The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  Why not simply accept the fact that the willow is a symbol.

  “Thank you,” said Wayne.

  “What do you think of this Payne?” asked Missus Fitzgerald.

  “I dunno really.”

  “Go ahead,” said Fitzgerald, “roll it over in your mind: What do you really think of the bastard.”

  “I’ve got my doubts,” Codd said.

  Missus Fitzgerald chuckled. “You’re so deferential, Wayne. That makes us even fonder of you.” Wayne thought of automotive differentials, how they accepted the power of the motor and made those wheels turn massively like all those wheels turned massively in grade-school educational movies about the U.S. on the go.

  “Wayne,” said Fitzgerald, “we’ve got our doubts as well. But because of Ann, who is essentially just a baby still, can you follow that? still just a baby, Wayne, because of Ann this guy has us over a barrel and we have no recourse at all. He cannot be discouraged. He cannot be sent away. God, I remember when I was wooing the missus, why hell I—”

  “Let’s not talk about you just now, dear.”

  “That’s right, honey. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. —Uh, Wayne, I don’t know how to say this—” He turned to his wife. “—but God damn it honey, aren’t we getting fond of Wayne?”

  Wayne picked up the thread right along in here, about how he was earmarked as the son-in-law. In his mind’s eye, he twirls a silk opera hat; beside him in the box, Ann listens raptly as a heavy fellow in a jerkin bays, “Amour!”

  “Yes, Duke, indeed we are.”

  “Wayne, let me throw the meat on the table. This bird has kind of got the double whammy on us, what with Ann’s being, at this point, little more than a child. And, on the level, the guy has our hands tied.”

  “This goes way back,” says Missus Fitzgerald. “We’ve had him in the house like a cat burglar, you know, rooting through the liquor cabinet and whatnot.” Fitzgerald studied her face for indiscretion. “No, Duke, now,” she said, seeing it. “Wayne has to know.”

  “This is true,” Duke acceded slowly.

  “Anyhow, we just wanted to fill you in,” she said.

  “Kind of put the bee in your bonnet,” he said.

  “And you kind of see what you can come up with,” she said.

  “Go ahead and finish your highball,” he said.

  “You’ve hardly touched it,” she said.

  “Oh, hell, take it to the bunkhouse and finish it,” he said. “And bring back the glass when you’re through.”

  14

  C. J. Clovis too was now asleep in the mobile home; he had removed the two artificial limbs. Since the missing arm and missing leg were from the same side of his body, he looked, sleeping on his stomach, like a boomerang. In his dreams, he twitched with happiness. He saw his towers crossing the country, none out of sight of the other. He dreamed of a natural harmony in which the silent war of bats on bugs left a ground level peace where ladies shelled peas under evening trees. Slivers of white showed between his lids as his eyes rolled to applause.

  Two years ago, George published Ann’s poems. It was a birthday present. The book was reviewed in Sumac, a literary magazine which had assumed the subscription list of a former publication, Diesel, a journal of lesbian apologetics. Seeing the review again gave Ann such a sense of her own ability to synthesize hard-edge experience that she lost a good deal of her fear of going off with Nicholas:

  • •

  It is difficult to talk of the work of Ann Fitzgerald without mentioning the sense of longing, of time and love past, that percolates through her best verse. These are delicate moods that survive the most concrete—even brutal—details. This, from A Loss Of Petals (George Russell Editions, Malaga, 1968):

  “Beside me on our bed

  his sleep fitful:

  We lingered at our lovemaking(s).

  And at his tossings

  his

  dong

  flopped

  wanly

  To the Posturepedic shadows

  of mice and loss.”

  At a time when poetry faces schism and a dearth of real gift, Fitzgerald’s perfect reveries throb just under the skin of a discredited craft.

  She would have shown the book to Payne long ago, if it hadn’t been for the publisher’s colophon. And she didn’t really want him to know how clever she was. Moreover, she had a specific interest in photographing him when he was being most emptily superior, when reflex maleness made him show himself at his worst. Nothing personal, mind you; she was chasing universals.

