Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  A bank of untended lilacs enclosed a small back yard with a picnic table that had built-in bench seats on either side, a burn barrel, a clothesline, a swing set (Does he have kids? Frank wondered. How can I not know if he has kids?), a barbecue with a red enamel lid and a crooked little crabapple tree still in blossom. An open lighted window faced into this yard and there was a table just inside the window at which sat Boyd Jarrell, apparently asleep with his head on his arms.

  They managed to slip through the lilacs quietly and Frank whispered his plan for them to sit at the picnic table and observe. They didn’t quite understand, so he went forward and sat on one end of the bench seat facing the house. He gestured for the others to follow. June came and sat next to him, then Joanie. Finally, Lucy came and sat. It was her relatively light extra weight that caused the picnic table to flip over on top of them. Frank felt the wood press his face and heard June’s hissing Okie curses. Joanie was on all fours, bucking, trying to get it off all of them in one powerful gesture but then complained she had gotten splinters in her rump. Frank grasped the table and raised the whole thing back into place with a red face. Lucy remained sitting on the ground, cross-legged, muttering, “I just hate it.” Frank’s first concern was Jarrell, but he saw his position hadn’t moved. They sat again at the table, two on each side.

  Then they watched.

  “Is he asleep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he passed out?”

  “That looks the same as asleep.”

  “Where’s the little woman?”

  “Nowhere to be seen. But you know what? He’s moving.”

  He was. More than that, a continuous murmuring could be heard. Riveted, Frank tried hard to make it out.

  “What’s he saying?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t know. If you promise to be quiet — Joanie, this goes for you — I’ll go up and listen.” Joanie covered her mouth with both hands. The others nodded compliance and Frank crept to the window. He listened until he could understand what Jarrell was repeating.

  He was saying, “I have nothing, I have nothing.” It was a choking voice and Frank felt an immense weight fall upon him. He stood looking in the window until Jarrell became silent again, his head rested in his arms. And it wasn’t for a long moment before Frank was conscious of the burning eye that gazed out at him.

  “Ladies,” he said in a clear voice. “I’m afraid he has seen me. Why don’t you get home as best you can. I’m going to have a word with Boyd.”

  Boyd Jarrell rose slowly to his feet and his shadow shot across the yard. The women screamed and ran headlong into the willow bushes.

  Frank wanted to slip away too, but this was his responsibility. He walked around to the door, which was unlighted. He tapped on it and got no response. He tapped again. Nothing. He opened the door. It seemed to open into the abyss.

  “Boyd?”

  He walked in.

  “Boyd? It’s Frank.”

  Frank walked around the house calling Boyd’s name. It was a plain house with a beer company print of Charlie Russell’s Last of the Ten Thousand for decoration. In the bedroom were a pair of dirty jeans over the back of a chair. The empty drawers of the dresser were pulled out. There were coat hangers on the floor and the closet was open, with a handful of worn snap-button shirts hanging inside and a battered pair of rough-out cowboy boots with curled-up toes.

  He went back to the kitchen and looked in the pantry. There was a bottle of whiskey in there and he poured himself a shot at the sink and sat down. It was quiet. He sat and listened. He made out a train a long way off, then perfect quiet once again. He sensed that he was being watched from the side but didn’t turn that way for a moment, instead sipping the whiskey before deciding to look. He turned slowly and discovered a deer staring at him through the kitchen window. Beyond her, two others stood high on their back legs and ate the crabapples out of the tree in the yard. The deer faded from the window and Frank sighed. He made a note and weighted it with the whiskey bottle. The note said, “Stopped by — Frank.”

  “Who’s the note for?”

  Frank looked up. Boyd was in the room with him.

  “Why, it’s for you, Boyd. I couldn’t find you.”

