Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Owen’s father appeared and boomed that an umpire was needed. He hung his suit coat on the backstop, tugged his tie to one side, stepped behind the catcher, folded his arms behind him, and bent forward for the next pitch. There was no next pitch. The players saw his condition, and the game dissolved. As Owen started to walk home with his father, Mr. Kershaw, observant, came out his front door and gave them a curt wave. Owen tried to think of hubcaps he didn’t have yet while his father strode along, looking far ahead into some empty place toward home.

  On the school bus the next day, Owen fielded questions about “the ump” and sat quietly, sensing the small movements of the turtles in the bottom of his lunch box, which was otherwise filled with the random sorts of things his mother put in there—Hostess Twinkies, not particularly fresh fruit, packaged peanut butter and crackers. Ben was sitting on the broad bench seat at the back, between the twins, who tied things in his hair and pretended to help him with his homework while enjoying his incomprehension. He must have begun to feel rewarded by his limitations. The twins whispered to each other and to Ben and made his face red with the things they said. Then Ben told the twins about Owen’s turtles, and the twins told the safety patrol, who towered over Owen’s seat and asked to see his lunch box.

  “Why do you want to see it?”

  “Give it to me.”

  “No.”

  The safety patrol worked his way forward to the driver and said something, then returned. “Give it to me or I’m putting you off the bus.”

  Owen slowly handed the lunch box to him. The safety patrol undid the catch, opened the lid, and dumped the food. Then he pried out the false bottom and looked in. “You know the rules,” he said. He gingerly lifted the turtles out of the box, leaned toward an open window, and threw them out. Owen jumped up to see them burst on the pavement. He fell back into his seat and pulled his coat over his head.

  “You knew the rules,” the safety patrol said.

  Life went on as though nothing had happened, and nothing really had happened. Ben was the twins’ plaything for several months, and then something occurred that no one wanted to talk about—if one twin was asked about it, the question was referred to the other—and Ben had to transfer to a special school, one where he couldn’t come and go as he pleased, or maybe it was worse than that, since he was never seen at home again or in town or on the football field with his water tray. Owen continued to attend the football games, not to watch but to wander the darkened parking lot, building his hubcap collection. As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.

  ON A DIRT ROAD

  I’d have thought we would have met the Jewells sooner, since we all had the same commute down the long dirt road to the interstate and thence to town and jobs; to say they never reached out would be an understatement. The first year they didn’t so much as wave to either Ann or me, a courtesy conspicuously hard to avoid given that passing on our road is virtually a windshield-to-windshield affair, and an even slightly averted gaze is a very strong bit of semaphore. That we could see their faces in extraordinary detail, his round and pink with rimless glasses, hers an old bohemian look with stringy hair parted in the middle, hardly seemed to matter. He looked sharply toward us while she just stared away.

  “It’s just fine with me,” Ann said. “We don’t spend nearly enough time with the friends we already have.”

  “Oh, baby, we need new ones.”

  “No, not really. We’ve got good friends.”

  “Like the vaunted Clearys?” I was egging her on.

  “That wasn’t great, I’ll admit,” she said. “Maybe they need another chance.” This was a reference to a dinner celebrating the Clearys’ seventeenth wedding anniversary. The big party on an odd year was their idea of a joke. They had us wearing paper hats and twirling noisemakers, all part of their bullying cheer, which made us feel they were making fun of us. I wouldn’t have put it past a guy like Craig Cleary, regional super-salesman and fireworks mogul, with a Saddam Hussein mustache that somehow matched the black bangs his dour wife wore down to her eyebrows. Before we even went, I had told Ann that I’d rather go to town and watch haircuts, but she pronounced the whole thing clever. “Cleary’s an oxygen thief,” I pleaded. “You can hardly breathe around him.”

