Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  It was inevitable that he would get worked once more for the newsletter. Hoyt wanted to know how Briggs had found Faucher.

  “Breathing,” Briggs said.

  “You’ve got good air out there,” said Hoyt. “I’ll give you that.”

  In November, on his way to the town in North Carolina he had saved from oblivion, he stopped in Boston, rented a car, and drove to the prison at Walpole, but Faucher refused to see him. Sitting in his topcoat in the pale-green meeting room, Briggs rose slowly to acknowledge the uniformed custodian who bore his rejection. He was furious.

  But once he was seated on the plane, drink in hand, looking out on the runway at men pushing carts, a forklift wheeling along a train of red lights, a neighboring jet pushing back, he felt a little better. His second drink was delivered reluctantly by a harried stewardess—only because Briggs told her he was on his way to his mother’s funeral. At this point, a glow seemed to form around Briggs’s seatmate, and Briggs struck up a conversation, ordering drinks for both of them as soon as the plane was airborne. The seatmate, an unfriendly black man who worked for Prudential Insurance, actually was going to a funeral, the funeral of a friend, and this revelation triggered a slightly euphoric summary of Briggs’s friendship with Faucher, delivered in remarkable detail, considering that Briggs’s companion was trying to read. Briggs concluded his description of his visit to the prison by raising his arms in the air and crying, “Hallelujah!”—a gesture that made him realize, instantly, that he had had enough to drink. The seatmate narrowed his eyes, and when Briggs explained that, at long last, a chapter of his life was over, the man, turning back to his open book, said wearily, “Do you actually believe that?”

  NORTH COUNTRY

  Austin was the more obviously vigilant as they made their way under the canopy of the ancient climax forest, the overgrowth of low alders and ferns towering over him and Ruth. They both had huge canisters of bear spray they’d bought in New Hazelton, but only Austin had ever had to use it—an experience that gave him no confidence, since the bear stopped only feet away as the can emptied, and seemingly thanks to mature reflection rather than violent arrest. As he shook the nearly weightless can, the bear, on its hind legs, elevated its nose and just chose not to maul him. He told Ruth the spray worked great. “Point and shoot,” he said. “Nothing to it.”

  They followed a game trail paralleling an unnamed creek that emptied a long way to the south into the main stem of the Skeena River, nearly a hundred miles from its debouchment into the North Pacific. It was mostly forest of cedars and hemlocks, silent except for the small dark winter wrens and the many generations of ravens, the young who squawked and the bearded old with their ominous kraah and an inclination to follow the intruders.

  This was a world Austin knew. Bearing his heavy pack, he moved with the rocking gait of a Sherpa while Ruth, equally fit, found the near-rain-forest conditions almost impossible. She studied Austin’s measured stride and tried to emulate his concentration on the space in front of him, his alertness to the least resistance, and the continuous reference to an objective he somehow kept clear in his head.

  Both were in their late twenties. Austin kept his auburn hair cropped close and, combined with the rapier sideburns he affected, the look strengthened his somewhat arranged individualism. He had made a sort of sub-rosa living near wild places since his late teens, guiding hikers and heli-skiers around Revelstoke; and he’d helped mining companies search for metallurgical-grade coal in the high country on the Montana–British Columbia border, where from time to time a dope plane flying right on the deck soared down the alpine valleys into the United States. His mother, a Canadian nurse who married an American merchant mariner, had given him half his nationality. He was either a dual citizen or stateless, depending on whom you talked to or, rather, how he felt. When the subjects of religion, nationality, and race came up, he said, “I don’t believe in that stuff,” and he didn’t. What he believed in was money, but he never had enough for his problems—or for Ruth’s either.

  Ruth came from Burnaby, British Columbia, a tough town whose greatest product was Joe Sakic, the Avalanche center. Her mother left her and her father, a millwright, when Ruth was just a child and Sakic was still playing for Lethbridge. Her father admitted that he didn’t know quite what to do with her, and she moved out at fourteen to skateboard, then waitress at Revelstoke, and finally develop her skiing to instructor competency, which provided a seasonal living yet made each year an uncertainty.

