The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  Payne sprinted out of the calf chute, running zigzag across the graded dirt. Jim Dale gave him a headstart, then struck the quarter horse which came flat out from the chute, the rider rising forward, his looping rope already aloft for the moment it took to catch Payne, then darting out around Payne, tightening around his shoulders to an imperceptible instant as Jim Dale Bohleen dallied his end of the rope hard and fast around the saddle horn to flip Payne head over heels, the long thin rope making a gentle arc at the moment of impact, between the saddlehorn and Payne. The horse skidded to a stop and, backing very slightly to tighten the rope, dragged Payne. Jim Dale was upon him now, lashing hands and feet with his pigging string.

  Payne lay there, feeling the grit between his lips and teeth. Beyond the judge’s stand he saw the Absaroka Mountains, the snow in the high country, the long, traveling clouds snared on peaks. He remembered the record player over yesterday’s loudspeaker—“I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart”—its needle jumping the grooves as six broncs kicked the timbers under the judge’s stand to pieces.

  “Two more,” Jim Dale says, lazily coiling his rope between his hand and his elbow, “and I’ll teach you how to work a bronc saddle.” Payne heads for the calf chute.

  The Fitzgeralds had box seats. They were almost the only rodeo patrons who were not in the grandstand and were consequently islanded among empty boxes. Mister, Missus and Ann Fitzgerald sat with Fitzgerald’s foreman. He had been hired by the realtors who were managing the Fitzgerald ranch and keeping its books at a hefty fee. This was Wayne Codd. The ranch itself was one of a valleyload of write-offs, being sleepily amortized by the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

  Wayne Codd was a young, darkly stupid man from Meeteetse, Wyoming. His eyes, small and close, suggested an alternative set of nostrils at the other end of his nose. It would not be fair to take unexplained peaks of Codd’s recent history and evaluate him without talking of his past; it is possible, for example, that he was run over by an automobile quite a few times as an infant.

  One of Codd’s tricks was to drag his saddle out of the back of his GMC and take it into a bar where he would strap it on a stool, placed in the center of the dance floor, and make some little clerk sit in it all evening by slapping the piss out of him every time he tried to dismount. From time to time, Wayne Codd had been shot and stabbed with various weapons; but had not died.

  Codd made no secret of his attitude toward the elder Fitzgeralds. He often said, “Duuh!” to Fitzgerald’s obvious remarks and sometimes called him Mister Dude P. Greenhorn.

  did Codd hide his scratching lust for Ann. The Fitzgeralds had a little bathhouse near the stream from which their ranch was irrigated; and one day when he was supposed to have been repairing the headgate, Wayne Codd lay under its green pine floor, the interstices of whose boards allowed him a searing look at Ann’s crotch. Two days later, he blew a week’s salary on a Polaroid Swinger which he stored in an iceskate carrying case under the bathhouse.

  It seemed to take so long to get through the drearier events. The barrel races, wild cow milking contests, synchronized group riding by local riding clubs often composed entirely of ranch ladies with super-fat asses, wouldn’t stop. “Let’s hear it for Wayne Ballard and his Flying White Clouds!” cried the announcer after a singularly fatuous event in which an underfed zootsuiter shot around the ring with his feet divided between two stout Arabians.

  In the far towering Absarokas, a gopher and a rattlesnake faced off under an Engelmann’s spruce. Mountain shadows, saturated with ultraviolet light, sifted forty miles down the slopes toward the Livingston fairgrounds. And far, far above this confrontation between two denizens of the ultramontane forest, a cosmonaut snoozed in negative gravity and had impure thoughts about a tart he met in Leningrad or Kiev, he forgot which.

  “Folks,” said the announcer mellifluously, “ah wont to speak to you about croolity to animals. We have got the broncs coming up here in a minute or two. And as some of you good people already know, certain bleeding hort spatial intrust groups is claiming croolity on this account. But I wont you good people to see it this way: If you wasn’t watching these broncs here today, you’d be lickin the pore devils on some postage stamp.” Far, far from the grandstands and box seats, the announcer raised hopeful hands to those who would see.

