The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  At the same time, he saw curious things happening in the American West. For instance, at the foot of the Belt Mountains, a young man who had earlier committed the stirring murder of a visiting Kuwait oil baron, ate from a tin and barked “mudder” at his captors.

  A tall summer thunderhead hung over the valley of the Shields River, in fact, directly over the Fitzgerald ranch, certain of the walls of whose main house hid the little dinner party from the view of nobody whatsoever.

  Nobody whatsoever would have been much interested in Payne’s discomfort which was quite carefully cultivated by two of the three people around him.

  “No,” Payne said, “I couldn’t eat another turnip.”

  “Potatoes?”

  “No,” Payne said, “(ditto) potato.”

  “What about some asparagus?”

  “No,” said Payne, “(ditto) any more asparagus.”

  “Payne,” said Fitzgerald, “what do you want?

  “How do you mean?”

  “Out of life?”

  “Fun.”

  “Really,” said Missus Fitzgerald.

  “So do you.”

  “But,” she said, “I’d have hardly put it that way.”

  “Nor I.” Fitzgerald, naturally.

  “I would have,” said Ann, trying to show her surprise at their remarks. The word “fun” seemed to accrete images of liberation.

  “You would have put it,” Payne said in a general address to his elders, “more impressively. But you would have meant fun.”

  “No,” said La, “we would have meant something more impressive than fun too.”

  “You seem to imagine that by fun I mean some darkish netherworld of hanky-panky. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

  Fitzgerald shook his head in a wintry smile. The effect, entirely unsubstantiated, was of wisdom.

  “What do you mean by fun?” Missus Fitzgerald inquired.

  “I mean happiness. Read Samuel Butler.”

  “I assure you we have.”

  “Do it again.”

  “Oh, Payne, now,” smiled Fitzgerald, his face a study in major Greek pity. “Payne, Payne, Payne.”

  Payne felt, thinking of his father’s furnace, that he wanted to heat the air to incandescence for six cubic acres around the house. “Cut that shit out now,” he told Fitzgerald.

  Ann, sensing the feasibility of Nicholas’ blowing his stack, raised the tips of conciliatory fingers over the table’s edge as in steady there, steady now big feller, don’t kick over your oats there now big feller there now you.

  “I wanted,” Payne said, “merely to have dinner in an agreeable atmosphere. Is generosity no longer available?”

  “Ah Payne, Payne, Payne.”

  “Give it to me straight. I can take it.”

  The mother told Payne that they had had enough of him. “We merely asked what you believed in,” she said. “We had no idea it would precipitate nastiness.”

  “What I believe in? I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coor’s beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch.” Missus Fitzgerald was seen to leave the room, Ann to gaze into her lap. “I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap-minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and Hammond Home Organs. I believe in ramps and drop-offs.” Fitzgerald got out too, leaving only Payne and Ann; she, in the banishing of her agony and feeling she was possibly close to Something, raised adoring eyes to the madman. “I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise again. I believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren’t you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What’s more, credo in unum deum, I believe in one God. He’s up there. He’s mine. And he’s smart as a whip.

  “Anyway,” he said mellifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, “you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig’s guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is.”

  And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven.

  An instant later, he imagined he was singing the Volga boat song. Ann clapped a hand over his mouth. It wasn’t the Volga boat song. It was some febrile, mattoid, baying nonsense. No one saw why he should be acting up like this.

  “What are you doing?” It reminded her of the way people went crazy on TV as opposed to Dostoyevsky.

  “Dunno.”

  He had strained himself.

  His feeling was that it was the dining room, the act of eating itself, that dramatized what the Mum, the Dad, had in mind for him. That was what was behind their fierceness over their food; they were pretending it was him, he decided; and he didn’t like it from an almost metaphysical plane of objection; to the effect that martyrdom should be represented more strikingly than in platters of meat and vegetables. These things, thought Payne, are not relics. Bits of the true sirloin. He imagined monstrances filled with yams and okra; our beloved smörgasbord has gone on before.

  Payne calmed down. He considered the solemn flummery of the Fitzgeralds’ departure, the effect that time was not to be wasted on him. He looked at Ann, becomingly leaning on the table with both elbows. A certain hirsute mollusc came to mind.

  “Dinner seemed to fall short of one of those civilized encounters of mind we hear about.”

  “Yes,” Ann said, ungratefully adding, “your fault as much as theirs. It just seems completely uncultivated.”

  “I think so.”

  “That kind of silliness could be endless. You’ll never tire each other out.”

  “My silliness means more.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I’ve made it a way of life,” Payne said. “That means something.”

  “But what are we going to do. I’m so tired of this, this—”

  “Yes, me too.”

  “This, this—”

  “Yes,” Payne said.

  “We could run off,” she said, thinking that she could take pictures, making the act of running away itself the unifying factor or theme.

  “I see it in my mind’s eye,” Payne said wearily.

