The Cadence of Grass (10 page)

The bawling of the cattle made conversation impossible. Evelyn tipped her head toward the noise, her excuse for cutting it short. Bill bumped her on the shoulder with an open hand, then turned to make his round of gates and latches, to nail up stray planks on the alleyway that led to the squeeze chute where tomorrow it would be determined which cows had started a new calf for next year. The old dry cows with numerous calves behind them over the long years would be slaughtered. Evelyn was going dancing tonight; tonight she would dance this all away.

She drove off in her little car, its floor a jumble of vaccine bottles, paper coffee cups, baler twine and hair elastics. She drove down the mountain foothills and then, still north of the modest skyline of the city, she turned east toward the stockyards. She followed a semi loaded with round bales until she’d passed the corrals, then parked in front of the café, an encouraging place where cattlemen and hippies could be found sitting at the Formica counter listening to Otis Redding under a sign for Black Cat Stove Polish. Various bits of advice were posted, including
No promises about eggs “over” or “scrambled
.” And
If you have a fork, you don’t need a spoon to stir your coffee
. And one really caught her attention:
Kill or remove ants on counter
. Here was a spot for Red Wolf, she thought, then added, Now
I’m
doing it. A young man tried unsuccessfully to catch her glance, but without returning it she realized the time for such things was not so far away.

She saw how hard it was snowing and tried to imagine that the calves were better off in the trucks. She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you. The snow was blowing up against the front of a travel agency, obscuring the words “holiday” and “foreign currency” on its sign.

With an almost military sense of purpose she made her way through several shortcuts, from which occasional pedestrians appeared or disappeared, coats and scarves drawn across their faces. Her friends Violet and Claire, ambitious beauties, had a small shop on Main Street, Just the Two of Us, that, despite its high prices, Evelyn loved for its rarified sense of exotic couture right next door to an old saddle shop whose owner was their landlord. Evelyn doted on the interior of this silly boutique with its endless chalk white walls and racks of clothes in an arrangement impossible to understand. The owners looked out over their treasures in conspicuous separation from the big old-fashioned cash register to which they hoped to repair often enough to avoid eviction by the saddle maker, who, at the first of the month, came sniffing around for his check. Claire—lips pursed and breathing through her nose in concentration—held a dress abstractly to Evelyn’s shoulders. “Thank goodness,” Violet said in her surprisingly deep voice, “you don’t have a big bosom. Big bosoms make good clothes look stupid. Big bosoms are basically
rural
.”

Evelyn stood in manure-covered boots, the dress hand-pinned to the shoulders of her ripped, blue-plaid, snap-button cowboy shirt.

“I hadn’t heard that,” she said, spotting something else entirely, a black dress whose cut in back Evelyn thought might moderate her overly defined shoulder muscles, something about its little straps, their closeness to the neck, the perfect seams curving toward the hips like arrows, the detailing! She pointed. “That one, I think, if it fits.”

“There goes my suggestion,” Claire said with a pretended pout, letting the dress she’d held against Evelyn fall over her arm.

“I just have hunches.” Evelyn held the weightless thing at arm’s length before her. After cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, it looked exciting. “I could get somewhere in this,” she said. Claire and Violet stared at this odd remark as Evelyn took the dress back to the changing room. What kind of coat would it take in weather like this? Certainly her Carhartt stockman’s coat, stained with veterinary products, was not it. Tonight, she’d find out. A bearded man in a stadium coat was watching Violet and Claire present various items—scarves, a chain purse, a makeup kit, blouses, a beaded top—with ferocious coquetry and a stream of commentary as to their merits. Evelyn changed into the pretty black dress and by bouncing on the balls of her feet made it fall down over herself and into place with reassuring emphasis. Admiring herself in the mirror, she drew the dress up high on her thighs and said to the mirror, and its imaginary occupant, “Will that do?” Tonight she would dance in feral vigilance. She’d find some guy and forget the poor calves, went the plan.

Claire turned to Evelyn, her blue eyes piercing beneath her peachy eye shadow and a new no-nonsense look. She said, “And?”

“I like it,” said Evelyn.

The bearded man seized this opportunity to slip away, the door to the street swinging shut behind him.

“You should.
So
killer.” Claire started replacing the goods that were evidently wasted on the departed shopper. “I love the big cough as he goes, like ill health prevented his buying something. . . . What’d the calves weigh?”

“They weighed like lead.”

“Turn any back?”

“We locoed eight.”

Claire made a clucking sound and said, “You can feed ’em out of that, but it takes a couple of months. I had twenty one year and by April they looked like show calves. We took them to Billings Livestock and sold the shit out of them.”

Together they moved to the ornate cash register, which stood in nostalgic disuse next to the electronic box for processing credit cards. Violet, despite her blazing makeup and avant-garde clothes, managed to sound wistful. “When the federal government let the meatpackers concentrate, they ruined it for the little producer. That’s why
we
moved into town. P.S. I don’t miss the wind. But Evelyn, I wish you would let your nails grow.” Her brow was furrowed.

“There’s no time to grow my nails. I’ve got to get me a little
tonight
. I haven’t had it in such a long time.”

Violet looked worried.

“I see a lot of guys, Evelyn. You want a loaner?”

“Uh, no. You miss a bunch if you don’t find ’em yourself.”

The bar was beyond the city limits, in an industrial-looking building, where a large number of cars and pickup trucks were parked in the snow with little sign of life around them except a desultory shoving match between two bearded men wearing baseball caps. Nothing came of it beyond flattening a circle of snow beneath their feet.

