The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  “I’m old enough to make this decision,” Ann told her mother. Codd went out. Clovis’ breakfast came. He scowled at the lady of Amerind extraction who drummed around the table splashing cups full of coffee.

  “What did you say?” Fitzgerald, this shocked man, asked his daughter.

  “Nicholas and I wish to set up housekeeping.”

  “You just aren’t fussy,” her mother accused, “are you.”

  “And it’s time she got started,” Dad averred.

  “Well, she’s not, Duke. She’s not fussy and she never was.”

  “Life has a way of bringing out fussiness.”

  “Ann,” said her mother, “I hate to see you learn to be fussy the hard way.”

  “I told you later!” said Fitzgerald to Codd who had reappeared. “Now get.” Codd shrank away. “Not one bat tower,” he said, catching Clovis’ eye.

  “I can get it for you cheap,” Clovis said.

  “Tell us you don’t mean that,” Missus Fitzgerald said.

  “I don’t mean that.” Ann shrugged.

  Now Clovis really began to eat as if there were no tomorrow, shooting through not only his own large breakfast, but all the leftovers as well. At one point, he had three pieces of toast and an unsqueezed grapefruit clamped in the appliance. It would be friendly and fun to say that he held the others in thrall.

  Payne excused himself with the tiny wink that means the toilet; and escaped. The truth was the blood vessels in his head were pounding in an apoplectic surge. He went outside under the exploding cottonwoods and hot mountain light feeling an upwelling of relief of freedom of space of scarcity of knowing there was the invisible purling descent of mountain water someplace right close. In the watercourses on the side slope he could see green hands of aspen the million twirling leaves. Then he jumped into the Hornet and bolted.

  A time-lapse photograph would have shown the palest mint-green band against the mountains and the steady showering of transcontinental earthclods from the dying rocker panels and perforated bulbosities of fender. Behind the spiraling lizard of glass-faults, the preoccupied face of him, of Payne. What did he ever do to anybody?

  The man at the Texaco who had excited himself about the bushwhacked recaps said, “Go ahead and use it. Not long distance, we hope.” Payne looked around. There was no one else. “We?”

  “You and me.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no just a local call.”

  A minute later, Payne asked Codd to give him Clovis. Clovis came to the phone.

  “Hello?” he asked warily.

  “Me, Payne. Get out of there. I don’t want you peddling a tower to my future in-laws.”

  “Future in-laws. You ought to hear them on the subject of you, pal.”

  “I have and don’t want to anymore.”

  “A horse who isn’t gwine finish.”

  “I don’t need to know that.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Texaco.”

  “Are you coming back ever?” So Clovis had picked up the true pitch of Payne’s departure.

  “The body says yes.”

  He’d been gone an hour. When he sat down at the table, he could see the Fitzgeralds sniffing the Hornet’s fuel leaks. Once Payne saw a picture of André Gide in his library, wearing a comfy skull cap, looking at a bound folio and puffing his Gauloise cigarette. Thinking of that now, Payne couldn’t completely see why he should continue to take his lumps here in the presence of breakfast scraps and depleted grapefruits.

  “We’ve been having an incredible conversation with your boss,” Missus Fitzgerald said to him.

  “Good,” Payne said.

  “About these oddities, these bat towers, you two are pushing.”

  “I’m just the simple carpenter,” Payne said.

  “Mister Clovis says you’re going to Key West,” said Fitzgerald, unnaturally elated to be able to announce this.

  “It’s news to me.”

  “Yup,” Clovis grinned, “it’s so. Are you ready for the rest?”

  “I am.”

  “I nailed them for twenty G’s: one tower and one only. Naturally, it will be our masterpiece.” Payne was pleased with the news; though it pained him to have Clovis use his confidence tone in front of the Fitzgeralds. “One catch. No bats down there. We’re going to have to bring our own. Just a detail. And you did hear me about the twenty G’s.”

  “Yes,” Payne winced. They conversed as though the room were empty of anyone but themselves.

  “You shoulda seen the two-page telegrams I was whamming down there. You didn’t know it but I composed the damn queries in that creekbottom. And you oughta seen my literary style. Right out of the adventurer William Beebe whose underwater footsteps I have always longed to trace through the atolls of Micronesia.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” Clovis said, “and how we got them.”

