Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “Let’s have a look at this expensive dog,” said Barry.

  “Expensive? I got about twenty-five cent an ar to work the prick.”

  Tippett whistled through his teeth, and a pointer came in from the next room on his belly and laid his head on Tippett’s knee. “Thar Bandit.”

  “Fine-looking dog,” said Barry. About all Barry knew about Bandit was that he was mostly white.

  “He get better lookin’ when you turn him a-loose. Fellow need enough country for a dog like Bandit. Use a section and a half of bean field in five minutes.” Tippett stared once again at L. Michael Royce’s money. “This any good?” he asked, holding it up. Barry just nodded. A long silence followed. Barry felt that a kind of intimacy had formed. This man had something that he and Royce and the man in Louisiana wanted. When he took the dog to the car on a lead, Tippett said, “I was sixty-six in August. I’ll never have another dog like that.” He didn’t pet Bandit before going to the house: he never looked back.

  Barry started down the road with Bandit on the seat beside him. As he went back through Blue Wood, the huge clouds he had noticed driving to Tippett’s seemed to enlarge with the massive angular light of evening, and the empty buildings of the town looked bombed out and derelict. A man was selling barbecue from an outdoor smoker. Barry stopped and ate some pork and slaw while he looked at the four-way roads trailing off into big fields. He thought, I’d like to give that dog a whirl. The man rolled down the lid on the smoker.

  “Like anything to drink?”

  “S’em Up,” said Barry. He had decided he would run Bandit.

  Barry drove alongside the vast soybean field with its tangle of stalks and curled leaves and long strips of combined ground. There were hedgerows of small hardwoods wound about with Osage orange and kudzu. Some of the fields had gas wells, and at one county-road corner there was a stack of casing pipe and a yellow backhoe as battered as an army tank. When the road came to an end, the bean fields stretched along a stream course and over low rounded hills as far to the west as Barry could see. This is it, he thought, and stopped.

  Bandit stirred and whined when the engine shut off. He sat up and stared through the windshield at the empty space. It made Barry apprehensive to not quite understand what riveted his attention so. I wish I had more information, he thought, a little something more to go by. Nevertheless, he turned Bandit loose and thought for the short time he saw him that Tippett was right, that he got prettier and prettier, in his burning race over the horizon.

  Until he was gone. It was as though Mike Royce towered up out of the Mississippi horizon to stare down at Barry in his rental car, clutching the orthodonture photographs and Barry’s employment contract.

  He got out and started running across the bean field. He ran so fast and uncaringly that the ground seemed to rise and fall beneath him as he crossed the hills. He hit a piece of soft plowed ground, and it sapped his strength so quickly he found himself stopped, his hands gripping his knees. Oh, Bandit, he cried out, come back!

  Just before dusk, he came through a grove of oak on the edge of a swamp. A cold mist had started up in fingers toward the trees, and at their very edge stood Bandit on point, head high, sipping the breeze, tail straight as a poker, in a trance of found birds. Barry thought he cried out to Bandit, but he wasn’t sure, and he knew he didn’t want to frighten him into motion. He walked steadily in Bandit’s direction. The dog stood at his work, not acknowledging him. When he was about a hundred feet away, the covey started to flush. He froze as birds roared up like brown bees and swarmed into the swamp. But Bandit stood still and Barry knew he had him. He admired Tippett’s training in keeping Bandit so staunch and walked to the dog in an agony of relief. Good Bandit, he said, and patted his head, Bandit’s signal to go on hunting: he shot into the swamp.

  The brambles along the watery edge practically tore his clothes off. His hands felt sticky from bloody scratches. By turns he saw himself strangling Royce, Tippett, and the man in Louisiana. He wondered if Royce would ever see him as a can-do guy again. From Cub Scouts on he had had this burden of reliability, and as he felt the invisible dog tearing it away, he began to wonder why he was running so fast.