Evelyn was soon inside dancing and tossing down drinks between partners, amidst shouts of “Party hearty! It’s beer thirty!” She danced with a ponytailed man wearing hospital scrubs who wouldn’t speak to her, then a college student in a lumberjack shirt and with a smooth empty face, then a rather clean-cut youngster in khaki pants and a blue chambray shirt who described himself, with startling precision, as “a Reno-trained slot machine consultant.” Apart from the disorienting blaze of lights and electrified music, and the disturbing spectacle of the lead singer’s stalking movements up and down the stage at either end of which were snow-filled windows, there was a rather peaceful anonymity, and the black dress continued to thrill her.

She took note of her new partner with the detachment of an anthropologist, his nice quality of having no more than smoothed his blond hair back after his shower; she absolutely loved that he seemed afraid to speak to her. He was a handsome and perhaps uncomplicated unit. When humans are raised for meat, Kansas feedlots will give this guy all the grain he can eat. He had plunged his hands into his pockets in a particularly hopeless gesture when he asked her to dance, and yet he was very becoming. All Evelyn’s green lights were on as she hung round his strong young neck. “What is your name?” she asked.

“I’m Evan.”

She was mad for this shy politeness, incongruously coupled with his newly palpable arousal. This was getting good, though whether it would cure the dolor of the morning’s shipping remained to be seen. The waves of alcoholic euphoria were sure helping. Evelyn was determined, no matter how many drinks she had, not to tell him how attractive he was. That always blew up in your face. That made scumbags out of Boy Scouts!

“My name is quite close to yours, Evan. Mine is Evelyn.”

As she said this, she felt the room grow distant and time awkwardly slow. She couldn’t for the moment understand why saying her own name aloud made her loneliness so evident that it nearly choked her. Now all funny thoughts had fled. She looked at her young dance partner and wondered if he yet understood that all the cures for loneliness failed, that it was a chronic state and that anything used to anesthetize it turned into its own problem. Yes, she thought, we’ll spare Evan that.

The lead singer came rushing across the stage, bent back from the waist, madly waving a handkerchief, his mouth a distorted trumpet. A sort of codpiece slid halfway down one thigh as angry quarter notes from the guitarist drove him back to the microphone screeching, “Don’t need no, Don’t got no—!” while he raped the stand that held it up. This provided an awkward background that Evelyn suddenly thought was funny. At that same moment, when the front door opened and snow flew in, the singer took time out from his throes to actually frown at the weather.

That did it. Evelyn doubled in laughter. Indeed, Evan had to hold her up, even as she recognized this as hysteria and a ghastly form of release. But it was contagious: the dancing stopped. Right after the fraught singer had concluded several pacts with the devil, the air went out of the room. The lead guitarist peered through the lights furtively. The drummer’s blurred arms no longer seemed part of him as he stole furtive glances at the audience. Evelyn’s hysteria was a conquering force. The singer seemed strangely platitudinous when, so soon after his arrangements with Satan, he demanded of the crowd, “You want to try this? Anybody like to get up here and show us how good they are?” An unshaven brute in the audience, beer bottle brandished by its neck, his hat on backward, informed the singer that he was “crazier than a shithouse rat.”

Evelyn had to get out of here right then. “I need some fresh air,” she said to Evan.

His mouth dropped open an instant before he caught himself and tried to look wise and in control. It was
adorable
. This had every chance of being several hours of true love, an inoculation that could last the entire winter.

“I got a car,” he said.

“I’ll bet you do, Evan.”

It was a perfect old Cadillac Coupe de Ville, astonishingly spacious. The foot of snow on the windshield seemed to cast its own pale light on the interior. She unexpectedly began asking herself what she was doing here, with things rather going around and love somewhat less easy to reference. Evan no longer seemed afraid of her, and she was not sure she liked that. The idea of a sudden new Evan was not in the cards. The stillness of his gaze struck her as predatory. “Like the car?”

She watched him to see if anything in his expression might help her answer his question. “I do like it, Evan. It feels big, almost like a boat.”

Evan weighed his words, his face barely moving as he spoke. “I like it because it don’t have an electronic ignition.”

Evelyn felt challenged to understand Evan’s remark.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about those electric things.”

“Well, you ought to know about
that
one.” Evan seemed riveted.

“It’s too late now,” she said, thinking to add, “to learn auto mechanics,” but she was unwilling to chance anything clever. She had to see where this was going since the unblinking face of the newly confident Evan now made her want to get out of the car. She thought she’d better humor him. “Perhaps you could fill me in on this ignition business, in your own words, of course.”

“You know about the New World Order?” He was unzipping his fly.

She frowned at this behavior, and he stopped. “Is it like the United Nations?” she asked hopefully. Oh boy, she thought, here come the black helicopters.

“It’s way worse.”

“Uh, in what way, Evan?”

“They want to turn us into slaves.” He was matter-of-fact about this.

“You don’t say. But Evan, what about the auto mechanics you promised to explain?” Everything seemed to have gone to his eyes. She had a fleeting thought that if she were suicidal, this would be her man. “Didn’t you promise?”

Evan watched and waited her out.

“The New World Order is gonna use satellites to turn off all the electronic ignitions. They’re gonna enslave all the white males who own recent-model cars.” Evelyn widened her eyes to suggest that she hadn’t realized this automotive feature was available. “Then they plan to use Gurkhas to round us up and put us in concentration camps located in Kansas. It’s common knowledge.”

Kansas? Evelyn remembered that was where her calves were going.