Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “Do you know why I stopped talking?” he inquired.

  “Yup.”

  “I thought so. Well, what can you do.”

  Holly said, “I’ll wash, you dry.”

  He turned on the radio, the oldies station, and Van Morrison sang while they worked.

  You can take all the tea in China,

  Put it in a big brown bag for me,

  Sail right round all the seven oceans,

  Drop it straight into the deep blue sea.

  “As we boogie to the suds,” said Holly, arms deep in the soapy water, Frank with his towel and lost in his dreams. “I know you’re thinking about Mama,” she said.

  That night Frank lay in bed and watched the full moon from his window, the great pure shape rising through the telephone lines, the treetops and over the roofs to race cool and smooth and alone in the sky. Its pale light barely illuminated the distant mountains. He couldn’t sleep. He almost felt he’d gotten a hold of the moon and was being towed along in the chill.

  He wondered what was to become of Holly. She was certainly the most reliable person he knew, filled with plans she was capable of achieving. He did not think she was liable to be swept away by someone she had failed to size up correctly. He liked life’s randomness, its buckshot absurdity and disconnections, but he didn’t like them for his daughter. The story possibilities for his life were getting narrower by the minute and randomness was perhaps what his life needed. Holly, he thought, needed narrowing story possibilities. Lying in his own panel of cold moonlight, Frank thought only of the madmen, the crazy drivers, the pretty boys, the flamboyant professors, the head of the citizens’ group, the careerists. He was worried sick about Holly and that was that.

  22

  Frank and Holly carried their coffee outside into the cool morning. The early sun slanted across the street in bands between the rows of spruce and silver maples. The street climbed rapidly to the south, and on either side were the old pioneer houses with their eclectic and eccentric architecture. They walked along and looked up onto the old porches, the hidden off-center doorways and the neat clapboard walls, the tall chimneys with recessed sides and fancy crenellated tops.

  Frank didn’t want to eat at the Holiday Inn for fear of running into June, whom Holly liked but who seemed, when anybody else was around, entirely too raucous for Frank’s taste. And invariably, she tried to get Frank to buy Holly another car, a Buick, when she already had a good one, a jaunty green Honda Civic. Frank thought he was bending over backward in the friendship anyway by driving a Buick he couldn’t bear, a car as loose-jointed and ungainly as Rozinante. So they went to the Dexter; but it was such a beautiful day, they ordered the Travelers’ Special in order to get back outside as soon as possible. He thought Holly might want to fish, but today she just wanted to visit the ranch. He didn’t mention that he and Mike had decided to sell it.

  On three different occasions, as they walked back up Main, people swerved toward them and waved gaily to Holly. “Who’s that?” Frank asked each time, and it was always some old friend from high school. He said she had a lot of friends and she agreed unaffectedly. When he added that they could use some help with their driving, she gave him a look of comic exasperation. She had been more or less humoring her father since she was six or seven, or at least, when times got tough, tolerating him.

  Holly sat in the car looking out at the pastures, her door open, one foot on the ground. He considered telling her that he and Mike were going to sell the place. He knew he wasn’t paying as much attention to its management as he should. Frank’s father had wanted Holly to own a piece of family land one day. Holly was the only person to whom his father had ever shown open affection, and when his mother had told him that this was the only way the old man knew how to show the emotion for Frank he had never been able to express, Frank didn’t believe her. Anyway, he didn’t think he ought to be asked to believe it. At thirty-eight years of age he had found himself tearfully telling his mother, “If he loved me, he should have said so.”

  When he remembered that moment, he writhed with discomfort. But that wasn’t fair either. His mother assumed that it was her fault. He felt worse, and deserved to feel worse. He had spent half a lifetime directing his dissatisfaction with his father at her. Does anyone really mind? he wondered today. Or does the world just go on by, like one of June’s Buicks, with some fool’s foot through the firewall. Maybe it was just more of that outlandish concept of his youth, “lonely teardrops,” romantic solitude at its most heightened, made into a way of life for a middle-aged man.

  They began walking, and followed the little creek that came down through the corral, a muddy-banked trickle that grew as they followed it up into the timothy pasture where it forked. Above the fork it was bigger still and had more speed, deep and undercut, and finally when they were both winded, it was a real mountain stream bouncing through the junipers. The new movement of morning air up the slope carried the wild grass smells on the blue light. They could see across the valley into a tall, absolute sky. Frank looked over and thought, I have the sweetest little girl in the world. Why not have a thought like that? he asked himself.

  “Let’s sit here.”

  “I’d love to,” said Frank, and did a split-knee lowering of himself to the ground and put his knuckles together, fingers turned up in imitation of a meditative pose.

  “No, no, no,” said Holly, and sat in a correct lotus position, face elevated perfectly into the breaking day. “Like this.”

  “I could do it if I had a beer,” said Frank.

  “Boy, you look apprehensive.”

  “I am apprehensive.”

