Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “I met a girl at that little gift shop who wanted to meet you. Tina. Said she could come out. I’m sure she’ll sleep with you.”

  “I’ll have to look into it,” Bill said wanly. His brothers weren’t like this. They’d show merriment for Tina. They’d want to get them a little and not think it over. Bill reached across and took Ellen’s hand. It was strong. It weighed something. He wished she wouldn’t smile when she looked at him. She wasn’t pornographic. Sometimes when he went volitionless, her eyes glittered as though a little victory were at hand. What victory? Watching someone pull himself out of a hole?

  A small cloudburst hit the trailer, the kind you can see all the way around in the mountains. Bill got up to look out. It hit so suddenly that the drops of water threw dust in the air. His two horses swiveled into the wind, their tails blown up along their flanks. Then it stopped and Bill opened the door to let the air, fragrant with cedar, fill the trailer. He sat down and refilled their ice water.

  “Let’s do something this year before it’s too late,” Bill said.

  “For example?”

  “I’d like to go to Monticello,” said Bill. But suddenly he could not understand why it had to be impossible for him and Ellen to be happy in an ordinary way. Then it subsided. Monticello went in one ear and out the other.

  “Why don’t we make a real trip,” he said. “We’ll take the horses and go to Texas. That’ll get us south and sort of east. We’ll be almost there.”

  “The Texans will be funny. We can go to the Alamo.”

  “If it’s all right, I’d like to visit Bunker Hill.”

  “Then let’s leave our horses at home.”

  “I don’t feel like eating,” said Bill.

  “I really can’t appeal to your needs, can I?” said Ellen.

  But as the days went by, the trip did acquire some actuality. They bought a road atlas, even though Bill had often said the road atlas had ruined American life. But the road atlas made it clear that their trip was pretty much of a zigzag. Still, they spent frequent evenings in the trailer foreseeing the meaning of their destinations.

  * * *

  —

  John and Walter asked if they could all have a drink at the hotel. When they got there, Bill was already seated next to the pensioners in the lobby. An old cowboy with a tray bolted to his electric wheelchair shot in and out of the bar delivering drinks. The three sat around a table that gave them some distance from others and moved their whiskey thoughtfully on coasters like Ouija styluses. John produced a sentimental appearance in his bow tie, his hair parted closer to the crown than was currently fashionable. Walter, astonished gull-wing eyebrows and dark jowels, looked the power broker he was with his wide tie and grim suit. They weren’t such bad fellows, Bill thought. They have the advantage of the here and now, and Bill was man enough not to blame his slipping gears on them.

  “What’s the deal on the cows?” Walter asked.

  “I’m going to can about thirty head.”

  “How come?”

  “Old, dry.”

  “Ship all the steer calves?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bill said. “The market’s not very good, but it has to get some better. Fifty-five counties in drought relief. A lot of cattle went through early. It’ll be back a little by fall. But I want to hold the heifers over and sell them as replacements. I don’t see two droughts in a row.”

  “What’ll you do after you ship? You going to feed them yourself?” Walter said with an ironic smile, his mouth left of center.

  “No, Walter. I’m going to hire that out,” Bill almost shouted.

  “Easy, big feller,” said Walter. “Be cool.”

  “Refill?” asked John, holding his arm up. A little circular gesture told the old cowboy to scoot into the atmospheric lighting of the bar. John began to talk with his air of halting introspection. He was very likely to say something specious, but the appearance of its having been tugged from the depths of consideration made him difficult to contradict.

  “Walt and I have been kind of forging ahead all year as though we had your proxy.”

  “So you have,” Bill said. He gave a vast sigh.

  “We take it that things can’t stagnate altogether and the day will come when you’ll want to get a grip, but that day is not here now.”

  “That sort of describes it,” Bill said. “And it sort of doesn’t. I see the three of us as being fortunate, don’t you?”

  “What we have long understood,” said Walter, “is that you feel a mandate for greater meaning, and we don’t oppose that. John and me are just two little old MBAs. We want more of what we’ve got, and we’re too old to change. When we get this thing right, we—or one of us—might run for office.”

