Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Also by Thomas McGuane

  The Cadence of Grass

  The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing

  Some Horses

  Nothing but Blue Skies

  Keep the Change

  To Skin a Cat

  Something to Be Desired

  Nobody’s Angel

  An Outside Chance

  Panama

  Ninety-two in the Shade

  The Bushwhacked Piano

  The Sporting Club

  Gallatin Canyon

  Driving on the Rim

  Crow Fair

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Thomas McGuane

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Several stories first appeared in the following publications: Esquire: “Viking Burial”; McSweeney’s: “Little Bighorn” and “River Camp”; The New Yorker: “The Casserole,” “Cowboy,” “The Driver,” “Gallatin Canyon,” “The Good Samaritan,” “The House on Sand Creek,” “Hubcaps,” “Ice,” “Motherlode,” “Old Friends,” “Papaya,” “A Prairie Girl,” “Riddle,” “Stars,” “Tango,” “Vicious Circle,” and “Weight Watchers.” Many of the stories were previously published or collected in the following collections: To Skin a Cat (Dutton, 1986): “Dogs,” “Flight,” “Like a Leaf,” “A Man in Louisiana,” “The Millionaire,” “Partners,” “The Road Atlas,” “A Skirmish,” “Sportsmen,” and “Two Hours to Kill”; Gallatin Canyon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006): “Aliens,” “Cowboy,” “Gallatin Canyon,” “Ice,” “Miracle Boy,” “North Country,” “Old Friends,” “The Refugee,” “Vicious Circle,” and “Zombie”; Crow Fair (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015): “Canyon Ferry,” “The Casserole,” “Crow Fair,” “The Good Samaritan,” “Grandma and Me,” “The House on Sand Creek,” “Hubcaps,” “Lake Story,” “A Long View to the West,” “On a Dirt Road,” “Motherlode,” “An Old Man Who Liked to Fish,” “Prairie Girl,” “Shaman,” “Stars,” and “Weight Watchers.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Names: McGuane, Thomas, author.

  Title: Cloudbursts : collected and new stories / Thomas McGuane.

  Description: New York : Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017039288 | ISBN 9780385350211 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385350228 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Humorous.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.A3114 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017039288

  Ebook ISBN 9780385350228

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: Sunlight in Park, June 10, 1917 (detail) by Charles E. Burchfield. Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives.

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  V5.2

  EP

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Thomas McGuane

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Sportsmen

  The Millionaire

  A Man in Louisiana

  Like a Leaf

  Dogs

  A Skirmish

  Two Hours to Kill

  Partners

  The Road Atlas

  Flight

  Vicious Circle

  Cowboy

  Ice

  Old Friends

  North Country

  Zombie

  Miracle Boy

  Aliens

  The Refugee

  Gallatin Canyon

  Weight Watchers

  The House on Sand Creek

  Grandma and Me

  Hubcaps

  On a Dirt Road

  A Long View to the West

  The Casserole

  Motherlode

  An Old Man Who Liked to Fish

  Prairie Girl

  The Good Samaritan

  Stars

  Shaman

  Canyon Ferry

  River Camp

  Lake Story

  Crow Fair

  Tango

  The Driver

  Papaya

  Little Bighorn

  Kangaroo

  Viking Burial

  Ghost Riders in the Sky

  Riddle

  A Note About the Author

  For Laurie, my light

  The world was still changing, preparing people for one thing and giving them another.

  —Peter Taylor, “The Old Forest”

  SPORTSMEN

  We kept the perch we caught in a stone pool in front of the living-room window. An elm shaded the pool, and when the heavy drapes of the living room were drawn so that my mother could see the sheet music on the piano, the window reflected the barred shapes of the lake perch in the pool.

  We caught them from the rocks on the edge of the lake, rocks that were submerged when the wakes of passing freighters hit the shore. From a distance, the freighters pushed a big swell in front of them without themselves seeming to move on the great flatness of the lake. My friend that year was a boy named Jimmy Meade, and he was learning to identify the vessel stacks of the freighters. We liked the Bob-Lo Line, Cleveland Cliffs, and Wyandotte Transportation with the red Indian tall on the sides of the stack. We looked for whalebacks and tankers and the laden ore ships and listened to the moaning signals from the horns as they carried over the water. The wakes of those freighters moved slowly toward the land along the unmoving surface of water. The wakes were the biggest feature out there, bigger than Canada behind them, which lay low and thin like the horizon itself.

  Jimmy Meade and I were thirteen then. He had moved up from lower Ohio the previous winter, and I was fascinated by his almost-southern accent. His father had an old pickup truck in a town that drove mostly sedans, and they had a big loose-limbed hound that seemed to stand for a distant, unpopulated place.

