Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Neither can I,” said Dean, feeling the absurdity of his subdued reply. He hadn’t seen her in a decade, and she was making him nervous. Gay Nell took him by the arm as though she needed it for support. “I haven’t seen this man since spring break in nineteen-what.” Terry Turpin appeared at the end of the front hall and blocked off most of its light. He took in his wife, clinging to Dean’s arm. “A little wine,” he said, “perhaps a couple of candles?”

  Dean thrust out his free hand. “Dean Robinson,” he said. “How do you do?”

  “I’m getting there, pardner,” said Terry Turpin, looking at the hand and then taking it. Terry still seemed like the football star he had been. Gay Nell had always had a football player, and this was certainly the big one. Dean had been a football player too, a disconsolate benchwarmer. Terry’s face was undisguised by its contemporary cherubic haircut, his thighs by his vast slacks. He smiled at Edward without shaking his hand and turned to lead them into the living room. Dean, behind him, marveled at the expanse of his back. But the face was most astonishing: handsome, it was nevertheless the face of a Visigoth with tiny incongruous ears.

  A television glowed silently in the living room, running national news, and when the sports came on, Terry took a remote channel changer from his pocket, flipped on the volume, got the scores, and turned it down again. Terry didn’t pour them drinks, but he went to the bottles and named off the brands. Then he went to the half-size refrigerator, pulled open the door, and said, “Ice.”

  “You’ve really made this place your own,” Edward said, gazing around. Is that a compliment? Dean wondered. Probably just amiable pandering, something he needed to learn.

  “It is our own,” said Terry.

  Edward turned to Dean, but without full eye contact. “Terry has an air charter service that fills a gap.”

  “A gap?” said Terry. “The Northern Rockies?” Terry’s excitement over this point gave Dean a chance to look at Gay Nell, still as pretty as when they had dated, holing up here and there. She had a long chestnut braid down the middle of her back and bright, black eyes that missed nothing. At one time, she had seemed to be astonished at everything she heard, a fizzy vitality that brought attention to herself. That astonishment had been modulated to the point that it was now a mystery whether she was hearing any of this at all, the bursts of enthusiasm less frequent, the absent gaze the more characteristic. Dean felt he interested her less now that flannel was a larger part of his day.

  They moved like a drill team to the dining room. Next to the table was a vast window with a white grid overlay to suggest multiple panes. A pond had been dug out and landscaped, and the perfection of its grassy banks and evenly spaced, languorous willows depressed Dean. A silent woman in an apron began to serve the meal. Dean was in a swoon to find his old crush on Gay Nell still intact, though he missed the commode-hugging party girl she’d once been.

  “Well,” said Gay Nell, raising her glass. “How good to see everyone so healthy and so prosperous!” They all raised their glasses. The burgundy made red shadows on the tablecloth. Dean had his throbbing hand on Gay Nell’s leg. Edward stared at him and he removed it. “And how thrilled we are to have you at our table tonight.” Dean knew his Gay Nell; it took little to get her lubricating.

  “You seem quiet,” said Terry to Dean. I wonder if he noticed, Dean thought, looking back at the slab face with its small ears and the corded neck set about with alpaca. Gay Nell seemed serene, practically sleepy.

  “Dean has learned restraint since rising to partnership. It’s very becoming.” No one patronized like an elder statesman better than Edward.

  “Partner!” said Gay Nell. Only a pretty woman could chance a screech like this one. Dean jumped and Terry swung his big bovine face in the direction of his wife who all but cowered as she spun one of her several rings.

  “They’ve got me on a trial basis. I could be sent down anytime.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” said Edward. “It’s quite final. That’s the charm.”

  “We haven’t got titles in my racket,” said Terry. “Just the balance sheet and a five-year plan.”

  Dean listened, nodding mechanically, and asked himself how Terry even got anyone to ride in his airplanes. He thought there would be a polite way to ask the question, but feared hearing all too clearly how America was beating a path to his hangar. And he sensed something else: that Terry could be bridling at the idea that a smooth transition was under way here, from Edward, the firm’s certified gray eminence, to a rising star whose performance might be limited by an on-the-job-training atmosphere. Even Dean couldn’t guess how much of this might be true. He dropped the thought because it led nowhere, and it was difficult to think of anything more than Gay Nell’s leg, the yellow dress with its wet handprint.