  “But,” John cut in, “by way of reassuring you, Bill. We’re thriving on all the fronts we have chosen to fight on.”

  “Oh, yeah? What about the gasohol plant?”

  “We dialed it down to an enriched feeder deal. The pig guys are knocking our door down.”

  “I thought maybe you trapped yourself there. Do you want to buy me out?”

  “Not necessarily,” said John, indenting the bows of his tie. “No doubt we would disagree about valuation.”

  As soon as John began to demur, sinking his chin into the softness of his neck, Walter cut across and said, “Let’s say that’s the case. No one was ever killed by a hypothesis.”

  “Ten times earnings,” Bill said.

  John’s and Walter’s disparaging chuckles were hair-trigger affairs that gave them away better than anything Bill could have made up. Bill saw himself as Jefferson while John and Walter were the twin halves of Hamilton’s brain.

  “Come on, you crooks, give me a number,” said Bill, and his brothers raised their eyes to the plaster ceiling. Just then, Bill felt a gust of power in the room, a brief touch of the thing that held these men’s interest, and he did not necessarily despise it any more than he would despise weather. If he ever worked it out with Ellen, he might not want to have mishandled this. “The trouble with this sort of thing,” said Bill, “is you never know who the Honest Johns are, do you? I mean, we hang it on profits, and the company suddenly goes into a long-range development plan, and the profits go down.”

  Walter was hot. “How do you go into long-range development retailing RVs and selling pig feed?”

  “You’d find a way,” said Bill.

  Before things got out of hand, John spoke up. “You’ve got the performance to date. Our little-bitty deal couldn’t stand hostility. We could never move around with that hanging over us.”

  “Rest assured the cows aren’t going into long-range development,” said Bill. “I’m holding my end down.”

  “Don’t be a son of a bitch,” said Walter. Walter didn’t give a damn right now, and you had to listen to him.

  “It’s clear the both of you view me as a problem.”

  “No, we don’t,” John chimed in. “But your search for meaning is a bore.”

  Bill felt trapped by the characterization. These brutes were sincere. Walter and John got to their feet. This was going nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  Bill had hired an acid casualty to feed cattle for him, an ideal hand who never looked to the right or the left and kept his mind firmly on a job it was very hard for most people to keep their minds on. He called himself Waylon Remington, though Bill was quite sure that was not really his name. All that was left of Waylon’s hairdo from the good-time days was a long goatee. He talked to himself.

  It had taken Bill a long time to get used to lining Waylon Remington out on a job. He would give Waylon his instructions and get no reaction whatsoever. It was fairly disconcerting until Bill realized that Waylon heard him perfectly well and would act as instructed. But Bill felt very solitary telling him what to do as though making a speech in an empty room.

  Today, he explained to Waylon Remington how he wanted his stackyard arranged. “Just get the big hay panels from near th
e house and wire them up in a square around the stack. Make sure your entryway is on level ground so you can get in and out with the tractor.” Bill and Waylon were driving down through the hay meadow as Bill spoke. “And use plenty of steel stakes on those panels around the entry, or the whole shitaree will fall down. Remember you have to drive that tractor all the way around the stack to get ahold of the round bales.” Waylon Remington stared at the hood ornament.

  “Now,” said Bill as they reached the irrigation headgate, “let’s get out here.” The two got out and went to the flume. It was about half full. The water took off toward the south, split up a couple of times, and fanned onto the field. “Now, Waylon.” Bill glanced over at Waylon Remington, just two feet away. His mouth was open, and Bill could hear the breath in his teeth; his lower lip was cracked and dry. “I need for you to be moving those dams just once a day from now on because we’re starting to lose our water for the year. Keep moving them twelve steps at a time but one time a day instead of three.”

  He went down alongside the Parshall flume. “Keep track of these numbers on the gauge. If you see a big change, either up or down, come get me, and we’ll read the tables and make another plan. You never know when they’ll shut down the center pivots upstream. So, it could change…Waylon?”