  In the immediate future, she wanted only a dead-level view of the country. She wanted to be along for the ride just like those cowboy’s floozies she saw at all hours sitting under the rear-view mirrors of pickups. The simple national archetypes like floozies, bowlers and rotarians seemed suddenly to be rather at one with things, possibly in a way Lozenge could never have foreseen. In an epoch in which it was silly to be a druid or red Indian, there was a certain zero-hour solace in being something large enough to attract contempt. Ann looked forward to being a floozy as another girl might have anticipated her freshman year at Vassar. With almost Germanic intentness, she had set her sights on being cheap and available and not in the least fussy.

  She broke out the peroxide, pouted at herself in the mirror and squeaked, “Call me Sherri.”

  In the quiet of a Michigan evening, Payne’s mother tweezed a dog’s hair from the meat loaf. A moment later, without warning, she thrust a spoiled cheese into a lidless plastic garbage pail. Payne’s father, in the den, stared at a picture of Payne dribbling in for a lay-up. “Mother,” he called to Missus Payne, who was trying apparently to thrust that cheese all the way to the bottom of the pail. “Here’s that picture of Nicholas dribbling in for a lay-up you asked about!”

  Nicholas Payne hunkered in his handmade bow-roofed and screened motor wagon and packed with joy his possessions. He knew that this little driveway he was parked in was hooked up to every road in America; and all those roads ran to the sea.

  He slowly packed his mummy bag into its stuff sack thereby closing the parenthesis on whatever fantasies he had had about walking over the mountains that summer. He took the sheepherders’ stove to pieces and stored it. He lifted the cookware down from the hooks on the ceiling and rolled the Coleman lantern in a towel.

  • •

  Wayne Codd sat on the one-front step that his bunkhouse had, watched Payne, and waited for it to get dark. He just wanted to get in there and play it by ear. Afterwards—on those evenings when he and Ann weren’t at the opera—they would have two possibly three hand-picked couples over for bridge and drinks. Sometimes when they were feeling restless, they would drive out to Gallatin Field to see the kind of people who got off the plane, just to keep a check on that. Late that night, Ann would perform her duties as a wife. Codd troubled over that idea a moment or two, mistakenly emphasizing the word “perform” in his mind; until with exquisite anguish he saw what was essential to the notion. “Duties!” he groaned with ecstasy. “Perform duties!”

  Dad Fitzgerald was awfully hungry and just prowling around the kitchen and getting in the Missus’ way. She ignored him and moved through the room with a certain dirigible grace. When, from time to time, he caught her eye they smiled at each other; until once when he smiled and she just stared back at his face. She came up close to him. “I thought so,” she said. “Get back upstairs and groom your nose!”

  “I’m hungry!”

  “I’m not going to have that at dinner. I told you if you let yourself go I’d go back for bank inventory. Now groom that nose.” Fitzgerald started to leave the room. Her voice softened. “Dinner will be ready when you come down,” she added to placate the honking auto dodo.

  He went back up the stairs of a house built on the ancestral hunting grounds of the Absaroka Indians, with a gloomy certainty that the rotary nose clipper had been left at home. And even though he knew it was irrational, he began to lose interest in the West.

 
Codd, originally hunkered by the wagon, later hunkered by a bush; and then out of pure feral instinct, moved, unconsciously, under the bush itself until his camouflage was quite complete and only the shiny points of his Mariposa cowboy boots and slow-burn eyes would have been visible to a botanist peering to identify the bush (Juniper).

  The point of his left elbow rested upon his knee. His left hand supported his face, tilted to the left to smear slightly the flesh on the Anglo-Mongol cheekbone. His right forearm rested upon the other knee at such a pitch that his fingers dangled all the way to the ground, resting delicately upon the end of an iron sash weight.

  If you had photographed Codd and drawn a circle around the picture of him, the diameter of which was a direct line drawn from the tip of one boot to the crown of his head, he would have filled the whole circle with the rest of his body; he was compact, in this posture, as dense and raring as a seamless cannonball.