  Dinner seemed to go on and on, a less attractive form of nourishment, thought Dean, than an IV bottle. The work at hand was the airing of Terry’s dream of “tying up the big open.” When Dean raised his eyebrows slightly at this notion and looked across at Gay Nell, he realized she watched his lips, the very ones that had just said “big open,” with rapture. It was a smoke screen for the leg operation and drew them closer in complicity. As she rippled her thigh he reexamined his theory that women were wild animals who preyed on little furry mammals such as men.

  Nevertheless, this dinner, where something was meant to happen, reminded Dean of his poor preparation for a life of enterprise. He had managed to reach maturity still thinking that you sat down to dinner only in order to get something to eat. Any kind of ceremony, it turned out, ruined his appetite. Like a child panicked by broccoli, he stole a glance at his unfinished meal.

  Edward drove Dean back to his car in silence. It was late enough that the streets were quiet. Then, as if to emphasize his silence, Edward turned on the radio. When they got to Dean’s car, Edward said, “You didn’t do well, Dean.” Edward’s face looked very serious. “And you had your hand on the leg of the client’s wife. Good night.”

  Dean was in shock. After he had let himself into his apartment, he asked himself if he were crazy—he could think about nothing but Gay Nell and what he had viewed with pride as his courage that night—and decided that, well, maybe he was. He danced alone to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music,” the weight of the partnership in direct conflict with the Jamaican beat.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday, awkwardness between Dean and Edward could be felt throughout the office. It was equally certain to Dean that it was Edward’s intention that this be so. They stopped outside the firm’s library for the usual lighthearted word, and Edward gave him, he thought, rather a look. “How was your weekend?”

  “It was all right,” said Dean. “It was fine. Watched football. Took some dry cleaning. Uneventful.”

  “I see.”

  “Everything improved once the part with your client was behind me.”

  “Terry is a good client,” said Edward boring into Dean with his stare.

  The chill expanded from Edward to other key lawyers in three days, and the feeling that he was welcome was gone. Dean had plenty of work to do and his first thought was to do that, do it well in a blaze of productivity. Instead he called Gay Nell with the door of his office wide open. “I still love you,” he said.

  “Is that so,” she inquired. “Strangest call of the year.” When he hung up the phone, he felt ruin rising around him. He called Edward’s office. “Edward, don’t go around to your cronies and teach them to gaze at me like an undisciplined schoolboy. I don’t enjoy it. Even though I’m a partner in the firm, it’s taken all the strength I possess to stay interested in this inane profession in the first place.” Edward breathed on the other end in astonishment. Dean hung up, pressing the phone into the cradle and holding it down with both hands. He began to stroll the office, speaking out loud. “Is there some sort of decertification procedure for new partners?”

  Edward rang up on the interoffice line.
“Terry in touch this a.m. Might go away.”

  “Good riddance. Less shit work for you.”

  In just moments, Edward was in the doorway, his face moving toward him. It was hypnotic. Was Edward on his feet? Was Dean’s own chair gliding? Edward’s face came forward, and as it became a mask, one that made a final and mythic ceremony of disappointment, an emotion too small to have ever held the attention of an important tribe. “You evil puke,” said the mask. “We’ll find a way to cut off your balls.” This was the Edward Hooper that Dean had always heard about.

  * * *

  —

  But something quite different began to happen. Word got out that Dean had stood up to his client. In his despair, he had called Terry and told him to piss up a rope. Evan Crow, an estate planner, seized Dean’s hand silently one afternoon. And when Dean suggested the whole thing didn’t sit very well with Edward Hooper, Evan got out his actuarial tables and, massaging the bridge of his nose, pointed out that Edward wouldn’t live long enough to make his opinion matter. Other lawyers in the firm stopped by, leaned into his office doorway clutching papers, and winked or left brief encouraging words that could be reinterpreted in a pinch. “Giving my all for love,” Dean reflected, “seems merely to have advanced my career.”

