Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “You might have been right,” Louise said. “It doesn’t look good.”

  She almost certainly had better things to do. But looking down the line of cars, I felt my blood pressure rising. Her hands rested quietly in her lap. I couldn’t possibly have rivaled such serenity.

  “How do you plan to anger this guy in Rigby?” she asked.

  “I’m going to try haughtiness. If I suggest that he bought the dealership cheap, he might tell me to keep the damn thing. The Atlanta guy just wants to start somewhere. All these people have a sort of parlay mentality, and they need to get on the playing field before they can start running it up. I’m a trader. It all happens for me in the transition. The moment of liquidation is the essence of capitalism.”

  “What about the man in Rigby?”

  “He’s an end user. He wants to keep it.”

  I reflected on the pathos of ownership and the way it could bog you down.

  “You should be in my world,” Louise said. “According to the law, water has no reality except its use. In Montana, water isn’t even wet. Every time some misguided soul suggests that fish need it, it ends up in the state supreme court.”

  Birds were fleeing the advance of automobiles. I was elsewhere, trying to imagine my buyer, red faced, storming out of the closing. I’d offer to let bygones be bygones, I’d take him to dinner, I’d throw a steak into him, for Christ’s sake. In the end, he’d be glad he wasn’t stuck with the lot.

  Traffic headed toward us, far down the road. We were all packed together to make sure no one tried to pass. The rules had to be enforced. Occasionally, someone drifted out for a better look, but not far enough that someone else could close his space and possibly seal his fate.

  This trip had its risks. I had only recently admitted to myself that I would like to make more of my situation with Louise than currently existed. Though ours was hardly a chaste relationship, real intimacy was relatively scarce. People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits—they always set some aside, in case they might need them to spend on someone new. I found it unpleasant to think that Louise could be withholding anything.

  But I thought I was more presentable than I had been. When Louise and I first met, I was just coming off two and a half years of peddling satellite dishes in towns where a couple of dogs doing the wild thing in the middle of the road amounted to the high point of a year, and the highest-grossing business was a methamphetamine tent camp out in the sagebrush. Now I had caught the upswing in our local economy: cars, storage, tool rental, and mortgage discounting. I had a pretty home, debt-free, out on Sourdough. I owned a few things. I could be okay. I asked Louise what she thought of the new prosperity around us. She said wearily, “I’m not sure it’s such a good thing, living in a boomtown. It’s basically a high-end carny atmosphere.”

  We were just passing Storm Castle and Garnet Mountain. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw a low red car with a scoop in its hood pull out to pass. I must have reacted somehow, because Louise asked me if I would like her to drive.

  “No, that’s fine. Things are getting a bit lively back there.”

  “Drive defensively.”

  “Not much choice, is there?”

  I had been mentally rehearsing the closing in Rigby, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had this sort of absurd picture of myself strutting into the meeting. I tried again to picture the buyer looking seriously annoyed, but I’d met him before and he seemed pretty levelheaded. I suspected I’d have to be really outlandish to get a rise out of him. He was a fourth-generation resident of Rigby, so I could always urge him to get to know his neighbors, I decided. Or since he had come up through the service department, I could try emphasizing the need to study how the cars actually ran. I’d use hand signals to fend off objections. I felt more secure.

  Some elk had wandered into the parking lot at Buck’s T4 and were grazing indifferently as people pulled off the highway to admire them. I don’t know if it was the great unmarred blue sky overhead or the balsamic zephyr that poured down the mountainside, but I found myself momentarily buoyed by all this idleness, people out of their cars. I am always encouraged when I see animals doing something other than running for their lives. In any case, the stream of traffic ahead of us had been much reduced by the pedestrian rubbernecking.

  “My husband lived here one winter,” Louise said. “He sold his pharmacy after we divorced, not that he had to, and set out to change his life. He became a mountain man, wore buckskin clothes. He tried living off the land one day a week, with the idea that he would build up. But then he just stuck with one day a week—he’d shoot a rabbit or something, more of a diet, really. He’s a real-estate agent now, at Big Sky. I think he’s doing well. At least he’s quit killing rabbits.”

  “Remarried?”

  “Yes.”

  As soon as we hit the open country around West Yellowstone, Louise called her office. When her secretary put her on hold, Louise covered the mouthpiece and said, “He married a super gal. Minnesota, I think. She should be good for Bob, and he’s not easy. Bob’s from the South. For men, it’s a full-time job being southern. It just wears them out. It wore me out, too. I developed doubtful behaviors. I pulled out my eyelashes and ate twenty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of macadamia nuts.”

  Her secretary came back on the line, and Louise began editing her schedule with impressive precision, mouthing the word “sorry” to me when the conversation dragged on. I began musing about my capacity to live successfully with someone as competent as Louise. There was no implied hierarchy of status between us, but I wondered if, in the long run, something would have to give.

  West Yellowstone seemed entirely given over to the well-being of the snowmobile, and the billboards dedicated to it were anomalous on a sunny day like today. By winter, schoolchildren would be petitioning futilely to control the noise at night so they could do their schoolwork, and the town would turn a blind eye as a cloud of smoke arose to gas residents, travelers, and park rangers alike. It seemed incredible to me that recreation could acquire this level of social momentum, that it could be seen as an inalienable right.

