Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “We’re going along the freeway. I see this other Cadillac, but it’s a two-tone. I’m sitting there trying to think which I like better. Obviously, the driver of the other Caddy is having the exact same thought. We get real close and head for the identical off-ramp. Suddenly it looks like we’ll collide. I swerve. I crash into a jalopy. The jalopy takes off. Why did the jalopy need to be there in the first place!”

  “That’s it?” said Claude. “Where’s Sid?”

  “Sid has gone. He said, ‘You own it.’

  “Whatever happened to us, Claude? Whatever happened to our luck?” Iris was free to assume what she had brought upon them.

  * * *

  —

  About halfway through the last month of Iris’s pregnancy, the adoptive parents came by to meet her. Betty did it up as an occasion with fresh flowers on the end tables. Claude checked his watch, shot his cuffs, looked out the window at rapid intervals. Iris had been dressed in high-octane maternity clothes: a conical navy-blue dress with a whimsical, polka-dotted, droopy bow tie.

  At the very moment of the Anses’ arrival, Claude seemed to panic. He was frozen in the hallway babbling in a low voice. “They can’t find the door. They’re gonna walk into the lake!” He started to call out in a high, tinny voice, projecting crazy merriness, “Back there! Right where you parked! You missed it! You missed…the front door!”

  “Iris!” said Betty. “Animate!”

  They finally came inside, and the introductions were achieved as the judge looked carefully at everyone, settling finally on Iris, whom he examined at length until she said, “I’m not a horse.” But the judge took it well and said this was a happy day in their lives. Judge Anse and his wife, Mona, were a couple in their fifties. Judge Anse seemed unable to leave his judicial air at home and put a considerate pause before each remark, a pause that left one feeling scrutinized. His wife looked very scrutinized. It was easy to think that her desire for a baby was all she had left under scrutiny.

  “We had a baby once,” said Mrs. Anse without varying the tone of her voice. “We had it such a short time we didn’t have time to name him. It appeared in the obituary as Baby Anse, comma, boy. But we had him and he was ours. For a while.”

  “Are you familiar with ectopic pregnancy?” asked Betty of no one in particular.

  “Is it a problem?” said Judge Anse.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Nothing she’s got, I hope,” said the judge, jerking his thick head toward Iris.

  “No, it’s something I had,” said Betty.

  Judge Anse said he worked hard and there was no one to leave it all to, and we can’t live forever. That seemed to anger him and he used off-color language. He asked the present company to excuse his French. Iris sat blankly in the middle of a discussion of what a difficult age it was for raising children. It was hard to tell whether this was a reference to Iris or to the age in which the baby would live. But it must have been the latter because Claude said conclusively that the country had nowhere to go but up.

  Mrs. Anse kept a level gaze throughout this, directed upon Iris. Iris felt this gaze and was ready for anything. When Mrs. Anse smiled and asked her question, Iris was ready. “What was the young fellow like?” she inquired.

  “A real gorilla,” said Iris.

  “Have we mentioned Iris’s grades?” Betty asked in panic. “Straight As.”

  * * *

  —

  “The agencies wouldn’t talk to us,” said Mona Anse in a cracking voice. “They told us we were too old.”

  “Well, not exactly true,” said the judge patiently.

  “It is for a Caucasian baby. Old. That’s all we heard. We heard it from the state, from the Lutherans, from the Catholics. Old. People suggested every crazy thing you can imagine: midgets, pinheads, boat people. I may be old, but I won’t be taken advantage of.” The judge rested his hand on the back of his wife’s. “If you’re old, you get a brown one. You have no choice in the matter.”

  “Let ’em whine,” said Claude to the empty middle of the room. “They’re getting a bargain.”

  Later, Iris found out how they met Judge Anse. “Your father is being sued by a man at the plant who lost something in a machine,” said Betty, blandly.

  “Lost something?” said Iris. “Lost a what?”

  “A limb. That’s how we got to meet Judge Anse. He’s hearing the case.”

  Iris thought for a moment and said, “Isn’t that like selling my baby?”