  Finally, he bumped into Hooper once again. “Edward,” said Dean, “I don’t know if you realize how low the water supplies are in the Prairie Provinces. But in case you don’t know or don’t want to, let me tell you that the old potholes that made such a lovely nursery for waterfowl are very much dried up. Wheat farmers are draining the wetlands in the old duck factory.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the punch line?”

  “Do as you wish,” Dean drawled. “But I think that it is very much in your best interests if you never shoot another duck.”

  Early one morning, before the coffee was made, before the messages from the day before were distributed through the offices and the informal chats had died out in the corridors, Dean’s phone rang. It was Edward Hooper. Dean hadn’t talked to him in months.

  “Can you come down?”

  Dean had just put the jacket of his suit over the back of his chair. He started to put it back on but, on second thought, ambled out the door toward Edward’s office in his shirtsleeves, tie tugged to one side. He gave the closed door a single rap. One hand in his pocket, he eased the door open. Edward was at his desk. Under a wall of antique duck decoys sat Terry Turpin, elbows on the arms of a Windsor chair, fingers laced so that he could brace his front teeth on the balls of his thumbs. He seemed thoughtful. He tipped his face up and smiled with a vast owlish raising of his brows as if to say, Where’s the end to all this surprise?

  “Terry,” said Edward measuredly, “asked to see you.”

  “My size has gotten to where I need to see everybody,” Terry said, illustrating the idea of size with vast upturned mitts.

  “I’d heard you were clear up to Alberta,” said Dean.

  “And the desert the other way.”

  “How’s Gay Nell?”

  “She’s off to the coast for a cooking seminar. And we bought us a little getaway in Arizona.”

  “All that cactus.” Dean sighed, hinting most gently that going to Arizona might not be the brightest idea in the world.

  “Let’s come to order,” Edward broke in. “I think Terry is looking for a little perspective on his air freight and charter service.”

  “No, Edward,” said Terry patiently. “On everything.”

  “I meant that,” said Edward.

  “Ed, try to stay one jump ahead of me, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Edward, looking into the papers in his lap.

  Sometimes, Dean thought, silence can have such purity. It was so quiet in the room, like the silence of a house in winter when the furnace quits. Edward got to his feet slowly. He’s going to leave this building, thought Dean.

  Edward shaped and adjusted the papers in his hand. He looked at them and squared up their corners. He set them on the desk. He gave Terry a small, almost-Oriental smile. “Goodbye,” he said, “you deserve each other.” He sauntered out, his gait peculiarly loosened.

  “Well, he looked happy,” said Terry with a pained expression. “What do you suppose he meant by that? Am I following this?”

  THE ROAD ATLAS

  Across the way, a woman was posting the special in the window of the hotel. It was hot all along the street, and the sky was hazy from the evaporation of irrigated fields. Bill Berryhill came out of his brothers’ office and looked for his car. He was wondering why he could not get through a common business discussion with them without talk of level playing fields, a smoking gun, a hand that would not tremble, who was on board, and what was on line. When he got up from the table and said he had other things to do, Walter, the eldest brother, took the cold cigar from his lips and dangled it reflectively.

  “Billy,” he said, “this is a family. Without your interest we’re clear to the axle. What are we going to do?”

  Bill enjoyed the iridescence of this sort of thing and never meant to bring it to a stop. Walter was being a little bit dull, though, looking at Bill’s eyes for his answer.

  “I’m not a team player,” said Bill. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

  The middle brother, John, wearing a bow tie and blazer, busied himself with papers, jerked his chin with a laugh.

  “Where does that leave us?” John asked, clearly expecting no sane reply.

  “You’ll just have to thumb it in soft,” said Bill.

