Nothing but Blue Skies Read Online Free PDF Page B

chin. He looked like an English pirate. “Did you bring your clubs, Frank?”
    “You know, I didn’t. I have to go straight from you back to town.”
    “What a shame. Can’t even make nine holes?”
    “I can’t,” Frank said. “And you know what else? I haven’t played since the year I last had cattle on you. I just kind of pulled my business life over my head and that was that.”
    Some war was on the radio and the café was quieter than usual. Conversations murmured on about the eroding price supports for grain, the cattle feeder monopolies, baseball.
    “Your boy still at the college?” Frank asked.
    “Getting ready to graduate.”
    “Is he going to come back to the ranch?”
    “I don’t think so.” Bob smiled, shrugged.
    You didn’t work your way up in ranching. You might get the job but the owner was always someone else. Frank saw a man appear in the doorway with his dog. The continuity was going out of ranching, and Frank felt sorry for the people who had seen so much in it and couldn’t go on with that, in their families or in any other way.
    The waitress announced, “No dogs.”
    “No dogs?” the man in the doorway said.
    “No dogs.” She bent behind the counter and emerged with a large beef bone. “Take him outside and give him that.”
    The man took the bone and went out. He was back in a moment without the dog. “I gave him the bone,” he said. He had a pushed-in upper lip and gray-black crinkled hair that grew well down on his forehead.
    “Yeah, good. You going to have lunch?” the waitress asked.
    “I might just have a cup of coffee while she’s working on that bone.”
    “Yeah, that’d be fine,” she said.
    “Where’d that great bone come from?”
    “Today’s soup.”
    “Oh, sure. Well, she’ll appreciate it.”
    Frank’s father used to eat here regularly when he had an interest in the hardware store and then an insurance agency that later moved to Grass Range, where it was absorbed by an office in Lewistown.Then he had a ranch at Straw, west of Eddie’s Corner, and it was easy to use the Lewistown office for the ranch business. The ranch, as far as he was concerned, was just another file at the Lewistown office. Payroll, government programs, expenses, everything was just that one file, ran almost a thousand mother cows. Bob Cheney started at the Straw place when he was a young cowboy, later went to work on the JA for Mrs. Melwood and then the Salvation Army. All the same job except the Salvation Army didn’t speculate but ran it as a conservative cow-calf place and in good years leased some grass. And it was good grass: buffalo grass and some bluestem.
    Bob and Frank had always gotten along, once even worked together, so Frank got the first call on the grass. It wasn’t insider trading; he paid the going rate, but it was an awfully good grass deal. Frank thought he could make some money on it, a little anyway. He did these yearling deals only when he thought he was having a good year. You took out a big loan and bet it on one throw of the dice. He liked being in business with people like Bob Cheney, liked talking to them.
    “When’s your girl finish school?” Bob asked.
    “Two more years.”
    “She’s at Missoula?”
    “At Missoula.”
    “She got a boyfriend?”
    “She did. I hesitate to tell you this, but he had a gold ring in his nose.”
    “Aw, come on.”
    “I ain’t a-shitting you,” said Frank rakishly. He wallowed in the fellow feeling produced by sharing this impression of weirdness in his child’s generation. The nose ring was part of the bohemian stance of the young man, a stylish underpinning for his scheme to get into “pizza graphics.” Frank hadn’t asked about that. He’d just said, “Right.” He was baffled by young people these days and knew full well that that was a cyclical thing. He just couldn’t fathom how they could be so indifferent to their own future and security when it looked like the country had much to fear in years to