  Unneighborly though they were, the Jewells had the fascination of mystery, but that was likely due to the extent of their remodeling project. For half a year, tradesmen were parked all around their house, the familiar plumber and electrician, but also the wildly expensive Prairie Kitchens people must have been there for two months, with those long slabs of polished black granite in the front yard lying under a tarp that blew off regularly and was just as regularly replaced. “It’s granite,” I said. “Stop worrying about it.”

  Ann said, “Could they be building a restaurant?”

  The Jewells would keep us wondering, and I thought we agreed about the Clearys. So after a perfectly pleasant ride home through the tunnel of cottonwood one night, I met Ann’s announcement of the Clearys’ invitation that we meet them at Rascal’s for pizza with regrettable thoughtlessness: “No fucking way,” I think is what I said. Or “Fuck no.” Or “Is this a fucking joke?” Something like that. As I say, thoughtless. Ann didn’t take it well.

  “If memory serves, you were the one clamoring to get out more.”

  “I wasn’t ‘clamoring.’ What’s more, these people aren’t promising.” All I wanted was my chair and the six o’clock news, not pizza peppered with Craig Cleary’s rapid-fire hints as to how I might turn my career around.

  “You’re not even a little tempted?”

  “No.”

  “But I accepted!” I was thunderstruck and all too mindful of how lovely she looked as she primped for this pizza outing in town, a wholly inauspicious occasion to which she seemed excitedly committed. She wore the flowered silk skirt with the delicate uneven hem that she knew to be my favorite and the linen shirt with pleats, another of my favorites, both of which had been hibernating in her closet. All these preparations for pizza with two boors? When I caught her taking a final glance in the hall mirror, I detected distinct approval. As she left, she chortled, “I hope you don’t feel stuck!”

  “We have two cars,” I said cheerfully.

  I admit that I was aware of our isolation and in a way glad to see her take the lead in freshening things up. But we’d been through at least one so-called social occasion with the Clearys, and I thought our disapproval was solid. I remember asking Ann on the way home, “How about the ‘Moroccan cuisine’? We should have called them on it: Moroccan? Moroccan how?”

  Ann had said, “But exactly.” At that time.

  So finding myself at loose ends because of the Clearys of all people came as a surprise. I pulled open the door to the refrigerator hoping to ignite my appetite, but I got no farther than lifting a piece of Black Diamond cheddar to my scrutiny before returning it and closing the door. I went into the mudroom and looked at my car through the window, trying to think of something I could do with it. I really wasn’t used to Ann going off like this on her own. I have a way of extolling peace and quiet in theory without enjoying it in practice and end up fending off the idea that I’ve been abandoned. As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun listing my more regrettable traits, and this one has always made the cut. I think the list was supposed to help me improve myself, but it’s turned out to be just another list alongside yard chores, oil changes, and storm windows.

  I’ve been out of the legislature for over a year, and it has not been the best thing in the world for our relationship, though I just hate to use that word. I served one term and made my values plain to the voters—respect for the two-parent household, predator control, and reduced death taxes for the family farm. When I ran for a second term, fringe groups twisted everything I’d said, and the net result was this Assiniboin half-breed named Michelle Red Moon Gillespie cleaned my clock, leaving her wigwam for the capitol in Helena while I, unwilling to resume my job
as a travel agent, headed home to try to figure out what was next. I kept my office in town on the theory that something would come along, but nothing did. It allowed me at least to keep Ann at bay while I tried to think, and we went on referring to it as “my job.” Eventually, my weakened state was something she could smell, and once or twice I caught her regarding me in a way I never saw when she was frisking around the Governor’s Ball or any other time when I was a senator. We talked about the early days of our marriage, before the travel agency, before state politics, before we learned there would not be children. We were going to get the fuck out of Montana and buy a schooner. We even flew to Marina del Rey to look at it parked there among thousands of other boats that never went anywhere. I said, “You know, I just can’t see it.”

  Ann said, “You’re not serious! I’ve heard nothing but ‘schooner’ for the last five years!”

  “It was only a dream.”

  “I’ll give you dream. Don’t do this to me again.”

