Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “Not hiring.”

  “A little sumpin’ to eat, place to sleep, and a TV; wouldn’t have to pay me.”

  “Wouldn’t have to pay you? What exactly is it you want to do for free gratis?”

  “I’d work, but like I say you’d need to train me.”

  “But not pay you?”

  “You heard right, mister. Just those things I mentioned.”

  The two swept out the old milk house, which had a two-stage concrete floor and a place for the creek to run through, though the creek had been diverted long ago and the room was dry enough. Then they assembled an iron bed and rolled out a thin mattress, which they beat until the room filled with dust. “No telling what’s been living in here,” said Orval, with an ingratiating smile. Neville threw up his hands in wonder. “But I guess that’ll do you. Gon’ have to.”

  “TV.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said TV.”

  “I haven’t got but one and it’s up to my house.”

  “I told you when we started in on this,” hissed Neville, “that I’d require a TV.”

  The reception was exceptionally poor in the milk house, but by adding aluminum foil to the rabbit ears they were able to get two channels, one all snowy with Greer Garson. The tension seemed to go out of Neville’s body as he told Orval to call him for supper and then settled down on the pipe bed for some viewing, ignoring the dust that continued to rise and the perhaps-too-vigorous closing of the door by Orval.

  In the morning, Orval was determined to see if he could get his money’s worth out of this man, who had introduced himself as Karl “with a K.” He could tell right away that Karl meant to stay, as he hurled himself into shoveling out the calving shed, a job requiring no experience whatsoever but a strong tolerance for grueling repetition. At one point, he went at this with such demonic energy that it caused Orval to tell him whoa-up, he had all day. Neville wiped his forehead, leaned on the shovel, and asked Orval if he had any family, smiling as he heard about Dulcie as though for the first time. Today he’d parted his hair in the middle, and with the dark beard he had the appearance of an old-time preacher, someone who could talk about Jesus with plausible familiarity. Orval thought he’d have to find him some other clothes if he worked out, something brighter, because he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the preacher look. There was always one going up the road with a Bible in the glove box supposedly to convert the dump bears but probably to check out the little squaws.

  This one was here for vengeance. “She ever get out to see you?”

  “Just on weekends.”

  “But that’s tomorrow.”

  “The horse sees more of her than I do.”

  “Could be, now you got a hired man, there’ll be more time for the two of you to visit.”

  “I’m available!”

  It seemed like he spent half of Saturday, the set on mute, listening to her gallop up and down the place, wondering when she’d get the curiosity to come over and say howdy. Poor old Orval was doing the vigil thing in his rocker, Saturday beer in hand, but Neville could tell he wasn’t getting much in the way of contact either—on a day made for family, a light breeze in the cottonwoods, the Cheyenne sleeping it off up the road, and the rare lowing of distant cattle. Springtime!

  She knocked on the door.

  Neville had a loose, gangly act ready for this, head tipped to one side, wire lightly wrapped around his left hand as he turned to let her in. Blue light from the silent television jerked around a room that smelled like concrete and once stored an ocean of purest milk. Dulcie wore jeans and tennis shoes, a snap-button western shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had on sunglasses. He liked her firm arms, the lariats and roses that decorated the pink shirt. She gazed at him and, crossing her arms behind her back, leaned against the door she’d just closed. She raised her forefinger to slide the sunglasses down enough to look over their top.

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  “That’s more than I can say!” Neville called out.

  “May I turn that thing off?”

  “No!”

  “Well, I am. I’m turning it off.”

  Dulcie went past him and bent over the set, reaching for the controls. Neville had the wire on her in nothing flat, called her a low-down escort service. Though there was a spell of tumult—more like a rerun than anything new—it was the moment when movement stopped that finally produced surprise, and Neville was swept by desire at last. Everything in his life had led to this ravishing stillness. He knew who to dedicate this one to.

  * * *

  —

  Orval went on sitting in his rocker, stubbing out his cigarettes in a tomato juice can. Sooner or later, Dulcie would have to put the horse up and come have a few words with him. At the same time, his new hired man wandered down the darkening road away from the little ranch, away from the Cheyenne and their old cars, weeping at the innocence now beyond his grasp, never to be a virgin again. It was great to feel something so strongly. He hoped to weep forever. If only his father could have been there to see him with tears streaming down his face. It would have been a beginning, something good. He could just hear his voice.

  Well, son, I’ll be damned. You feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you?

  MIRACLE BOY

  We always went back to my mother’s hometown when someone was about to die. We missed Uncle Kevin because the doctors misdiagnosed his ruptured appendix, owing to referred pain in his shoulder. Septicemia killed him before they sorted it out with a victorious air we never forgave. The liverless baby was well before our time—it would have been older than my mother had it lived—but my grandfather’s departure arrived ideally for scheduling purposes in the late stages of diabetes; we drove instead of taking the train and en route were able to stay over for an extra day at the Algonquin Inn in western New York, taking advantage of Wiener Schnitzel Night, and still make it in time for the various obsequies while reducing prolonged visits by priests. (My father was an agnostic and fought sponging clergy with vigor, remarking that he had “fronted his last snockered prelate” and adding, “Amazing how often it’s Crown Royal.”)