  Ruth, like Austin, was a heroin user; both would have been more entrenched if their income had been predictable. Their love of the outdoors and great physical enthusiasm sustained the long dry spells; but these always contained some component that led back to using, and that led back to Vancouver, that phenomenal aperture to the drugs of Asia.

  Their most reliable connection was a Sikh gallery owner, Sadhu Dhaliwal, who specialized in North Coast art above the table, drugs and protected antiquities under, the most honest junk dealer in Van with a clean business mind under his made-to-measure five-yard muslin turban. Ruth had put Austin onto him: you got a better shot with East Asians who were utterly paranoid about the immigration service and played it straight, at least in the details. There was nothing straight in the big picture, of course, but the big picture always spoiled everything for everybody.

  And they were wise; they never went to Vancouver unless, as a kind of enfranchisement, they were prepared to use. To land in that town with empty pockets hoping to improvise your way onto the golden thoroughfare was to risk terrible consequences, and they were far too smart for that. Hence this trip through a primeval forest known with surprising intimacy by Austin. In certain respects, it was a perfect life: you descended from some of the wildest country left on the planet, sunburned and hard muscled after a season of gazing upon creation, straight down into the city of man where bliss came in a blue Pacific wave and the most beautiful hookers lined up around the cruise-ship terminals and chatted about the future.

  They were happy to be together and joked affectionately about how they’d met. “Whose futon is this, anyway?” And “You’re not my cat!”

  Several curious ravens were following, now so preoccupied that they blundered into trees and then croaked in dismay. They really did suggest mischief. Once, when he stayed for a week with the Gitxsan band near Kispiox, Austin heard a story about ravens meeting in the spring to discuss the tricks they’d play that year. He liked his stay with the natives, Christmas lights on the houses year-round. Perhaps they trusted him too much, but that was life. He saw ravens perform a kind of funeral on his lawn at Kamloops, when his cat was afraid to leave the house, the same lawn where they taught their young to fly after they’d been shoved from the nest. Though the neighbors complained about all these noisy birds, he loved them. He went down to Mexico with Ruth on some transaction, and when he got back the ravens were gone. The neighbors had done away with them. He and Ruth were not in such great shape after Mexico, and the raven thing got them so down they ran from it and didn’t light until they found another rented house, a trailer this time, in Penticton, where, right after getting his flu shot from the national health service, Austin briefly decided he was an American. They had started drinking, which was a feeble alternative, though it led to the same place. It was time to go up-country again, this time with a plan that took them to this forest just north of the Skeena with his prized information from the natives.

  “Austin. I have to take a break.”

  They stopped and shrugged off their packs, which slumped to the ground, but as soon as they stood still the mosquitoes began to find them. Ruth could feel them against her hands as she tried to wave them away. They rose in clouds from beneath the ferns and forced the two to resume hiking. “We’re close,” said Austin, his voice betraying a slight impatience with Ruth. He had a GPS, which he took from his pocket while he walked, glancing at its small screen before putting it away. “I can’t tell; it’s in kilometers, but close.”
/>   “I don’t know how you ever found it in the first place.”

  “The old-fashioned way, work. Not a lot of people like to crash around in brush the grizzlies think they own. I had general stuff from the First Nations guys, but I still had to work my ass off.”

  “I hope we don’t see bears today.”

  “Squirt ’em.”

  “That’s pretty cold. I’m frightened.”

  He wasn’t cold, really; he’d already heard the distinctive woof of a bear but declined to worry Ruth about it. He kept his eyes on the lighted swatch of huckleberries near their path and saw the moving furrow in the bushes, but an encounter never came.

