed with clothes and books and
records. And down the hall, in his own room, he found the packer: Susan, still dressed, carefully folding a blouse and placing it in a suitcase on the bed, which held four other pieces of matching luggage, an expensive plaid fabric set that she had bought to complement the beautiful calfskin group that had seen her through college, and which now sat near the door, packed and ready to load. There were also a few boxes, filled mostly with books.

“Well, home is the hunter,” she said. “Home from his hillbillies.”

He asked her where Whit was.

“Downstairs. On the davenport.”

“I missed him.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“I gather you're going home to daddy.” Blanchard was amazed at how easily the words came.

“That's right. I called him tonight,” she said. “He's going to fly to Springfield in the morning and rent a car. He should be here around noon.”

Blanchard sat down on the bed, grateful that it was there. “You mind telling me why?” he asked. “Why this sudden?”

“There's nothing sudden about it. You know that.”

“It's one in the morning, Susan.”

“So?”

“So I'd like an explanation.”

She looked at him, her eyes heavy, bored. “An explanation? That's what you want, is it?”

“That's right.”

“Why not the usual? We're still broke, aren't we? And didn't I tell you Whit and I'd be leaving one of these days? With you or without you.”

“You're not answering me. Why
tonight?
”

For a while she went on folding and packing, ignoring him. Then, shrugging, as if she were giving in to some unpleasant
necessity, she went over to the dresser and got an envelope out of her jewelry box.

“Here, I guess you might as well see the goddamn thing,” she said, handing it to him. “A note from one of our kindly Christian neighbors.”

Blanchard considered not even reading it, for he had a pretty good idea what its contents would be. Nevertheless he opened the envelope finally and took out the letter, a single sheet of scented yellow stationery. It read:

Dear Mrs Blancherd

You dont no me. If you went to church some mabe you woud but I no you dont feer GOD or love HIM. Anyway I think you shoud no you husbin stepin out on you with a Hore which work at sweet crick tavern. they go to her traler and CHEET on you. This is Gods punish of you for being what you are.
Repent
ye for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand!!!

—A god-feering Christian Mother

After he had finished the note Blanchard continued to sit there on the bed, unable to think of a thing to say. He read the note again and then crumpled it up and tossed it at the waste-basket next to his desk, but missed, and had to watch the obscene little wad roll back toward Susan, who ignored it.

“When did you get it?” he asked finally.

“About a month ago.”

Blanchard thought of that month and how their sex life had all but disappeared during it, and how he had added that fact to his brief against her, as a further justification for his continuing
to see Ronda. It made him feel abysmally stupid and insensitive, more ridiculous than immoral.

“Don't try to explain,” she said. “I don't care that much about it, frankly. It's not why I'm leaving anyway. It was just the last straw, I guess. I mean your not being here tonight, after I pointedly asked you to be. Instead you run off to play with your little hillbilly slut. So I decided, why wait? Whit and I aren't needed here, aren't wanted, and what's more, don't like it here. So why drag it out?”

She shut the suitcase that she had been working on and snapped the lock closed. Placing it with the others on the floor, she briskly started on a new one.

“What can I say?” Blanchard tried. “I'm very sorry. And I know it sounds stupid—and there's no reason you should believe me—but the girl is unimportant. She's just—I don't know—therapy or some damn thing. Something to keep my mind off my problems. The ranch. You know.”

Susan was waving his words away. “Don't bother, okay? I said I didn't care all that much, and I mean it. A beer maid at the ‘Sweet Crick'—somehow I just can't get worked up about her. But then of course it's not as though it's never happened before, is it?”

There had been a secretary at Darling almost six years before, a very attractive, very funny divorcee whom Blanchard had gotten so deeply involved with that he had even taken her with him on business trips. And Susan had found out, had almost left him because of her, staying finally only because he had convinced her of the truth, that it was she he loved, just as he still did, in his own inconstant fashion.

Blanchard got up and went to the window, though all he could see in it was his own reflection, old Don Juan of the Ozarks. He wanted to go over to his wife and take her in his arms and try to undo the whole squalid mess not with useless
words but with his body, his being. But he knew she would not have abided his touch, not this night, with the smell of another woman probably still on him. So he used what he had.

“If you go, Susan, it could be permanent. You realize that?”

“It
will
be permanent.”

“I mean the two of us, the three of us, together. You're assuming I'll leave here—”

“Do you have a choice?”

“Like I said this morning, beef is coming back. If the price gets to fifty cents, and if the bank extends our note—”