Gallatin Canyon (10 page)

Orval brought Neville a Grain Belt and Neville thanked him politely. “You seem like a well-brought-up feller,” said Orval Jones.

“I’m a virgin,” said Neville. This remarkable statement was true. But Neville had developed expectations, based on some exceedingly provocative suggestions by Dulcie, which were not so completely lost on him as Dulcie had imagined. From his vast store of secondhand information, he had concluded that he was about to hit pay dirt—3D adult programming. In fact, she told him he’d need a condom and, in the resulting confusion, stopped at Roundup to help him pick one. But, once inside the drugstore, he embarrassed her by asking if they were one-size-fits-all, like a baseball hat, and then balked when the clerk explained he had to buy them as a three pack. Neville told him that the thought made him light-headed.

Orval was on the sofa and seemed defeated by Neville’s very existence. Nevertheless, he made a wan attempt at conversation. His jeans had ridden up over the top of his boots to reveal spindly white legs that seemed to take up little room in the boots, just sticks is all they were. The terrible bags under his eyes gave the impression that he could see beyond the present situation.

“Neville, you say you come from a banking background.”

“Foreground.”

“Ha-ha. You’ve got a point. And do you—uh, actually work at the bank too?”

“Hell, no.”

“Hell, no. I see. And what
do
you do?”

“TV.”

“TV sales?”

“I watch TV. Ever heard of it?”

“I suppose that should’ve been my first guess.”

“Uh,
yeah.
”

Neville had learned from television that remorseless repartee was the basis of genial relations with the public. He really meant no harm, but not having any friends might have alerted him to the dangers of this approach. The appearance of harmlessness disguised the violence he had inside him and would save him from ever being held accountable for its consequences, when he quite soon gave it such full expression. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Neville Senior managed the Southeast and Central Montana Bank; he was a genuinely upright and conventional individual who worked hard and played golf. His wife had died some years ago, so he had had charge of Neville Junior from early on. In the winter, he went once a month to St. George, Utah, fighting Mormons for tee times, and returned refreshed for work. He was a happy, well-balanced, thoughtful man who had accepted the work ethic he’d been raised with and which caused him to spend too little time with his only child. Their prosperous life was such that there were no duties that his son could be assigned that would instill the father’s decent values. And he didn’t want him on the golf course with his various hairdos. Walking down North 27th in Billings with his tax attorney, he once passed a youth with pink, blue, and green hair not so different from Neville Junior’s. “When I was in the navy,” the attorney said, “I had sex with a parrot. Could that be my child?”

Neville Junior worried him. The boy had been raised by a television set, as his father readily admitted. It was bad enough that his language and attitudes came directly from shows he’d seen; he seemed to have found sufficient like-minded companions to keep him from questioning his way of life. What was unsettling was that long after his age would have made it appropriate, Neville Junior had failed to show any interest in girls. As the nice-looking son of a bank president, he should have been cutting a wide swath. Girls liked him and came around to watch TV with him; girls that sent his father’s mind meandering in ways inappropriate to his age and state. His frequent attempts to catch his son in flagrante delicto resulted only in an invitation to join the couple innocently watching the late movie. It was not so many years ago that he himself had boogied under the strobes of big cow-town discos where today’s dowagers once wriggled in precopulatory abandon.

For a banker, Neville Senior was remarkably free of malice, and his great wish was to overcome the gap of loneliness that lay between him and his heir. It’s possible that he imagined that bringing Neville Junior into the randy orbit that seemed to include everyone
but
Neville Junior would have the effect of giving the two some ordinary common ground upon which they could begin to talk like a couple of guys. Boning up on
TV Guide,
as he had once done, proved futile. Real watchers like Neville Junior had a subtle language not easily penetrated by poseurs. He just stared when his father asked if there was anything good on tonight.

“Neville,” said the father, “two things: I wish I’d been a better parent.”

“You’ve been all right. Don’t sweat it. What’s the second?”

“Sex,” barked Senior. “Why aren’t you interested in sex?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dad. Virginity is no disgrace. At least it keeps you from weighing sixty pounds and being covered with giant sores.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“It only has to be that way once, and you can count me out.”

“It should be seen as a gift, a gift of love and joy that perpetuates the race.”

“Perpetuates the race? Are people still in favor of that?”

“I don’t know how you’ve become so cynical at your age.”

“You can’t accept that I’m happy, can you?”

“Are you?”

“Considering the cards I’ve been dealt.”

“Have they been such bad cards?”

“You tell me.”

“I guess I can’t.”

“Just because you named me after yourself doesn’t mean I have to turn out like you.”

“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be any good.”

“I’m not saying that. Different isn’t good or bad. It’s different is all it is. Get it?”

“You could change your name. I’d understand.”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve never thought of myself as Neville.”

“What have you thought of yourself as?”

“Karl.”

“With a C?”

“With a K.”

Much later, when Neville Senior had decided that life was not worth living, he would give this Karl-with-a-K idea a final thought.

From his suite at the Northern Hotel, as a summer sun descended on city streets blue with heat, pressed in upon by angular store-fronts and shade-hunting pedestrians, Neville Senior called an escort service. Given that the city police had been recruiting undercover officers lately to nab concupiscent johns, this was risky business, but Neville Senior believed the scrutiny was directed at streetwalkers and so he felt relatively safe, if a bit frightened. Anyway, when it came to your own flesh and blood, risk was unavoidable. He had cash, plenty of it, and he intended to buy Neville Junior out of his dubious virginity and joyless view of things. More than that, he wanted to buy him the high road to the human race, which in his view was bound together more by fornication than anything else. In his life, courtship was fornication, life was fornication, and grief revealed but one road back to the light of day and that was fornication. The only answer to life’s complexity:
fornication.