  He reached higher ground and a grove of hickories with a Confederate cemetery, forty or fifty unknown soldiers. He sat down to rest among the small stones, gasping for air. What he first took to be the sound of chimes emerging distantly from the ground turned out to be his own ringing ears. It occurred to him that some of the doomed soldiers around him had gone to their deaths with less hysteria and terror than he had brought to the chase for this dog. Maybe it wasn’t just the dog, he thought, and grew calm. Maybe it was that little bitch, her crooked teeth and her brute of a father.

  It was dark and Barry gave himself up to it. A symphonic array of odors came from the ground with the cooling night, and he imagined the Confederate bones turning into hickory trees over the centuries. Shade, shelter from the wind, wood for ax handles, charcoal for barbecue. Bones.

  But, he thought, standing, that dog isn’t dead yet; and he resumed his walk. He regained open country somehow and walked in a gradual curve that he thought would return him to his car. Maybe his feet remembered the hills, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t care. His eyes recorded the increasing density of night until he could no longer see the ground under him. The moon rose and lit the far contours of things, but close up the world was in eclipse. He came to a pond. Only its surface could be seen like a sheet of silver hanging in midair. As he studied it, trying to figure out how to go around, the shapes of horses materialized on its surface. He knew they must be walking on the bank, but the bank itself was invisible, and the only knowledge of horses he had was the progress of their reflection in the still water. When the horses passed, he walked toward the water until he saw his own shape. He watched it disappear and knew he’d gone on around.

  Back in the bean field, Barry felt a mild wave of hysteria pass over him once more, one in which he imagined writing a memo to Royce about having been knee-deep in soybean futures, much to report, et cetera, et cetera; by the way, couldn’t seem to lay hands on Louisiana man’s dog, et cetera, et cetera. Hope dog-face girl’s teeth didn’t all fall out. More later, yrs, B. After which, he felt glumly merry and irresponsible.

  When he got to his car, it occurred to him that this had all happened a couple of miles from Tippett’s house. No great distance for a hyena like Bandit. So he drove over there, to find the house unlighted and silent. He walked to the door. A bark broke out and was muffled. Barry knocked. The door opened and Tippett said, “I thought you went to Louisiana.” Barry followed Tippett into the empty room. Tippett had a loose T-shirt on, and his pants were held by the top button only. Barry looked all around and saw nothing.

  “He come back?”

  “You lose that dog?” Something tapped across the floor in the next room. He doesn’t want to go to Louisiana, he thought, and he surely doesn’t want to go with me. A wave of peace came over him.

  “Yeah, I did,” said Barry. The old man studied him closely, studied his face and every little thing he did with his hands. Barry quit surveying the old man’s possessions and wondering what time it was somewhere else. “What do you suppose would make a trained dog just go off and leave like that?” Barry asked. He was playing along: he knew the dog was here.

  The old man made a sound in his throat, almost clearing it to speak something which must not be misunderstood. “Son,” he said, “one day you’ll understand that anything that’ll eat shit and fuck its own mother is liable to do anything.” Barry thought of the men down in the Confederate graveyard. He considered the teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter and his own “future.” Above all, he thought of how a dog could run so far that, like too many things, it never came back.

  LIKE A LEAF

  I’m underneath my small house in Thorne. The real-estate people call it a “starter” home, however late in life you buy one. It’s a modest house that gives you the feeling that either y
ou’re going places or that this won’t do. This starter home is different; this one is it. It’s perfect for a jerkwater town like Thorne.

  From under here, I can hear the neighbors talking. He is a successful man named Deke Crowley. His wife is away, and he is having an affair with the lady across the street, a sweet and exciting lady I’ve not met yet. Frequently he says to her, “I am going to impact on you, baby.” Today, they are at one of their many turning points.

  “I think I’m coming unglued,” she says. “Can’t we go someplace nice for a change?”

  She has a beautiful voice, and underneath the house I remember she is pretty. What am I doing here? I’m distributing bottle caps of arsenic for the rats that come up from the river and dispute the cats over trifles. I represent civilization in a small but real way, and when I hear him say “Maui,” I know he’s deceiving her and she’ll never get there. He’s going to use her up right here where she’s at.