  “I told the old lady to get lost. She didn’t want to get lost. So I helped her get lost.” His face looked dazed with backed-up rage. “Now I’m back.” Frank looked at the face. Boyd was almost beyond anger, his rage was so abstract. Frank felt himself turn helpless. This was just the moment when blood should have been flowing to his limbs, but it seemed to be going the other way. He felt like a flounder. He thought he might try defusing this situation by telling Boyd that he felt like a flounder, but there was not a lot of humor in the air.

  “While I’ve got you,” he began.

  “While you’ve got me?”

  “Yes, while I’ve got you.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “I didn’t think so, no,” Frank said. “What about the can. I use the can?”

  “You gonna wet your pants?”

  “Actually, possibly.”

  “Go ahead, and then I want you right here.” Boyd gestured toward the hall with a jerk of his lips. He slowly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he watched Frank.

  Frank went into the bathroom and closed the door. Then he turned around to look at the door. Good, a bolt lock. He locked it. Then he took in his surroundings. A toilet, a bathtub with a pipe ring around the top and a telephone-shaped shower head on a flexible metal pipe, and a big open window with the breeze pushing its plastic curtains.

  “You better open up,” came Boyd’s voice. “I heard you lock it.”

  Frank could see the door flexing against the restraint. He didn’t answer but looked at the window. He knew Boyd was thinking about the window too.

  “I hope you’re not gonna watch me take a leak,” Frank said in a loud voice. He turned on the tap and hot water came out at a hard volume. When the steam billowed from the spray, he detached the shower head and stood next to the window. A few moments passed and Boyd lunged into the window space. Frank let him have it full in the face with the shower head. Boyd howled and went over backward. Frank ran through the bathroom door, up the hall, through the kitchen and out the front door.

  Seeing Boyd come around the corner with one hand clapped to his face, Frank jumped into Boyd’s black Chevy half ton and got the doors locked before Boyd could arrive. Boyd picked up a rock from the driveway and brandished it alongside the driver’s window. Frank looked out, expressionless as a manikin, as he lifted his right hand slowly from his knee and felt the keys rattle against the back of his hand. He started the truck. Boyd went a short distance away and began beating a cottonwood tree with the rock. Frank felt he had no choice. He turned around and went out the driveway.

  It wasn’t until he got out to the highway that he looked into the rearview mirror and saw Boyd crouched in the bed of the truck. So he went up Sand Hill Road to Blind Creek Road, the most potholed road in the county. He drove up Blind Creek Road as fast as he could and still successfully wrestle the wheel. Sometimes Boyd was four or five feet in the air. He could now see that Boyd was ready to beat the window in if he could, but there was nothing in back but a spare tire that bounded around, seeming to chase Boyd from place to place in the bed.

  Blind Creek Road rejoined Sand Hill and took him into Belwood, still at a high rate of speed. As he entered Belwood, he could see the cloudy security light in front of a single-bay car wash and a green Chrysler Coronado starting to nose into the huge, whirling, soapy brushes. He drove in behind it, blowing his horn frantically. The Chrysler stopped and he bumped it from behind, still blowing his horn. The Chrysler pulled forward and Frank eased the Chevy into the car wash, looking up into the rearview mirror just in time to see Boyd vanish under the brushes. He pulled forward just a bit more and slid across the seat, letting himself out the far door. By crouching next to the wheel well, he was able to slip out without getting soap-
brushed.

  The big rack overhead rolled forward, transporting the huge spinning brushes and their load of hot water and soap. By the time Frank stood up enough to see, the owner of the Chrysler, a heavyset man in a nylon windbreaker, was standing next to the left fender of the truck, presumably waiting for the driver to get out. Frank slipped around the side of the building, and by the time he got across the street where there was a bar, he could hear oaths and the exchange of blows.

  12

  Saturday morning, first light, a silvery gleam along the ridge of the Lutheran church. The few cars reflected the sleepiness of their drivers as they eased up Assiniboine Avenue. Frank cleaned up the mess he had made, got the drink glasses out of their crevices in the living room, scraped the solidified mass out of the bottom of the wok with his cooking shovel under a stream of hot water and opened all the windows to let in the day.

