Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “Is that an Indian?” asked Coral of the hitchhiker standing beside the Canyon Creek on-ramp. Best to ignore Claudia who was playing around in her purse.

  “Indians don’t dress like Indians,” said Claudia. “That’s a hippie. I realize it was an awkward question.” She swept her lips with a ChapStick.

  “Do they still have those?” Coral asked as she picked caramel corn from the floor mat. I think she meant hippies.

  “They do here,” Claudia said.

  “It’s too hypothetical.”

  “You have to spot them before it’s too late. Eliminate the ones in cowboy hats. Then move to the turtlenecks, car buffs, and southern new money.”

  Coral, wincing slightly, experienced this as noise. Finally she asked, “Claudia, you and Niles, how big of a deal is it actually, would you say?”

  “Honey, it’s as big as I need it to be.”

  We had arrived: motel, vacant lot, chain link, Walmart bags in the lilacs. I secured adjoining rooms and keys. We took Claudia to the café at the Trading Post and ate tacos made with Indian fry bread and buffalo burgers. We were right across from the battlefield where Sitting Bull had made so many beautiful memories. Claudia and Coral discussed leaving home, letting me scrutinize the four Frenchmen at the table near the service entrance, including one who’d bought a war bonnet in the gift shop, causing mock eagle feathers from assorted poultry to flutter in the ceiling fan. Claudia gazed at us. “Are you two always this happy?”

  “That’s a joke, right?” said Coral.

  “You just seem a bit complacent. To me. But what do I know?”

  “We long for complacency.” The sudden widening stare from Coral alerted me to possible danger.

  Claudia said, “Hey, I was just reaching out. Is all it was.” She now wanted to buy something for Niles and made a detour through the gift shop, returning with a Custer’s Last Stand coffee mug wrapped in tissue. She held it against her cheek and smiled at us. “ ‘Complacent’ was a poor choice of words.”

  “You want to make it a little clearer?” said Coral.

  “No, Miss Coral, I don’t. I’ll leave it at that. Just another chapter. It’s so nice we’ve grown up. Do you remember the crazy stuff we used to do?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” said Claudia, holding the Custer mug very still. She smiled at the odd silence in the room and said, “So that was then, and this is now?”

  We paused before saying good night, moths batting around the lights by our doors. In the parking lot, an elderly Indian in an oversize and tattered suit coat lit his companion’s cigarette. She waved away the smoke and smiled at him. It made me happy to notice it. Once in our own room, Coral sat heavily on the bed and said, “I’m taking her out. How did she come up with this so-called complacency?”

  I said, “She’s confusing it with contentment.” It was utter bullshit. When placating Coral, I could lay this stuff on with a trowel. I don’t know why I bothered, because when I look back, there’s the Indian in the suit coat waving away the smoke from his companion’s cigarette while Coral and I are just getting used to the idea that we were hardly meant for each other. It must have been a relief, because the rest of the trip was much more fun. We packed up, checked out, and headed to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in our quiet car, so quiet in fact that I turned on the radio while we drove and listened to cattle prices. We strode out onto the battlefield in the fresh morning air, the smell of prairie, a sky streaked with altocumulus clouds. Among the headstones where the troopers of the Seventh Cavalry fell, we came to the very spot where Custer died and where his small headstone was remarkably no bigger than anyone else’s. Claudia read the inscription, looked up, and cast her eyes across the battlefield. Coral and I were lost in our thoughts.

  Really, it’s all good. I hated Boise (it took three years) and went home to the badly shrunken family iron-ore business and somehow made a living only slightly smaller than the one I’d made in Boise. One year I managed to ignore a ton of parking tickets and ended up in Coral’s court. “You again!” she said and threatened me with an ankle monitor. I paid the tickets.