  Hoods were beginning to appear in the school, beginning to grow drastic haircuts, wear Flagg Flyer shoes, and sing Gene Vincent songs. They hung inside their cars from the wind vanes and stared at the girls I had grown up with in an aspect of violence I had not known. They wolf whistled. They laughed with their mouths wide open and their eyes glittering, and when they got into fights they used their feet. They spent their weekends at the drag races in Flat Rock or following their idol Iggy Katona around the dirt tracks. Jimmy and I loved the water, but when the hoods came near it all they saw were the rubbers. We were downright afraid of the hoods, of how they acted, of the steel taps on their shoes, of the way they saw things, making us feel we would be crazy to ever cross them. We were sportsmen.

  But then, we were lost in our plans. We planned to refurbish a Civil War rifle Jimmy’s father owned. We were going to make an iceboat, a duck blind, and a fishing shanty. We were going to dig up an Indian mound, sell the artifacts, and buy a racing hydroplane that would throw a rooster tail five times its own length. But above all, we wanted to be duck hunters.

  That August we were diving off the pilings near the entrance to the Thoroughfare Canal. We had talked about salvaging boats from the Black Friday storm of 1916 when the Bob-Lo steamer passed. The wash came in and sucked the water down around the pilings. Jimmy dove from the tallest one, arcing dow
n the length of the creosoted spar into the green, clear water. And then he didn’t come up. Not to begin with. When he did, the first thing that surfaced was the curve of his back, white and Ohio-looking in its oval of lake water. It was a back that was never to widen with muscle or stoop with worry because Jimmy had just then broken his neck. I remember getting him out on the gravel shore. He was wide awake and his eyes poured tears. His body shuddered continuously, and I recall his fingers fluttered on the stones with a kind of purpose. I had never heard sounds like that from his mouth in the thousands of hours we talked. I learned from a neighbor that my screams brought help and, similarly, I can’t imagine what I would sound like screaming. Perhaps no one can.

  That was the month that my father decided I was a worthless boy who blamed his troubles on outside events. He had quite a long theory about all of this, and hanging around on the lake or in the flat woods hunting rabbits with our .22s substantiated that theory, I forget how. He found me a job over in Burr Oak cleaning die-cast aluminum molds with acid and a wire brush. That was the first time I had been around the countrypeople who work in small factories across the nation. Once you get the gist of their ways, you can get along anyplace you go because they are everywhere and they are good people.

  When I tried to call Jimmy Meade from Burr Oak, his father said that he was unable to speak on the telephone: he was out of the hospital and would always be paralyzed. In his father’s voice with its almost-southern Ohio accents, I could feel myself being made to know that though I had not done this to Jimmy, I was there, and that there was villainy, somehow, in my escape. I really don’t think I could have gotten out of the factory job without crossing my own father worse than I then dared. But it’s true, I missed the early hospitalization of Jimmy and of course I had missed having that accident happen to me in the first place. I still couldn’t picture Jimmy not able to move, being kind of frozen where we left off.

  I finished up in August and stayed in Sturgis for a couple of days in a boardinghouse run by an old woman and her sixty-year-old spinster daughter. I was so comfortable with them I found myself sitting in the front hall watching the street for prospective customers. I told them I was just a duck hunter. Like the factory people, they had once had a farm. After that, I went home to see Jimmy.

  He lived in a small house on Macomb Street about a half mile from the hardware. There was a layout duckboat in the yard and quite a few cars parked around, hot rods mostly. What could have explained this attendance? Was it popularity? A strange feeling shot through me.

  I went in the screen door on the side of the house, propped ajar with a brick. There were eight or ten people inside, boys and girls our own age. My first feeling, that I had come back from a factory job in another town with tales to tell, vanished and I was suddenly afraid of the people in the room, faster, tougher kids than Jimmy and I had known. There were open beer bottles on the tables, and the radio played WJR and the hit parade.

  Jimmy was in the corner where the light came through the screens from two directions. He was in a wheelchair, and his arms and legs had been neatly folded within the sides of the contraption. He had a ducktail haircut, and a girl held a beer to his lips, then replaced it with a Camel in a fake pearl-and-ebony cigarette holder. His weight had halved and there were copper-colored shadows under his eyes. He looked like a modernized Station of the Cross.

  When he began to talk, his Ohio accent was gone. How did that happen? Insurance was going to buy him a flathead Ford. “I’m going to chop and channel it,” he said, “kick the frame, french the headlights, bullnose the hood, and lead the trunk.” He stopped and twisted his face off to draw on the cigarette. “There’s this hillbilly in Taylor Township who can roll and pleat the interior.”

  I didn’t get the feeling he was particularly glad to see me. But what I did was just sit there and tough it out until the room got tense and people just began to pick up and go. That took no time at all: the boys crumpled beer cans in their fists conclusively. The girls smiled with their mouths open and snapped their eyes. Everyone knew something was fishy. They hadn’t seen me around since the accident, and the question was, What was I doing there now?

