9
On certain hot days after the work was done Emmet would step onto his porch across the way with a beer and sit in one of the wooden rockers and stare out at the land. In time Grant would come over and they’d sit and talk about what the weather was bringing and what must be mowed or painted or planted or mended the next day, watching the dusk slide down. Emmet would tell Grant to smoke and Grant would say he’d get around to it but then wouldn’t because of the old man’s throat, and in silence they’d watch the stars swim up over the hills. The bats and swallows in their soundless, extravagant dances.
At this day’s end in early September Grant filled his mug and stepped outside and went down the steps, the dog rising stiffly from her place under the porch to follow. The black El Camino sat as before, as it had sat all day.
“I see you had the same idea,” Emmet said, raising his coffee.
“Seemed like a night for something warm.”
“Fall’s coming. Set down, partner.”
Grant lowered into the other rocker that had been meant for Alice
Kinney and for the remaining days of the old couple’s lives. The dog sniffed up a spot farther back on the porch, turned twice, and dropped with a huff to the boards.
Emmet had napped and shaved and there was pink in his face above the red windbreaker and he’d dragged a comb dipped in scented oil through his white hair.
“That patch looks good from here,” said Grant.
“How’s that?”
“I say that chimney patch looks good from here.”
In the west a large bird sat atop the ridge on the point of a lodgepole pine that had long ago shed its branches and pointed like a needle at the sky. This same bird found this same perch at the same hour every day, as if to maximize its own effect before the sunset, resting in silhouette until prey or some other bird impulse set it moving again. By its regularity it had become an unspoken fact of the ranch, like the hills themselves—although once, early on, Grant had commented on the bird, and the old man had grown silent and still. Then he told Grant that his wife liked to say that if she must come back to this earth and not to heaven she hoped God would let her come back as such a bird—hawk or eagle or falcon. And if she did come back as one of these, said Emmet, she hoped she would have no memory of ever having lived as a human woman. She wanted to look down from the air and know the things a bird should know and nothing of what men thought or did, but just to watch them as a bird would, from up high, no more curious and no less wary than any other creature.
They’d sat watching the bird.
Do you believe it? Grant had said.
Believe what?
That a person can come back.
Emmet had set his boot down from his knee. Sipped his beer. Raised the opposite boot to the opposite knee. At last he said he didn’t know if he believed such a thing in any religious kind of way, if that’s what Grant was getting at, but he said his wife had been the one true thing of his life and when he looked out on this land and saw that bird setting atop it that way, well. He blew as if expelling smoke from his lungs. I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes. Don’t you?
Now the bird pushed off and beat its wings twice and rode them south along the piney ridge, and the men were quiet and the dog slept, and into the heart of that calm there came a sudden piercing sound—a high, sharp whistling that sliced through the screens and made Emmet duck in his rocker as if struck to the back of the head. They both turned and found the whistler standing in the door, in the screen, lips pursed, looking from man to man. After a moment he turned the latch and brought the shrill notes out onto the porch.
“Quit now, by God,” Emmet said.
The whistling ceased midnote and Billy stared at him. “You don’t like that tune?”
“That wasn’t no tune I know.”
“That was Hank Williams, Pops. Here, listen.” He stepped between the rockers and turned to face the men. A tall, lean young man in a black leather coat and crisp white shirt. Dark hair stashed behind his ears and a small tuft of beard clinging to the underside of his lower lip. The coat was of a sporty cut and creaked when he moved.
“No, now, stop,” Emmet said. “You are painin my ears.”
Billy stopped, one hand paused in the air, a longneck beer bottle swinging in a noose of finger and thumb. He turned to Grant: “All of a sudden he hears like a bat.”
He sat on the railing and crossed an ankle over his knee in a mirror image of his father and began to jitter a black cowboy boot as if it were something they should all watch. His eyes appeared very blue in the twilight. He set his beer on the rail and got out his cigarettes and shook one up to his lips and began to put the box away but then gestured it at Grant.
“No, thanks.”
“You quit?”
“No, just holding off a bit.”
“Ah,” said Billy. He dropped his boot down from his knee and straightened out his leg so as to snake two fingers into his jeans and said around the cigarette: “So how’s tricks, Grant? I was wondering if you were still around.”
“Still around, Billy. How’s tricks with you?”
“Holding down the old fort over there, are you?”
“Just till the landlord kicks me out.”
“Ha,” said Billy. He uncapped a silver Zippo and spun the flintwheel and lit his cigarette and shut the cap again smartly. He blew smoke in the direction of the old ranch house and said, “I hope you like it cold. A man will piss icicles of a winter morning over there. And then what happens the second he moves out? They build themselves this overheated Ramada Inn over here.” He recrossed his leg and jiggled the boot in the air. The lighter moved restlessly in his fingers, silver, then blue-violet, silver again.
“Don’t you believe it, Grant. He’s had that whole house all to himself whenever he wants. Him and his friends.”
“Used to,” said Billy.
Grant sipped his coffee.
“What is the matter with you, son?” Emmet said.
“You’re welcome to it, Billy,” Grant said. “I can make other arrangements.”
“What? Hell, I don’t want in there. I don’t want nothin to do with that place.”
Emmet shook his head and looked away. Billy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke thinly.
“Those are good-looking boots, Billy,” Grant said.
Billy held his foot still. He aimed the pointed toe at the porch ceiling.
“I took them off a man down in Denver thought he could play nine-ball. A fool and his boots are soon—hey,” he said, looking beyond Grant, “there you are, girl. Come on over here.”
The dog lay in the shadows watching him. She looked at Grant.
“Don’t look at him, come here.” Billy pinched the cigarette in his lips and spanked his thighs and the dog rose slowly and went to him, her head low. “You don’t remember how to come when you’re called?” He took her head in his hands and shook her.
“Let up on her,” Emmet said.
“Aw, she loves it. Don’t you, Lo, don’t you, huh? We used to wrastle like goddam alligators.”
“She’s too old for that now.”