Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane Page B

the public yard in Billings. You didn’t go here in a cattle truck; you went in the short-range stock truck in all the clothes you owned because the cab heater went out ten years ago. Some went pulling a gooseneck trailer behind the pickup. You could unload either at one of the elevated chutes or at the ground-level Powder River Gate, which opened straight into a holding pen where the yard men, usually older ranchers who had gone broke or were semiretired, sorted and classed the cattle for that day’s sale. Joe stopped and looked back out into the pens to get an idea of the flow of cattle. It looked pretty thin and there was a cold rain blowing over everything. The yard men leaned on their long prods and stared out across the pens into nowhere.
    Joe went inside. A secretary typed away, filling out forms, and Bob Knowles, the yard owner, manned the counter. Through a pane of glass behind his head, the sale ring could be seen as well as the small wood podium from which the auctioneer called the sale and directed his stewards to thebuyers. Bob Knowles had been here since the years Joe and his family were still on the ranch. He peered at Joe with a smile.
    “How long you back for this time?” he asked.
    “Damned if I know. But Lureen lost her lease. I told her I’d watch some yearlings for her this summer. She had a grass deal with Overstreet and he dropped her. How’s it look for today?”
    “Dribs and drabs,” said Bob, lifting his feed-store cap to smooth back his sandy hair. “All day long. What are you looking for?”
    “Grass cattle, but everyone’s got so much hay left over.”
    “That’s it. We just don’t have the numbers,” Bob said. Joe completely trusted Bob and moreover, he didn’t want to hang around here all day every Tuesday buying cattle ten at a time.
    “Bob, you want to sort up some cattle for me and just buy me what you can? Then just lot them till we get a couple of semiloads.”
    “Tell me what you want.”
    “Big-frame fives and sixes for under sixty-five bucks a hundredweight. Sort them up so they look like a herd.”
    “That’s a tall order. Maybe too tall. How many do you want?”
    “Two hundred and fifty head and I’d take some spayed heifers in there if it had to be.”
    “I can’t do it in one day,” Bob said decisively.
    “Can you do it over four weeks?”
    “I can get pretty close.”
    “Let’s do ’er then. I’ll get my banking done. And don’t hesitate to make me some
good
buys.” By this point, Joe was enjoying himself so much he was just hollering at Bob and Bob was hollering back.
    Imagine, thought Joe, a world in which you could trust a man to buy you a hundred fifty thousand pounds of beef with your checkbook when he is getting a commission. A particular instance of the free enterprise system running with a Stradivarian hum.
    Darryl Burke, the banker, had known Joe so long and liked Joe so well and was so glad he was back in town that he would have liked to see him skip this business with the cows and, as he said, “orient his antenna to the twentieth century.” Joe sat in his bright vice-president’s cubicle surrounded by tremendous kodachromes of the surrounding countryside.
    “Cut the shit and give me the money,” Joe said. He enjoyed viewing Darryl in his suit because it gave him the curious ticklish surprise of time passing to see an old pal of the mountain streams and baseball diamonds actually beginning to blur into “the real world.” Joe was without contempt for “the real world”; it merely astonished him that any of his old friends had actually succeeded in arriving there. Joe leaned over and said in a loud whisper, “Does your secretary actually believe this act of yours?”
    Darryl grimaced and waved his hands around. He knew of course that life was a trick. But it wouldn’t do to have the secretary find it out. Joe hated having to sit somewhat outside and spot the gambits. But he sustained a slight fear that whatever carried people