  “I seen a bunch of ducks moving,” Jimmy said.

  “I did, too.”

  “Seen them from the house.” Jimmy sucked on his cigarette. “Remember how old Minnow Milton used to shoot out of his boathouse when there was ducks?” Minnow Milton had lived in a floating house that had a trap attached to it from which he sold shiners for bait. The floating house was at the foot of Jimmy’s road.

  “Well, Minnow’s no longer with us. And the old boat is just setting there doing nothing.”

  The next morning before daybreak, Jimmy and I were in Minnow Milton’s living room with the lake slapping underneath and the sash thrown up. There were still old photographs of the Milton family on the walls. Minnow was a bachelor and no one had come for them. I had my father’s twelve-gauge pump propped on the windowsill and I could see the blocks, the old Mason decoys, all canvasbacks, that I had set out beneath the window, thirty of them bobbing, wooden beaks to the wind, like steamboats viewed from a mile up. I really couldn’t see Jimmy. I had wheeled him in terror down the gangplank and into the dark. I set the blocks in the dark, and when I lit his cigarette, he stared down the length of the holder, intently, so I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I said, “What fun is there if you can’t shoot?”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “I’m gonna shoot. I was just asking.”

  “You ain’t got no ducks anyways.”

  That was true. But it didn’t last. A cold wind came with daylight. A slight snow spit across the whitecaps. I saw a flight of mallards rocket over and disappear behind us. Then they reappeared and did the same thing again, right across the roof over our heads. When they came the third time, they set their wings and reached their feet through hundreds of feet of cold air toward the decoys. I killed two and let the wind blow them up against the floating house. Jimmy grinned crazily. I built a fire in Minnow Milton’s old stove and cooked those ducks on a stick. I had to feed Jimmy off the point of my Barlow knife, but we ate two big ducks for breakfast and lunch at once. I stood the pump gun in the corner.

  Tall columns of snow advanced toward us across the lake, and among them, right in among them, were ducks, some of everything, including the big canvasbacks that stirred us like old music. Buffleheads raced along the surface.

  “Fork me that there duck meat,” said Jimmy Meade in his Ohio voice.

  We stared down from our house window as our decoys filled with ducks. The weather got so bad the ducks swam among the decoys without caring. After half a day we didn’t know which was real and which was not. I wrapped Jimmy’s blanket up under his chin.

  “I hope those ducks keep on coming,” he said. And they did. We were in a vast raft of ducks. We didn’t leave until the earth had turned clean around and it was dark again.

  THE MILLIONAIRE

  It was merely a house beside a lake which had been rented, winterized to extend the period of time it could be let, though it was hard to see who would want its view after summer was over, a view of places just like it, divided by water. It was furnished with the kinds of things owners wish renters to have within the limits of their anxiety about damage, impersonal things. Strangely, the owners stored their golfing trophies here, old trophies, and the miniature golfers on them, their bronze coats flaking, belonged to another age. One foot tipped too far; their swings were still British and lacked the freedom of motion American trophy makers later learned to suggest. Something of the reflected stillness of the lake was felt in the living room and the wraparound porch, where the outdoor furniture seemed out of place and the indoor furniture had inadvertently weathered.

  Betty was a handsome blonde in her middle forties wearing a green linen Chanel suit. She walked into the house, stooping with two suitcases and managing to clutch the house keys with their large paper tag. Iris, her fifteen-year-old daughter, in
the late stages of pregnancy, awkwardly looked for something to do. Betty set the luggage down and stared about with a Mona Lisa smile. She shot a glance at Iris, who was heading for the radio. Iris stopped.

  “I guess the landlord saw us coming,” said Betty. Iris made an assenting murmur in her throat; it was clear she was yet to develop any real attitude toward this place. “Though blaming him for scenting misfortune seems a bit academic at this stage of the proceedings.”

  “Mom, where’s the thermostat at? I’m getting goose bumps.”

  “Find it, Iris. It will be on the wall.” Iris turned and looked off the porch toward the lake. Betty kept talking. “When we went to stay on the water in my youth—when we went to Horseneck Beach, for example—the water made a nice smell for us. It seemed to welcome us…the smell of the ocean. But this lake! Well, it has no odor.”

  “It’s smooth out there. Nice for waterskiing.”

  “In your condition?” Betty walked to the phone and picked it up. “A dial tone. Good…So, anyway, let’s batten down the hatches. Pick yourself a little delivery room. I’m in shock! I have traipsed a hundred miles from my home for a summer surrounded by strangers and their weekend haciendas. If only I’d been clever enough to bring something familiar, my Sanibel shells, anything.”

  “I’m familiar,” said Iris with a pout.

  “Not entirely, you’re not.”