  “Iris, isn’t it time you grew up?”

  * * *

  —

  The night the contractions began, the whole thing almost fell apart. Iris bolted and was found two hours later hiding in a boathouse clear on the other side of the lake. By the time they got her back to the house, Betty was behind with the buffet. Somehow, everything went back into place, and when Judge and Mrs. Anse and Dr. Dahlstrom arrived, Iris was secured upstairs. Supplies were laid out. Dahlstrom had been playing golf, and Claude had to lend him some carpet slippers to keep him from marking up the floor with his cleats.

  “What are you hoping for?” asked Dahlstrom.

  “We don’t care as long as it’s got five of everything,” said the judge. Dahlstrom made a Dagwood sandwich. Betty went up and down the stairs at frequent intervals. Claude seemed edgy but remarked that the leading indicators were up.

  Dr. Dahlstrom was balancing his sandwich on one palm and building with the other, when Betty came down and said, “Delwyn, now.”

  “Betty, wait for the pretty part.” Betty sat while Dahlstrom ate his sandwich, holding it between bites in front of his admiring gaze like a ship model. When he finished, he said, “And now the good doctor will work his magic. You people pace and wring your hands, whatever blows your hair back.” And he went up the stairs.

  There was no way to disguise the waiting. Betty mentioned a Big Band Era retrospective on FM but got no response. Everyone was quiet, but Claude seemed to be smoldering. He slumped down inside his suit coat and stared. After a while, he said, “A good deal was had by all.” This was not lost on Mrs. Anse.

  “To whom do you think you are speaking?” she asked, simultaneously with a moan from the second floor.

  “Simmer down, Mona,” said Claude. “Simmer down.”

  “I don’t want this ruined.”

  “Try the salad. Betty used walnut oil.”

  “This end is well done,” said Betty pointing at the roast. “You can see the rare from where you are.”

  “You’d think I’d feel young tonight. But I don’t. I wonder why?” asked the judge.

  “Have you tried Grecian Formula Nine?” asked Claude.

  “You’re a crumb,” said the judge. “You’re an insufferable crumb.”

  “And why not?” Claude flared. “I’m about to become a grandfather. How do you think that makes me feel? And Betty, my childhood sweetheart, this whole goddamned thing is going to make a grandmother out of her. You know what this means, Judge? This means we’re starting to die. That jackass doctor upstairs is shoving us into history.”

  “If that’s how you feel,” the judge said. “That’s how we feel.”

  So, by the time Dr. Dahlstrom arrived at the top of the stairs to announce a successful birth, Claude and the judge were at a stalemate. Claude’s moment of vindication lay in his climbing the stairs alone, without looking back, to view the baby lying in its mother’s arms. Whatever was going on around her, Iris was too happy and too far away to notice the arrival of Judge Anse and his wife, or to realize that her baby was a millionaire.

  A MAN IN LOUISIANA

  That winter, Ohio Exploration had its meeting at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. Barry Seitz went along as special assistant to Mike Royce, the tough, relatively young president of Ohio Exploration. Barry knew spot checks could happen anytime, and as this was his first job that could go anywhere, he memorized everything. The range of subjects ran from drilling reports in various oil plays in the Southeast
to orthodonture opinions concerning Mike Royce’s impossibly ugly daughter. It was Royce’s thought that the girl’s dentist was “getting the teeth straight, all right, but blowing her profile.” Barry was to “mentally note” that Mike Royce wanted to get together some three- and four-year-old snapshots of the girl and arrange a conference with the dentist. Barry didn’t envy the dentist. The girl had inherited her father’s profile and would always be a rich little bulldog.

  The winter meeting was going to be shortened and therefore compressed because Mike Royce had just decided that he hated the South. So everyone was on edge, and the orthodontist issue seemed quite inflamed the longer Royce contemplated his daughter’s mouth. Barry could see the pressure forming in his boss’s face as he stared past the crab boats making their way across the dead-slick bay. Barry arranged to have some pictures same-day delivered, and he was with his boss when he thumbed through the snapshots.

