Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “How can you tell they’re out-of-staters?” Frank asked.

  “Shit, you just look at them. For one thing, the motherfuckers take little tiny steps.”

  “Oh.”

  “And they’re dressed for an Everest assault. I don’t have to tell you that there’s a world of difference between Deadrock and Mount Everest. The cocksuckers will come into the Dexter, read the menu and leave, go down the street to O’Nolan’s, read the menu, leave, then drive out to Wendy’s, tie up everyone in the drive-up line, customizing their goddamn burger order, hold this, hold that. I hate to see it, man. I wish they’d go back to where they came from.”

  “I can remember when you were an easygoing first baseman.”

  “Yeah, well, I wised up. I’ve got plenty of anger in me now and it gets my ass out of bed in the morning. That’s the only way you get anything done. This country was built by pissed-off people.”

  “Maybe that’s what I need,” Frank mused. “I don’t know, I just get sad. When you get comfortable you tend to brood on your losses. Hunger produces optimism. You’re on the move and that big Dagwood sandwich is just around the bend.”

  “Well, I hope I catch up with it. Them boys at Rail Link busted my union and cut me to the bone.”

  Frank felt the quiet that ensued, two men on a riverbank, didn’t used to be here and someday would be gone. Just now their lives seemed so important. Frank had made a killing in real estate; Phil would never be out of debt. Both of them loners, by choice or not. Brief stories of local life. Frank felt it made sense to think of it this way.

  Through the afternoon, Phil fished on ahead. A breeze came up, and casting the pale fly line was not quite the pleasure it had been earlier in the day. The small clouds that rode the westerly cast racing shadows on the ground. Trout kept coming to the fly. The riverbank curved like the rim of a bowl. It was taller than Frank was on its outside edge and its face was speckled with the borings of swallows who came and went incessantly. There were small groups of ducks occasionally floating toward him, and when they struck an invisible boundary, they took flight and wheeled to the east. A small island divided the river and balanced the two halves of water in an even flow across a pure white bar of gravel.

  Frank noticed the great length of Phil’s shadow on the ground as he walked toward him. Moths arose in clouds from the prairie and nighthawks began to soar in the violet light. The day of fishing was over. They broke down their tackle, got in the car and started along the empty road toward home.

  “That was all right,” said Frank.

  “I guess it was.”

  “I really stop thinking about everything else when I fish. I think about how to catch a fish, period.”

  On state and local news, Mr. Medicine Horse, a prominent chief in the sun dance ceremony, was running for sheriff of Hardin, promising to join his opponent, Mr. Rogers, in avoiding undue mudslinging.

  “Good luck, Mr. Medicine Horse,” said Phil to the road ahead.

  “If he didn’t learn mudslinging at Crow Agency, he better study it now before it’s too late.”

  “So, what’s happening with your ranch?” Phil asked as they bent around toward the south.

  “It’s ruining my life. I fired Boyd Jarrell.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “Well, he had his merits. Hard worker, good cowboy. This was the usual deal, he was hunting for a quit and he found one.”

  Phil looked out the window rigidly. “I thought he needed to be elsewhere a long time ago.”

  Frank drove and thought for a moment. “I’m surprised you feel one way or another about him.”

  “I have to be honest, Frank. He spent all his free time running you down. I told him I didn’t appreciate it. He said it was a free country. I thought he was no good.”

  It was absolutely silent in the car except for the hiss of wind around the doors. Frank felt something in his stomach. “I didn’t know that was the case, Phil.” Frank realized he had been naïve in thinking his problems with Boyd had been between them.

  “That was the case.”

  Frank kept driving. He was no longer thinking about Boyd; he was thinking about Gracie. The last time the ranch had meant anything to him was when Gracie kept Archie, her little paint gelding, out there. One spring he just disappeared. Frank was later told on pretty good authority that a rancher up the road had shot him to make a bear bait. After that, Gracie didn’t want to go out there anymore. Frank couldn’t help his silence. He wanted to say something to make Phil feel better, but he couldn’t speak.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything, Frank,” said Phil.