  Holly gazed vaguely across the valley. They could hear the train heading for Bozeman but couldn’t see it. The whole valley was a green and gold grid of farmland and country roads and silver threads of irrigation. One big sprinkler gun to the west drew a pale drifting feather of water across a dark green stand of alfalfa. From this perspective, the valley seemed quite unsettled. The warmth of the new day was making the air hazy over the irrigated ground.

  “What we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about Mama,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.” Frank stretched his legs out in front of himself and leaned forward to try to touch his toes.

  “Okay?” Holly tried to prod him.

  “Let me think.”

  “I honestly believe you owe it to me.”

  “ ‘Owe.’ I see.” Frank’s first instinct was that she looked far too much like her mother for this conversation to be anything but squeamish. “I don’t know where to start,” he said. She wasn’t looking at him and she wasn’t looking at anything in front of her. A little dust devil picked up a twist of yellow cottonwood leaves and flung them.

  “Let me start, then. First of all, I think the wake or the funeral, or whatever it was, was unnecessary.”

  “It was necessary to me.”

  “In what sense?”

  “I had to close that chapter of my life, darling. I was in terrific pain.”

  She reached over and held his hand but did not quite soften the expression of determination on her face. He felt his heart racing. She said, “And I consider that group of pallbearers to be a no-good bunch of traitors.”

  “Sweetheart, they were simply my friends. They wanted what was best for me. They wanted me to be happy. They knew that my heart was broken. I’ll always be grateful for the way they carried some of that pain away.” Frank was conscious of a stuffy, artificial tone creeping into his voice, obviously meant to hold Holly at a certain distance. His mind kept trying to escape into the idea of buying a sports car, another thousand yearlings. Time had taken something away from the funeral.

  “Did any of you wonder what that outrageous wake must have made me feel like?”

  Frank thought for a moment. “Maybe we didn’t think about that as much as we should have.”

  “Going down Main Street with a coffin? A loudspeaker truck playing ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones?
The pallbearers were all … bombed. Very few people in that huge crowd had ever even met Mama. Some of them believed she really died! It was a disgrace and now it has become a famous disgrace, the big event of the last ten years.”

  “Well, it was a lot of fun for some people. Folks remember the good times.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  Frank scratched around in the dirt with the point of a stick. He was in trouble with Holly.

  “Want to play tic-tac-toe?”

  “No.”

  “So, what is this?”

  “I’m going to graduate one of these days. I’m going to come back here to live. Mama’s having a pretty tough time. Maybe she’d want to come back. But how could she, after that stupid funeral? Or was that the whole point?”

  Frank lay back on the deep wild grass and all he could see was sky, a few white clouds, nothing but blue sky.

  “I don’t know what to say.” He sounded like a little kid. He felt kind of funny.

  Holly was peering at him. “You really don’t, do you.”

  “It just doesn’t seem like the conversation I should be having with you.”

  “Are you uncomfortable?”

  “Yes, I’m uncomfortable.”

  They drove back to town when they got hungry, and Holly made him eat in the health food store, with its otherworldly waitresses and bland food. Then they went to the used bookstore, where he found The Conspiracy of Pontiac by Francis Parkman and Holly found Thus Spake Zarathustra, which had unfortunately been recommended to her by the head of the citizens’ group, Lane Lawlor. They went to the hardware store and bought a Rainbird sprinkler and a hummingbird feeder. Later in the afternoon Holly went to see her friends and Frank went home to try to catch up on some work.

  23

  He was dreaming:

  “I would like to have sex with you,” Gracie said.

  “That would be nice.”

  “It’s more or less free, you know.”

  “More or less?”

  “Free. Plus options, taxes and dealer prep. Hope that eases the sticker shock.”

  “It does.”

  Where exactly were they? Frank woke up and stared toward the ceiling, not quite making it out in the faint light from the street. They were in Texas, that was it. Victoria? Corpus Christi? He couldn’t quite remember. It was outside of town in an old motel, so the sign said “Motor Court,” with mesquite and cat’s-claw growing right up to its dirt parking area. There was a little store across the road that said “Smith Gro.” The town was just beyond. Someone had painted on a viaduct, “El North Side.”

  Frank leaned over on his stomach and adjusted the clock’s face toward himself. It was after three. It was awful lately, seeing all these crazy hours, which had remained undisclosed for years in a zone of sleep safety. There was a gasp of air brakes and Frank held himself, face sweating into the pillow, until his cock jolted in his fist. He thought lightly, This is no way to live. The phone rang and was quickly picked up in the bedroom across the hall. Holly talking to a boyfriend in the dark. Three in the morning. Hot wires to Missoula.

  Frank left before Holly awakened. He wrote her a note as he ate his breakfast, listening for movement in her room. She might have been on the phone for a long time. He walked to the office, taking in the songbirds’ cascade of music from the garden beds along his way. Birds are very important, he told himself, trying to peg in one value to start the day. An old man pulled handfuls of wet green grass clippings from beneath his lawn mower. Across the street, the yellow cherry-picker arm of a phone company truck rose slowly through the branches of a maple tree.

