Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  Frank walked softly past one of the rottweiler signs toward the well-lighted outline of a small mock Tudor painted in the cheerful colors of the Bahamas, pink and blue. There was a side yard that separated this house from its neighbor, a house with a For Sale sign in its yard, perfectly dark so that Frank could observe this family without thinking about the house behind him. Unfortunately, when he reached the beginning of the side yard, the guard dog exploded into his view, rigid against a short length of steel chain. Its rage and astonishment at finding Frank there reduced its snarl to something so internal as to be past a warning and simply the prelude to an attack.

  “Ooh, datsa big fellow,” Frank murmured, backing away. He made himself feel, through waves of terror, real affection for this dog on the theory that any insincerity on his part and the dog would uproot the chain and tear his face off, leaving not even lips to offer an explanation to the homeowners. Frank made like a love-sodden star of some Podunk gospel hour and backed away into the next yard where he fell over the For Sale sign. A floodlight went on and, even though he was seated on the lawn, he cast a long black shadow in its harsh light. There was somebody standing on the front porch of the house.

  “Frank?”

  “Yes?”

  “Frank Copenhaver?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Steve Jensen.”

  “Oh hey, Steve!”

  Steve, one of the doctors who rented from Frank, was having a wonderful time atop Phil’s wife Kathy, a remarkable lapse in his closely planned life. Frank was conscious of the acrimony over the clinic rent. He was even more sensitive to looking like an intruder.

  “Frank, what are you doing?”

  Frank decided to go into microfocus. “Tripped over this blasted sign,” he called out. “Fell on my butt!” He had a hold of the stake of the sign and was looking closely at the lettering. He could see the brush strokes in the paint.

  Jensen walked over to where Frank now stood dusting the seat of his trousers. He looked at Frank blankly and then very slowly a knowing smile came over his face. He laughed to himself. Frank just waited. Jensen looked off, smiling, then turned back to Frank. “You’re checking out this house, Frank. I know you. You don’t want the realtors knowing you’re interested. Talk about your covert operations!”

  “You gonna tell?”

  “No, I’m not gonna tell.”

  Frank batted him playfully on the shoulder. “You promise you’re not gonna tell?”

  “I promise I’m not going to tell.”

  “Steve —”

  “What?”

  “I owe you one.” Frank dropped his head submissively.

  Frank declined Steve’s offer of a drink. He didn’t want to get into anything intimate about the clinic, much less discuss his hosing Phil’s wife. Gesturing to the house next door, Frank said that he had seen enough, and indeed he had; but the desire for the ordinary was still in him and it was heightened the minute he contemplated returning to his empty house. Steve commented that it was amusing that Frank even left his car elsewhere, calling it “extreme realtor fear.”

  Frank could only go along with these spiraling witticisms. These days, everything took such a long explanation, it was turning smart people into mutes. Combining the knowing look with absentmindedness was the great modern social skill as far as Frank was concerned, and he thought he had it down pretty fair. It would never occur to the doctor that this was a new Frank, certainly not the one who acquired and managed the clinic so acceptably over the years. This was the night Frank. This was the solitaire who feared that happiness was past. This was the roaming dog.

  But he had extraordinary luck just a few blocks away, a couple helping their daughter, who was maybe twelve years old, with her homework. They sat around the kitchen table, the mother right next to the struggling child, the father sipping coffee and pitching in when he had an answer. Frank tried to remember how much of this he had done with Gracie and Holly. He tried to be ironic about the golden light that flooded these three people from the opulent globe over the table. The schoolbook lay open in front of the pretty child next to a heap of marvelously rumpled papers. Steam rose from the coffee. The mother had pinned her hair up to keep it out of her way. The father sharpened a pencil. Frank thought these people had not always lived in town and were buoyed by the convenience of their suburb, the handy shopping, the populous grade school. Good grief, it was an American family! Frank rested his chin on the windowsill and gazed upon this rapturous scene, shriven by time, tears pouring down his face. We used to be one of those, he told himself. We had that in our hands.

  21

  Frank put his car in the short-term parking lot and walked into the airport, a low and rustic-looking modern terminal just past which could be seen the tall silver tail of an airplane. It was dusk and the airplane was tinted with the dusty pink of sunset. Frank was sure it wasn’t Holly’s plane, and when he got inside he found he had almost ten minutes to spare.

  He stopped at the newsstand and bought the paper, skimmed the local news and left it on a plastic chair. The plane on the ground was being loaded and there was a short line at the security x-ray. A few of the older and more countrified travelers who perhaps had not flown much put their purses and other belongings on the conveyor belt with extreme suspicion. Frank hunted around for a tearful goodbye and found one, a plain girl in dowdy navy blue slacks and jumper, squeezing the hand of a vague-looking youth with long sideburns and a catfish mustache; she wept silently. She stared into his face almost imploringly while he gazed around in a rubbernecked way, as if to say, “Get a load of this.”