  And announced the next six riders on the card.

  The first was Chico Horvath of Pray, Montana. “Let’s try the horse, cowboy! Yer prize money’s awaitin!” Chico got himself bounced right badly and marred the stately cowboy’s retreat with a slight forward bend from the waist indicating damage to the stomach. A clown ran out and collapsed in the dirt, jumped in and out of a barrel, frequently permitting his pants to fall down. Two good rides followed, in the order of their appearances, by Don Dimmock of Baker, Oregon, on a horse named Apache Sunrise, and Chuck Extra of Kaycee, Wyoming, on Nightmare. The fourth rider, Carl Tiffin of Two Dot, Montana, was trampled by a part-Morgan horse name of Preparation H. The fifth rider scratched.

  “Our Number Six rider,” went the announcement, “is a newcomer and an unusual one. Our cowboy is Nick Payne of Hong Kong, China. Nick spent his early years fighting Communism. Let’s watch him now. He draws hisself a mean ole roan some of you know by reputation. Let’s watch now, Nick Payne of Hong Kong, China, on Ambulance!”

  “A Chinaman bronc buster,” exclaimed Wayne Codd. “I have seen spooks and redskins but this here is some sort of topper.” The Fitzgeralds, their interest galvanized, competed, clawing, for the binoculars. It was herself, La Fitzgerald, who confirmed their awfulest suspicions.

  “It’s him,” she breathed. Ann raised her telephoto lens to the arena, her hand perspiring on its knurled black barrel.

  Giddy with horror, Payne stood on the platform beside the Number Six bronc chute looking slightly down at Ambulance. He could not look straight at the horse. The ears of Ambulance lay back on his vicious banjo-shaped skull and the hoofs of Ambulance rang like gunshots on the timber. A man in a striped referee shirt—falsely suggesting that this was a sport we were dealing with here—ran up to Payne. “God damn it, cowboy! Get aboard!” Artfully, Payne avoided the nazzing of his undies. He looked down at his gloves. He moved as though underwater. Jim Dale had resined his gloves for him and they were sticky as beeswax. Looking, then, at Ambulance he wondered which of them was to end as glue. Everyone was yelling at him now. It was time. The strapped muscle of Ambulance’s haunches kept jumping suddenly at the movement of hooves cracking invisibly against timber underneath.

  He got on. Friendly hands from behind pulled his hat down so he wouldn’t lose it. Payne tried to keep his legs free by extraordinary Yogic postures—inappropriate here at the rodeo—then dropped them into the stirrups and took his lumps. As Bohleen had shown him, Payne wrapped his gloved and resined hand palm up in the bucking rope. When the rope was wrapped to the swell of thumb, he closed his grip and mummified quietly. Then Payne lifted his left hand in the air where the judge could see it was free and clear.

  Payne’s joy—filling him now—was steady and expanding; and lit the faces of the cowboys sitting on the fences around him, smiling at one whose turn it was now, whose own million-color shirt filled and billowed softly in the wind, whose own sweet and gambling ass rested without deception on a four-hundred-dollar Association saddle having bought a one-way trip on a thousand pounds of crossbred viciousness. All questions of his history and ambition were null and void. Whoever it was had pulled his hat down around his ears would have known that. Payne had gotten on.

  He nodded and said as the others had, “Let’s try the horse.” And someone reached down behind him and jerked the bucking cinch. The gate flew open and the cowboy from Hong Kong, confusing the clangor of the clown’s comic cowbell with his own rattling testicles, wondered how, after two terrible plunging bucks, he had not only managed to stay aboard but also—as the horse soared forward onto its front legs so that he feared going butt first down over its head—had made the magic touch of spurs to shou
lder, the left hand still sky-high and the right hand way back under his crotch somewhere.

  Then the horse stood full length, towering on its satanic hind legs, wriggling and sunfishing its thousand-pound torso, and fell over backwards.