  He gathered up his rod, his fishing vest and waders, and drove over past Connolly Park where some children were already kicking a soccer ball back and forth between them. He stopped a few blocks beyond, where a street ended in a view of the stockyards, got out and knocked on the door. It opened and Phil Page came out carrying his tackle. Page was tall and thin with a long black beard that came down to his chest. Almost all that revealed expression were his eyes, which were detached and suspicious. Frank and Phil had played on the same baseball team in high school. Phil was a first baseman, and Frank always thought he had the right sort of detachment for that position, a driftiness in responding to the facts, a kind of lag timing peculiar to first basemen.

  “Hi, Frank.”

  “Phil. We’ll go in my car.”

  Phil put his tackle in the back seat of Frank’s car and got in.

  Phil Page was a brakeman on the railroad. Their friendship, which went back a quarter of a century, had been revitalized by troubles with their marriages. It was just like being back on the baseball team together. Phil usually fished with him on the weekends, but only if they made what he called a reasonable start.

  “How’s the railroad life?”

  “Rolling.”

  “Making any money?”

  “A little.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s go way the shit up the Sixteen,” said Phil. “I’m in a brook trout state of mind.”

  They stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store to get some lunch supplies. The woman at the cash register was watching television so intently that Frank was able to slit the plastic wrap on a porn magazine and get a glimpse of the photographs, one after the other; it was like a seafood catalogue. Hard to maintain fascination in the face of that. The vagina was a splendid thing, but viewed as a monument it was entirely terrifying. The tiny, out-of-focus heads in the shadows behind those colossal, multicolor Mount Rushmore–sized cunts made Frank sorry he had looked. He wondered if these young women were discovered at soda fountains the way they used to discover Hollywood movie stars.

  Phil came around the corner. “Man cannot live by bread alone,” he said, then held up a jar. “He must have peanut butter.” Phil displayed the two described items. “What else?”

  “Two six-packs.”

  The country opened up quickly as they came down out of the Bridger Range going east toward the route of the old electric railroad. Blue skies, white flatiron clouds, sagebrush and grass, rhythmic hills betraying sea-floor origins, a sinewy black road that lifted on occasion to afford a glimpse of sparkling watercourses in the willows, cows of different colors but the same expression, doe-eyed calves, hawks contouring an air cushion on the surface of the land, the golden skeletons of tumbleweed blown into the fence corners, pictures of politicians on the telephone poles grinning insincerely into the vast space, and gophers running, heads down for speed or heads up to alertly observe themselves being run over.

  A truck went by with a pair of scowling ranchers in front.

  “I wonder if their mothers tie weights in the corners of their mouths,” Phil said. “You know, kinda like the Watusis do to their ears and lips. I bet that’s the case, the mama rancher hangs weights in the corner of baby’s mouth. Then the little boy baby gets a little cowboy hat and little boots with little spurs and weights for his mouth. Next they give the little shit a little lariat and stick a pair of steer horns on a hay bale. Most generally, the little shit is called Boyd, and in ten or twenty years’ time Boyd’s getting drunk and beating cows with his stock whip, abusing his old lady and stubbing out cigarettes in front of the TV.”

  “During this entire time,” said Frank, “your railroader is mostly in church or tending his kitchen garden or cuddling a litter of rabbits to help them through a blue norther. He’s a man of few words but they are always the same words: ‘The Railroad Built Montana.’ ”

  “Turn left,” said Phil. “Asshole.”

  The road took them off into a prairie with brilliant pale stands of bear grass and, below, a spring surrounded by aspens. A quarter mile beyond the spring a long slough solidified into a shining expanse of canary grass, deep green and dense. The Sixteen River meandered between parallel bands of willows, a true sagebrush trout stream heading west to rattlesnake canyons and the wide Missouri.

  They stood beside the car, rigging up their rods and tying on flies. “Attractor patterns today,” said Phil. “And death to all streamside entomologists.”