  We came down Targhee Pass to Idaho, into a wasteland of spindly pines that had replaced the former forest, and Louise gave voice to the thoughts she’d been having for the past few miles. “Why don’t you just let this deal close? You really have no guarantees from the man from Atlanta. And there’s a good-faith issue here too, I think.”

  “A lawyerly notation.”

  “So be it, but it’s true. Are you trying to get every last cent out of this sale?”

  “That’s second. The first priority is to be done with it. It was meant to be a passive investment, and it has turned out not to be. I get twenty calls a day from the dealership, most with questions I can’t answer. It’s turning me into a giant bullshit machine.”

  “No investments are really passive.”

  “Mutual funds are close.”

  “That’s why they don’t pay.”

  “Some of them pay, or they would cease to exist.”

  “You make a poor libertarian, my darling. You sound like that little puke David Stockman.”

  “Stockman was right about everything. Reagan just didn’t have the guts to take his advice.”

  “Reagan. Give me a break.”

  I didn’t mind equal billing in a relationship, but I did dread the idea of parties speaking strictly from their entitlements across a chasm. Inevitably, sex would make chaos of much of this, but you couldn’t, despite Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, “use venery” as a management tool.

  Louise adjusted her seat back and folded her arms, gazing at the sunny side of the road. The light through the windshield accentuated the shape of her face, now in repose. I found her beautiful. I adored her when she was a noun and was alarmed when she was a verb, which was usually the case. I understood that this was not the best thing I could say about myself. When her hand drifted over to my leg, I hardly knew what to
do with this reference to the other life we led. I knew it was an excellent thing to be reminded of how inconsequential my worldly concerns were, but one warm hand, rested casually, and my interest traveled to the basics of the species.

  Ashton, St. Anthony, Sugar City: Mormon hamlets, small farms, and the furious reordering of watersheds into industrial canals. Irrigation haze hung over the valley of the Snake, and the skies were less bright than they had been just a few miles back, in Montana. Many locals had been killed when the Teton Dam burst, and despite that they wanted to build it again: the relationship to water here was like a war, and in war lives are lost. These were the folks to whom I’d sold many a plain car; ostentation was thoroughly unacceptable hereabouts. The four-door sedan with a six-cylinder engine was the desired item, an identical one with 150,000 miles on it generally taken in trade at zero value, thanks to the manipulation of rebates against the manufacturer’s suggested retail. Appearances were foremost, and the salesman who could leave a customer’s smugness undisturbed flourished in this atmosphere. I had two of them, potato-fattened bland opportunists with nine kids between them. They were the asset I was selling; the rest was little more than bricks and mortar.

  We pressed on toward Rexburg, and amid the turnoffs for Wilford, Newdale, Hibbard, and Moody the only thing that had any flavor was Hog Hollow Road, which was a shortcut to France—not the one in Europe but the one just a hop, skip, and a jump south of Squirrel, Idaho. There were license-plate holders with my name on them in Squirrel, and I was oddly vain about that.

  “Sure seems lonesome around here,” Louise said.

  “Oh, boy.”

  “The houses are like little forts.”

  “The winters are hard.” But it was less that the small neat dwellings around us appeared defensive than that they seemed to be trying to avoid attracting the wrath of some inattentive god.

  “It looks like government housing for Eskimos. They just sit inside, waiting for a whale or something.”

  This banter had the peculiar effect of making me want to cleave to Louise, and desperately, too—to build a warm new civilization, possibly in a foolish house with turrets. The road stretched before me like an arrow. There was only enough of it left before Rigby for me to say, perhaps involuntarily, “I wonder if we shouldn’t just get married.”

  Louise quickly looked away. Her silence conferred a certain seriousness on my question.

  But there was Rigby, and, in the parlance of all who have extracted funds from locals, Rigby had been good to me. Main Street was lined with ambitious and beautiful stone buildings, old for this part of the world. Their second and third floors were now affordable housing, and their street levels were occupied by businesses hanging on by their fingernails. You could still detect the hopes of the dead—their dreams, even—though it seemed to be only a matter of time before the wind carried them away, once and for all.

  I drove past the car lot at 200 East Fremont without comment and—considering the amount of difficulty it had caused me in the years before I got it stabilized and began to enjoy its very modest yields—without much feeling. I remembered the day, sometime earlier, when I had tried to help park the cars in the front row and got everything so crooked that the salesmen, not concealing their contempt, had to do it all over again. The title company where we were heading was on the same street, and it was a livelier place, from the row of perky evergreens out front to the merry receptionist who greeted us, a handsome young woman, probably a farm girl only moments before, enjoying the clothes, makeup, and perquisites of the new world that her firm was helping to build.

  We were shown into a spacious conference room with a long table and chairs, freshly sharpened pencils, and crisp notepads bearing the company letterhead. “Shall I stay?” Louise asked, the first thing she’d said since my earlier inadvertent remark, which I intuited had not been altogether rejected.

