Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  But one shanty revealed a flickering light, and to it I attached all my hopes. At its door, I made out voices, and I stopped before knocking. They were voices from my classroom, and I listened as if dreaming to what sounded like a quarrel. First the drum major, cocky and bantering. The other seemed to plead and whimper and was, of course, Mrs. Andrews. And then there were different sounds, less precise than words. I had no business knowing what I knew.

  I landed a long way from where I’d put on my skates and was obliged to traverse a considerable distance on my blades, tottering upon pickerel grass, water-rounded glass shards, and pebbles, waving my arms around for balance while thanking everything around me for further days on earth. But in a scrap of tangled beechwoods, these pious thoughts soon crumbled before my lurid new vision. Light from the small houses that lined the narrow road to the shore made of my flailing progress wild shadows in the leafless trees. I heard dogs barking behind closed doors, and one homeowner let his beagle out while watching me from his porch. I tried to manage my movements, but I couldn’t walk normally, nor could an observer see that I was wearing skates. The beagle approached to within ten feet and sat down, emitting a single reflexive bark as I passed his lawn. The owner remained on his porch and in silence watched me go by.

  I didn’t go on the ice again that winter. It seemed there were better things to do. As the days grew longer, I often saw the drum major starting his paper route as I got home from mine. We didn’t speak, but my customers got the news on time.

  OLD FRIENDS

  John Briggs was made aware of the fact that some sort of problem existed for his friend and former schoolmate Erik Faucher by sheer coincidence. A request for news came from the class secretary, Everett Hoyt, who had in the thirty years since they’d graduated from Yale hardly set foot out of New Haven. With ancestors buried at the old Center Church in spitting distance of both the regicide Dixwell and Benedict Arnold’s wife, Hoyt was paralyzed by a sense of generational inertia. It was said that if he hadn’t gotten into Yale, he would not have gone to college at all but would have remained at home, waiting to bury his parents. Now, in place of any real social life, he edited the newsletter, often accompanying his requests with small indiscretions delivered with a certain giddiness—which he called Entre News—concerning marital failure or business malfeasance, and they almost never made it into the alumni letter.

  Hoyt phoned John Briggs at his summer home in Montana, on a nondescript piece of prairie inherited from a farmer uncle, and, while pretending to hunt up class news, insinuated that Erik Faucher, having embezzled a fortune from a bank in Boston, had gone into hiding.

  “I have heard through private sources that our class scofflaw is now headed your way.”

  Briggs waited for the giggle to subside. “I certainly hope so,” he snapped. “I’ve missed Erik.” But he began to worry that Erik might actually come.

  “See what you can do,” Hoyt sang.

  “I don’t understand that remark, Everett.”

  “Perhaps it will come to you.”

  “I’ll let you know if it does.”

  Faucher’s ex-wife, Carol, called around five in the morning, having declined to account for the time change. “How very nice to hear your voice,” said Briggs, producing a cold laugh from Carol. “How are you?”

  “I’m calling about Erik. He has not been behaving sensibly at all, some very odd things to say the least.”

  Briggs absorbed this in silence. He knew if he said anything at all, he’d have to stand up for Faucher, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “Carol, you’ve been divorced a long time,” he said finally.

  “We have mutual interests. I don’t know what sort of plan he has in place. And there’s Elizabeth.” Elizabeth was their daughter.

  “I’m sure he’s made a very sensible plan.”

  “I don’t want Elizabeth to wind up sleeping in her car. Or me, for that matter.”

  “I don’t think we should argue.” This was in response to her tone.

  “Did I say we should? I’m saying, Help. I’m saying, It’s about time you did.” When Briggs failed to reply, she added, “I know where he’s going and who to put on his trail.”

