Frank watched and thought how much he wished things would change faster at McDonald’s. Americans had overtaken their product line, if he was any judge, waiting for McThis and McThat. If there were only a few departures or insights — McShit on the toilets, anything — it would be so much easier to take one’s seat in this American meeting place and not feel such despair that the world was going on without you.
“How’s your deal going?” Mike asked.
“It’s all right. Hasn’t been much to it this last little while. Exchanged some cattle. Everybody’s getting run off the national forest. There’s a bunch of timid traders out there. I had the idea to do a warm-up lot somewhere, maybe Billings, but the way this yearling thing has been looking, the price of feed and everything else, I just didn’t have the juice to do it, not and guarantee gains where they need to be.”
“What about the water slide at Helena.”
“Sold it.”
“The Hertz franchise at Helena — I got to tell you, Frank, I’m hearing all the time now that you’re overextended.”
“It’s true, but I’m getting by with it. The Hertz franchise is fine. I wish I had a bunch more.”
“Frank!” Mike, at first incredulous, was soon off in thought.
Young people had started to fill up the place and were blowing the straw wrappers off their straws. They all looked so intense to Frank, so ready to burst into something. The ones who got crowded shoved back. The ones who were hot, coming in from outside, took off their coats and fanned their faces hard.
“I say we dump the ranch,” said Mike.
“Count me in,” said Frank, still looking at the youngsters clamoring for hamburgers. That should have been a signal to get back into the cattle business more seriously. He had bought and sold thousands of cattle the way other people played pinochle on Thursdays and he had done it with other people’s money as well as his own. Now he was thinking that once he got out from under the present loans, he might not want the risk, responsibility, commitment, whatever. So, sure, sell the ranch. And thus would end an American family’s place on earth.
“You want to list it?” Frank asked.
“Let’s run an ad.”
“Mike, why don’t you write it.”
“Sure, let me write it,” said Mike. “You know, I’m not a reflective guy, but at a time like this it might be nice to sit down and compose a few words about the old place.”
“You want to try it now?”
Mike got a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket, where it had made a dime-sized blue spot. “Fire. You start,” Mike said, and turned over his paper placemat. “Give me a headline.”
“Old home place,” said Frank. “In capitals, OLD HOME PLACE.”
“Okay, then underneath: ‘In same family four generations.’ Didn’t our grandfather start the place?”
“It was his parents. Fattened oxen that came off the immigrant wagons.”
“Gotcha: ‘Local farm dynasty decides to relinquish ancestral headquarters.’ This I like. Don’t say anything against it. ‘Long-awaited decision. Priced to move. Principals only.’ Got it. Hoss, I’m putting it in the Wall Street Journal. I’m going to say that Hollywood types forced us out of the cattle business. That’s one of the best ways to get a Hollywood type to buy it.”
“Add: ‘Moose, deer, bear, elk, grouse, trout.’ ”
“Why?”
“They all have that, all local ads. One keystroke on the IBM. You don’t want this ad to look like it was done in L.A. They never mention the one kind of wildlife they all have, rattlesnakes.”
“All right,” Mike said, writing. “What else?”
“What’s the view?”
“There isn’t one.”
“We better come up with one or we’re going to have to go on owning it. Can we just say, ‘Big sky’?”
“I think that’s fair. That doesn’t really misrepresent anything. I mean, what’s big to one person may not be big to another. Anyway, people who are out there trying to scoop up old family places are in on this bullshit. It’s kind of like date rape. You can’t get fucked if you don’t spread your legs.”
“You’re great, Mike. You always see things so clearly. I get bogged down thinking about the lives that have been lived out there, the crops gathered, the calves shipped.”
“It just gets in the way, Frank.”
Frank left it in Mike’s hands and walked out to the parking lot while his brother visited with the many normal people he knew inside. Whenever they talked business, Mike liked to act tough. That’s why his deals were all stiffs. Frank barely cared, but he did care, and an undetected slyness had worked for him long enough that he was dangerously overextended. He had to keep a mental buoyancy or go under.
The parking lot was now full of cars and the great white clouds were reflected on their colored roofs. Frank looked up and got the feeling he was looking clear into outer space. A truck piled high with yellow split firewood went through the drive-up line with two laughing cowboys in front, their hats on the back of their heads, the radio blaring the Neville Brothers’ “Yellow Moon.”
Frank stopped and tried to feel his detachment against this throbbing daily intensity that was all around for the asking. Whenever he jumped in, he overjumped; when he tried to stay reasonable, he was like a cat burglar in the homes of everyday people, or someone who had broken into the zoo on a day when it was closed. The street was busy; people were pouring in and out of the restaurant. People sat with their car doors open, their feet on the pavement, and ate ice cream. And yet the big vacant sky seemed to proclaim their isolation. Frank found it attractive in a way even he knew was ludicrous, like the impulse that sends shy people to nudist colonies. Or even the one that landed him among the Eskimos. This is why bland people buy sports cars, he thought; things get lively around them and they have to jump in there with their car. He remembered how he and his friends used to dance through the night to the rock bands, none more extreme than Dick Hoiness’s Violet Twilight, or the Great Falls screamers Standing Start, or the psychedelic band from the Assiniboine reservation, Arthur and the Agnostics, with its stupendous lead singer Arthur Red Wolf, or the great all-girl hard-rock band, the Decibelles. And what fun those darn drugs were. Marvelous worlds aslant, a personal speed wobble in the middle of a civilization equally out of control. And it was wonderful, however short, to have such didactic views of everything, everyone coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Hard to say what it all came to now. Skulls in the desert.
Frank set out for the ranch in somewhat higher spirits, the possibility of not owning something that had always been in their lives throwing the place into sudden and blazing relief. He was able to go over its every feature in his mind now, from springs to dragging gates to the smells of the cellar and the loose boards in the parlor, the paint on the cupboard doors with the previous contrasting paint job, the flour bins with the odorless mummified mice. Yes, he thought, a lost home and the gates of hell.
There was little traffic, and clouds distinct enough that one could navigate by them. A distant tractor plowing a summer-fallowed field trailed a plume of brilliant dust high in the air. The yellow-and-black-striped gates at the railroad crossings stood out vividly in the farm greenery along the tracks. “Slippin’ and a-slidin’,” sang Frank to himself, “peepin’ and a-hidin’.” What a day. What freedom, what breezes. What life ahead! “I been told, baby, you been bold!”
When he drove into the farmyard and looked at the fine old white house with its porches and chimneys, its slanted stone-sided cellar entry, its small chaste cedar shingles, the outbuildings, fenced and ditched small fields beyond, he could already feel it floating into abstraction like a diploma, into a rather glamorous distance.