  Payne cleared, rolling free of the enraged horse who, still on the ground, actually stretched to bite at him; its enormous legs churned on the opposite side of him as it surged to get to its feet again. Payne, already standing, his joy flooding in blinding rainbows that it was over before it had begun with no evidence that he could not ride a bronc revealed, adjusted his hat beside the flailing horse, took two exquisitely bored steps, kicked Ambulance a good one in the ass, turned and bowed delicately to the cheering crowd now rising to its feet in homage.

  The horse finally got its footing and soared angrily away between two pick-up riders, one of whom reached to snatch the bucking cinch free so that the horse seemed to glide to a stop, flaring at shapes and fences.

  Payne smiled to the lingering applause and beat the dust from his Levi’s with the borrowed Stetson straw.

  7

  Wayne Codd drove. Fitzgerald sat in front, not thinking of Payne. He was trying to imagine why all those polled Herefords he bought had calves with horns. He was suspicious that Codd, who had arranged the purchase, had just dehorned a lot of cheapjack range stock and turned himself a tidy sum. It was mortifying to think this throwback could have cheated him.

  Ann sat in back with her mother. She burned with love and admiration while her mother merely burned. The four of them rode up the valley of the Shields and stopped when a shepherd drove his band of blackface sheep across the road in a single surge, his two dogs running importantly around their perimeter like satellites.

  “You are to be strictly unavailable,” counseled the mother in no uncertain terms.

  Ann did not answer. She was finding it difficult not to respond to Payne’s heroic performance. She still saw him insouciant far across the arena and beneath the judge’s stand, a giant, vicious horse soaring over his head. It was too bad, she thought, that she lacked the nerve to call him, if only in her heart, Pecos Bill. It seemed for once his confusions and indecision were invisible and gone as he stood in perfect clear air under mountains—at one with the situation. And this made her think of his refusal to read her favorite D. H. Lawrence novels because he said Lawrence always tried to be “at one” with things.

  “We weren’t born in a Waring Blender,” he told Ann. He called Lawrence “Lozenge” and frequently associated him with devices that made pulp from vegetables.

  To the immediate east of them, in the Crazy Mountains, a Forest Service plane stocked a mountain lake with trout, releasing its cloud of fish against the Delft-blue sky.

  Ann lay her head back on the tan leather of the Mercedes’ seat and did quadratic equations in her head for a while; then rehearsed the skeletal articulations of the Rhesus monkey that she had dissected against Gray’s Anatomy. For reasons only she knew completely, Ann was ready for ficky-fick.

  Wayne Codd, two years on the job, had certain reservations about his employers. His predecessor as foreman had blown a ventricle and died the previous winter pushing bales of winter feed off the wagon. Codd thought the man was a good old boy and when his request of the Fitzgeralds—that he be buried on the old ranch—was refused, Codd signed off on them for good. The foreman had wanted his spot under the big sky, up on the old Soda Butte where he could see the ghosts of retreating Shoshone. Codd, then just a hand, knew he would succeed the old foreman so long as he didn’t offend the realtors who were running the place; but the advancement embittered him. It still seemed that—even though the old boy had only worked on the ranch five-and-a-half weeks—his request to be buried up in the high lonesome deserved better than the Fitzgeralds gave him.

  Instead, they sent the foreman’s body back to the wife and child he had deserted in Wyandotte, Michigan. His union local buried him in his arc-welder’s uniform. The casket was draped with leis. The funeral dinner was catered by River Rouge Polynesian Gardens.

  Wayne Codd had not only the physical features but the memory of an elephant. He knew that when the chips were down the Fitzgeralds would go South on everything he damn well knew was decent. And that went for Ann. That is why, on hot swimming days, he put in the long, long hours under the bathhouse. At the end of the day, the little Polaroid Swinger seemed to weigh a ton; and for this trouble and the trouble of lying on his back swatting the big striped horseflies, his Stetson dropped over the pointed toe of one boot and the circles of honest cowpoke sweat expanding toward the pearly diamond buttons, he got a handful of obscure little photos of what looked like a field mouse behind bars.