  “I mean it though, Nicholas.”

  “The hobo shot. The American road. We sit in ditches covered with sage and pollen. Cannonades of giant mid-American laughter flood the sky around us; it is ours. We are giants in the earth snagging Strategic Air Command bombers in our hair because it is big hair. That goes up. Where bombers are.”

  There was a disturbance at the door, a small aggressive shuffling, the lout’s movement of Codd.

  “I was wondering.”

  “Yes?” Payne said, the dim view showing.

  “If there was anything I could do.”

  “No, Wayne,” Ann said pleasantly. “Thanks, not now.”

  “But Mister Fitzgerald said to come over and see what I could do.”

  “Nothing, thanks, Codd,” Payne said.

  “I was sure that—”

  “The old dodo gave you a bum steer,” Payne said simply.

  “I’ll tell him,” said Codd with the smile the
re.

  “You tell him that you were given a bum steer by him and had received it in good condition.”

  “Yes, because he said for me to come see what I could do. But I’ll tell him from you that the thing was he had given me this bum steer.”

  “One other thing, Codd.”

  “No, you one other thing a minute. I’m thinking of busting you in the God damn mouth.”

  “No, Codd.”

  “No, what.”

  “You won’t do that. You’ll announce it over and over but in the end you won’t do it.”

  “That’s your idea, huh.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Well if you get it,” Codd said, “don’t come cryin to me. Because it’ll just be a case of you achin for it and me givin it to you.”

  “As a guest here I resent the abuse of footlings. Presently, I may be heard to shriek for the management.”

  “Do it.”

  “Peep. See? My heart’s not in it. Codd, one false move and I’ll pull your upper lip over the back of your head. And another thing: I love you.”

  “Then you’re a fruit.”

  “But Ann too, see? It’s one of those world brotherhood deals that’s liable to end in liquidation. Damn it, I’m washing my hands of you. I’d hoped you’d turn out to be something better than this. Your mother and I had dreamed you’d be the first mate on a torpedoed Nazi destroyer. And I don’t know where this leaves us; with our dreams I guess; of what you might have been; if it hadn’t been for the war years.”

  “What you ought to do,” Codd said, seeming to know what he was talking about, “is go up to Warm Springs and get yourself certified. Far as I’m concerned, yer too crazy to beat up.”

  “Yes,” said Ann. Her soundest social notion was that everyone in the world was too crazy to beat up.

  Codd walked down the hallway, the bulldogging heels of his tiny cowboy boots ringing on the hardwood. With a light feinting gesture of the head, he avoided injury by elk’s antler at the corner of the living room; with a low scuttling jump, he avoided entanglement with bearskin at the front of the grotesque travertine fireplace with its iron firedogs and prestolite scented simulogs. Pivoting in a sharp dido around the far entrance to the living room, he was in an identical hallway where, once more, there was the ringing of the tiny boots as his forward bolting posture soon hurtled him through the far screen door. On the lawn, he walked over the cesspool, invisible to him under the sod; among the heavy willows he strode toward his bunkhouse beneath the singular tattoo of Orion.

  Hanging, later, upended over the dormer window of Ann’s room, he watched her mock burlesque before Payne, their subsequent entanglement, her compact uplift of blushing buttock, his paler flesh and hers flaring in their seizure, the long terrific prelude and final, spasmic, conjunctive entry, marked, unknown to either of them, by the gloomy jetting of Codd against the shingles overhead.

  Codd, spent, saw the rooftree sink suddenly in his vision, Orion start up, and realized he was falling. In a terror of being perceived hanging from the lintel, his livery about his knees, he launched himself into space, plunged into a lucky willow and merged himself against the heavy rigid trunk while Payne knuckled up and down the sill saying I know you’re out there.

  Satisfied that it had only been a limb falling, Payne returned to Ann, lying upon her stomach. The peerless, long back arced up at her bottom; Payne sat next to her and slid his hand underneath, thinking this is where Darwin got the notion of primordial ooze; put a speck of it under a microscope and see Shakespeare leaping through time; also, lobsters, salamanders, one coelacanth. He knelt between her thighs, raised her hips, thrust and flooded helplessly. My God. How many fan letters could you seal with that. Enough to get the message across, perhaps. Mock turtle soup.

  Leaving Ann’s room and proceeding to his own, he passed, in the lugubrious great hall of the house, Mister Fitzgerald, smoking peevishly and adjusting with one glowing foot an ornate iron firedog.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Well, Payne, good evening.”

  “Do you want to speak to me?” Payne asked.

  “Not at all.”

  Payne continued past the stone entry of that really funny room and into the glossy varnished passageway to his own quarters. About halfway down that corridor, he ran into Wayne Codd who, from his position within an insignificant shadow cast by a large plaster-of-paris penguin, inquired whether or not Payne would care to fight.