  Eileen acknowledged him with the least movement of her chin she could manage. He had left her sequestered by paper mountains, offering no leadership whatsoever for weeks now. She could take anything — murder, mayhem — but not lack of management, and he could see her sullenness growing by the second. It was just like Boyd Jarrell. Frank was now what the Mexicans called a perro enfermo, a sick dog, something in his center not quite as it was supposed to be.

  He was perfectly well aware of how he was letting things slip. Nevertheless, he went straight past to his own quarters, sat down and tried to reignite the importance of title reports, brand receipts, sharecropping contracts, rent receipts, tax assessments and reassessments, the basic paper trail of doom as he currently saw it; hostile letters from the Forestry Department, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife; partnership offers and get-rich-quick schemes as they were understood by a limited business environment such as his. He longed to prowl once more in the subdivisions where the tough insurance men and car dealers and rising doctors lived. He longed for the sight of a booze-disheveled bank vice president vaguely picking his nose over a Book-of-the-Month Club notice in his veneered den. He loved those rare moments of capturing people without their game faces on. By the time he got to work in the morning, the world was already in a three-point stance, resting its weight on its knuckles. He wanted to reacquire that stance, learn what he had once known but what had seemed to slip away with his wife.

  He had spent his life with his guard down and wanted to return the favor. He remembered when they first moved to town and the Episcopalians came out during the evenings before Christmas to carol. Frank and his family felt blurred and unfocused behind their window while the Episcopalians, with long scarves and song books, with real singing voices, tenors, basses, sopranos, baritones, round singing lips and red cheeks like people on Christmas cards, sang to the goofy Catholics in their house. “Look at them,” said his father, watching the snow sift down on their quality faces. “If I don’t bankrupt a few before it’s over, I won’t have lived.”

  The first spell in town had been a strain. His parents fought continually in their small house, culminating in his father’s stringing a taut strand of barbed wire down the middle of the marital bed to make sure there would be no mingling. His mother complained that she couldn’t get the bedding on the mattress without great difficulty and that she didn’t want to be on his side anyway. “This way we’re sure,” said the old man, still trying to learn how to run his apartment building and live in town. He had a bunch of Indians in there too, loud reservation Cheyennes who were always cooking in the middle of the night and playing the radio.

  Frank picked up his phone and asked Eileen to come in. He had made a list of minute things she could not possibly have remembered and put them in his top drawer, which was open just enough for him to read them, an old trick of his father’s. Eileen entered seeming to wonder what on earth he could want with her. Her discontent was taking new forms every day.

  “Everything all right, Eileen?”

  “Just fine,” she sang.

  “That’s good. I’m afraid I have been a little absentminded lately, which can’t have been pleasant for you.” Silence. “But I’m sure you got along without me just fine.” Silence. Eileen smiled slightly and Frank’s eyes dropped to his list in the drawer. “Eileen. Couple of things. The Willow Creek place. I asked you to get the water rights adjudication info from the county. May I have it now?”

  “When was this?”

  “I asked you to get it two months ago.”

  Eileen barely moved. “I’ll have to get it now.”

  “I see, Eileen. Okay. And the double billing from the surveyors. Is that in hand?”

  “I’ll have to check.”

  “Where is the video cattle auction literature I asked for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  Frank slipped the drawer shut and tilted his chair back. He let the last trace of sound leave the room. Eileen was back on the job now and not wallowing in the managerial vacuum Frank had created. But he didn’t want to release her. There was something else. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he could feel it rising toward the surface with a slight dread. Then it was here.

  “Tell me, Eileen, does my wife ever call you?”

  Eileen looked down.

  “I see. And what do
es she want?”

  A helpless shrug.

  “Does she want money?”

  “——”

  “She wants money, then.”

  “No.”

  “She doesn’t want money. Then what does she want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She wants information. Where is she, Eileen? And this time I want an answer.”

  Eileen said, “You find out yourself, playboy.”

  This was too astonishing. He had to imagine he had misheard. He tried to think of other words that sounded like “playboy.” Frank wandered to the window, his temples pounding. He had pushed Eileen too far. Instinctively he looked for the old couple, remembered the old man unwrapping his wife’s piece of candy. The sun slanted like an examining light into the corners of the yard. A bright and slumbrous column of dust marked a recently departed automobile. A magpie sat on the single telephone wire that soared in and attached to the wall. He realized that Eileen had pretty much said what he thought she had said. He would come in from another direction.

  “Quite right, Eileen,” said Frank. “I haven’t been what I should have been of late. We’ll see what we can do.”

  Eileen listened and Frank imagined that she was comparing him perniciously to his own father. It left him with the feeling that in speaking to Eileen, he was never quite speaking for himself, with her mustiness of another era.

  24

  Frank adjusted the gooseneck lamp over the oak desk in his den and pulled up chairs for himself and Holly. Holly had been studying most of the day and had tied her hair back with a bandanna. “Let’s have a look,” she said. Frank opened the drawer and pulled out two aluminum fly boxes. Holly drew them toward herself and tipped open their lids. Inside, they each had twelve compartments with glassine covers that could be opened by tripping a small wire latch. About half the compartments were filled with flies. Holly frowned.