  KANGAROO

  Named for a father never to be seen again, Patrick Howell identified as Latvian—his mother had described his face as the “map of Latvia,” the country of her birth—and was a veteran parole officer in the city of Issaquah, an amiable fat man who belted his pants above his belly and wore short sleeves in all weather, his pocket liner kept full of pens. His years on the job had made him the skeptical but compassionate soul now hanging around the Pier 86 grain terminal, watching from what seemed a safe distance as his charge—Scott or Travis or whatever name he was now going by—stood beneath an empty container ship from China until the package fell from the four-story slab of a vessel into his arms. Howell was very sad to see this and rarely went to this much trouble to keep his parolees on the straight and narrow; but Scott or Travis had touched him as only a few young men—often ingenious but troubled or wounded, and on their way to lives as career criminals—had done. They were hard to turn around, quite unlike his murderers, whose problems often went away the minute they pulled the trigger. Travis or Scott was almost umbilically connected to container ships and the shifting populations of their crews. These ties had been forged in the bars of Ballard, where no matter how drunk you were or how persuasive your companion, you could still smell the ships and waters of the North Pacific. Howell thought he understood the addiction, but his idea that it might be in remission in Scott/Travis’s case was, he acknowledged, delusional.

  When, after its long fall from the side of the ship, the package landed in Scott’s arms, it nearly brought him to his knees, though it failed to knock the furtiveness out of him, an aspect oddly accentuated by his scrawny frame. He remained in a feral crouch, gazing slowly all around himself to see if he had been observed, and just catching Howell turning away. Too late: he had violated probation, the membrane between him and a possible return to prison. Until then, he had had no interest in visiting his hometown in connection with his mother’s death only days ago. But now he decided he would go despite having promised himself to never set foot there again.

  He scurried to the first green can, lifted the heavy steel lid, and dumped 150 counterfeit Rolexes before turning in the direction of Howell’s last position, with his hands raised to show they were empty. He was panting, but Howell was gone.

  Scott left Issaquah and began driving, a trip that could be accomplished without a stop if he made all the lights. Because a modest inheritance was involved, a run-down house, someone had bothered to inform him about his mother. He felt he couldn’t have what he truly wanted, which was never to arrive and never run out of gas. She had been a negligent mother, and he had spent long spells of his childhood in foster care, known by his baptismal name, Travis; but his life since had gone well enough, thanks to numerous lucrative if fishy enterprises trafficking low-end contraband, and there were times when he had even begun to imagine how his mother might have turned out as she had, a disheveled custodial case and worn-out party girl. Anyway, it was too late. If she had thought about him at all at the time of her death, she would have guessed that he had turned out bad. He had inherited her house and all the unpaid taxes that amounted to more than it was worth—besides which, it was in the floodplain, so not much use tearing it down for the lot. It was just one of the places he had lived as a child, when he had served as ring bearer at one of her numerous weddings. The groom had given her a gift certificate for a white-dove release, and at the ceremony, conducted by a friend wearing a priest’s collar made of cardboard, the guy from the dove outfit released a pair of the birds from a miniature Taj Mahal to cheers; then the shit hit the fan. They played a 45 rpm record, “Open the Door, Richard,” until fights broke out with the customary weapons, tire irons, sash weights, and razors. As he drove east, he guessed that no one would realize he’d gone home, and by simply disappearing, any guilt at letting Howell down was blurred. Besides, Howell had no busine
ss taking these things personally, and he had told him so to his face at Denny’s. Still, it hurt to disappoint maybe the only person who’d ever actually cared about him.

  He drove over the Cascades, the ShitMobile, his half-dead oil-smoke muscle car, barely managing the climbs; and he pulled into Cle Elum Farm & Home Supply, where he bought a bolt cutter to remove the ankle monitor. Just past the Sunset Highway exit, the interstate crossed the Yakima River. Scott pulled over, clambered down the bank, and threw the monitor and bolt cutter into the river. Up on the highway, an old Corolla with Idaho handicap plates and one headlight, stopped to see if Scott was having car trouble. The driver, a perilously skinny old lady wearing a red beret, got out and looked at Scott’s empty car. Then the passenger door opened, and what must have been her husband climbed out very slowly and in a crouch. He wore the dashboard overalls of a farmer and a visor that read FREE MUSTACHE RIDES. When they’d looked over the bank and seen Scott, the old woman remarked, “Threw something away.” Grandpa snorted. “Hope it weren’t no baby.”