  About the time that it became plain that Payne would not only clear out soon but perhaps—even if it was not plain to the Fitzgeralds—take Ann along with him, Codd began to conduct a curious delineation of his own plans all toward asking himself the question whether or not he was willing to go to the State Penitentiary at Deer Lodge and there to manufacture license plates for automobiles, all for the pleasure of busting Nicholas Payne down to size and, in some ultimate manner, fix him for good. The question was in the long run one that sprang from a fantasy of himself scuttling out of a low, dense bush, whirring almost invisible out of that bush with his speed, to hit Payne over the head with something of a single ball-peen density sufficient to prevent the rising of Payne again from the spot on anything but a litter for the deceased. He giggled with a thought of Payne afloat in brains and spinal fluid. R.I.P. if you think you deserve it because here’s where God takes over! Wayne was a religious boy.

  The relief Codd got at having developed a frame of action permitted him to enjoy, as he once always had, his little bunkhouse. On the shelf beside the Motorola, a blue flowerpot burst with poppies grown right from a Burpee’s packet. That took tender loving care! His postcards, cowboy writing paper, electric cattleprod, wrap-around sunglasses, Model 94 Winchester 30–30, bathing suit (Roger Vadim model), Absorbine, Jr., truss and Philmore crystal set with loop antenna—were all carefully arrayed in the doorless closet next to the TV. His 4-H belt buckle, angora dice, birthday cards (30) from his grandmother and novelty catalogues were all on the dresser next to his great-grandfather’s Confederate forage cap and great-grandmother’s hard porcelain chamberpot out of which he had eaten untold tonnage of treated grains and cereals from the factories of Battle Creek, Michigan.

  And on the walls were many varnished pine plaques emblazoned with mottos. And there were snapshots of girlfriends, bowling trophies, hot cars, a dead eagle spread over the flaring hood of a Buick Roadmaster. In the top right-hand dresser drawer behind the army socks were many unclear snapshots of Ann’s twat. Seen from under the bathhouse floor by the impartial eye of the Polaroid camera, it seemed itself to be a small, vaguely alarming bird, not unlike a tiny version of the American eagle lying on the hood of the Buick Roadmaster; alarming to Codd anyway, who, let’s face it, never had known what to make of it. What was the use of his getting a lot of pictures of the darn thing if he couldn’t touch it?

  The bed was just a bed. The chairs were just a bunch of chairs. There was a parabolic heater with black and white fabric cord. There was just a regular bunch of windows—well, only four; but they seemed to be all over the place. One window was close to the door and today it framed the blaring red mug of an unhappy Duke Fitzgerald.

  “Come out here a minute, Wayne.”

  There was just one Wayne Codd in there and he came out.

  “Sir?”

  “Can’t you do anything?”

  “He hasn’t given me a chance.”

  “He did night before last. I found you K.O.’d on his step.”

  “I got sucker-punched, sir.”

&nb
sp; “Well, Codd, I thought you’d have had your own stake in this.”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean I don’t know if you realize what he’s got her doing.”

  A dish dropped and broke faintly in the main house.

  “Oh, yes I do, sir,” Codd said firmly, “I’ve seen them at it.”

  Fitzgerald waved his hands frantically in front of his face. “For God’s sake Wayne.” Wayne looked down at his boots, remembered Orion streaking up, the lash of trees. “I saw them, sir.”

  Hideously, Fitzgerald had an agonizing image of Payne as a kind of enormous iguana or monitor lizard, even the beating throat, in rut, over the vague creaminess of Ann. Suddenly, out of the generalized eroticism, he was back in the winter of 1911, lying on his Flexible Flyer on a hill in Akron, imaginatively pitting himself against a flying-V of naked women. He remembered their rubbery collision, the women writhing and squealing under his runners.

  “Codd it’s rough. Chemistry … changing times … God I don’t know.”

  “But I will do the job, sir.”

  “Gee Wayne I do hope so. It’s what he ought to have.”