  “D’accord, sport. I’m putting on a royal Wulff tied with me own pinkies.”

  “I long to feel that creek push in on my waders.”

  “I long to hear the Pflueger opera as I drag the first hog to the gravel.”

  “I doubt there’s any hogs up here. Not enough water.”

  Frank suddenly thought about Boyd Jarrell. Boyd hated people who fished, although he spent plenty of time watching television or sitting in bars. Sometimes after he’d been in a bar for two days and spent every cent he’d made that week, Boyd would tell people, “I’ve lived next to these cricks all my life, but I’ve never had time to fish.”

  “Walk down about half a mile and I’ll fish behind you,” Phil said. “We can hopscotch.” He was pulling on his beard and looking through the willows into a small pool. “I can see about nineteen of the fuckers from here,” he said in an enraptured voice. “Time to rip some lips.”

  Frank started along the stream bank at a brisk walk. A covey of partridges took to the air in an ivory rush, brown terrestrial birds against the blue of outer space. After a bit he looked back and watched the heron-like figure of Phil Page forming a bow of line in midair over the stream, a slight breeze lifting his black beard from his chest. A meadowlark stood atop a Canadian thistle and poured out its song, barely pausing as Frank passed by. The prairie grass rolled away to the north. About halfway to the horizon, a sandstone seam made a long wavering line in the silvery grass. The sun dilated toward noon and Frank felt breathless to be in this very spot.

  The line straightened and fell, and the bright speck of fly soared on the current. It lifted into the air again, then returned to teeter along the quick water on its hackles until it disappeared down a small suction hole, and the trout was tight, vaulting high over the water again and again. The rod made a live arc in Frank’s hand, and in a minute the fish splashed in the shallows at his feet. He grasped the fly and the trout wriggled free. Frank let out a deep sigh and looked down the meander of wild water; it spiraled away forever.

  He could see Phil fishing behind him, hovering on the stream bank and probing with his fly line like an insect. Every so often his rod tightened in a bow and Phil scrambled down the bank to grab a trout. Frank caught three in a row from a flowing pool. Miles and hours went by and it was time for lunch. Frank stretched out on the stream bank, his fly rod crossed on his chest, the sun warm on his face, and waited for Phil to catch up. Ants were crawling on his forehead. He was drifting off, thinking how easy friendship could be.

  “Good grief,” Frank said and sat up. “I’m suddenly starving.”

  “I’m afraid we’re talking PB
and J here, sport.”

  “That’ll do just fine.”

  “Doesn’t really go with beer, but who really gives two shits what goes with beer when you got beer?”

  “Not me,” said Frank, pulling the top and smelling the spray of hops on his face. “Oh, boy.”

  “The little creek’s hotter than a two-dollar pistol today.”

  “I lost count.”

  “So did I.”

  They ate and watched the stream as though something very important could happen there at any moment. Some jelly leaked into the palm of Frank’s hand and he licked it out. A band of antelope drifted over the top of the sandstone seam and began to graze toward the west. The clouds climbed like a low ladder toward the west and a darker blue.

  “You been going out?”

  “Some,” said Frank. “No one special.” He thought about it: was that true?

  “Anyone I know?”

  “You know Lucy Dyer?”

  “Wasn’t Jerry Caldwell fucking her?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “I’m pretty sure she was fucking Jerry. This’d be a year or so ago. But what’s the difference? The only thing that’ll stop them from fucking the mailman is AIDS. My old lady’s probably fucking somebody right now. Who gives a shit.” He pulled his beard straight down while he thought. “It’s inflation. The consumer is king.”

  Frank thought of saying something but he didn’t. He just tried to watch the country. Phil soon went on to something else: out-of-staters. Seems every time Phil tried to go downtown, he had to plow through out-of-staters to get anywhere he was going. Things, no matter how you looked at them and as more time went by, were a bitch. Phil had set his face.