  “Actually, I started thinking back … about Gracie.”

  “That’s good. I didn’t think you were that worried about what anybody said.”

  Frank waved the whole thing away. The silence resumed and it was oppressive. “Yup, old Gracie.” Phil writhed around in his seat, trying to watch out the window. He fooled with the radio, then turned it off again and took a great sigh. He dropped his fist to his knee.

  “Okay, me and Kathy, we’re married like twenty years. It’s not perfect but it’s okay. The day we get the news Denny Washington’s gonna bust the union, I take off a half day and head for the house. I walk in. I hear it in the back room. I have to see with my own eyes: Kathy’s fuckin’ our family doctor. You know him, an asshole backpacker in your clinic, Dr. Jensen. And I can see he’s trained her in a couple deals I’d never found out about. I go out and sit in the hall. I sit there and think: A, do I shoot them? B, do I divorce her? C, do I shoot myself? I’m going round and round. The doctor walks by. Kathy walks by. And that’s it. Life goes on. End of story.” Phil went back to gazing out the window and they rode the car together as if it were a time machine.

  “I appreciate that, Phil.”

  “I guess that if we didn’t have trout fishing, there’d be nothing you could really call pure in our lives at all.”

  Frank stared at the road ahead, filling with joy at this inane but life-restoring thought. “I do like to feel one pull,” he said.

  “Yes!” Phil shouted and pounded the dashboard.

  “Yes!” shouted Frank, and they both pounded happily on the dashboard. “Trout!” The volume knob fell off the radio. Phil dove down to look for it, muttering “Fuckin’ douche bag” as he searched.

  A few miles down the road, Frank drove past a hitchhiker sitting atop a backpack with a thumb out.

  “That was a girl,” said Phil. Frank hit the brakes and backed up a quarter of a mile. The girl stood up and looked in the car. She had a sweater tied around her waist and sunglasses held by a bright pink strip around the back of her head. She evaluated Frank and Phil and got in.

  Frank said, “You want to get up here in front?”

  “No, back seat’s fine.”

  Phil caught Frank’s eye. “Let me get that pack for you,” he said, and wrestled it into the car. As she clambered in behind the tilted front seat, Phil mouthed the words “Not bad” so that Frank could see. She had a strong fresh smell of woodsmoke.

  “How far you going?” Frank asked.

  “Deadrock.”

  “Where you coming from?”

  “The Highwood Mountains.”

  “The Highwoods!” said Phil.

  “What were you doing in the Highwoods?” Frank asked. She was watching the roadside go past.

  “I was trying to see a wolf.”

  “A wolf!” said Phil. “There’s no wolves in the Highwoods.”

  “Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” said the girl.

  “Are you an out-of-stater?” asked Phil.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “I’m from Minnesota originally. There’s wolves there too.”

  “I’m Frank and this is Phil. What’s your name?”

  “Smokie. Watch out for that truck —”

  “Sonofagun was halfway into my lane.”

  “You were halfway
into his lane,” said Phil. “That’s why he was blowing his horn.”

  “Was I really? I’ll be darned.”

  “Have you guys had a few?”

  “We been fishing. It has the same effect on us.”

  “So, where’s the fish?”

  “We let them go,” said Frank, glancing into the back seat. Smokie had a rope of ash hair in a braid that hung over her shoulder. She was young.

  “You let them go?”

  “Yeah,” said Phil. “We train them so out-of-staters can’t catch them.”

  “You’re a riot,” said Smokie.

  Phil looked like he’d been slapped, if lightly. He stared straight through the windshield. The elevators appeared, then the stockyards, then the fast food and car lots, agricultural supplies and used furniture, pawn shop, video rental.

  “God, this is getting built up,” said Phil. “I mean, where the hell’s the town? Used to be right over in here.”