  Briggs’s friendship with Faucher had been long and intermittent. Arbitrarily assigned as roommates at the boarding school they’d attended before Yale, they had become lifelong friends without ever getting over the fact that their discomfort with each other occasionally boiled over into detestation. Sometime earlier they had been sold loyalty much as the far-fetched basics of religion are sold to the credulous. When Briggs was in his twenties and had sunk everything into a perfectly legitimate though very small mining company in Alberta with excellent long-term prospects but ruinously expensive short-term requirements, Erik rescued him from bankruptcy by finding a buyer who bought Briggs out at a price that restored his investment and even gave him a small profit to accompany this dangerous lesson. Erik explained that he’d had to waste a valuable quid pro quo on this and waved his finger in Briggs’s face.

  When Erik was pulled from the second story of a burning whorehouse on assignment for UNESCO as part of a Boston Congregationalists’ outreach to hungry Guatemalans, Briggs made a desperate stand to keep the matter out of the newspapers and saw that nettlesome citations on his dossier were expunged.

  Against these decades of loyalty, they seemed to search for an unforgivable trait in each other that would relieve them of this abhorrent, possibly lifelong burden. But now they had years of continuity to contend with, and it was harder and harder to visualize a liberating offense.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m glad you called,” he said to Erik while holding a watering can over the potted annuals in his front window. “Everyone else has said you’re headed this way.”

  “Everyone else? Like who?”

  “Like Carol, the vulgar shrew you took to your heart.”

  “Carol? I don’t know how she tracks my movements.”

  “And things are not so well just now?”

  “Oh, bad, John. It’s not wrong to claim the end is in sight.” His voice struck Briggs like a saw.

  “I do wish this came at a better time. I’m on a short holiday myself, the theory being rest is indicated—”

  “I won’t be any trouble.”

  “Is that so?”

  Erik arrived at night while Briggs was preparing his notes for a company stalemate in Delaware for which he was serving as an independent negotiator. It surprised Briggs that Faucher had found him at all, having ventured forth from the Hertz counter at the Billings airport with nothing but a state map. He arrived with a girl he’d picked up on the way. Briggs met her after being violently awakened by Erik’s jubilant goosing and her feral screeches. Her name was Marjorie, and Faucher confided that he called her Marge, “short for ‘margarine,’ the cheap spread.” This was not the sort of remark Briggs appreciated and was therefore exactly in the style Faucher had adopted over the years. Around midnight, Faucher reeled downstairs to inquire, with a hitch of his head, “Do you want some of this?”

  “Oh, no,” John said. “All for you.”

  Thereafter Marjorie, who seemed an attractive and reasonable girl once she started sobering up, came downstairs to complain that Erik had asked her to brush his teeth for him. John advised her to be patient; Erik would soon see he must brush his own teeth and would then go to sleep. Briggs offered her the rollout on the sun porch, but she returned wearily to Erik, having gone to the front window to cast a longing eye at the rental car. She wore a negligee that just reached her hips and, when she slowly climbed the stairs again, presented a view that was somewhat veterinary in quality. The aroma of gin trailed her. When Briggs went to bed, he thought, Who drinks gin anymore? A full moon made bands of cool light through the blinds. The Segovia he’d put on at minimum volume to help him sleep cycled on, “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” again and again.

  He hadn’t been asleep long when he was awakened by
noises. In the kitchen there were intruders. Briggs heard them, thumping around and opening cupboards and speaking in muffled tones. He wondered for a moment if he had forgotten that he was expecting someone. Once out of bed, he slipped into his closet, where his twelve-gauge resided on parallel coat hooks for just such a time as this. Briggs quietly chambered two shells and lifted the barrels until the lock closed.

  In the living room, he knelt behind the big floral wing chair that faced the fireplace and its still-dying embers. From here he could see the intruders as silhouettes, moving around the kitchen, briefly illuminated by the refrigerator light. He lifted the gun and, resting it on the back of the chair, leveled it at the closer figure. Only then did he recognize the man as his nearest neighbor, with whom he shared a water right from the irrigation ditch and a relationship that strained to be pleasant; the other intruder was the man’s wife, a snappish, leanly attractive farm woman who was less diplomatic in concealing her distaste for Briggs. Listening to their conversation, Briggs understood that they expected him to be out of town and were raiding his refrigerator for beer. Briggs decided that confronting them would create waves of difficulty for him in the future and that this episode was best forgotten or set aside for use another time. So he put the gun away and crept back to bed. The neighbors departed a short time later with a farewell fling of beer cans into his roses.