  Bill wanted to get the horses, but he wasn’t confident Waylon could keep a horse moving; so he put the truck into four-wheel drive and took him around four or five more projects. Tighten about a mile and a half of fence, adding clips and stays as he went. Fix the chain in the manure spreader. Add hydraulic fluid to the front-end loader and hit all the grease zerks. They drove past the salt blocks set out in old tractor tires, checked fly rubs, tanks, and springs. This didn’t require Bill to talk, and it got pretty quiet in the cab. Then Waylon Remington began to hum. He hummed the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Bill began to panic. Could he really leave?

  * * *

  —

  Bill put five yearlings into the pen and warmed up Red Dust Number Seven in front of them. The young horse was cinchy and liable to buck the first few minutes. He stopped him and rolled him back a couple of times.

  Bill trotted Red in a circle. He had him in a twisted wire snaffle and draw reins, and he kept Red’s head just flexed enough that he could see the glint of his eye on the inside of the circle. Red was getting so that if Bill took a deep seat and moved his feet forward in the stirrups he would start down into his stop. Then he’d likely as not run his head up and be piggy about turning. This was where Bill thought he was the roughest. Red kind of straightened up when he had a cow in front of him.

  Bill cut a yearling out of the small herd. The steer just stopped and took things in. The steer moved, and Red boiled over, squealing and running off. Bill took a light hold of him, rode him in a big circle, then back to the same place on the steer. This time, Red lowered himself and waited; and when the cow moved, he sat right hard on his hocks, broke off, stopped hard, and came back inside the cow. Now he was working, his ears forward, his eyes bright. This little horse was such a cow horse; he sometimes couldn’t stand the pressure he put on himself. The steer then threw a number 9 in his tail and bolted. Red stopped it right in front of the herd. He was low all over, ready to move anywhere. Bill tipped his head and saw the glint: of eye and the bright flare at his nostrils. Bill cut another cow.

  This one traveled more and let Bill free Red, moving fast across the pen. Bill was pleased to be reminded that this was a horse you could call on and use. After a minute more, Red was blowing, and Bill put his hand down on his neck to release him.

  The colt’s head came up as though he were emerging from a dream, and he looked around. Bill wished he never had to be anywhere else.

  * * *

  —

  First, they were going to drive, then a nervousness about being gone so long came over them. Bill said, “Why are we going on this trip anyway?”

  “I wanted to go to the Alamo, and then you wanted to go to Monticello, I think, and Bunker Hill.”

  “What happened to that?”

  “You said the Texans would be funny and let’s skip Texas. And then we were going to go—I don’t know, something about Thomas Jefferson.”

  “That seems inappropriate. We’d spend the whole time explaining to strangers what we were doing.”

  “Well, we’ll just go somewhere else,” Ellen said. She was looking long and hard at Bill, who was clearly in some kind of turmoil. He knew that, even while they talked, his brothers were making things happen. Bill didn’t seem to want what he and his brothers owned, but he didn’t want it taken away.

  “I don’t know about Monticello,” he said. “It’s just a big house. The Alamo and Bunker Hill speak for themselves.” Bill felt serious failure very close now.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m going to take this trip.” In her green cotton shirt, she seemed mighty. Bill didn’t say anything. “You ought to come, Bill. But I’m beginning to think you won’t.”

  “I’m going to miss you. You think I’ve just quit, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know whether you have or not,” she said. “But something’s got to give. What’d you do with the road atlas?”

  FLIGHT

  During bird season, dogs circle each other in my kitchen, shell vests are piled in the mudroom, all drains are clogged with feathers, and hunters work up hangover remedies at the icebox. As a diurnal man, I gloat at these presences, estimating who will and who will not shoot well.

  This year was different in that Dan Ashaway arrived seriously ill. Yet this morning, he was nearly the only clear-eyed man in the kitchen. He helped make the vast breakfast of grouse hash, eggs, juice, and coffee. Bill Upton and his brother, Jerry, who were miserable, loaded dogs and made a penitentially early start. I pushed away some dishes and lit a breakfast cigar. Dan refilled our coffee and sat down. We’ve hunted birds together for years. I live here, and Dan flies in from Philadelphia. Anyway, this seemed like the moment. “How bad off are you?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to get well,” said Dan directly, shrugging and dropping his hands to the arms of his chair. That was that. “Let’s get started.”