  No one photographed Codd. No one knew Codd was in the bush with the sash weight watching Payne behind the screen of his wagon. Codd could see little more than the movement of a lantern now behind the screens and behind the leaves of his own bush. Rising over the barn in a sky still very slightly blue, the moon made a mark like when your arm is grabbed and a fingernail sinks. A light was still on in the barn. The door was open and a luminous gold rectangle of hay dust was lit from behind. Codd was passing time by guessing weights and distances. As patient and systematic as he seemed to be, Wayne Codd was in the most important ways completely out of kilter. The words “ball peen” pivoted through his mind too ardently for anyone’s comfort but his own.

  Payne examined the trailer hitch with a flashlight. It was a good sturdy mount with welded struts and a two-inch ball. The trouble was it was necessarily attached to the car. He could see the circle of metal corruption around each of the welds and, looking underneath, whole sections of the frame seemed mechanically compromised and degenerate. The essential horridness of the Hudson was disclosing itself. It had begun to destruct.

  He crawled further under the car, examining the places where the steel of the springs had crystallized. The shocks were hopeless. Every grease nipple exuded a fist of gritty sludge. As Payne looked around, he began to develop a fear that the car would collapse on top of him.

  How he wished he had his old Matchless motorcycle again with its single 500 c.c. cylinder, its low-end monster torque and simplicity. He was sick of the lurching mechanical hysteria. He wanted to stretch out on the Matchless, his chin on the gas tank, his feet crisscrossed on the rear fender, his hands out in front of him like a man in a racing dive, and listen to that English engine come up on the cam for the purest and most haunting wail he had ever heard since Niña de los Peines.

  No more Hudson Hornet seat springs liberating suddenly from the long oppression of upholstery to stick him in the ass. No more steel shriek of brakes and sudden vision of highway through the floorboards. No more gradual twirl of rear-view mirror or wide-open charge down quiet streets even though the foot was off the accelerator and he was now groping on the floor to pull it back.

  Payne wanted a Coupe de Ville with mink upholstery. He wanted factory air and four on the floor. He wanted tinted glass and the optional four barrels. He wanted a stingy-brim Stetson and a twenty-three-hair moustache. He wanted the AM–FM with stereo speakers in the back, the tape deck; and the climate control lever that let you have Springtime in the Laurentians forever.

  For a long time he lay there with the nine-battery Ray-O-Vac in his hand. It never occurred to him that it was unwieldy and flimsy compared to a sash weight.

  Codd saw the light fan out from under the car and started to make his move. He spilled forward onto his fingertips, his face up and forward like a mandril’s; and sidled into the evening air.

  During the Livingston rodeo, a gopher and a rattlesnake had faced off under one Engelmann’s spruce way up in the ultraviolet-saturated shadows of the Absarokas. Only the snake had been able to pay attention. After that the gopher was done for. A goner. What’s more, the gopher died a virgin. His own secret genetic message sent a million years ago went undelivered. The message of the snake, however, had gone special-handling first-class registered. Which goes to show: It doesn’t pay to scrimp on postage.

  Payne was remembering when the dogs were passing the foot of the stairs. Is that what they were? Were they dogs? Yes, he decided, those were man’s best friends passing the foot of the stairs. Sometimes he feared going downstairs in the morning that they’d still be there to rip through his terrycloth robe and tear at his inwards.

  He looked at the rather vague edge of the Hornet’s rocker panel. Thrust under and toward him were the snakeskin tips of Wayne Codd’s Mariposa cowboy boots.

  Payne understood now. He imperceptibly moved the flashlight off his chest and propped it beside him so that it continued to fan out at exactly the same angle. Codd’s placement of his feet, just outside the penumbra of light, now made sense. Then Payne moved carefully to get out from under the car at the other side. He looked back. The boots hadn’t moved. The long curves of them were crisscrossed with the shadows of tie-rods. Payne rolled free, rising slowly to look at Codd through the windows of the car. Codd’s head was bent downward, watching with absolute attention and lack of motion.