  Faucher’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “Were those people looking for me?”

  “No, Erik, go back to sleep. They’ve gone.”

  * * *

  —

  Marjorie was the first up: she had a remedial geometry class to teach. “Always a challenge after a long night,” she explained to John. She wore a pleated blue skirt and a pale-green sweater that buttoned at the throat. Her hair was drawn back from a prettily modeled forehead. She was at the stove, one hand on her hip, the other managing a spatula. “Potatoes O’Brien and eggs. Then I’ve got to run.”

  “But you don’t have to cook—”

  “Oh, I can’t have a day with missing pieces.” She cast a brilliant smile at him and held it just long enough to suggest he’d missed the boat. Erik wouldn’t be getting up for breakfast because, she explained, he had an upset tummy. She held the spatula in the air while she said this, suggesting by a jotting motion that she was only reciting facts as they had been given her. Then she made a tummy-upset face. Marjorie reminded John of teachers he’d had—punctilious, too ready to use physical gestures to explain the obvious, a hint of the scold. They ate together with the unexpected comfort of strangers at a diner. She paid absolute attention to her food, looking up at him intermittently. She raised a forefinger.

  “First thing he said to me was ‘You’re amazing.’ I have learned that when they tell you you’re amazing, it’s over before it starts.”

  “Just as well. Neither of you was feeling any pain.”

  “I never have any idea what will happen when I get drunk. But why would you get drunk if you knew what was going to happen?” she said. “You probably get off just watching people make mistakes. That’s not a nice trait, Mr. Briggs!”

  She smoothed her skirt and checked it for crumbs. “I’m out of here,” she said as she stood up. “What’s it like?” She went to the window and craned to see the sky. “Not too bad. Okay, bye.”

  * * *

  —

  Their boarding school was modeled on English public schools and built with iron ore and taconite dollars. In four years, the boys were made to see America through some British fantasy and believe that the true work of the nation fell to pencil-wristed Episcopalians who sang their babies to sleep with Blake’s “Jerusalem” or uttered mild orotundities like “great good fortune” and “safe as houses.” Their hostility toward each other was such that dormitory reassignment was considered, but they seemed always to find a reason to mend their differences. They kept up a sort of friendship at college, but when Erik moved into a rented place on Whitney Avenue with an Italian girl from Quinnipiac, they lost track again. After college, each had been in the other’s wedding, and they had, for a short time, lived in the same New Haven neighborhood while they attempted to launch their careers. Then, as John was less and less in the country and Faucher relocated to Boston, they became part of each other’s memories, and certainly not ones either enjoyed revisiting, though they continued to make sentimental phone calls on holidays, euphorically re-creating soccer triumphs on the rare occasions they were actually together. John Briggs didn’t know quite why Erik Faucher was visiting him now. Surely this would be a dumb place to hide; he must want something.

  When Briggs heard the shower start upstairs, he went outside and smelled the new morning wind coming through the fields. There were a few small white clouds gathering in the east, and a quarter mile off he could see a harrier working its way just over the surface of the hills. From time to time it swung up to pivot on a wing tip and then resumed its search.

  The window of the upstairs bathroom opened, and a wisp of steam came out, followed by the head of Erik Faucher. “John! What a morning!” Briggs was swept by a sudden and unexplained fondness. But when Erik began singing in the shower, Briggs found his voice insufferable.