  “Don’t you worry your head, sir. He’s going to have it.” Codd began to choke a little with emotion at having proclaimed even in so veiled a fashion his dismal loyalty. He was without relations and nobody loved him. This was going to have to do.

  “Ann,” said her mother, “wouldn’t you stay a minute?”

  “Of course I will, Mother. You never—”

  “I know I’m tiresome and maybe a … a little old.” The smile. “But just this once.”

  “You never want me to stay! You want me to get going after meals. ‘Why don’t you get a move on?’ you’re always saying! I’d love to sit and talk a minute for crying out loud!”

  Missus Fitzgerald fanned all that away, all that sass, all that fearful adolescent whatnot, all that chemistry.

  “I’m going to make you a proposal.”

  The little furrow, only one now, between the tapered eyebrows; the delicately rouged beezer narrowed with the seriousness of it. Ann grew desperate. I’m only a kid, she thought, I want to hightail it; not this thing with papers. She wondered what it could mean anyway, feeling her chemicals boil up the neck of her Pyrex beaker. But the old lady looked bananas as she produced now a red vinyl portfolio with her lawyer’s name, B. Cheep, Counselor-At-Law, in gold rubber on its handle. Out came the papers, business papers, girl; papers with which Missus Fitzgerald planned to make a serious obstacle to Nicholas Payne.

  “These aren’t only for people who go bald,” said the Missus.

  “What’s this? What is this, Mother?”

  “The wig bank! The wig bank!” The famous lapis lazuli glitter of eyes.

  “Oh.”

  “You say ‘oh.’ ”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “I wonder if you would say, ‘oh’ in some of the circumstances I have been forced to visualize.”

  The gnomic tone bothered Ann.

  “Maybe I would say something quite different, Mother.”

  “I wonder if you would say ‘oh’ if you were a part-time secretary at the bank in Wyandotte who had dropped December’s salary on a teased blonde beehive which you had stored all through the summer and broken out for the Fireman’s Ball in November only to find that the expensive article contained a real thriving colony of roaches and weevils; so you spray it with DDT or 2, 4-D or Black Flag or Roach-No-Mo and all the bugs, all the roaches, all the weevils run out and the wig bursts into flames by spontaneous combustion and the house which you and your hubby—because that’s what they call their husbands, those people: hubbies—burns down around the wig and your nest egg goes up with the mortgage and it’s the end. I wonder then, if you were her and had owned this wig which you had stored privately, I wonder if you would have wondered about a refrigerated fireproofed wig bank after all? Or not.”

  A little voice: “I would have put my wig in the wig bank.”

  “I THOUGHT SO. And I was wondering one last thing. I was wondering if the owner of this wig bank came up to you and hinted at a partnership I was wondering if you would shrug with that pretty little dumbbell face and say ‘oh.’ ”

  Suddenly Ann wanted to bring in the cane crop in Oriente Province where the work and earth was good all at once and Castro came out in the evenings to pitch a few innings and maybe give your tit a little squeeze and said he appreciated your loading all those arrobas for the people; and the cane fields ran to the sea where a primitive but real belief in Art helped people meet the day.

  “How can I be your partner?” she asked.

  “Come to Detroit with me now.”

  “But Nicholas I wanted to see more of Nicholas.”

  “You wanted to see more of Nicholas.”

  “Don’t make fun.”

  “I had smaller chances for developing standards, my girl. But I developed them I assure you. I was fussy.”

  “Well, so am I.”

  “Not to my way of thinking.”

  “I’ll go along with that.”

  “You control your tone,” her mother said.

  “You control yours.”

  “Trying to extort a half interest in my wig bank and not plan on showing up for the work side of things.”

  “I don’t want a half interest in your little bitch of a wig bank.”

  “You don’t have the standards for the job anyway,” says the Ma, lighting a Benson and Hedges. “Well, you won’t get it I assure you. We need people who are fussy.” When Missus Fitzgerald got rolling scarcely anyone in sight got off unabraded.