  Deke Crowley laughs with wild relief. Once I saw him at the municipal pool, watching young girls. He was wearing trunks and allergy-warning dog tags. What a guy! To me he was like a crude foreigner or a gaucho.

  Anyway, I came down here because of the rats. Read your history: they carry Black Plague. Mrs. Crowley was on a Vegas excursion with the Thorne Symphony Club. When I get back inside, the flies are causing a broad dumb movement on the windows. We never had flies like this on the ranch. We had songbirds, apple blossoms, and no flies. My wife was alive then and saw to that. We didn’t impact, we loved each other. She had an aneurism let go while carding wool. She just nodded her pretty face and headed out. I sat there like a stupe.

  They came for her and I just knocked around the place trying to get it. I headed for town and started seeing the doctor. Things came together: I was able to locate a place to live in, catch the Series, and set up housekeeping. Plus, the Gulch, everyone agrees, is Thorne’s nicest neighborhood. A traffic violator is taken right aside and lined out quick. It’s a neighborhood where folks teach the dog to bring the paper to the porch, so a guy can sit back in his rocker and find out who’s making hamburger of the world. I was one of this area’s better cattlemen, and town life doesn’t come easy. Where I once had coyotes and bears, I now have rats. Where I once had the old-time marriages of my neighbors, I now have Impact Man poking a real sweet gal who never gets taken someplace nice.

  My eating became hit or miss. All I cared about was the World Series after a broken season. I was high and dry, and when you’re like that, you need someone or something to take you away. Death makes you different like the colored are different. I felt I was under the spell of what had happened to me. Then someone threw a bottle onto the field in the third or fourth game of the Series and almost hit the Yankee left fielder, Dave Winfield. I felt completely poisoned. I felt like a rat with a mouthful of bottle caps. All my sense of fairness was settled on Winfield, who is colored, like I felt having been in the company of death. Then Winfield couldn’t hit the ball anyway, and just when Reggie Jackson got his hitting back, what happens? He drops an easy pop fly.

  What were my wife and I discussing when she died? Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. It seems so small. Sometimes when I think how small our topic was, I feel the weight of my hair tearing at my face. I bought a youth bed to reduce the size of the unoccupied area. The doctor says because of the shaking, I get quite a little bit less rest per hour than the normal guy. Rapid eye movement, and so on.

  Truthfully speaking, part of me has always wanted to live in town. You hear the big milling at the switching yard and, on stormy nights, the transcontinental trucks reroute off the interstate, and it’s busy and kind of like a last-minute party at somebody’s house. The big outfits are parked all over with their engines running, and the heat shivers at the end of the stacks. The old people seem brave trying to get around on the ice: one fall and they’re through, but they keep chunking, going on forward with a whole heck of a lot of grit. That fact gives me a boost.

  And I love to window-shop. I go from window to window alongside people I don’t know. There’s never anything I want in there, but I feel good because I am excited when somebody picks out a daffy pair of shoes or a hat you wouldn’t put on your dog. My wife couldn’t understand this. Nature was a shrine to her. I wanted to see people more than she did. Sit around with just anybody and make smart remarks. Sometimes I’d pack the two of us into the hills. My wife would be in heaven. I’d want to buy a disguise and slip off to town and stare through the windows. That’s the thing about heaven. It comes in all sizes and shapes.

  Anyone in my position feels left behind. It’s normal. But you got to keep picking them up and throwing them; you have got to play the combinations or quit. What I’d like is a person, a person I could enjoy until she’s blue in the face. This, I believe. When the time comes, stand back from your television set.

  I don’t know why Doc keeps an office in the kind of place he does, which is merely the downstairs of a not-so-good house. I go to him because he is never busy. He claims this saves him the cost of a receptionist.

  Doc and I agree on one thing: it’s all in your head. The only exception would be aspirin. Because we believe it’s all in your head, we believe in immortality. Immortality is important to me because, without it, I don’t get to see my wife again. Or, on the lighter side, my dogs and horses. That’s all you need to know about the hereafter. The rest is for the professors, the eggheads who don’t have to make the payroll. We agree about my fling with the person. I hope to use Doc’s stethoscope to hear the speeding of the person’s heart. All this has a sporting side, like hunting coyotes. When Doc and I grow old and the end is in sight, we’re going to become addicted to opium. If we get our timing wrong, we’ll cure ourselves with aspirin. We plan to see all the shiny cities, then adios. We speak of cavalry firefights, Indian medicine, baseball, and pussy.

