The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  Acclaim for

  THOMAS MCGUANE’S

  The Bushwhacked Piano

  “McGuane is one of this country’s most important literary voices, whose stylish prose—a heady combination of laconicism and hard-boiled baroque—has been compared to such disparate American sensibilities as Hemingway and Faulkner.”

  — Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “A wonderfully wild, hysterically funny book.”

  — Boston Herald

  “The Bushwhacked Piano makes me think of all four Marx Brothers mounted on an attenuated tandem bicycle, out of control the wrong way on a one-way street, against the mainstream of oncoming traffic; no hands, ma, and no brakes! Thomas McGuane can only be imitated. There’s no one else around who comes close enough for comparison.”

  —William Hjortsberg

  “Brilliant, funny writing on every page.”

  — The New York Times

  “A genius in a genre of his own invention.”

  — Larry Woiwode

  “Positively, delightfully insane.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  Books by

  THOMAS McGUANE

  The Sporting Club, 1969

  The Bushwhacked Piano, 1971

  Ninety-two in the Shade, 1973

  Panama, 1978

  An Outside Chance, 1980

  Nobody’s Angel, 1982

  Something to Be Desired, 1984

  To Skin a Cat, 1986

  Keep the Change, 1989

  Nothing but Blue Skies, 1992

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1994

  Copyright © 1971 by Thomas McGuane

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, in 1971.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  McGuane, Thomas.

  The bushwhacked piano.

  I. Title.

  [PS3563.A3114B8 1984] 813′.54 84-40014

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83222-1

  v3.1

  This book is for my mother and father.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  When the sea was calm

  all ships alike

  Showed mastership in floating.

  —W.S.

  1

  Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwhacked a piano through the open summer windows of a neighbor’s living room. The child’s name was Nicholas Payne.

  Dragged from the tree by the piano’s owner, his rifle smashed upon a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.

  “You have spoiled my piano.”

  The child would remember the great wing of the lid over his head, the darkness, the cut wires curling upon themselves, the smell of spice and the sudden idea that the piano had been sailed full of spice from the Indies free of the bullet holes that would have sent it to the bottom, resonant with uncut strings, its mahogany lid slicing the wind and sheltering a moist and fragrant cargo of spice.

  What an idea.

  After that, wisdom teeth, a perfect horror: one tooth slipping out as easily as an orange seed popping from between your fingers; the other less simple, requiring the incision of a flap of skin and the chiseling through a snarl of impacted roots and nerves, the tooth coming away in splinters and his very mortality flashing from the infected maw.

  Then: a visit to his grandfather’s farmstead. Abandoned. The windows glinted blank on a hay field gone entirely to pigweed. Wingnuts made soft black moons in the punky wood of ruined shutters. When he shielded his eyes at the front porch window and saw into the old kitchen, he perceived the pipes of myriad disconnections, jutting and pointing into space; and, in the half-light of a far corner, a white enamel water heater, a rash of rust broken out on its sides, crouched like a monster. When he kicked in the front door, it swung wide and wobbling; its lock spilled screws far too long. He started to explore but quit at the bathroom where a tub poised lightly as a dancer on cast-iron lion’s feet, its faucets dry, bulbous.

  Years away but, he thought, in direct sequence, a woman sat on a blue stool striking at her hair with a tortoise-shell comb. And behind, on the bed, Nicholas Payne, her seducer, sighted between the first two toes of his right foot, wishing his leg were a Garand rifle.

  There were any number of such things from that epoch, but a handful seemed to make a direct footpath to lunacy: a stockbroker’s speckled face, for example, his soft, fat eyes and his utterly larval voice.

  He was too young to have to make such connections, rolling across an empty early-morning city, red-eyed in an eggstained bathrobe, a finger in each corner of his mouth drawing it down to a grotesque whitening slit through which he pressed his tongue. Since they found him curiously menacing, the attendants supplied a canvas coat with longish sleeves. It was insulting and unnecessary.

  That was some time ago now, and he recovered at home. When he was being odd, he would sometimes, at night, go to his bedroom window, ungirdle, and urinate on the walnut trees radiant below him in the moonlight. Sometimes he boiled eggs on the electric range and forgot to eat them or went into the closet and stood in the dark among all the dusty shoes. He had an old cello, painted blue, and he often sawed upon it. One night he took the pliers to its strings and that was that.

  His family said that he could not be trusted around a musical instrument.

  Then, just when he was doing so well in school, he lit out on a motorcycle. And nowadays that trip would come to him in happy little versions and episodes. Anyone could see that he was going to pull something like that again. Even his mother’s friend who had managed the Longines Symphonette could see he was fixing to pull something. She taught piano, and Payne took from her.