  He was thinking that if he’d had this GPS with him on the first trip he wouldn’t have brought Ruth here at all. They’d be back in Van on the yellow brick road like the time they were so loaded looking at war canoes in the Museum of Anthropology. The security guards kicked them out, and they ended up crashing in broad daylight in Stanley Park after being expelled from the Ted and Mary Greig Rhododendron Garden for falling on the rhododendrons. Ruth was troubled that they’d found themselves among so many homeless and saw it as a sign. Austin was amused by her love of portents, her belief in symbols, and almost wished he could share it. He considered himself too literal minded, though he also felt that if he’d been no more practical than Ruth they’d both be doing shit work around ski resorts the rest of their lives, never really having the merest glimpse of the great beyond.

  A couple of times it had gotten away from them. The most humiliating, of course, was when they’d had to move back in with Ruth’s dad, the millwright, holed up sick in his basement, but at least they weren’t in a program. That had been a close call; yet it seemed after each of their grand voyages they’d moved a little closer to a program. The old guy was off making plywood like the good automaton he was and thought Austin and Ruth just kept getting the flu. That’s why, when Austin thought about his dual citizenship, he concluded that Canada still had a little innocence left. If you could look at a forest and see plywood, you were still innocent.

  Austin found the clearing and waited at its edge, in the manner of a host, for Ruth to catch up.

  “Here it is.”

  The totem pole lay stretched out in ferns and moss, strikingly distinct from the forest around it. Shafts of light entered the canopy and illuminated the clearing in pools of brightness. Austin and Ruth moved along its length, staring at the details of the carving, strangely mixed parts of animals, birds, humans, salmon.

  Ruth gave a huge sigh, and Austin said, “What’d I tell you?”

  Then he walked to the end of the pole, where a fearsome animal head raised fangs toward the canopy. He took out a cell phone and dialed. After a moment he said, “You want me to start at the top? Okay, it looks like a wolf. Is there a wolf clan? Well, it looks like a wolf. Ruth, what’s the next one? Ruth says mosquito turning into a human. If I recall my Gitxsan, that’s Fireweed Clan. And she says, yes, Wolf’s a clan, too. Then frog with hawk’s beak, followed by another mosquito with a frog on its head, then it looks like a beaver dancing with a raven, and last is two bear cubs, one of which is turning into a boy. They’re pretty well separated; I know you could cut them up. I mean, the fucking thing is forty feet long. You’ll be happy, Sadhu, and if we’re good to go on the you-know-what, I’ll just give you the coordinates, and Ruth and I will see you in Van.” He stopped talking and took the GPS out of his pocket again. “Hold on, Sadhu, it’s finding satellites now. All I gotta do is push MAN OVERBOARD, then I can give you the numbers…” Austin recited the position, longitude and latitude down to minutes of degrees, and then hung up. He turned to Ruth with a huge grin.

  She asked, “Is there a lot?”

  “Is there a lot!” He thought, We’re going to have to pace ourselves or we’ll be dead inside a year. “Yeah, Ruth, there’s a lot.”

  ZOMBIE

  Orval Jones, a widower, had a big green willow tree he was very proud of. This thing sat out on their lawn like a skyscraper, and Jones bragged about all the free air-conditioning he got out of it. The neighbors, almost to Harnell Creek, were a Cheyenne family, always working on their cars, whom Jones referred to as “dump bears.” After the Indians, the road kept going but in reduced condition until it was just a pair of ruts that turned to impassable gumbo at the first rain shower but finally led to an old ranch graveyard in a grove of straggling hackberry and box elder.

  Dulcie Jones came home to introduce her boyfriend to her father, who had trained her in the values of law and order and so understood her difficult and sometimes-perilous work. She was twenty-four, a pretty dishwater blonde with a glum heart-shaped face and a distinctive V separating her upper incisors. She held a cigarette between the ends of the first two fingers of her right hand, the arm extended stiffly as though to keep the cigarette at bay. She wore gold earrings with a baseball hat. Beside her stood Neville Smithwick, sly as a ferret in his pale goatee and sloping hairdo. Dulcie was an escort girl and sometime police informant, though her father was aware of only the latter portion of her résumé as well as her day job at an optometrist’s office. All-knowing Neville was her dupe. As a fool, he had made her work easier. Under ordinary circumstances, Dulcie served her customers as they expected. If she should suspect they were impecunious, however, she turned them over to the police, who saw to it their names appeared in the paper with varying results: laughter at the office, families ruined, and so on. In such referrals, she got paid by the fuzz. No tips.