  Doc doesn’t come out from behind the desk. He squints, knowing I could lie, then listens. “My house in town is going to work fine. The attic has a swing-down ladder and you look from a round window up there into the backyards. You can hear the radios and see people. Sometimes couples have little shoving matches over odd things, starting the charcoal or the way the dog’s been acting. I wrote some of them down in a railroad seniority book to tell you. They seem to dry up quick.”

  “Take a trip.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then pack for one and don’t go.”

  “I can do that.” “Stay out of the wind. It makes people nervous, and this is a windy town. Do what you have to do. You can always find a phone booth, but get out of that wind when it picks up. And anytime you feel like falling silent, do it. Above all, don’t brood about women.”

  “Doc,” I say, “I’ve got a funny feeling about where I’m headed.”

  By hauling an end table out to the porch, despite that the weather is not quite up to it, and putting a chair behind it, I make a fine place for my microwave fettuccine Alfredo. I can also watch our world with curiosity and terror. If necessary, I can speak when spoken to, by sipping my ice water to keep the chalk from my mouth.

  A car pulls up in front of Crowleys’; Mrs. Crowley gets out with a small Samsonite and goes to the house. That saves me from calling a lot of travel agents. The world belongs to me.

  I begin to eat the fettuccine Alfredo, slow, spacing each mouthful. After eating about four inches of it, I see the lady from across the street, the person, on the irregular sidewalk, gently patting each bursting tree trunk as she comes. Since I am now practically a mute, I watch for visible things I can predict. And all I look for is her quick glance at Deke Crowley’s house and then a turn through her chain-link gate. I love that she is pretty and carries nothing, like the Chinese ladies Doc tells me about who achieve great beauty by teetering around on feet that have been bound. I feel I am listening to the sound of a big cornfield in springtime. My heart is an urgent thud. To my astonishment, she swings up her walk without a look. Her wantonness overpowers me. Impossible! Does
she not know the wife is home from Vegas?

  I look up and down the street before lobbing the fettuccine Alfredo to a mutt. He eats in jerking movements and stares at me like I’m going to take it back. Which I’m quite capable of doing, but won’t. I have a taste in my mouth like the one you get in those frantic close-ins hunting coyotes. Sometimes when I told my wife I felt this way, she was touched. She said I had absolutely no secret life. The sad thing is, I probably don’t. But that look when the dogs are onto a coyote, you never forget it.

  I begin sleeping in the attic. I am alone and not at full strength, so this way I feel safer. I don’t have to answer door or phone. I can see around the neighborhood better, and I have the basic timing of everybody’s day down pat. For example, the lady goes to work on time but comes home at a different hour every day. Does this suggest that she is a carefree person to whom time means nothing or who is, perhaps, opposed to time’s effects and therefore defiant about regularity? I don’t know.

  Before I realize it, I am window-shopping again. Each day there is more in the air, more excitement among the shoppers, who seem to spill off the windows into the doors of the stores. The sun is out and I stand before the things my wife would never buy, not risqué things but things that wouldn’t stand up. She seems very far away now. But when people come to my store window, I sense a warmth that is like friendship. Anytime I feel uncomfortable in front of a particular store, I move to sporting goods, where it is clear that I am okay, and besides, Doc is fixing me. My docile staring comes from the last word in tedium: guns and ammo, compound bows, fishing rods.

  When I say that I am okay, I mean that I am happy in the company of most people. What is wrong with me comes from my wife having unexpectedly died and from my having read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson when my doctor and I were boning up on immortality. But I am watching the street, and something will turn up. In the concise movements of the person I’m most interested in, and in the irregularity of her returns, which she certainly despises, I sense a glow directed toward me, the kind of light in a desolate place that guides a traveler still yearning for a destination.