Dulcie arrived straight from her shift at the optometrist, and Neville Senior welcomed her in his most courtly manner. “Came right away,” she said. “Two saps in the waiting room with drops in their eyes.” She seemed taken aback at first by his nervousness and perhaps foresaw the long hard work sometimes necessary to overcome the anxiety of skittish customers for the sake of the almighty dollar. Bummer.

Dulcie kept her purse beside her; the cell phone inside it required only a single key to be pressed and her mission would be accomplished, either by an arrest or the heading off of an assault. It seemed she would have to buy time to size up the transaction. Some adjustment of plan was required because unexpectedly this geezer had a plan of his own. After a long day at the optometrist’s shop, Dulcie was glad to learn that the heavy lifting would come later, but at the very least they had old man Neville for procuring. That it was for his own flesh and blood was hardly extenuating, and one way or another she’d get paid. Anything to get away from dreary folks reading the acuity chart: “P . . . E . . . C . . . F . . . D—I can’t read that last line. . . .” Of course you can’t, you need glasses!

He gazed at Dulcie with admiration: at first lustful but, when she noticed, adding avuncular overtones and calling her
dear
so as to assure her he wasn’t getting ready to whip it out. She might have been touched if she’d known this modest transaction would later in the year result in his suicide—though it was not easy to say what might get through to Dulcie Jones, barrel racer.

While Dulcie went off to spruce up in the bunkhouse, Orval gave Neville a tour of the place, apologizing for the disorder of the kitchen as they passed through. “It takes a heap of living to make a home a heap!” he said merrily. Neville said he bet Orval had a million more where that one came from. When they were out of earshot, Orval said, “You’re kind of a smart-ass, aren’t you?” He got right in Neville’s face.

“If you say so,” Neville said, as though trying to help Orval in the best way he knew how. Orval was thinking of slugging him and stared at the spot on Neville’s face where he imagined landing the blow. Overcoming the temptation he asked how Neville had met his daughter, making it clear by his tone that he was sorry it had ever happened. He’d been counting on a cowboy or someone in law enforcement.

“My dad introduced us. She’s going to be our new vice president. He wanted me to get to know her on behalf of our business.”

“Vice president? Vice president of what?”

“Of our bank, Southeast and Central Montana Bank. Member FDIC.”

“What about the optometrist?”

Neville remembered her looking without glasses at the road map that morning.

“I guess she doesn’t need him,” he said, suddenly wondering if Dulcie was farsighted. He might not feel as safe with her at the wheel. He’d been so relaxed watching his day go by in the rearview mirror, never going rigid against his seat belt as he did whenever he distrusted the driver. He so looked forward to what he expected from Dulcie, and yet he felt the responsibility of considering her as a candidate for vice president of the bank. He realized he didn’t quite understand the situation, but knew he would do anything in the world for his father, to whom he helplessly longed to reach out. But this was different. The bank had always been kept from him, so that his father’s asking him to do something connected with his livelihood suggested a change.

“You want to drive the tractor?” Orval asked. Neville understood he was being humored, but he hadn’t expected Orval to go rural on him this quickly.

“I doubt it.”

“Well, what would interest you, Neville?”

“You got any archaeological sites?”

Orval went outside, started the tractor, and backed it up to the loaded manure spreader. It was clear he had decided to go about his business, but Neville followed him innocently as he drove out into the pasture and then activated the PTO, showering the youth with turds. Neville saw right through his apologies and walked back to the house, looking for Dulcie. He had a mean-spirited impulse to tell her that her father would not be welcome at the bank. But all that was tempered by the attraction he felt for her, aroused by her various provocations and double entendres. His girlfriends had always acted as if being available was enough. It wasn’t; he required much more. Neville enjoyed this sense that Dulcie was after him like a bad dog, and knowing she was just trying to get the vice president’s job made it all oddly spicy.

“What happened to you?” she asked, when he caught up to her in the yard.

“I’m not too sure.”

“I think it’s time we got us a room.”

“Amen to that,” Neville said, with a look of terror. She was flicking at him with the backs of her fingernails, loosening some of the debris.

Driving out of the yard, Neville leaned well out the window to wave goodbye. Orval’s return wave seemed to say good riddance and confused Neville, who thought they’d hit it off.

Once out of the driveway, Dulcie made the gravel swirl under the tires. They were heading now for the Absarokee cutoff; she told Neville she had a good spot in mind. She held his gaze until he said, “Watch the road.”

They wound along well-kept hay meadows, tractors in the field spitting out bales, swathers moving into the dark green alfalfa and laying it over in a pale green band close behind the standing grass. The road flattened, and in its first broad turn was the small, tired motel. Dulcie pulled up in front of the office. As she got out of the car, Neville asked her to be sure there was TV. A crevice of irritation appeared briefly between her eyebrows and she turned to the entrance. When she came back, she climbed in brusquely and threw the key on the seat. She gave him a long look and said, “Room seven,” allowing her tongue to hang out slightly. Neville gave a small bounce to show he understood.

When the door closed behind them, they surveyed the room, its brown pipe bed, plastic curtains, and gloomy prints of the Custer massacre and the Blizzard of ’86. Dulcie took it all in, and when she turned to Neville he was holding up one of his new condoms. “Americans are coming together to stamp out HIV,” he said, with touching sincerity. “Can you help me with this?”

Not at all self-conscious, Neville stripped and stood naked next to his pile of clothes, instantly erect. Dulcie lit a cigarette and knelt in front of him. There was nothing to do but apply the condom. Cigarette held in the V of her teeth, squinting against the rising smoke, she rolled it on deftly. “Now,” she said, standing up, “I’ll just go into the bathroom and get ready.”