  The last thing Phil said that day was “Shit.” Frank had pulled up in front of his house and Phil thanked him for a great day, another great day on the stream; then Phil snagged his shirt getting out of the car and said his last word for the day. Smokie moved to the front seat. Frank glanced over at the front door of Phil’s house. Kathy was not there welcoming him home, glad to see him. Frank thought of the day she and the family doctor strode out of that modest doorway. It sharpened a pain inside him.

  “Where can I drop you?” Frank asked.

  “Anywhere around here is fine.”

  “No, I’m happy to take you where you’re going.”

  “I haven’t picked a spot, I guess.”

  They drove on past the hospital and a light-truck repair place. The trees curved right overhead in the old neighborhood as they approached Main.

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “No.”

  Frank turned his head to look. “You don’t?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Frank thought for a long moment about his afternoon and looked at this fresh-faced, vital creature. “I know a spot you can stay,” he said and drove her back to Phil’s.

  “Phil,” he said with a look, “I hate to impose, but Smokie needs a place to stay.” Frank thought Phil would be grateful, but he stood there and complained about what a mess the place was. Finally, he agreed that if Smokie walked around the block for half an hour first, she could stay on the couch. He was quite grouchy about that. Frank thought as he drove off, I’m so cynical I thought he’d take it as a favor.

  13

  Frank went straight to his breakfast meeting with Doctors Jensen, Popelko, Dumars and Frame in the dining room of the Dexter Hotel. They were his renters. He got there a few minutes late and the doctors were telling stories over their first cup of coffee. Dr. Popelko, an obstetrician who had taught his specialty, explained how he had tried to get his university to hire prostitutes. He chuckled, his little round face completely wrinkled, his bow tie bobbing and the shoulders of his loud plaid sport jacket shuddering. “How do you teach students to do a vaginal?” he bayed across the dining room. “It’s no different than learning to ride a horse. You need vaginas! Where are you going to get them? In the old days, we used poor people’s vaginas in exchange for medical treatment. Now everyone has insurance. The chancellor’s wife isn’t going to let you use her vagina, is she? The chairman of the English department is not liable to suggest that the medical students train on his daughter’s vagina. The only answer seemed to be prostitutes. But when I suggested this as a budget item to the university, I damn near lost my job. It made the papers and the born-agains were marching. I went into private practice. I had to!”

  “Morning, Frank,” said Dr. Dumars. Frank carried his own coffee and roll and set it among the more complete breakfasts of the doctors. Dumars was an older doctor, close to retirement, and bore himself with the gravity old doctors sometimes had as a result of all they had seen. Jensen and Frame were young and ambitious, with huge split-level homes. Jensen, the seducer of Phil’s wife Kathy, had blond hair which he had arranged in pixieish bangs, a modern and alert young man with staring eyes. Frame was somber; the skin under his eyes was dark and his lower lip hung in a permanent pout. He was staring at Frank.

  “Been fishing, Frank?” Jensen asked.

  “Yeah, I went Saturday over on the Sixteen. It was pretty darn good,” Frank said. Jensen knew he fished with Phil. This was a way of taking Phil’s temperature at long range.

  “Huh,” said Jensen, “we went to the Big Horn over the weekend. Sixteen-foot leaders. Antron emergers. Size twenty-two.”

  “A little tough for me, sounds like.” Frame was still staring at Frank.

  Jensen shrugged. “I wanted to get a couple of days in. There’s a marathon in Billings next weekend, then a prostate seminar in Sun Valley the following weekend, and so on, and there goes your life.”

  Dr. Frame spoke abruptly. “Do you uhm know what?” He was trying to look right through Frank.

  “I shudder to think.”

  “The rent at the uhm clinic is too high.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Frank.

  “Too high, too low, it’s more than we’re uhm willing to pay.” Frame was teaching Frank the ABCs of running his building.

  Frank sipped his coffee, peered over the top of the cup at the other doctors, who were not tipping their hands, letting Frame run point. Popelko had a purely inquiring look on his face; he wanted a factual outcome. Jensen was just being serious about whatever it was. No one was going to mediate on Frank’s behalf, that was clear. Frank said, “Why don’t you move out?”