  Before I relate the death of my grandmother, I have to summarize that of my grandfather, because that was where I acquired my short-lived reputation as a worker of household wonders. Ever since I have had great sympathy for those identified as seers or healers; my heart even goes out to those merely called lucky. Like someone drifting lazily down the Niagara River, the big fall is just a matter of time.

  My grandfather, though a diabetic, went on occasional sweet binges, cherry pies at Al Mac’s Diner, and he injected himself with insulin daily, to our agog fascination. He held in reserve giant sugar-filled jawbreakers in his pocket, and when I was too pressingly talkative a single one of those hunks would keep me silent for almost three hours. He was a quiet man, a volunteer fireman who played checkers in the open-fronted firehouse down whose brass pole I was sometimes allowed to slide. In his youth he had read in a newspaper that “Many people persist in making the cemetery a place of recreation, generally a foreign element prompted by ignorance,” and thereafter he was a tireless promoter of public parks.

  On the Fourth of July, while most of the family was at the parade on North Main Street, and after a midday meal of quahog chowder, swordfish, beet greens, and corn, he lay down on his big brown favorite couch and died. He’d never taken up more room than he needed, and in an essentially matriarchal household his death was mostly seen as foreshadowing my grandmother’s, though it was widely celebrated among “the foreign element.” This was not long after little boys were given dresses to wear, and my mother and aunts sent me off dressed as a hula girl for the Fourth of July parade, a debacle that ended in my breaking a white plastic ukulele with its Arthur Godfrey “automatic” chord changer during one of many clashes with Azorean native Joao Furtado—later known as Meatball—who called me, with sensible directness, “little girl.” When I got home from the p
arade, my grandfather was dead. I studied the adults for clues. They were studying my grandmother for clues. She took to her bed. Three days later, she was still there.

  Her absence brought the household to a standstill. My mother and aunts seemed entirely helpless without her ordering them around. She did not even seem to acknowledge them when they visited her room, and a meeting was called where it was decided to send me in. Her idealization of children was counted upon to bring her around before the house and its contents sank into the earth, an eventuality I could imagine to include the opaque projector in the attic with its pictures of long-dead baseball players, the cabinet full of Belleek china in the priest parlor, all the wildly squeaky beds and creaking stairs, the bookless “library” reeking of cigars, and even the souvenir Hitler Youth knife my uncle Paul had given me. As it happened I was the only child available for idealizing, standing around with my mouth open. And so I headed to my grandmother’s bedroom, which was on the second floor, and there I acquired my reputation as a performer of miracles, setting myself up for a fall whose effects would never end. (When my father learned of my success, he began calling me Miracle Boy, later M.B.)

  I let myself in without knocking, closing the door behind me. From her bed my grandmother followed me with her eyes. I started to say something in greeting, but the impulse died, and instead I looked around for a place to sit. The ornate brass bed was to the right as I entered; to the left was a vanity with its silver brush and mirror carefully arranged. At the far end of the room was a door to a small porch over Brownell Street, access to which we were all denied, as it sagged dangerously with dry rot. I took the chair from in front of the dresser, pulled it up beside my grandmother’s bed, and sat down. I was perfectly comfortable. My grandmother had turned her head on the pillow to look directly at me, upon me, and I could tell that my presence was welcome. After a while, several formulaic remarks on the death of my grandfather passed through my mind, since even then I was capable of a modicum of glibness in the little-old-man style encouraged by my aunts. But those thoughts vanished and I gazed at my grandmother’s long hair, gathered around her face in silver braids. My mind wandered again, and then I spoke.

  “I was wondering,” I mused, “if Grandpa left me any jewels.”

  My grandmother stared at me, sitting on my hands in her vanity chair, knocking the toes of my shoes against each other as the silence lengthened. Suddenly she began to laugh, from some deep place and loud enough that the scurrying of my mother and my aunts could be heard outside the door, where they must have been eavesdropping. Then my grandmother sent me away so she could rise, dress, and make our supper. Thus was born my reputation as a child healer, my personal albatross, Miracle Boy.

  * * *

  —

  The house was a typical triple-decker on a very small lot, hardly bigger than the footprint of the house itself, with a tiny yard bound by a severely rectilinear and humorless hedge. Any game in the yard had to involve the roof, usually winging a ball up there and guessing which side it would fall off. My uncle Paul, a veteran of World War II, was always willing to do this with me for hours on end; he never really seemed to have a job. Otherwise, all you could do in the yard was stand there and stay clear of the hedge. This being a corner lot, the windows on two sides gave a point-blank view of the faces of pedestrians, and the second- and third-floor windows were ideal for the launching of tomatoes, stink bombs, and rotten eggs. Once, when my constant adversary, Meatball Furtado, had chased me all the way from North Park, Aunt Constance was able to pour boiling water on him from the second floor, melting the cast on his recently broken arm. This unambiguous Irish-Portuguese skirmish pretty much reflects the fortress quality of the small neighborhoods of the town, with a church at the center and a pocket park for escalating ethnic conflict. In time, jicks, Portagees, and harps would be partners in law firms and especially in local politics. Then they’d move away and just be Americans—consumers, parents, drivers of minivans. I suppose it’s a good thing.