  As yet, Payne had not specified his alarm, picked his flavor between terror and concern. He moved very cautiously to the front of the car without alerting Codd and then watched him for some moments. He spotted the long billet of sash and felt an indignation of his own that was entirely dangerous. He studied Codd very closely then. He could not have missed anything. He did not miss the soundless motion of Codd’s eyes turning up to see him.

  Codd began to move, loose and righteous with what he had to do. When he was close enough he swung at Payne. He swung too far because the weighted fist hit Payne under the ear so that Payne felt something sing through him but did not fall. Then, when Codd missed on the next swipe and kicked wildly at Payne, Payne rushed him and got him over the hood of the car battering him against the moonlit dihedral of windshield and feeling a tremendous turbulence inside of himself as he lifted the ragdoll weight of the shrieking Codd up again and again to beat him full length over the front of the car. And, as though Codd were without any weight at all, he began to no longer hear Codd striking the car but could only see the head as fragile as a winter melon colliding against the curving glow of glass making spidery shooting stars in the windshield at every touch.

  Payne released him, sickened, and sat down. Fitzgerald was in full motion running toward him, crossing and recrossing the rectangle of light from the barn. Then Ann was coming too, an enormous silver nimbus of bleached hair around her head.

  In complete physical possession, Payne watched the lolling go out of Codd’s head as he came down from the hood of the car. Codd seemed a moment later to teeter back from the angle of the Mariposa boots as he raised the sash weight high overhead and brought it down against Payne’s skull. Payne felt himself guide its clear descent with his eye. The moment of shock was a single click, as a cue ball touches the triangle of billiard balls, a clean line, a perfect sound, then the balls of color bursting from the center and darkness pouring in until zero.

  15

  It was quickly apparent that Codd had not given Payne, as it first looked, a blow that was mortal. The question of damage to the brain, however, was not settled. The notion Ann had was that her family would take an upright line in compensating Nicholas. As for herself, she would feel honor bound to do whatever he told her to do.

  Now that was an alarming idea. She was filled with a terrifying and delicious vision of living her life out with a man who had been made a feeb by damage to his brain. She saw her parents out of misguided loyalty giving Payne work that he could do. And suddenly a terrible picture of Payne wheeling bins of disinfected wigs in her mother’s wig bank came to Ann. For a long time, she had secretly photographed Payne at his worst moments; but pictures of him reduced to idiocy by brain damag
e would be of merely pathological, rather than artistic, interest. This thought of hers, clear as it was, diminished Ann more than she would ever be able to know.

  But, poor girl, she was so undermined at the moment. At the time of the accident, she had seen the complicity between Codd and her parents; one, she assumed, that had got out of hand. Then her mother had spotted Ann’s peroxide hair and, even before it was determined whether or not Payne was dead, had screeched, “You little hoor!”

  When Payne regained consciousness, he discovered that he had lost much of his peripheral vision; producing what the doctor described as “vignetting”; it gave him the sense of looking down a pair of tubes. Added to the insane headache he had, it was very disconcerting. No one knew if it was permanent or not.

  Ann came often but he could never quite figure if he had just seen her or imagined it. So he lay there in an indescribable air of expectation, most of which turned out to be unwarranted.

  Clovis was in and out all the time, displaying his familiarity with the staff. He gave Payne some advice that seemed rather wild-eyed in the beginning and then made sense. Clovis conducted a few arrangements to substantiate the advice and, two days later, Payne was feeling well enough to act upon it.

  Summoned by Payne’s attorney, sitting beside him now, the Fitzgeralds arrived at the hospital, all three of them. Payne directed them to chairs and they sat, next to the sink.

  “As soon as I am able,” Payne said, “I am going to Key West to build a bat tower. I plan to take Ann with me. We will of course live together; ‘cohabit’ is the word, Heath informs me.” Payne gestured to indicate Counselor Egdon Heath beside him. “Both on the way and after we get there.”