“You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” David asked, with a coldness that surprised him.
“A hundred percent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there, with stakes like this? Think about it, Dave. If you’re at all interested in getting rich, you tell me.”
Ray was soon snoring. David was intrigued that all these revelations failed to disturb his sleep. He himself was wide awake, brooding over how colorless his own life was in comparison to Ray’s. Ray was a con man and a failure, but what had he ever done? Finish high school? High school had been anguish, persecution, and suffering, but even in that he was unexceptional. He’d never had sex with a mansion tour guide. He’d had sex with a fat girl he disliked. Then the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Blackhawks. Praying for deployment against worldwide towel heads. A commanding officer who told the recruits that the president of the United States was a “pencil-wristed twat.” Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. He still lived with his mother. Was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop he’d got it from in the eighth grade.
Perhaps it was surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he had: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. David took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records — all easily learnable, but David brought art to it, and he had no idea where that art had come from. He was a genius preg-tester. Whether he was straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proven in spring calves, was renowned. Actually, David preferred preg-testing stoned. Grass gave him a greater ability to visualize the progress of his arm up the cow’s rectum. His excitement began as soon as he donned his coveralls, pulled on his glove, lubed it with OB goo, and stepped up to the cow stuck in the chute. Holding the tail high overhead with his left hand, he got his right hand all the way in, against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveled out the manure to clear the way past the cervix, and finally, nearly up to his shoulder, grasped the uterus. David could nail a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He never missed, and no cow that should have been culled turned up without a calf in the spring. He could tell the rancher how far along the cow was by his informal gradations: mouse, rat, Chihuahua, cat, fat cat, raccoon, beagle. Go through the herd, or until his arm was exhausted. Throw the glove away, write up the invoice, strip the coveralls, look for food and a room.
Perfect. Except for the dough.
He’d once dreamed of owning jewels, especially rubies, and that dream was coming back. Maybe glue one on his forehead like a Hindu. It’d go over big on his ranch calls.
Morsel made breakfast for her father, David, and Ray — eggs, biscuits, and gravy. David was thinking about Ray’s “last dime” back in Jordan versus the rolls of bills in his pack and watching Weldon watch Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove while the men ate. “Anyone want to go to Billings today to see the cage fights?” she asked. David looked up and smiled but no one answered her. Ray was probing around his food with his fork, pushing the gravy away from the biscuits, and Weldon was flinching. Weldon wore his black Stetson with the salt-encrusted sweat stain halfway up the crown. David thought it was downright unappetizing, not the sort of thing a customer for top-drawer bull semen would wear.
At last Weldon spoke at top volume, as though calling out to his livestock: “What’d you say your name was?”
“Ray.”
“Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”
“I’m doing my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”
“Daddy, leave Ray alone. You’ll have time to get to know each other and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”
When Morsel brought Ray some canned pineapple slices, he looked up at her with what David took to be genuine affection.
She turned to David and said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment he stuck his fork back in his food she put a hand in his face and said, “That’s all you can eat!” and laughed. David noticed her cold blue eyes and thought he was beginning to understand her.
To Weldon, she said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick?”
Weldon stopped his rhythmic lip pursing. “Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly.
“C’mon, Daddy. Give you a dollar.”
“Okay, Mor, put on the music,” he said with a sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Weldon swayed to the mournful tune and then seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began: “Keep a-movin’, Dan, / Don’t you listen to him, Dan. / He’s a devil not a man.” Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and, with sinuous movements, balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record — “Dan, can you see, / That big green tree, / Where the water’s runnin’ free” — when the peanut fell to the table and Weldon’s chin dropped to stare at it. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and left the room. For a moment it was quiet, and then came the sound of Weldon’s plane cranking up.
“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record,” Morsel said glumly, as she cleared the dishes. Heading for the living room, she added, “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It don’t look good and it’s expensive.”
David had taken care to copy out the information from Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and put inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed off to the cage fights. David used his cell phone and 411 Connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she claimed to be, his widow. It took two calls, a couple of hours apart. The first try, he got her answering machine: “You know the drilclass="underline" leave it at the beep.” On the second try, he got Ray’s wife. David identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service and Ray’s wife listened only briefly before stating in a firm, clear, and seemingly ungrieving voice that Ray was dead: “That’s what I told the last guy and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said that he had been embezzling from a credit union, left a suicide note, and disappeared.