  Once back in the ShitMobile, Scott was careful to drive the speed limit as the sun slowly set behind him. Living near the north coast, you felt the sun just sank into the Pacific Ocean, no reason to feel it went on. He didn’t want to leave the coast. The ocean was a happy place, and all those people in the interior where he was headed would end up by the ocean, sooner or later, or hate themselves. He had no reason to believe his mother had seen the ocean, though one of her boyfriends had been a chief bosun’s mate on a saltwater tug that hauled hundred-ton crawler cranes to bridge projects. He wound up in Montana fucking Scott’s mom because he didn’t like the ocean.

  At that moment, courtesy of Verizon cell towers, Howell could have known one of two things: Scott had either jumped into the Yakima and was gone, or Scott had thrown the tether into the Yakima. Unfortunately, Verizon would also have told of the tampering, and Howell would conclude that Scott had flown the coop, the only other explanation being that he had chosen not to die wearing a monitor, but Howell was no romantic. “Onward!” Scott exhorted the ShitMobile as he forged his way east. He forgot to check the odometer when he gassed up, and Howell, who had once ridden in Scott’s car, mused, “Who knows how far that piece of junk will go anyhow. Better put ‘hitchhiker’ in the bulletin.”

  He listened to country radio on the long drive up the Columbia Basin, over the top, and down to the prairie towns below. The bumper sticker on the side of his Plymouth Hemi’s fake turbo scoop read IN TWANG WE TRUST. Once a girl trap at drive-ins, for fifteen years it had been nothing but a chick repellent with a V-8 and was now too conspicuous for a getaway car. If somebody’d only leave another unlocked that he could hot-wire, he’d get him a new one. Heartsick and trailing smoke and tappet noise across the grain fields of the Palouse on a nineteen-way psycho crossroad, things surely had to improve. The Styrofoam coffee cups accumulated on the floor. If he could only shoot up, he could make the time fly, but no such luck: the road crawled at him and the little towns hardly looked like dope bazaars even if he’d had extra money, which he did not. He always disliked assessing his resources, but this time it was necessary. Should’ve kept a few Rolexes.

  At dusk his hometown emerged from the foothills with an extraordinary ghastliness until he conceded no town was actually as grim as this parade of grain towers, railroad sidings, the blood-colored county courthouse, and meager houses drawn back on their yards. He felt a ferocious pride at having escaped this dump. If it had not been his hometown, it might have seemed an ordinary backwater village, not unpleasant, well kept and with enough trees. As it was, even jail seemed a reasonable option.

  His various foster parents had overfed him, and Scott was pleased that the fat Travis anyone in this tank town might have recognized had been replaced by the slender, health-conscious, “commodities trader” Scott, a fucked-up gym rat. Awkward conversations were improbable. By “awkward,” he meant ones likely to arouse guilt over the so-called abandonment of his mother. Scott was not buying that at all, and so far, no one had suggested it. They didn’t know his new name and they didn’t know his record. For all they knew he was an accountant at the Seahawks’ head office. “Just a little cog,” he had often informed the credulous who were drawn to the false modesty of this affable crook. Looking straight at him, they believed it was an accountant with a box seat at the Kingdome before their very eyes. The motel was embedded in a truck stop, and the all-night noise made his sleep intermittent at best, but he got enough, and the café breakfast and coffee helped with his recovery. His sedan was the only car wedged among the transcontinental trucks, and he ate among exhausted men. He noted that it was a beautiful day and, with one quick phone call to the only funeral home in town, confirmed that he was not interested in viewing the body. His vehemence was remarkable and not well understood by the woman directing the mortuary: “I don’t want to see it. You want to see it, you see it. Count me out because no way is it something I need to see.” Taking offense at such aggression, she would have answered back, but he’d hung up on her.