  But all Payne could remember was that first cross-country trip. He was on an English Matchless motorcycle and headed for California. Nebraska seemed so empty he sometimes could scarcely tell he was in motion. Those were soil-bank days and you had to watch out for pheasants on the road. Payne felt intuitively that a single, mature rooster could disable an English racing machine. Later, he recalled two cowboys outside of Vernal, Utah, in a windstorm, chasing a five-dollar bill across a feed lot.

  A girl rode with him from Lordsburg, Colorado, to Reno, Nevada, and bought him a one-pound jar of Floyd Collins Lilac Brilliantine to keep his hair in place on the bike.

  And California at first sight was the sorry, beautiful Golden West silliness and uproar of simplistic yellow hills with metal wind pumps, impossible highways to the brim of the earth, coastal cities, forests and pretty girls with their tails in the wind. A movie theater in Sacramento played Mondo Freudo.

  In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puff
y fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, “My horse is soiled!” While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

  In the spring of that year, San Francisco was dark with swamis. He didn’t stay long. Until that fall he lived north of San Francisco in a rented house, in the town of Bolinas. The memory of that now isolated these months to a single morning when he had turned out at dawn and gone to the window. Looking across the meadow that was the southern end of the low, vegetated mesa he lived upon, he could see the silver whale shape of fog that lay in from the sea, stilled, covering Bolinas, the lagoon and the far foothills. The eucalyptus around the house was fragrant in the early wet sun and full of birds. Firing up the motorcycle, he went spinning down Overlook Road toward the ocean rim of the mesa, straight toward the wall of fog at the cliff. Shy of the edge, he swung down onto Terrace Road and dropped quite fast through the eucalyptus and cedar, really as fast as he could go, through repetitive turns, the smells by-passing his nose to go directly to the lungs, the greenery overhead sifting and scattering shadows, the dips in the road cupping sunlight, the banked turns unfolding his shadow, the whole road flattening out, gliding along the base of the Little Mesa, down the corrugated concrete ramp onto the beach where he found himself in the fog with the sun melting it into streamers and the beach dark, streaked, delicately ridged like contour plowing; and everywhere the rock underpinning nosing through the sand and Payne obliged to steer a careful fast course with the front wheel swimming a little, until he reached Duxbury reef where he once caught a big, blushing octopus the color of any number of slightly gone-off tulips, as well as gunnysacks of monkeyface eels, cabezone and cockles—provender. He set about now getting mussels, snatching them off the rocks impatiently with less philosophical dedication to living off the land than to eating mussels at intervals of twice a week steamed in sixty cents a quart, third-press mountain white, and fennel. When he finished his work, he sat on the largest boulder at the end of the reef, the base of which was encircled with drifting kelp, weed and the pieces of a splintered hatch cover. The fog retreated to an almost circular perimeter within which a violet sun shone. The sea stood in a line of distant mercury. The sanderlings raced along the edge of the sea in almost fetid salt air. And Payne, thinking of home and knowing he would go home, saw with some concision that, as a citizen, he was not in the least solid. In a way, it was nice to know. Once he began to see himself as societal dead weight, a kind of energetic relaxation came over him and he no longer felt he was merely looking for trouble.

  The homecoming itself was awash in vague remembered detail; the steamer dock on Sugar Island looked draped in rain. He remembered that. It was a wet, middling season in Michigan; he forgot which one. There were a number of them. And this: the condemned freighter Maida towed by tugs toward a chalky wafer of sun, toward the lead-white expanse of Detroit River, black gleaming derricks, slag—the whole, lurid panorama of cloacal American nature smarm debouching into Lake Erie where—when Payne was duck hunting—a turn of his oar against the bottom brought up a blue whirring nimbus of petroleum sludge and toxic, coagulant effluents the glad hand of national industry wants the kids to swim in. This was water that ran in veins. This was proud water that wouldn’t mix. This was water whose currents drove the additives aloft in glossy pools and gay poison rainbows. This was water the walking upon of which scarcely made for a miracle.

  Moping on an abandoned coal dock, Payne rehearsed his imagined home. He tried by main force to drag back the bass-filled waters he actually remembered. He dreamed up picturesque visions of long packed lawns planing to the river and the lake in a luminous haze beyond. He recollected freighters and steamers sailing by, the side-wheeled and crystal-windowed palaces of the D & C Line that had so recently gone in stately parade up the Canadian channel, the sound of their orchestras borne across the water to Grosse Ile.

  But this time the Maida toiled before him on the septic flow, vivid with arrows of rust thrusting downward from dismal scuppers. On deck, a handful of men rather specifically rued the day. Life in the U.S.A. gizzard had changed. Only a clown could fail to notice.