  “Please,” I said, gesturing toward a chair next to the one I meant to take. At that moment, the escrow agent entered and, standing very close to us, introduced himself as Brent Colby. Then he went to the far end of the table, where he spread his documents around in an orderly fan. Colby was around fifty, with iron-gray hair and a deeply lined face. He wore pressed jeans, a brilliant white snap-button shirt, cowboy boots, and a belt buckle with a steer head on it. He had thick, hairy hands and a gleaming wedding band. Just as he raised his left wrist to check his watch, the door opened and Oren Johnson, the buyer, entered. He went straight to Louise and, taking her hand in both of his, introduced himself. It occurred to me that, in trying to be suave, Oren Johnson had revealed himself to be a clodhopper, but I was probably just experiencing the mild hostility that emanates from every sale of property. Oren wore a suit, though it suggested less a costume for business than one for church. He had a gold tooth and a cautious pompadour. He too bore an investment-grade wedding band, and I noted that there was plenty of room in his black-laced shoes for his toes. He turned and said it was good to see me again after so long. The time had come for me to go into my act. With grotesque hauteur, I said I didn’t realize we had ever met. This was work.

  Oren Johnson bustled with inchoate energy; he was the kind of small-town leader who sets an example by silently getting things done. He suggested this just by arranging his pencils and notepad and repositioning his chair with rough precision. Locking eyes with me, he stated that he was a man of his word. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but took it to mean that the formalities of a closing were superfluous to the old-time handshake with which Oren Johnson customarily did business. I smiled and quizzically cocked my head as if to say that the newfangled arrangements with well-attested documents promptly conveyed to the courthouse suited me just fine, that deals made on handshakes were strictly for the pious or the picturesque. My message was clear enough that Louise shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and Brent Colby knocked his documents edgewise on the desk to align them. As far as Oren Johnson was concerned, I was beginning to feel that anyone who strayed from the basic patterns of farm life to sell cars bore watching. Like a Method actor, I already believed my part.

  “You’re an awfully lucky man, Oren Johnson,” I said to him, leaning back in my chair. I could see Louise openmouthed two seats away from Brent Colby, and observing myself through her eyes gave me a sudden burst of panic.

  “Oh?” Oren Johnson said. “How’s that?”

  “How’s that?” I did a precise job of replicating his inflection. “I am permitting you to purchase my car lot. You’ve seen the books: how often does a man get a shot at a business where all the work’s been done for him?”

  Brent Colby was doing an incomplete job of concealing his distaste; he was enough of a tinhorn to clear his throat theatrically. But Oren Johnson treated this as a colossal interruption and cast a firm glance his way.

  “It doesn’t look all that automatic to me,” he said.

  “Aw, hell, you’re just going to coin it. Pull the lever and relax!”

  “What about the illegal oil dump? I wish I had a nickel for every crankcaseful that went into that hole. Then I wouldn’t worry about what’s going to happen when the DEQ lowers the boom.”

  “Maybe you ought to ride your potato harvester another year or two, if you’re so risk averse. Cars are the future. They’re not for everybody.”

  Oren Johnson’s face reddened. He pushed his pencils and notepad almost out of reach in the middle of the conference table. He contemplated these supplies a moment before raising his eyes to mine. “I suppose you could put this car lot where the sun don’t shine, if that suits you.”

  Johnson having taken a stand, I immediately felt unsure that I even had another buyer. Had I ever acknowledged how much I longed to get rid of this business and put an end to all those embarrassing phone calls? I wanted to hand the moment off to someone else while I collected my thoughts, but as I looked around the room I found no one who was interested in rescuing me—least of all Louise, who had raised one eyebrow at the vast peculiarity of
my performance. Suddenly, I was desperate to keep the deal from falling apart. I gave my head a little twist to free my neck from the constrictions of my collar. I performed this gesture too vigorously, and I had the feeling that it might seem like the first movement of some sort of dance filled with sensual flourishes and bordering on the moronic. I had lost my grip.

  “Oren,” I said, and the familiarity seemed inappropriate. “I was attached to this little enterprise. I wanted to be sure you valued it.”

  The deal closed, and I had my check. I tipped back in my chair to think of a few commemorative words for the new owner, but the two men left the room without giving me the chance to speak. I shrugged at Louise and she, too, rose to go, pausing a moment beneath an enormous Kodachrome of a bugling elk. I was aware of her distance, and I sensed that my waffling hadn’t gone over particularly well. I concluded that at no time in the future would I act out a role to accomplish anything. This decision quickly evaporated with the realization that that is practically all we do in life. Comedy failed, too. When I told Louise that I had been within an inch of opening a can of whup-ass on the buyer, I barely got a smile. There’s nothing more desolating than having a phrase like that die on your lips.

  It was dark when we got back to Targhee Pass. Leaving town, we passed the BeeHive assisted-living facility and the Riot Zone, a “family fun park.” Most of the citizens we spotted there seemed unlikely rioters. I drove past a huge neon steak, its blue T-bone flashing above a restaurant that was closed and dark. There were deer on the road, and once, as we passed through a murky section of forest, we saw the pale faces of children waiting to cross.

  “What are they doing out at this hour?”