Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane Page B

water in his head gate. He had with him the border collie Joe had used as his cattle came in. Alvie was on a small battered Japanese motorcycle wearing his hip boots. He had his shovel fastened down with bungee cord and his blue heeler balanced on the passenger seat. Joe was walking to the truck with a load of outgoing mail and stopped to talk. They ended up talking about Zane Grey. Alvie’s old face wrinkled and his eyes looked off to unknown distances. He said, “I believe everything in them books. When them cowboys are in the desert, I’m hot. When they’re caught in a blizzard I send the old lady for another blanket. When they run out of food, I tear down to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich.” Even recalling these moments with his nose in Zane Grey caused rapturous transformation in Alvie, and the reality of a life directing muddy water downhill was made tolerable.
    “I’m supposed to put out new salt,” said Alvie, “but I’m toogoddamn tired. You wouldn’t think about doing that for me, would you?”
    “Sure I would,” Joe said.
    “You can still find your way around up there, can’t you?”
    “I think so,” said Joe.
    “I’m mighty grateful,” Alvie said. “Like I say, I’m wore out.”
    Alvie wandered up the creek and Joe loaded the truck with blocks of salt. He drove up through the basin, got out to lock the hubs, put it in four-wheel drive and climbed into the clouds, passing the Indian caves and the homesteaders’ coal mine, before he tipped over into the summer pasture. There were cattle scattered out on the hills in all directions. He could just make out the three small white structures of the salt houses in the blue distance. A velvet-horned mule deer ambled out through the deep grass ahead of him and bluebirds paused on the cedar fenceposts. The only sign of human life was an old sheep shearing engine abandoned half a century ago and looking in the dry air as though it would still run. It was vanity to think about owning this sort of thing. Joe could not exactly understand property. We want things when others want the same things. Still, looking out at pastures that ran to threadlike rivers at eye level, Joe could feel his bones blowing in the wind of the future, and it was a cheerful feeling. All his feelings were currently askew because of Ellen’s call, but this was still a good one.
    He loaded all the salt out and checked the two main springs. One was reduced in volume because of the winter’s low snow-pack at the heads of the coulees, but the cattle were still using it. The northern fence line was barely standing, held up by the sagebrush through which it ran, but it held all right and nothing seemed to be going through it. Joe had built that fence. When cattle got out, they just drifted into space andit was an easy thing to get them back in. There was grass everywhere, even on top of the wind-blown ridges where he and Otis had dynamited fencepost holes so long ago. He remembered now what a good gaining pasture it was and how his father, who was a grass man, used to say, Just take care of it and it will take care of you.
    He left the truck and walked. The pasture lay in three broadly defined planes that tilted separately and disappeared into the sky. He walked toward a tall rock formation that had once figured in a dream of his boyhood, a dream he had never quite figured out as to all its sources and details and implied perils. But this dream had left him with a high degree of respect for the operations of the subconscious.
    In his twenties, many years after the rock episode, he had eaten peyote and had the pleasure of a long conversation with thousands of irises, tulips, and roses at a commercial flower garden. He could
still
remember their nodding concern at each of his questions, their earnest weaving around on the ends of their stalks. As ridiculous as this experience came to seem, it enlarged his respect for flowers; and he sometimes found himself entering