Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Just south of the cemetery, where the road starts down into the Suce Creek bottom, was a car upside down and two people, a man and a woman, standing beside it. The beams from my headlights carved a garish hole in the dark. I could see that the man was holding and trying to calm the agitated woman, who was pointing toward a vacancy of brush and prairie. I turned off the radio, so as to concentrate on, and try to understand, what I was seeing. I pulled up behind the overturned car without any sense that the couple was looking to me for help. On the contrary, the man was waving harshly at me to turn off my lights. When I did, I could no longer see them very well, and it was unclear whether they wanted me to stay or whether there was something private about the woman’s anguished wails that I should respect. The glimpse I’d had of them with my headlights on had suggested that they were uninjured. I don’t know why this encouraged my bafflement or diffidence, but I just sat in my car waiting to be asked.

  Finally, that didn’t make sense either. I couldn’t just sit there but I really couldn’t go on. I got out of the car, risking the parking lights, which didn’t seem to offend the man as my headlights had. Now he beckoned me over, but with the same kind of authoritarian gestures with which he had ordered my lights extinguished. When I reached the couple, the man stared me straight in the face in a disquieting way. He was not big but seemed fit, with close-cropped hair and noticeably long sideburns. He shook his head to indicate either that this entire situation was a mess or that there was nothing to be done about the dramatic noises coming from the woman, a remarkably small person in a cotton dress that went all the way to the ground, who was still directing her cries toward the grass and underbrush. The man put his hand on my shoulder and moved me to a spot away from the noise.

  “She’s crying for her baby,” he said in an oddly confiding tone almost as though he was selling me the idea. When I asked if the child had been thrown from the car, he said, “There is no baby. She’s crazy. Just play along.” His gaze was very direct. “I think you can do that.”

  At this, the woman rushed over to us and stood just at the level of my chest so that the peculiar arrangement of her hair, piled atop her head with a comb thrust through it, drew my exhausted scrutiny.

  “He don’t believe me! Timmy was throwed from the back window. Out in the pickers.”

  The man was staring at her. She touched a finger to a button on my shirt. I thought it was a curious gesture for someone in her position. Her diction, too, was in contrast to the refinement of her face and the delicacy of her clothing. The man watched her as though he’d never heard her speak before.

  “Will you look for him? He don’t believe me, and I got no shoes on.”

  The man tilted his head and nodded, and I concurred that there was no harm in going along with this. It seemed entirely possible that there was a baby. As I looked back, I wondered whom I believed.

  I stumbled through the brush and weeds, my eyes not quite adjusted to the starry night. I thought something like a five-minute loop would demonstrate my willingness to help, but at the same time I listened for the sound of a child. I hadn’t gone far before I stepped into a badger hole and fell; by the time I got the dirt out of my eyes and my mouth, I was annoyed. I thought of the old cowboy and the boy back on Main Street and how there was something important about them that I couldn’t put my finger on. I was in no hurry as I stood up to pick the thistles out of my left palm.

  It was thus that I observed my car drive away, two little red taillights, and this threw me into a strange reflective state, in which my dissolute night at the Wrangler and my ensuing exhaustion, the cowboy and the boy, the two crooks who had just stolen my car, my remote house and its unconquered air of vacancy, all seemed to have equal value, that is, no value. I have gone back to this idea since, because I feel it was a clue to my eventual burden, this set of random data points by which I simply moved across some screen before being faced with a connivance that I couldn’t understand though it seemed to belong to me. The flashing light on a remote radio tower across the valley looked almost like a beacon, and I recall thinking that I could head for that as easily as go back to the road, where I no longer had a car. Later, misusing these memories to impress some girl, I would try pitching the idea that this descent into the abyss was hilarious, but I hardly laughed at the time.

  When I got back to the road, scuffed up, fingernails packed with clay, I looked both ways as though I might be run over on this empty highway. I knew where I was, just at the rise toward Deep Creek, Pine Creek, Barney Creek, and so on; I could smell the irrigated hay fields on the night air. I was more than ten miles from my house on a little-traveled road. The Absaroka Range made a sharp silhouette against the starlight.

  A car approached from the north, a pair of lights wobbling on the uneven pavement. I stood at the edge of the road, arms at my sides. The car pulled up beside me, and from within I heard a woman’s anxious voice. “Are you all right? You’re lucky to be alive!” I made an effort to sweep the dirt from my clothes before opening the passenger door; it gave me the moment I needed to understand this interesting development. Then I got in, flinging myself back against the seat. “Yes,” I breathed. “Very lucky indeed, thank you. I just need to get home.”