  Missus Fitzgerald stared at the first of their own sections, her mood utterly forged by the appearance of Pecos Bill. She had learned to identify the reddish furze of mature cheat grass and had been informed that it would not feed the stock. And though it was the only grass she could identify besides Kentucky Blue, she seemed to be singling it out of some fabulous variety when she cried, “That cheat grass!”

  The ranch house, with its downstairs sleeping porch that gave the effect of a lantern jaw, was surrounded by lesser buildings, all log: the barn, stable, bunkhouse and shop. She could see it now at the end of the ungraded road in the cottonwood trees she considered neither here nor there. She was an enthusiastic bird watcher with a mild specialty in warblers. Out here, all the beastly birds of prey that appeared in her Zeiss weighed down her spirits. In fact, she had asked Codd over and over to shoot a big harrier, a marsh hawk, that she could see from the breakfast room, sailing low over the gullies and pockets. From time to time, Codd would blaze away to no avail. And Missus Fitzgerald, seeing the great hawk, felt anew that Nature was diminished by it. It was warblers she wanted, the little pretties.

  They drove up front and parked. Fitzgerald looked around at the house and the yard. He looked at the great sheltering willow that had gotten its roots into the septic tank and gone beserk. “Peace,” said Dad Fitzgerald. “Ain’t it wonderful?”

  The Fitzgeralds’ Double Tepee Ranch, whose twin triangle brand aroused local cowboys to call it wishfully the Squaw Tits, sat on a bench of fat bottom land in a bend of the Shields River somewhere between Bangtail Creek and Crazyhead Creek. It was one of the many big holdings whose sale was consummated through the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The ranch had been founded, under its present name, by Ansel Brayton, a drover from New Mexico who had brought the earliest herds this far north. It was sold—through the Wall Street Journal—by Ansel Brayton’s grandson, a well-known Hialeah faggot.

  Fitzgerald was proud of his place and often said to his wife, “The ranch is good, Edna.” He would stroll along the willows of his river frontage or along the lane of Lombardy poplars, stop beside the lush irrigated hayfields now mowed and raked, with the bales still lying in the combed golden order of the harvested acreage. It was his ranch, not Edna’s.

  Of course, she wanted as small a part of it as she could. From his G.M. earnings he had set up separate investment facilities for the two of them; and it produced a little happy contention. She had built, with her share, a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions. She often compared its profitable records with the slightly scary losses of the Double Tepee. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceiling with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads. No sirree, Bob, thought Fitzgerald, I’ll take Montana.

  The living room of the ranch house was two stories high with a balcony at the second story. It was all done in a kind of rustic art nouveau: birchbark ormulu and decorated extravaganzas of unpeeled log.

  At the north end of the first floor was the library where they held today’s meeting. The question at hand w
as whether or not to call the police. “I don’t know,” said Missus Fitzgerald, “any use of the police at all downgrades everyone involved.”

  “They are merely a facility.”

  “But they mean something tacky,” she said.

  “They are a simple public facility.”

  “I know what a public facility is,” she said.

  “Okay, all right.” He waved her off with both hands.

  “It’s as if something low—”

  “We pay for them. We ought to use them.”

  “Something shabby—”

  In 1929 the Fitzgeralds were married. On their first morning together, he bellowed for his breakfast. She called the police on him.

  “—merely—”

  “—even vulgar or—”

  He never asked for his breakfast again. Not like that. Sometimes he got it anyway, in those early days. Now the maids brought it. He bellowed at them, like in 1929. Let them try the law.

  “Call the police,” said Fitzgerald doggedly. “Tell them the circumstances. They’ll hand Payne his walking papers so fast. Or I’ll get the bugger on the phone myself. I’ll tell him he just doesn’t figure. Do you read me?”

  In 1929, when two large bozos of the police profession snatched the up-and-coming economist from his breakfast table, he had doubts about the future of his marriage. As the shadow of his struggling form left a bowl of Instant Ralston in uneaten solitude, a vacuum fell between them that later became tiny but never disappeared. “The year of the crash,” he often said wryly, meaning his own little avalanche.