  So then, failing to notice would be a possibility. Consequently, he fell in love with a girl named Ann who interested herself in the arts, who was quite beautiful and wild; and who, as no other, was onto Payne and who, to an extent that did not diminish him, saw through Payne. In the beginning, theirs was one of those semichemical, tropistic encounters that seem so romantic in print or on film. Ann had a beautiful, sandy, easy and crotch-tightening voice; and, responding to it, Payne had given her the whole works, smile after moronic smile, all those clean, gleaming, square, white teeth that could only be produced by a region which also produced a large quantity of grain, cereals and corn—and stopped her in her tracks to turn at this, this what? this smiler, his face corrugated with the idiocy of desire and the eclectic effects of transcontinental motorcycle windburn, a grin of keenness, blocky, brilliant, possibly deranged. And stared at him!

  He went to her house. He croaked be mine from behind the rolled windows of his Hudson Hornet which in the face of her somewhat handsome establishment appeared intolerably shabby. He felt a strange tension form between his car and the house. The mint-green Hornet was no longer his joy. The stupid lurch of its paint-can pistons lacked an earlier charm. The car was now spiritually unequal to him. The wheel in his hands was far away, a Ferris wheel. The coarse fabric of the seats extended forever. All gauges: dead. The odometer stuttered its first repetition in 1953 when Payne was a child. A month ago he’d had a new carburetor installed. When he lifted the hood, it sickened him to see that bright tuber of fitted steel in the vague rusted engine surfaces. The offensive innocence of mushrooms. A thing like that takes over. A pale green spot on a loaf of bread is a fright wig inside of a week. These little contrasts unhinge those who see them. The contrast between his car and her house was doing that now. He could barely see through the windshield, but clear glass would have been unendurable. The world changed through these occlusions. Objects slid and jumped behind his windshield as he passed them. He knew exactly how a building would cross its expanse progressively then jump fifteen degrees by optical magic. Don’t make me go in that house. Just at the center of the windshield a bluish white line appeared like a tendril turning round itself downward and exploded in a perfect fetal lizard nourished by the capillaries that spread through the glass.

  Gradually, he worked himself from the machine, went to the door, was admitted, went through to the back where Ann Fitzgerald was painting a white trellis and, paint brush in her right hand, dripping pale paint stars in the dirt. “Yes,” she said, “I will.” Indicating only that she would see him again. “Stay where you are,” she said. An instant later she photographed him with a large, complex-looking camera. “That will be all,” she smiled.

  The steamer dock, the former property of the Sugar Island Amusement Company, defunct 1911, was a long balconied pier half-slumped under water. Near the foot of the pier, abandoned in the trees, was an evocative assortment of pavilions, ticket stands and stables. There were two carved and lofty ramps that mounted, forthright, into space. And the largest building, in the same style as the pavilion, was a roller rink. This building had come to be half-enveloped in forest.

  It was nighttime and the ears of Nicholas Payne were filled with the roar of his roller-skated pursuit of the girl, Ann, at speed over the warped and undulant hardwood floor. He trailed slightly because he glided down the slopes in a crouch while she skated down; and so she stayed in front and they roared in a circle shuddering in and out of the light of the eight tall windows. Payne saw the moon stilled against the glass of one unbroken pane, gasped something like watch me now and skated more rapidly as the wooden sound sank deeper into his ears
and the mirrored pillar that marked the center of the room glittered in the corner of his eye; he closed the distance until she was no longer cloudy and indefinite in the shifting light but brightly clear in front of him with the short pleatings of skirt curling close around the soft insides of thigh. And Payne in a bravura extension beyond his own abilities shot forward on one skate, one leg high behind him like a trick skater in a Dutch painting, reached far ahead of himself, swept his hand up a thigh and had her by the crotch. Then, for this instant’s bliss, he bit the dust, hitting the floor with his nose dragging like a skeg, landing stretched out, chin resting straight forward and looking at the puffy, dreamy vacuity midway in her panties. Ann Fitzgerald, feet apart, sitting, ball-bearing wooden wheels still whirring, laughed to herself and to him and said, “You asshole.”

  2

  It was one of those days when life seemed little more than pounding sand down a rat hole. He went for a ride in his Hudson Hornet and got relief and satisfaction. For the time allowed, he was simply a motorist.

  After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time that they had gone together.

  He had it on good evidence—a verified sighting—that Ann was seeing, that afternoon, an old intimate by the name of George Russell. There was an agreement covering that. It was small enough compensation for the fact that she had lit out for Europe with this bird only a year before, at a time when the mutual trust Payne imagined had grown up between them should have made it impossible to look at another man. Afterwards, between them, there had transpired months of visceral blurting that left them desolated but also, he thought, “still in love.” Now, again, George Russell raised his well-groomed head. His Vitalis lay heavy upon the land.