  “We haven’t paid last month’s rent.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “We just wanted to uhm send a signal.”

  “I don’t understand signals. I understand English.”

  “I tried English,” said Dr. Frame. “You didn’t seem to uhm understand.”

  “I understood. I was short on information. I didn’t realize you hadn’t paid the rent last month. You’re evicted.”

  At this the other doctors clamored. Dumars immediately pulled Jensen toward him by the coat and spoke into his ear. Frank stood up. The doctors were all trying to look like one unit, a little tribal dance group or something. Frank knew they didn’t want to move out; they just wanted to improve their deal. Frank read once that ninety percent of doctors went to medical school for business reasons. That made it easier for him to keep the rent where it ought to be than to imagine they were sheltering sick orphans.

  “Get your stuff out. Or hand deliver last month’s rent. I’ll be able to give you the new figures for next month, if you decide to stay. I don’t see last month’s check in my office today, you’re going to have to work out of your upstairs bedrooms.”

  Frank walked out into the street. The sunshine hit him. He could never think about property, or its problems, if the sun was in his face. A ranch couple walked by in matching denim; she had a dramatically tooled purse and he wore a bandanna. They were gazing around at the buildings and gesturing to each other with show-business savvy, projecting their feelings. What a big town this is! they seemed to say.

  Frank turned and went back into the hotel, feeling his thoughts roll forward like a barrel going down a hill. The doctors were still at their table. Frank stood at its edge.

  “That building is killing me,” he said. “Six percent of its capitalization before expenses. Why don’t you buy it? No, hold it, I know why. Because the return is so low. We’ll let Frank Copenhaver go on owning the sonofabitch. Let me tell you something: nobody’s getting such gentle rent treatment in this whole town. But don’t be greedy, don’t be greedy.”

  Outside, the sun was still shining. He saw crisp newspapers in their stand and smelled the bakery on Reno Avenue. There was a white vapor trail angling upward in the blue sky. He returned to his office in bounding spirits and gave Eileen Joanie’s, June’s and Lucy’s names and asked her to get them on the phone for him. He went to his desk and wa
ited. His desk phone rang and Eileen told him none of the three was in. He suddenly wanted company. It was painful.

  14

  It was beyond stillness; for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He felt the heat of her body against his right side and her open-mouthed breathing on his neck, the uneven breathing of a pounding heart.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s not Gracie.”

  “Oh, hi, Lucy.”

  She eased upright and drew the covers back. “A little birdie told you,” she whispered. “A little birdie told you a woman devoid of self-respect had stolen into your bed. Man, you’ve been out like a light.” He could see her breasts, pushed somewhat together by her upper arms. She was looking straight into his eyes as she reached up between his legs and took him in her hand, her hair hanging straight down alongside her face, a faintly superior smile. “Ooh,” she said, “it’s harder than Chinese arithmetic.”

  “Uh-hm.”

  “You pretty swift with this little deal?”

  “If everything goes according to Hoyle.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She was gradually drifting away as she held him, moving her hand up and down, her form almost rigid, head hanging down. Then she stretched her face toward the ceiling, murmured something and came slowly down on him with her mouth — a white arc of scalp visible where her thick hair was parted — all the way to the back of her throat, and she tried to say “We’ll see” again. The W was the only thing she could pronounce.

  “Ooh, hold it, hold it, hold it,” he said, grasping the sides of her face.

  She lifted her glistening mouth. “Too much?”

  “Yeah, too much.”

  “Can I put it in?”

  “Yeah, put it in — no! Just hold it a sec.”

  She made her finger slick on the end of his cock and swirled it around one nipple. “Let me put it in.”

  “You’ve got to hold it a sec. Don’t even say it again.”

  “In.”

  “Sh.”

  Her hips were still moving. He had to look off at the wall, the blank window, the drapes, the dresser. “Okay,” he said.