  “Shall I call someone, the—someone?” She held up her phone. A pretty face, sharply focused very dark brown eyes, shone in the thing’s green light. I said I didn’t think it was necessary. I supposed my own phone was traveling somewhere in the night, probably headed south, in my car. I tried to make conversation as we drove on. “Is that Cassiopeia?” She didn’t know—she was trying to watch the road. I remembered the groceries I’d had in the trunk of my car—some apples, orange juice, Lean Cuisine, two tins of Science Diet cat food, a fifth of George Dickel. I knew what was going to happen: it was three in the morning. We didn’t even get upstairs. We fucked on the couch with the front door open. The cat was all over us. She started laughing and soon left. I carried my clothes upstairs, threw them on the floor, and went to bed.

  Karen was her name. I don’t know if she got mine or not. She was an emergency-room doctor and smelled like surgical tape. She was tired from work and on her way home. I’m surprised she took the time with me. I believe I enjoyed the experience, but I really couldn’t stop thinking about the old cowboy and his young friend. She did tell me that her job was grim and had taught her to “live it up.” Maybe that explained it, as if an explanation was required.

  * * *

  —

  I awakened hungry, but it was almost midmorning. I had work to do! One of my skills was making models for other architects’ projects. I was in far greater demand for these models than I was for my own designs. In fact, they pretty well ate my career. I was making one now for a glamorous house in Bridger Canyon. It looked like a spaceship, with rooms cantilevered over a spring-fed pond. I could just picture it below the gorgeous massif of the Bridger Range, a real piece of shit. Oh well, it was a living.

  When I was this weary, I’d do various mindless things to get myself ready for the day, which necessarily demanded physical deftness. I was trying to drop two halves of a Lender’s onion bagel into the slots of the toaster simultaneously, a tough hand-eye maneuver: I’d nail one and the other would flop out onto the counter. I was further distracted by the beauty of the morning, visible above the sink, a crowd of finches in the lilacs beside the kitchen window, through which came the most ambrosial air from the spruces surrounding the yard.

  I didn’t get a chance to eat the bagel until later in the day, when it was cold and hard: a knock on my front door turned out to be our big Sheriff Holm, bursting out of his olive uniform and smiling suspiciously at me as he offered his hand. He had a large, round Scandinavian head and a blunt nose. He didn’t want a bagel, so I led him into the living room, where I offered him a straight-backed chair, a white oak Shaker knockoff I’d made myself, an extraordinarily uncomfortable thing that gave its occupant the feeling of enduring an inquisition, while ensuring the brevity of a
visit. I knew instinctively that this would be the right approach, given the startling appearance of the law. The chair made twerps out of most people, but the sheriff looked like he owned it. It may even have added to his authority. He got right to the point.

  “Do you know where your car is?”

  “I don’t. It was stolen.”

  “And you never got around to reporting it?”

  “I was with an emergency-room doctor, tending to other matters. Has it been found?”

  “It’s in Torrington, Wyoming, full of bullet holes.”

  This was a good time to say nothing.

  “They’ve got the guy,” he added.

  “What about the girl?”

  “In the hospital. She’s not gonna make it. They robbed the Sinclair station in town, rolled their car, and then got some help from you.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it—”

  “Really? Then why didn’t you report it?”

  “It was late.”

  “Pard, we answer the phone twenty-four-seven.”

  “I should have called. Of course, I should have. I should have picked up the phone and called.”

  “I could probably make a case here. I’m not going to, because I don’t think it would fly. But it never needed to come to this. Maybe you should think about that. There wasn’t nothing in the world wrong with that young woman. You ever see a pretty gal in a morgue? I don’t recommend it.”

  He gave me time to absorb this, but at that moment my mind was elsewhere. “Who’s that old cowboy walks around town in the middle of the night?”

  It took the sheriff a moment to answer. “If he has a name, I wouldn’t know it. Why do you ask?”

  I still had my work to do. I was able to use a piece of broken mirror for the pond. I just couldn’t make out how far back to go to find the part that wound up in Torrington. This was going to take a while.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas McGuane lives on a ranch in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of ten novels, three works of nonfiction, and three previous collections of stories, To Skin a Cat, Gallatin Canyon, and Crow Fair.

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