  Frank was eager to see which one was leaving. When the ticket agent announced the final boarding call, the girl released the young man’s hand and boarded the plane. The young man looked around anxiously to see if anyone had been watching, and in case someone had, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and flicked the imaginary drops of perspiration to the ground. In a matter of time, Frank thought, this loving relationship would be converted into a marriage.

  Frank joined the mixed group at the big window in scanning the sky for the next inbound flight. For some reason, he remembered a winter trip to St. George, Utah, he had taken with Gracie and Holly. He and Gracie had had an argument at their motel and Holly pretended to be drowning in the swimming pool. It was a realistic imitation of a drowning person — face down, limbs slowly sinking — and it ended the argument. Frank and Gracie were startled that Holly would go to such lengths. The desert abruptly seemed pointless.

  A glint appeared to the north, right at the level of the horizon, and began to enlarge. A moment later, the plane was taxiing at right angles to the terminal, a good way off, and then it turned and came straight in — pure, pretty silver, pink in the dusk with wriggling heat waves behind it and a big sound that suddenly penetrated the building.

  Frank stared at every passenger emerging from the expanding tunnel that attached itself to the plane. Some passengers took their own sweet time getting off and held up people behind them. After the first press, only a few passengers remained and Frank was afraid Holly wasn’t among them. But then she emerged, burdened by carry-on luggage, magazines and rolled-up newspapers, with the beaming smile that still filled Frank with complete happiness. She affected a rolling, impatient sailor’s gait until the last passengers were out of her way.

  He put his arms all the way around Holly and her luggage and squeezed. It was wonderful to feel plain love, even stupid love, just this sense of everything mattering all at once. He began hanging the luggage from one arm as he unloaded it from Holly’s. “Do you have a suitcase?”

  “Nope, this is it.”

  They walked toward the lobby. Frank gazed at her from the side while she walked, looking straight ahead, occasionally smiling at him. Holly had a serenely pretty olive face with brown, almost black, eyes that were as intense as the eyes of a sleek, quick animal. But when she grinned every bit of her face was affected in a crinkled way that swept Frank away with
appreciation. She was wearing baggy cotton pants and a washed-out pink mountaineer’s jersey. She had an old green bookbag with a drawstring of the kind that prevailed during Frank’s college years. And she wore a big, cheap man’s wristwatch without a strap safety-pinned to the jersey. She looked a little like her mother, but even more definitely she had inherited Gracie’s careless prettiness and the unpretentious assumption that, somehow, she was being admired. Our only child, thought Frank. It’s true!

  They got in the car and started toward town. Along the road out to Seventh, clouds of grackles showered down from power lines and swept back up again. Holly picked up one of Frank’s cassettes and smiled. “Can I play this?”

  Neil Young filled the car, guitar feedback and all. Holly played it loud and looked out the window at the weedy ditches flying by, the crazy, day-in-and-day-out blue sky of Montana, and the mournful howl of Neil Young: “Your Cadillac got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” It was funny, Frank thought, how that tone of apocalypse just kind of went away.

  When the song was finished, Holly turned it off and looked fondly at Frank. She said, “Dad.”

  “Weird Dad,” Frank said.

  “Weird Dad.” She punched out the cassette and held it up. As she peered at it, it seemed to acquire the quality of an artifact. “Where do you find these things?”

  “They find them when they demolish old mansions.”

  “Like you used to do?”

  “Yeah. They tore down this copper baron’s mansion in Butte. The walls were filled with Bob Dylan. When they got to the attic there was a mountain of Big Brother and the Holding Company posters and Jefferson Airplane albums nearly devoured by pack rats.” Frank was getting into this. He saw the black hand of times gone by lying on this treasure trove.

  For some reason, Holly liked to toy with the idea of her parents’ great and irreversible ancientness. She loved anecdotes about the sixties, which she associated with her father; she viewed him as a romantic rebel of ambiguity. She knew that he not only wasn’t fighting or protesting, he was demolishing the mansions and heirlooms of unguarded America. He was furnishing franchises with salad bars — and he never ate salad. He hated salad. He liked T-bones and potatoes. He even tried to tear down Mama’s indigo plantation! This last was a shared family-origin tale, though Mama owned no such plantation. Daddy the opportunist appears on the levee with a wrecking bar in his hand and a Los Angeles restaurant-chain contract in his hip pocket like a four-shot derringer. Gracie allowed a barbaric rakishness to seep into her version of Frank’s fomenting the spread of neon down the Mississippi. Holly always wanted to hear little stories of how they met and married.

  “What would you like to eat?”

  “Are you cooking for me?”

  “Have I ever not?”

  Holly puzzled through the tense, then said, “No, you’ve never not.”