  Here in this small yard, on his reluctant and occasional visits from the Midwest, my father sat, reading Yachting and contemplating a global circumnavigation, though, he often told me with a conspirator’s wink, he would not necessarily return to the same spot from which he’d gamely set sail—by which I guess he really meant he hoped one day to leave us. The closest he came to circumnavigating was a steel cabin cruiser that never left the dock and came with an oil painting of a busty woman walking through a crowded church. It was entitled A Big Titter Rolled down the Aisle. This vessel sat in a rental slip on a stagnant lake and served as a platform for cocktail parties. At the height of these gatherings, my father would start the engine and then look with authority over the transom to make sure the water pump was sending coolant out the exhaust. The feat was performed in silence and suggested that behind the revelry lay a serious world, the world of the sea.

  Now my grandmother was dying, the death of a monarch. My father was going to have to visit my mother’s cherished hometown and all his in-laws, a dreadful prospect, as he viewed my grandparents’ house as a lunatic asylum; its bubbling humanity trained a cold light on behavior that had its roots in his own days as an Eagle Scout and piano prodigy in a four-block area south of Scollay Square, where he was the only pianist, thanks to his iron-willed mother, half paralyzed by an early stroke brought on by her terrible temper. My father hated to play the piano, hated even to see one, and forbade me to join the Boy Scouts.

  Between my grandmother’s first and second strokes, my mother and I set out in the Nash for this old lunch-bucket city and its mosaic of neighborhoods, the house-rattling trains and worn-out baseball diamonds; my father told my mother he would follow “in due course” for the funeral. She looked him in the eye and asked, “What if she recovers?”

  I was inside my grandparents’ house on the occasion of her second cerebral hemorrhage. My reputation as a wonder worker had lingered in the years since my grandfather’s death, and at each crisis I worried that I would be asked to perform again. As the house filled with family members, including my physician uncle Walter, all gathered hopelessly around the door to my grandmother’s bedroom, which seemed to glow with ominous beams of light. Walter came and went wearing a stethoscope, which he had never before done in this house. He was so handsome it sometimes made his sisters gasp, and with all power now in his hands he seemed like a god.

  My mother ordered my father to get on the road immediately, and I worried that if his opinions got loose in this atmosphere every one of us would suffer. I was less focused on the impending demise of my grandmother than on seeing my favorite uncle, Paul, my grandmother’s youngest, a man in his fifties who sold the occasional insurance policy from his bare office in the Granite Block. He lived in a rooming house named Mohican House after the old Mohican Hotel, and his habits had changed little in many years, consisting as they did of day-drinking and reading odd books from the public library. He collected printed mazes; some, he told me, were quite famous, like Welk’s Reflection, Double Snowflake, and Jabberwocky. He was keenly interested in the tea clippers and had an old painting that he claimed to have fished out of some Yankee’s garbage pail, a portrait of a Massachusetts sea captain dressed in embroidered robes like the emperor of China.

  On our drive across Ontario and western New York, I listened again as my mother recited the saga of my grandmother, both hands on the wheel, cigarette in her mouth: the Saga of the Displaced Gael. Orphaned at twelve, Grandma worked a life-devouring job in the textile mills but managed a happy marriage to a fellow she met on the Narrows (Grandpa) between North and South Watuppa Ponds, where young people gathered. They were to enjoy fertile parenthood, modest gentility, economic sufficiency, and religious security only a block from their parish church; she did, however, occasionally cross the Quequechan River to attend Mass with French Canadian girlfriends she’d met in the spinning room at the Pocasset mill. My grandfather supplied special groceries to the side-wheelers of the Fall River Line, including
the Commonwealth, the Pilgrim, and the fabulous Princess. His was a tiny business based on special arrangements with a fruit boat that brought bananas from Central America. My grandfather told me of the deadly spiders that sometimes arrived with this cargo, hinted at Spanish treasure from Honduras (probably the origin of my previously mentioned interest in “jewels”), and described the three great steering wheels in the pilothouse of the Princess and the chandeliers in its engine room. Even my grandparents’ Yankee neighbors, who ranged from mill owners and bankers to broken-down fellows who delivered firewood by horse and wagon, accorded grudging admiration to this honest couple, especially as immigrants, got smaller and browner by the day. If my mother was too caught up in her story, she allowed me to drive on my learner’s permit while she kept smoking or chewed her thumbnail.

  The children grew up and took their respective places: teacher, policeman, physician, waitress, and finally occasional insurance salesman Paul, who came home from the war having lost his best friend to a German booby trap, a boy from President Avenue with whom he’d enlisted. Paul emphasized that the device was a Leica camera, which seemed to undercut the disparaging term for the thing that had killed his friend. After that Paul began to decline, and the gossip was that he wouldn’t have taken the loss of his friend so badly if the pair of them hadn’t been queer. But he was smart and resourceful and he managed to go on, usually by selling a policy to one of his drinking buddies. He was tall and well dressed, his auburn hair combed back straight from a high forehead in an elegant look that spoke of success. By evening, the look would change to something wild and slipping.