  The captain came out of the cabin in a cloud of marijuana smoke to ask if we were interested. He said he was tired of life at sea and was going to carry the anchor inland until someone asked him what it was. There he would settle down, find himself a gal of Scandinavian heritage, and raise a family. He kept looking hungrily at Ann, then back at me with an expression that said, What’s she doing with you?

  We flew home, and Ann began tap-dancing lessons. One day when I’d forgotten, she told me to flush the toilet immediately, adding, “In this matter, timeliness counts. I can’t be expected to review your diet at this remove.” That was one of the low points and yet another hint that my idleness was so complete that I no longer remembered to flush the toilet.

  By way of placating my instantaneous loneliness in Ann’s absence, I decided to visit the Jewells and find out why anyone would get so involved in remodeling such a plain house, one probably built on the cheap to judge by the rusty stovepipe sticking out the top. Their place was so close, I almost didn’t need to drive, though I did so very slowly, without listening to the radio or anything else as I thought about why I was doing this at all. I figured that it was a bit like having a drink, just a matter of changing gears. I didn’t know why Ann would want to join the Clearys. Was she that bored? Did I bore her? I certainly wasn’t entertaining myself. So going to visit the Jewells was not just a matter of breaking the ice with inscrutable neighbors but, frankly, to get myself out of our settled cottage with its old trees and vines, even for a short journey to what looked like remodeling hell a mile down the road. Would the Jewells peek at me through a crack of their front door and ask what I wanted? Would they pretend they weren’t at home? Either way it would be more interesting than killing time while I waited for Ann to return. A pleasant jolt of the unfamiliar ought to have been within my capacities. I might cook it up as an enchanting tidbit for Ann.

  I felt newly alive as I looked for a place to park in front of the Jewells’ house amid the building supplies, camper shell, cat travel crates, cement mixer. Two things struck me: the drawn curtains and pirate flag fluttering from the pole in the front yard. Also, the manufacturer’s stickers on the plate-glass windows had not been removed. As I passed the upended canoe going to the door, several cats ran out, one climbing the only tree in the yard. When I knocked, the door opened so quickly as to confirm that I’d been observed.

  “How did you find a place to park in all that junk?”

  Jewell’s teeth were big for his face, or he was just too thin for them, but his smile was intense and welcoming all the same. We were nearly the same height, so his eager proximity was especially notable. I found myself leaning back. He was very glad to see me!

  “I thought we’d never meet!” he cried. “Bruce.”

  “Well, here I am!” I exclaimed, sounding exceptionally stupid. “Bruce.”

  “You can say that again!” Was Jewell being ironic? The all-knowing look you get when you buy rimless glasses seemed at odds with his guileless enthusiasm. I was confused. “We don’t allow smoking,” he added. For just a moment, I thought Jewell was fucking with me, but the thought passed as I followed him into the house, his windmilling arms leading the way. That he was barefoot was not so remarkable given that he was at home, but it seemed at odds with his somewhat-spiffy attire, slacks and smoking jacket. Bruce was a little younger than me, and painted toenails might have been a generational thing I missed.

  “What’s with the pirate flag?”

  “Oh, Nell and I have a kind of game. I pretend I’m a pirate, and she’s a royal prisoner.” Jewell shifted into a guttural “pirate” voice: “You look after the old lady and I shall see to the daughters.”

  “Is that Blind Pew?” I asked.

  “Oh God, no. Anyway, at first we were going to be cowboys—here’s my study—and then astronauts. At the moment, it’s pirates, but who knows. Nell, thank goodness, has a private income. Being a programmer was more a matter of my personal dignity, but oh well, what’s the use of that? Life is short, don’t you agree, might as well enjoy it.”