  We took Dan’s dogs at his insistence. They jumped into the aluminum boxes on the back of the truck when he said, “Load”: Bonny, a liver-and-white female, and Sally, a small bitch with a banded face. These were—I should say are—two dead-broke pointers who found birds and retrieved without much handling. Dan didn’t even own a whistle.

  As we drove toward Roundup, the entire pressure of my thoughts was of how remarkable it was to be alive. It seemed a strange and merry realization. The dogs rode so quietly I had occasion to remember when Bonny was a pup and yodeled in her box, drawing stares in all the towns. Since then she had quieted down and grown solid at her job. She and Sally had hunted everywhere from Albany, Georgia, to Wilsall, Montana. Sally was born broke, but Bonny had the better nose.

  We drove between two ranges of desertic mountains, low ranges without snow or evergreens. Section fences climbed infrequently and disappeared over the top or into blue sky. There was one little band of cattle trailed by a cowboy and a dog, the only signs of life. Dan was pressing sixteen-gauge shells into the elastic loops of his cartridge belt. He was wearing blue policeman’s suspenders and a brown felt hat, a businessman’s worn-out Dobbs.

  We watched a harrier course the ground under a bluff, sharp-tailed grouse jumping in his wake. The harrier missed a half dozen, wheeled on one wing tip, and nailed a bird in a pop of down and feathers. As we resumed driving, the hawk was hooded over its prey, stripping meat from the breast.

  Every time the dirt road climbed to a new vantage point, the country changed. For a long time, a green creek in a tunnel of willows was alongside us; then it went off under a bridge, and we climbed away to the north. When we came out of the low ground, there seemed no end to the country before us: a great wide prairie with contours as unquestionable as the sea. There were buttes pried up from its surfac
e and yawning coulees with streaks of brush where the springs were. We had to abandon logic to stop and leave the truck behind. Dan beamed and said, “Here’s the spot for a big nap.” The remark startled me. “Have we crossed the stagecoach road?” Dan asked.

  “Couple miles back.”

  “Where did we jump all those sage hens in 1965?”

  “Right where the stagecoach road passed the old hotel.” Dan had awarded himself a little English sixteen-gauge for graduating from Wharton that year. It was in the gun rack behind our heads now, the bluing gone and its hinge pin shot loose, groove in the stock where he used it to hold down barbed wire when climbing fences.

  “It’s amazing we found anything,” said Dan from afar, “with the kind of run-off dog we had. Rip Tide. You had to preach religion to Rip every hundred yards or he’d leave us. Remember? I can’t believe we fed that common bastard.” Rip Tide was a dog with no talent, loyalty, or affection, a dog we swore would drive us to racket sports. Dan gave him away in Georgia, and he made a great horseback dog, just too much for guys on foot.

  “He found the sage hens.”

  “But when we got on the back side of the Little Snowies, remember? He went right through all those sharptails like a train. We should have had deer rifles. A real wonder dog. I wonder where he is. I wonder what he’s doing. Nineteen sixty-five. I’ll be damned.”

  The stagecoach road came in around from the east again, and we stopped: two modest ruts heading into the hills. We released the dogs and followed the road around for half an hour. It took us past an old buffalo wallow filled with water. Some teal got up into the wind and wheeled off over the prairie.

  About a mile later the dogs went on point. It was hard to say who struck and who backed. Sally cat-walked a little, relocated, and stopped; then Bonny honored her point. So we knew we had moving birds and got up on them fast. The dogs stayed staunch, and the long covey rise went off like something tearing. I killed a going-away, and Dan made a clean left and right. It was nice to be reminded of his strong heads-up shooting. I always crawled all over my gun and lost some quickness, too much waterfowling when I was young. Dan had never been out of the uplands and had speed to show for it.