  “No,” Payne said, and went to his room where he admired the drum-tight Hudson’s Bay blanket with its four black lines for the indication of class or general snazz. He had locked the door; but it was a short time before the clicking of Codd’s skeleton key groping for the indifferent tumblers of Payne’s lock was heard. Payne patted the cool surface of the sheet. “This is a happy Western lodge,” he said to himself. “I smell elk in this pillow.” Then close to the door, he said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll unlock it.” For a long moment, he made no movement. “You’ll have to pull the key out.”

  “Okay.” The key was extracted.

  “Come in,” Payne said. The knob wrenched and the door did not open.

  “It’s still locked,” came the ululating voice, urgent with wrath.

  “Hang on. Just a sec.” Payne brushed his teeth. “What did you call me?” No answer, but once more the swift perfect failure of the skeleton key. Payne’s ablutions were most complete. He brushed first smartly the teeth then smoothly the hair. He never once poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. He adjusted trimly the clavicles and elevated the coccyx at a racy angle like a Masai. By way of preparation, he bounded around the room in what came to seem a perfect frenzy. Abruptly, he flung open the door, knocked Codd unconscious, closed the door and turned in for the night.

  Presently, however, a brisk knocking was heard upon the door and Payne answered, expecting to find the drear, abnormally expanded face of the recently comatose Codd. Unexpectedly, he found instead Fitzgerald, at pains not to tread upon his foreman.

  “What’s with him?”

  “Receipt of blow to his chops. The hydraulic effect of that, you might say, toward a reduction of consciousness.” Fitzgerald stepped over him and entered the room. “I know why you’ve come.”

  “You do?”

  “Oui, mon enfant,” said Payne, “you want to invite me into your family.”

  “Do you realize how inexpensively I could have you shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do?”

  “But I’m alarmed you would maintain such connections.”

  “Well, goodnight then, Payne.”

  “Goodnight to you sir. I trust these morbid preoccupations of yours will not trouble your sleep. Look at it this way, I could have you shot as cheaply. I presume the price is within both our means.”

  “Yes, I suppose. Well, goodnight then, Payne.” He went out, taking elaborate pains not to step into the face of his foreman, Wayne Codd. Payne went to sleep, moved by the pismire futilities of moguls—their perpetual dreams, that is, of what could be done with the money.

  13

  A long gliding sleep for Payne was followed by a call to breakfast. He stumbled into the hallway and found himself in some sort of procession, the whole family moving in one direction, deploying finally in silence around a glass pantry table. They were served by an old Indian lady who maintained a stern air that kept everyone silent. Plates were put on the table with unnecessary noise. Then, when it seemed finally comfortable to eat, there was an uproar in the hallway. Behind Codd, darkling with rage, came the fabulous multiple amputee of untoward bat-tower dreams—none the worse for wear—C. J. Clovis, variously sustained with handsomely machined aluminum mechanisms and superstructures; around which the expensive flannel he affected (and now a snap-brim pearly Dobbs) seemed to drape with a wondrous futuristic elegance. The Indian woman stepped through the smoked-glass French doors in petulant response to the noise. Breakfast was ordered for Clovis. The Fitzgeralds arose, smiling gaily a
ghast. Admittedly, the rather metallurgical surface Clovis presented to the world would have been intimidating to anyone who hadn’t been in on the process.

  Payne made the introductions. Codd, sporting welts, bowed out. Payne watched him until his attention returned to the others; he found Clovis already selling a bat tower.

  “We don’t want a bat tower, Mister Clovis,” said La.

  “In what sense do you mean that?”

  “In any sense whatever.”

  Clovis gave them the encephalitis routine—mosquitoes as pus-filled syringes, et cetera, et cetera—including a fascinating rendition of death by microbe during which his plump sagging little carcass writhed mournfully beneath the abrupt motions of the metal limbs. From the viewpoint of the Fitzgeralds, it was really appalling. Coffee and toast cooled without interference. Fitzgerald himself was perfectly bug-eyed; though by some peculiar association he remembered canoeing at a summer camp near Blue Hill, Maine; afterwards (1921), he had puked at a clambake.

  “Still don’t want bats?” Clovis asked in a tiny voice.

  Missus Fitzgerald, who could really keep her eye on the ball, said, “Nyao. And we don’t want the tower either.”

  “Where’s my breakfast?” roared Clovis.

  “We want to live together,” Ann addressed her mother. “Nicholas and I.”

  “How did you pick us?” Fitzgerald asked Clovis.

  “I was looking for my foreman.”

  “Shut your little mouth,” Missus Fitzgerald told her daughter, who gnawed fitfully at a sausage. Codd was at the door once again.

  “Write my check,” he said, “I’ve had the course.”

  “We’ll talk about this after breakfast,” Fitzgerald said to him. “You may be right.”

  “It’s him or me,” Codd said.

  “Quite right,” Fitzgerald said, “but later, okay? We’ll have it all out.”