  Smithwick’s father, Neville Senior, had hired Dulcie to do away with his son’s virginity on the pretext of Neville Junior’s interviewing her for a job, during which exchange Junior was meant to succumb to her erotic overtures. This scheme Neville Junior absorbed but dimly. Rather than be frustrated by his obtuseness, Dulcie quite sensibly went about her day, with Neville in tow, so that, should the project collapse, she’d at least get a few errands out of the way.

  When she introduced Neville to her father, her father said in a not particularly friendly, half-joshing way, “I may have to give Neville a haircut.”

  “You and what army?” said Neville.

  Orval seemed to sober up. He was pushing sixty but still wore pointed underslung cowboy boots that aggravated his arthritic gait. The snap buttons on his polyester western shirt were undone around the melon of his small, protruding stomach, the underside of which was cut into by the large old buckle he’d won snowmobiling. He gave off an intense tobacco smell, and his gaze seemed to bounce off Neville to a row of trees in the distance.

  “Well. Come in and set, then. If you get hungry, I’ll bet you Dulcie’d cook something up.”

  “I don’t eat anything with a central nervous system.”

  “You what?”

  Mr. Jones twisted the front doorknob and kneed the door over its high spot as they went indoors. Dulcie was pleased to have caught her father early. It was only a matter of time before he would begin asking, “Will this day never end?”

  Orval brought Neville a Grain Belt and Neville thanked him politely. “You seem like a well-brought-up feller,” said Orval Jones.

  “I’m a virgin,” said Neville. This remarkable statement was true. But Neville had developed expectations, based on some exceedingly provocative suggestions by Dulcie, which were not so completely lost on him as Dulcie had imagined. From his vast store of secondhand information, he had concluded that he was about to hit pay dirt—3-D adult programming. In fact, she told him he’d need a condom and, in the resulting confusion, stopped at Roundup to help him pick one. But once inside the drugstore, he embarrassed her by asking if they were one-size-fits-all, like a baseball hat, and then balked when the clerk explained he had to buy them as a three pack. Neville told him that the thought made him light-headed.

  Orval was on the sofa and seemed defeated by Neville’s very existence. Nevertheless, he made a wan attempt at conversation. His jeans had ridden up over the top of his boots to reveal spindly white legs that seemed to ta
ke up little room in the boots, just sticks is all they were. The terrible bags under his eyes gave the impression that he could see beyond the present situation.

  “Neville, you say you come from a banking background.”

  “Foreground.”

  “Ha-ha. You’ve got a point. And do you—uh, actually work at the bank too?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Hell, no. I see. And what do you do?”

  “TV.”

  “TV sales?”

  “I watch TV. Ever heard of it?”

  “I suppose that should’ve been my first guess.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Neville had learned from television that remorseless repartee was the basis of genial relations with the public. He really meant no harm, but not having any friends might have alerted him to the dangers of this approach. The appearance of harmlessness disguised the violence he had inside him and would save him from ever being held accountable for its consequences, when he quite soon gave it such full expression. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  * * *

  —

  Neville Senior managed the Southeast and Central Montana Bank; he was a genuinely upright and conventional individual who worked hard and played golf. His wife had died some years ago, so he had had charge of Neville Junior from early on. In the winter, he went once a month to St. George, Utah, fighting Mormons for tee times, and returned refreshed for work. He was a happy, well-balanced, thoughtful man who had accepted the work ethic he’d been raised with and which caused him to spend too little time with his only child. Their prosperous life was such that there were no duties that his son could be assigned that would instill the father’s decent values. And he didn’t want him on the golf course with his various hairdos. Walking down North Twenty-Seventh in Billings with his tax attorney, he once passed a youth with pink, blue, and green hair not so different from Neville Junior’s. “When I was in the navy,” the attorney said, “I had sex with a parrot. Could that be my child?”