  Erik appeared in the yard wearing light cotton pleated pants, a hemp belt, and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Though his hair was uniformly gunmetal gray, he still had the eyebrows that John associated with his French blood. John did not expect much accurate detail about the previous night’s bacchanal, as it was clear he held his liquor less well than he used to. It was Erik who’d said that a Yale education consisted of learning to conceal the fact that you were drunk. He raised his vigorous black eyebrows. The wordless greeting made Briggs impatient, and he relinquished the pleasant sense that he could drink better than Erik.

  “This is my first day in the American West. Of course I hope to start a successful new life here.” Erik claimed to have flown from Boston, only less convenient than Kazakhstan, now that centralized air routes had made Montana oddly more remote. He didn’t seem tired or hungover, and his frame looked well exercised.

  “I see Marge made off with the rental car,” he said.

  Briggs made him some coffee and a piece of toast, which Erik nibbled cautiously while reading the obituaries from a week-old Billings Gazette.

  “One of these Indians dies, they list every relative in the world. This one has three columns of kinfolks: Falls Down, Bird in Ground, Spotted Bear, Tall Enemy, Pretty on Top. Where does it end? And all their affiliations! The True Cross Evangelical Church, the Whistling Water Clan, the Bad War Deeds Clan. All I ever belonged to was Skull and Bones, and I ain’t too proud of that! So please don’t list it when I go. I’m no Indian.”

  Briggs reflected that he could read the paper perfectly well and spare himself the non sequiturs. He eyed the bright prairie sun working across the window behind the sink. He treasured his solitary spells, infrequent as they were, and wasted very few minutes of them. This one, it seemed, was doomed.

  “Look at us, John, two lone middle-aged guys.”

  “Filled with blind hope.”

  “Not me, John. But I’m expecting Montana will change all that. What a thrill that the bad times are behind me and the real delights are but inches away!”

  Briggs wasn’t falling for this one. He said, “I hope you’re right.”

  “One of my great regrets,” said Erik solemnly, “is that when we were young, married, and almost always drunk, we didn’t just take a little time out to fuck each other’s beautiful wives.”

  “That time has come and gone,” Briggs said.

  “A fellow should smell the roses once in a while. Now those two are servicing others. Perhaps, in intimate moments, they tell those faceless new men how unsatisfactory we were, possibly including baseless allusions to physical shortcomings.”

  “Very plausible.”

  Their wives had despised each other. Carol was a classic but now-extinct type of Mount Holyoke girl from Cold Spring Harbor, New Yor
k, a legacy whose mission it was to bear forward to new generations the Mount Holyoke worldview. When their daughter, Elizabeth, was expelled from the college for drug use, Erik’s insistence that there were other, possibly more forgiving, institutions had placed him permanently outside the wall that sheltered his wife and child. When, even with certified rehabilitation, Elizabeth failed to be reinstated at Mount Holyoke, she lost interest in college altogether and joined the navy, where she was immediately happy as a machinist’s mate. Faucher was bankrupt by then, a result of habitual overextension, and his inability to support Carol in the style to which she had been accustomed led to divorce and Carol’s current position as a receptionist at a hearing-aid outlet on Route 90 between Boston and Natick. Very few years had brought them to this, and neither understood how.

  Briggs had always been quite uncomfortable with Carol, and he had been greatly relieved when it was no longer necessary for them to speak. His own wife, Irena, was a beauty, a big-eyed russet-haired trilingual girl from Ljubljana whom he’d met at a trade conference in Milan, where she was translating and he was negotiating for a Yugoslav American businessman whose family’s property had been nationalized by the Communists. John and Irena were married for only a few years, long enough for her to know and loathe the Fauchers. Briggs wasn’t sure what else went wrong, except that Irena hadn’t much liked America and had been continually exasperated by Americans’ assumption that Briggs had rescued her. With John flying all over the world, she was stuck with the Fauchers. In the end, aroused by the independence of Slovenia, she grew homesick and left, remarking that Carol was a pig and Erik was a goat.

  All of this lent Erik’s wife-swapping lament its own particular comedy.