  Ann went to her room. She was comforted a little by it and by the tremendous number of familiar objects. But the objects themselves brought a special discomfort. In this way: Ann felt that it might soon be requisite for her to go with Payne someplace and she wanted to do that. But she wanted to stay around and play with all the junk in her room and look out of the window and read passionate books and write poems and take photographs that held meaning. And she didn’t mind getting laid either if she could sleep at home; but to be out there on the road doing it and not be able to go back and play with all the junk at night.… Plus, someday, and this had to be gone into rather systematically, when it became necessary to think in terms of the long run, she did not want to find she had closed the door on George, the rara avis, as her father called him.

  Payne knew the time was coming now. He didn’t know when precisely; nor did he know that Wayne Codd, former Gyrene and present-day homicidal knucklehead extraordinaire, stalked him from afar, looking for an opening and feeling soundly backed up by the Fitzgeralds senior. Codd himself had no plan. He was just going to get in there and let the worst of his instincts take over. By contrast, Payne, excited about his coming travels, thought of the open roads of America and the Saturday Evening Post and its covers by his favorite artist besides Paul Klee: Norman Rockwell. “Make it me who’s out there!” He saw spacious skies and amber waves of grain. Most of all he saw the alligator hammocks of Florida and, in his mind’s eye, a stately bat tower standing in an endless saw-grass savannah over which passed the constant shadows of tropical cloudscapes; merry bats singled out stinging bugs at mealtime; Payne confronted a wall of Seminole gratitude. And on a high rounded beach the multiple amputee of original bat schemes smiled at a blue horizon.

  You’d think he’d never been there.

  These frosty mornings put the young wanderer in mind of the Tamiami Trail. He remembered, not uncritically, juice bars where the hookers went to keep up their vitamin C. He remembered a cocktail lounge with aquarium walls that let you see water ballet. He remembered his surprise when girls who had waited on him before appeared behind the glass, streams of bubbles going up from the corners of forced subaqueous smiles. Most of all, he remembered the vivid, rubbery cleavage of one of the girls who swam toward the glass. He wanted to stir her with wrinkled waterlogged fingers of his own. One day, he sat close to the glass and made a simian face over his c
uba libre. The girl, who turned out to be a Seminole, laughed huge silver globes to the surface.

  He was seventeen. Those were the days when he still went around on crutches for no reason at all and carried a pistol. He was riding his first motorcycle, an early hog, acetylene-torched from the contours of a Harley 74 (“Call it a Harley cause it harley ever starts.”), toward Everglades City with the Seminole girl on the back. For the first part of the ten days they traveled together, she seemed as assimilated as an airline stewardess—owned a bikini, ate snacks, screwed with a coy reserve and made, while doing so, the same “bleep” Payne heard subsequently from small weather satellites. He carried the crutches on the bike, the pistol in his pants. By the end of the trip, the coy reserve had vanished and in all respects, Payne felt, she had become an aborigine.

  She taught him this: Hold the pistol at the ready, ride the back roads in the ’glades at night in first gear with the lights on dim; when you spot a rabbit, hit the brights, shift to second and “get on it a ton” until you overtake the rabbit, draw the gun, shoot the rabbit and stop.

  Then the aborigine would skin the rabbit, make a fire and cook it over little flames that lit their faces, the motorcycle and the palmettos. After that, whiskey drinking and off-color games would set in.

  One night she took him to see an alligator the poachers hadn’t found: an enormous beauty with jaws all scarred from eating turtles. Miami wasn’t far away; but this was a thousand years ago, back when the Harley was already old.

  Now Payne meant to show Ann what it had been like. Incipient Calvinism would keep him from divulging the details of the Seminole girl’s lessons. Historically, she would be simply an Indian who had guided him in the Everglades.

  Payne had no way of knowing that Ann would expand his entire sense of the word “aborigine” with cute tricks of her own.

  Codd was summoned to the library, scene of recent ballpoint skirmishes and terminal conferences re: the transgressions of Payne. Missus Fitzgerald smoked contemplatively in the bay window, looking out upon the greedy willow that secretly probed for delicious effluents in the Fitzgerald septic tank. Fitzgerald, turned to the liquor wagon, his back to Codd, his hands doing something invisible like a baseball pitcher adjusting a secret grip on the ball. Abruptly he turned with one of his chunky famous highballs aloft for Codd—thinking, “The foreman is brought in for a drink with the owner”—and said, “Our dear Wayne.”