  * * *

  —

  Howell had a pretty good idea of where so-called Scott might be headed, and he accepted the police sniper the department had stuck him with, and which Howell usually resisted in the case of a nonviolent criminal fugitive. In essence, the sniper was a throw-in. Howell had known Scott was problematic, but desperation might be a new development; anyway, it might be better to be safe than sorry. It was a long ride and the sniper, a former shoe salesman, spent the time playing with his gun in the backseat while Howell enjoyed the quiet of the nice big black unmarked Ford Interceptor. As the sniper fooled with his Tikka T3x, or rather cuddled it, which was why he was in the backseat, he would roll down a window and look at things through the super-clear Leupold scope. Howell forbade him to shoot it from the car, no matter how far out in the country they might be. He’d already ragged him about having a desert-tan stock in the Pacific Northwest and had the sniper pretty well under his thumb while noting his peevishness. Howell tossed his cell phone over his shoulder and told the sniper to get the Montana weather, exactly at the moment when the sniper took a shot, jacking into the air a white plastic paint bucket about a thousand yards away in an empty pasture. “People need to pick up after themselves.” That was the sniper’s message.

  “Jesus God my ears are ringing.”

  “It’ll do that. It’s like sex with strangers: you should wear protection.”

  The immediate effect of shooting the plastic bucket was to slightly adjust the power dynamic within the police car; Howell gazed through the side window and then thought about the sniper shooting from the car, which he had banned. Was it worth a confrontation?

  “What makes you think he actually gives a shit his mother died?” inquired the sniper. He was always looking all around, even when asking questions.

  “You got something better?”

  The sniper settled into the backseat and gently lay his rifle across the floor, giving it a little pat. With one hand behind his head, he looked at his phone. “You ever try Under Armour?” No reply. “The best. Under Armour is the best. You could pave Iraq with Under Armour. They steal it and make shit out of it. I’ve seen them put curds in Under Armour trying to make cottage cheese. Supposed to be some new Under Armour shirt that’ll collect data.”

  “What the fuck’s that mean,” shouted Howell, “a shirt collecting data?” Whatever Howell had been feeling came out this way. It made no sense.

  “I don’t know!” wailed the sniper. “That’s not in my wheelhouse, but it don’t make it impossible. Probably goes to an instrument like your phone. Bluetooth or USB.”

  “You’re lost now.”

  This was the first raising of voices, and it silenced the car for a while until the sniper said, “Oh my God, are we near the Columbia Gorge?”

  Howell said, “North of here.”

  “Get a load of this”—reading from his tablet—“ ‘members of the Rainbow People, wished
to give birth while bungee jumping.’ ” He looked up. “It actually worked! The baby was born high over the gorge, but the mother kind of lost track of it. I guess the dad was able to swoop in and make a landing with the baby, but the mom couldn’t stop bungeeing and flew out over the gorge on this rubber band screaming, ‘My baby!’ All three ended up safe on the ground. But when papers interviewed them, they were so bummed. They wanted a girl!”

  * * *

  —

  Though drab, the town sat within sweet countryside, a splendid valley surrounding a blue river winding through meadows, and now Scott was actually glad to be visiting it again, recognizing that it would be the last time, unless he found he liked it better with his mother dead. There had been a day, after all, when it comprised most of his happiness or at least escape, as a ward of the community who appeared in the local paper at Christmastime in proudly donated new clothes, inciting his mother to snatch him back from foster care, annually declaring, “I’ll dress him,” cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “And I’ll dress him good,” tears in her eyes. “Ask around.” It hurt to remember this.

  On a fine day with hawks above the cliffs and the sky blue as ice, he drove up the river to a country bar once popular with his schoolmates. He felt equable enough to listen to the radio but thought a beer, or two, was nevertheless an excellent idea, since he was either excited to be on home turf or else just needed something to settle his nerves. He was surprised to find himself so on edge and looked abruptly from side to side as though he might be seeing things. Ranches were burning ditches, and the spring air was tangy with the grass smoke. For reasons he was unwilling to explore, he thought it best not to talk to anyone, and at this hour it was not likely anyone would be at the bar. If he was being followed from Issaquah he wouldn’t have to hear about it.

  At the sight of a truck and horse trailer parked in front, Scott considered turning back to town, then thought better of it and parked. Utah plates on the truck and trailer. He remembered his mother telling him that if he didn’t do his homework he’d end up in Utah, like she actually gave a shit if he did his homework or if some particular state was a bigger dump than Montana. He turned off the radio and the engine, congratulating himself on his jittery nonchalance while glancing around the corners of the building as if Howell could be lurking behind that mountain of bar trash.