  “I thought I could trust that guy,” said Royce from a darkening face. “He did this to me.”

  A number of the things Mike Royce said were irritating to Barry, and when Royce was angry, he said everything in a blur of exposed teeth that made part of Barry think of defending himself. But Barry knew he was on the cusp of failure or success. At thirty, a backward move could be a menace to his whole life; and while he knew he wouldn’t be in Royce’s employ forever, he wanted to stay long enough to learn oil-lease trading so that he could go out on his own. Once he was free, he could do the rest of the things he wanted: have a family, tropical fish, remote-control model airplanes. The future was an unbroken sheen to Barry, requiring only irreversible solvency. One of Barry’s girlfriends had called him yellow. She went out with the morning trash. Having your ducks in a row does not equal yellow. Barry was cautious.

  On the last day of their stay in Point Clear, Alabama, Mike Royce rang for Barry. Barry went down to his room and found Royce in a spotted bathrobe, his blunt feet hooked on the rungs of his chair, staring at the photographs of his daughter arranged chronologically. The little girl’s square head did seem to change imperceptibly from picture to picture, though Barry could not tell the influence of hormones from the influence of orthodontic wire. From left to right, the child seemed to be losing character. In picture 1 she was clearly a vigorous young carnivore, and by picture 7 she looked insipid, headed nowhere. It seemed a lot to blame on the dentist, who, Mike Royce pointed out, would be on the carpet Monday first thing. Barry wanted what Mike Royce wanted. So Barry wanted those teeth right, but it wasn’t like he could jump in there with his pliers.

  Now Royce turned his attention to Barry. He did not ask Barry to sit down but seemed to prefer to regard him from his compressed posture in his bathrobe.

  “Billy Hebert,” he said. “Remember him?” He was spot-checking a mental note.

  “Lake Charles,” snapped Barry.

  “Feature player in that deal down there. Now Billy’s main lick, for fun, is to hunt birds.” He reached Barry a slip of paper. “That dog is in Mississippi. I want you to get it and take it to Billy in Lake Charles.”

  “Very well.”

  “If you remember back, we need to be doing something out of this world for Billy. Big feature like that don’t grow on trees.”

  Barry could see the rows of private piers from Royce’s window. A few people had gone out carrying crab traps, towels, radios. They seemed to mock Barry’s dog-hauling mission with their prospects. But it was better than hearing about the girl’s teeth.

  A haze from the paper mills outside Mobile hung on the water. The causeway bore a stream of Florida-bound traffic. Bay shrimpers plied the slick, and playoff games sounded from every window of the resort. He knew cheery types lined up in the lobby for morning papers. They seemed happy enough, looking like a bunch of mental patients. But when riding mowers hummed with purpose on a December day in the Deep South, it seemed cruel and unusual to have to haul a dog from Mississippi to a crooked oil dealer in Louisiana.

  * * *

  —

  The road to the small town in Mississippi on Royce’s note wound up from the coastal plain past small cities and shantytowns. Barry ate at a drive-in restaurant next to an old cotton gin and drove up through three plantations that lay along the Tombigbee in what had been open country of farms and plantations. Arms of standing water appeared and disappeared as he soared over leggy trestles heading north. Barry began to be absorbed by his task. Where am I? he thought. He liked the idea of hauling a dog from Mississippi to Louisiana and didn’t feel at all demeaned by it, as he had back at the Marriott. He passed a monument where the bighearted Union Army had set General Nathan Bedford Forrest free, and he felt giddily—no matter how many GTOs and pizza trucks he passed—that he was going back in time, toward Champion Hill and Shiloh. Every third house had a fireworks stand selling M-80s and bottle rockets, and every fifth building was a Baptist church. Oh, variety! he thought, comparing this with Ohio.

  He reached Blue Wood, Mississippi, shortly after noon and stopped at a filling station for directions to the house of Jimmy F. Tippett, the man who had advertised the dog. Hearing his accent, the proprietor of the filling station, a round-faced man in coveralls, asked Barry where he came from.

  “Chillicothe, Ohio.”