  Opening the door to the study, Jewell called out, Ed McMahon style, “Heeeeeere’s, Nell!” And indeed there she was in a prospect of piled Lego pieces, with a large picture of the finished model thumbtacked to the wall next to her: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “She’s already done Big Ben. So she’s ready to move up the Architecture Series. This one got a great review in Eurobricks, didn’t it, Nell?” Her face had no expression of any kind, and she was wearing a wash dress of the sort seen in WPA photographs. “We got sidetracked by the Royal Baby Series when Kate’s little Prince George of Cambridge was commemorated with a fifty-five-brick pram.”

  “I want a baby!” boomed Nell.

  Jewell seemed not to have heard and introduced us. Nell struggled to respond. There was something wrong with Nell, big-time. Retarded, I think, but healthy otherwise and rather pretty. She stood up and smiled, quite a nice smile, and said with extraordinary deliberation, “Hullo.”

  Jewell said, “Why don’t I just leave you two for a moment and let you get acquainted.”

  I instinctively turned as though to follow Jewell out the door, but it was gently closed in my face. Nell said, “We don’t serve drinks in here.”

  “Ah.”

  “But we do have healthful snacks.”

  “Thank you, but I’m okay.”

  “This puzzle is very time-consuming.”

  She had a gentle, crooning voice that, once I absorbed its strangeness, was so soothing as to be almost hypnotic. She told me the puzzle didn’t really interest her and that before her accident she had seen the real Tower of Pisa and that hadn’t interested her either. I began to ask what sort of accident, to which she answered preemptively, “Bicycle,” before going on to tell how on Tuesday she got lost in the woods behind the house and that it didn’t bother her but it bothered “Bruce” and, because it had, she was sad all day, until “Bruce” made her pancakes with blueberry syrup and after that they were fine about the woods and what she was doing there.

  The door opened and Jewell, now shod—they looked like bowling shoes—entered briskly and said, “Just that little bit past name and face makes everyone more comfortable. So you’re Hoyt, right? Okay, Hoyt, I was going to throw something together for Nell and me. Care to join us? Not promising a lot because the kitchen is a work in progress, to say the very least.”

  This is when lightning struck. I glanced at Jewell in his suspenders and bowling shoes, and at Nell in her clean Depression shift, and said, “Why don’t we run down to Rascal’s and split a pizza? My treat.”

  Before Bruce could answer, Nell clapped her hands and bayed, “I love pizza!”

  “You really want to take us on, Hoyt? We’ve only just met, and we can be a handful. Nell is very active, aren’t you, Nell?”

  I had enough on my hands to understand why I had cooked up the invitation at all. My hands were already pretty full trying to figure out what I could have been thinking in the first place. I tried to sell mys
elf the idea that this would be a rescue operation to save Ann from the wearisome Clearys, but that still left me with the original bafflement as to why she wanted to meet them at all. Nevertheless, everything would be quite clear when the Jewells sat down at the table. The introductions would be interesting, and Nell versus the pizza menu could be a real hoot, since Rascal’s had about a hundred toppings.

  Nell made me promise to help her with the puzzle later, and when I agreed she looked at me quite pointedly and said that she was not a vegetable. I assured Nell that indeed she was not, and Jewell smiled his assent. We stood around for a bit while he set the burglar alarms, an exercise I failed to understand. The Jewells must have come from someplace where this was necessary. Their clothing seemed rural, backwoods almost, but had something of the costume about it. “Pizza!” said Jewell. “What an idea! Nell, when was the last time we had pizza?”

  “Two Thanksgivings ago,” said Nell sternly.

  “Did we enjoy it?” asked Jewell.

  Nell said, “How should I know?”

  I wanted to get in on this somehow and asserted that you could get turkey as a topping at Rascal’s, but the two just gazed at me thoughtfully as though the meaning of this would come to them if they were patient.

  In any case, we’d have to hurry along if we were going to catch Ann and the Clearys. Afterward, once she got her face out of the pizza, she could pitch in on her Legos. Ha! These were brave thoughts: I still couldn’t believe she’d prefer dinner with the Clearys to codependent nattering with me in our enchanted cottage with its vine-crowded windows.