  He found his car next to the hardware store, a pink parking ticket fluttering under the windshield wiper. Beneath the other wiper blade, old tickets curled and weathered. The car, a Cadillac of a certain age, had a tall antenna on its roof. Inside, a big radio was bolted to the dash with galvanized brackets. Bill Berryhill relied on this for his cattle and commodity reports. A border collie slept on the backseat, among receipts, mineral blocks, and rolls of barbed wire. He had a saddle in the trunk.

  I seem to lose my energy in those meetings, Bill thought. He fished a Milk-Bone out of the glove box, and the border collie got to her feet. “Here, Elaine,” he said and reached it back. She snapped it away from him and he started the car. A glow of irrigation steam hung over everything. A breeze, an August breeze, would make it more comfortable but less beautiful. A woman ambled by, loosening the armholes of her wash dress. Bill angled the vent window at himself and drove through town, dialing at the big radio. He swept through the band before finding Omaha; he slumped down and took in the numbers.

  He drove way out north of Thorne and up through the sage flats to his trailer house, trying to hit the Maxwell House can with his snoose. The trailer sat on a flat of land under a bright white rim of rock. It seemed to belong there. Bill had improved a spring above the house with a collection box. A chain-link kennel and a horse corral had shelters with a steel feeder for hay. He had his cutting horse in there and a using horse. The cutting horse was called Red Dust Number Seven, and the using horse was called Louie Louie. There was a window box with some dope plants and a neat row of mountain ash around the front of the trailer. On the rimrock above the trailer sat the satellite dish, and it provided great reception for Bill’s favorite shows: Wimbledon, the World Series, the Kentucky Derby, the America’s Cup, prizefights, and elections. He went inside shooing flies as he went.

  He turned on CNN for the news loop and called Ellen on the phone and asked her for lunch. He started a small sandwich assembly line. “As against apathy,” he told himself, “I have the change of seasons, the flowing waters, and the possible divestiture of my brothers.” Bill had wanted a sensible mix of conservative investments he wouldn’t have to think about. But John and Walter had gotten them into an RV distributor, a cow herd, a gasohol plant, and a grain elevator. Bill wasn’t interested in these going concerns, and he felt guilty about shirking all the fellow feeling. If only he could interest himself in keeping up with the Joneses, he could head off the troubling clouds.


  From the window over the sink, he could see two irrigators cross the hillside carrying rolled-up dams on their shoulders; the ends of the fabric blew in the drying wind. One man had a shovel, and a small red-heeler dog bounced behind them.

  Maybe Ellen and I can make something out of all this, he thought.

  Bill made the sandwiches. News briefs from the theater-sized screen threw parti-colored shadows around the trailer walls. Quarterlies piled by the recliner chair were wedged inside each other to mark the places Bill had left off. Ellen knocked on the door and came in. Bill was putting the lunch on the table. When she closed the door, the aluminum walls shook. “How are you?”

  “I’m great,” she said. She was a strong-featured brunette in her late twenties. Her hands were coarsened by outside work, but it made her more attractive, a widow. She came for lunch fairly often and sat right down and began eating. They each liked ice water, and Bill put a chiming pitcher of it on the table. He gazed around at the condiments. She reached him the Tabasco from behind the ice-water pitcher. They ate in relaxed silence. This is really nice, thought Bill. “I’m not getting anywhere with my brothers and it’s my fault,” he said. “Goddamn it, this is Big Sky Country, this is the American West. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “It’s a problem if you’re so defeated by it.”

  Bill wished they could make love after lunch. All energy would pass to his abdominal nerves. But it was out of the question. Volition would fill the air. And it seemed he didn’t want that. Bill and Ellen had a lot in common, not as much as Bill would wish, but many things: a love of reading, wryness, superfluous lives on land that had gone up in value while losing its utility. It could seem to him that her bereavement was her real location. She sustained in her actual home the air of a life lived elsewhere, just as Bill’s education had removed him. More than that, they faced lives that could be behind them. Bill thought that while it terrified him, it might well have consoled Ellen to know that the struggle for love and wholeness did not have to be gone through again. He even thought it was mean-spirited to view her beauty and merit as things wasted because they were not offered up to use. Still, all such considerations produced cloudiness and an irresolute foreground.