  The man looked at Barry’s face for a moment and said, “Boy, you three-fo’ mile from yo’ house!”

  He took a dirt road out past a gas field, past a huge abandoned World War II ammunition factory and rail spur. The town of Blue Wood had the air of an Old West town with its slightly elevated false-front buildings. Half the stores were empty, and the sidewalks had a few blacks as the sole pedestrians. Barry drove slowly past the hardware store, where a solitary white man gripped his counter and stared through the front door waiting for customers. “My God,” Barry murmured. He couldn’t wait to grab that bird dog and run. The teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter were behind him, familiar and secure. The creepy stillness had gotten to him.

  Jimmy F. Tippett’s house was on the edge of a thousand-acre sorghum field. It was an old house with a metal roof and a narrow dogtrot breezeway. Because of its location, Barry thought it had a faint seaside atmosphere. But above all it spoke of poorness to Barry, and dirty stinking failure; his first thought was, How in the world did this guy lay hands on any dog Mike Royce would buy? Hunching over in the front seat after he’d parked, Barry gave way to temptation and opened Royce’s envelope with a thumbnail. Inside was two thousand dollars in crisp hundreds. This, thought Barry, I’ve got to see. Never run into one for over fifty dollars.

  He got out of the car, walking around the back of it so he could use it as a kind of blind while he looked things over. There were great big white clouds in the direction past the house and a few untended pecan trees. There had been a picket fence all around, but it looked like cattle or something had just walked it down into the ground. Here and there a loop of it stood up, and the pickets were weathered of most of their white paint and shaped at their ends like clubs in a deck of cards.

  The pattern of shadows on the screen door changed, and Barry interrupted his thought to understand that one of the shadows would surely be Jimmy F. Tippett. So he strode up to the house, gulping impressions, and said, “Mr. Tippett, is that you?” but thinking how easy it was to picture a bullet coming through the screen door.

  “Yes, sir,” came a voice.

  “I’m Barry Seitz. I represent Mr. L. Michael Royce. I’m here about a dog.”

  The screen door opened. Inside it stood a small man about sixty years of age, in khaki pants and starched white shirt. He had an auto insurance company pen holder in his pocket and a whistle around his neck. His face was entirely covered by fine dark wrinkles. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked Barry over as though he were doing a credit check. “Tippett,” he said. “Come in.”

  Barry walked in. It appeared that Tippett lived entirely in one room. “I can’t stay but a minute. I’ve got to get this dog to Louisiana.”

  “Have
a seat,” said Tippett. Barry moved backward and slipped into a chair. Tippett watched him do it. “I’ll get the whiskey out,” said Tippett. “Help you unwind.”

  “I’m quite relaxed,” said Barry defiantly, but Tippett got down a bottle from a pie safe that held the glasses, too.

  “You want water or S’em Up?” asked Tippett.

  “Just straight would be fine,” Barry said. Tippett served their whiskey and sat down next to his television set. His drink hand moved slightly, a toast. Barry moved his. It was quiet.

  “You go to college?” asked Tippett.

  “Yes,” said Barry, narrowly avoiding the word “Wesleyan.” “And you?” he asked. Tippett did not answer, and Barry feared he’d taken it as a contemptuous question. Nevertheless, he decided not to go into anything long about college being a waste of time with a bunch of smarty-pants professors. In fact, Barry had a sudden burst of love for his old college. He felt a small ache looking around the bare room for days of wit and safety before he’d been on unfathomable missions like this one. Dogs, tooth pictures, oil crooks, a secure future. Tippett was humming a tune and looking around the room. I know that tune, thought Barry. It’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” You bastards fired on our flag first. Fort Sumter.

  “What’s that song you’re humming?”

  “Oh, a old song.”

  “Really! I sort of remember it as a favorite of mine.”

  “That’s nice. Yes, sir, that’s nice. Some of these songs nowadays, why, I don’t like them. They favor shit to me.” There was a worn-out shotgun in the corner, boots, a long rope with a snap on it. Barry handed Tippett a thick stack of bills. Tippett pocketed it without looking.