  Frank had already started her favorite, a monster of calories and simplicity known as New England boiled dinner, featuring corned beef, rutabaga, new potatoes, hot mustard and coarse grain bread he got from the Blue Moon bakery, whose sweet-smelling baked goods were proscribed by every responsible doctor. And beer. He loved to guzzle yellow cans of Coors with his beautiful daughter and talk football, school work, America, money, romance, the evolving life of the Great American West.

  She always asked about his fishing. Sometimes he showed her a new rod or an English reel or curious flies like sparkle duns and olive emergers and flashabou woolly buggers. They’d pull open his desk drawer at home and peer into the pewter-colored fly boxes with their exotic mysteries of silk and steel and feathers. He’d mention favorite river names: the Sixteen, the Ruby, the Madison, the Jefferson, the Bow, the Crow’s Nest, the Skykomish, the Dean. When she was a little girl, he would make up stories that took place in the great drainages like the Columbia or the Skeena or the Missouri, and the place names would restore their years together. He could still thrill her with the story about the time the great brown trout towed his canoe past the city of Helena in the middle of the night, past the glow of its lights on the night sky of August, a fish he had to break off at the head of thundering rapids whose standing waves curved five feet high in the cold white moonlight.

  They listened to the local news and weather as Frank finished cooking and Holly set the table. She laid out the utensils and napkins; she centered the hot pad and then Frank served the meal and poured the beer. They sat down and Holly sighed.

  “This is it,” said Frank.

  “No food on the plane. I’m ready.”

  Frank gazed with pride at his own cooking. Most of the time, he ate Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, Campbell’s tomato soup or leftovers dumped into half-limp taco shells while fixated on the livestock reports, the index of leading indicators, new home starts, west Texas intermediate crude or some other fool thing that seemed to connect him with the economics games there were to be played. In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power — as the Chrysler ads used to say — like the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Also, he was good at it and always had been. His mother had said he had his father’s nose: he could pick up the scent of a deal from a good ways off, as sharks are said to do with blood. He actually had the knack to a greater degree than his father.

  “I regard this as a quality family atmosphere,” Frank said to Holly.

  The superb golden light of evening came down through the leaves of the Norwegian silver maple and through the windows of the dining room and lit up their faces and the things on the table.

  “Who’s your current boyfriend?”

  “A fellow named Mark Plante.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this. What’s he like?”

  “Kind of a comical little nitwit. He won’t be around long.”

  “I like this guy more and more.”

  “There’s plenty where he came from. They’re like fleas on a dog. I’ve had several lunches with the leader of a citizens’ group. I’ve also had a few attentions from a young history professor.”

  “They’ve begun preying on the students, have they?”

  “I thought they always have.”

  “Well, with these bountiful federal grants, there’s more time for dalliance than there was in my day.”

  “They had other problems in your time — keeping you people from breaking into the president’s office and smoking the cigars, burning the flag, describing the pink spiders crawling out of your desks to the biology professor who can’t seem to make them out.”

  “Don’t ridicule, Holly. That stuff’s coming back. What about this bird from the citizens’ group? Haven’t I heard of him?”

  “He gets in the papers from time to time. He wants to keep Montana for Montanans.” Holly smiled with a new potato rakishly poised on a fork. “Would you ever let your hair grow again?”

  “No. I don’t think any of us would. It’s better to hide these secrets. To infiltrate. To duly note the action of the scavengers who have followed us down the great American highway.”

  “The secret drifter.”

  “The secret drifter.”

  “You are a drifter, aren’t you, Daddy? In your heart?”

  “A drifter.”

  “But you don’t move much anymore.”

  “This is my home. Recently, though, I visited the Eskimos.”

  “And?”

  “About what you would expect, sans igloos. They’re in a place that’s hard to live and it seems to get them down. They have TV. They know what’s going on. They want to know why they got dealt the permafrost. There are anthropologists and sociologists up there teaching them to curse their fate and cast their blame in a wide circle.”

  �
�I don’t understand what you were doing there.”

  “I wanted to get away. Remember Mama’s friend Lucy? She’s a travel agent. I told her to just put a little trip together for me that would really be a break. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me.”

  “How is Lucy, anyway?”

  “She’s bored, a fine person. She sits under the posters of tropic isles and doesn’t really care if anyone goes anywhere or not. You hear it in her voice. She doesn’t have that big belief, that Kathie Lee Gifford sort of booming view of people getting out and about on a cruise ship. She doesn’t really see why anyone bothers. And of course this pops up on the balance sheet as self-fulfilling prophecy —” He stopped abruptly. He could hear himself talking exactly as he would if he were talking to Gracie. When he looked at Holly, who was not eating but simply gazing both fondly and reflectively at him, he knew she was having the same thought, or something very much like the same thought.