Keep the Change Read Online Free Page A

doing a handstand, Joe made out the faint blue veins underneath. No matter what position Ellen was in, they stuck straight out. If he mashed them gently, they resumed their perfect shape upon release. If he pushed them to one side and let go, they sprang back. They were practically brand new and the feeling Ellen insisted upon was that they were so wonderful they canceled any further expectations.
    Joe overflowed with feeling for the girl in his arms. He had never felt such strong emotions. Everything meant something bigger. He could look at her for hours from only a couple of inches away.

5
    Together Joe and Ellen began to adopt the mopey love-struck postures, the innocent paralysis of young lovers in small towns. On Saturdays, they took one of the ranch trucks and drove into Deadrock for a swim at the city pool. Instead of yanking at each other and yelling by the poolside, they demonstrated the depth of their feeling by quietly working on their tans in fingertip proximity, or eating quietly by themselves at a shady snow-cone franchise. Joe could accept this because he knew the necessary crisis was coming. Gliding along on these parallel paths, feeling vaguely upset in this atmospheric filigree, watching the others thunder past barefoot at poolside, hot on the heels of screeching females, or crammed in fleshy heaps within sun-scorched automobiles, was almost acceptable to Joe because he was being swept along by something thrilling that he had no interest in understanding.
    But when Saturday night came around, Joe watched in astonishment as Ellen rolled out the ranch road in Billy Kelton’s flatbed truck. Billy and Joe had been best friends until thatday ten years ago when Billy beat Joe senseless. Joe was still not over the sense of injury. For his date with Ellen, Billy hadn’t even removed the stock rack or taken his saddle out of the bed. His filthy old chaps, lashed to the crosspiece behind the cab, flapped away carelessly. “That sumbitch must be harder than hell to steer,” Joe shouted as they went past waving, “the two of you having to sit under the wheel like that!”
    But the truck came back up the road at ten. Joe saw them through the bunkhouse window. He had been pacing around, expecting to be up half the night. He dove to extinguish his light. In a short time, Ellen tapped at his door.
    “Who is it?” Joe called.
    “Ellen. Can I come in?”
    Joe conquered the wish to let her in. “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”
    “Joe, I’ve got something to tell you.”
    “Tell it to the Marines. Tell it to Billy Kelton. I think you two should be very happy together.”
    She cried outside the door for a while. Finally, she said, “Good night,” and Joe fell asleep.
    Otis Rosewell generally stayed in town with his wife, but when things ran late, he bunked with Joe. He and Joe had a nice, easygoing relationship based on Joe’s looking up to Otis, and admiringly asking for advice. One night when they were musing about cows and horses and smoking cigarettes, Otis tossed an old screwdriver in his hand as he told about an older cowboy he knew who had worked for the Padlock and for Kendricks’ in Wyoming; this man, Otis claimed, would go out by himself for weeks at a time with his bedroll and a lariat and would single-handedly rope, brand, vaccinate, and castrate hundredsof calves. “It took a hell of a horse to keep that rope tight, naturally,” Otis went on. “But this old boy slept on the ground with his head on his saddle and hobbled his pony and went from one end of the herd to the other! He was born in a damn hurricane, this feller was—” On the far side of the bunkhouse, a rat ran up out of the woodpile about three feet up the wall. Otis threw the screwdriver toward the woodpile and it turned over in the air and speared the rat to the wall. The rat expired. Joe stared. Otis retrieved his screwdriver, threw the rat out the door and sat down.
    “Let me see you do that again,” Joe said.
    “Run up