Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “I guess we could write you a deposit,” said the man in the glasses.

  “No, I don’t expect you could,” Frank said, trying not to get in a rush, trying not to spill, trying not to let on that this was something he wanted out of now. He wanted to get this thing down to the bone. They had to know he was hurting.

  “Mister, we’re a good ways from home.”

  “Yeah,” said Frank, “this one I’ve also heard. You don’t dare show your face without ten pots of yearlings. You can’t even go up to the house without a thousand head because of what people expect of you in the Sand Hills.” He thought this would warm things up toward a closure, and he was right.

  The older man said, “They expect quite a little, don’t deny that.”

  “If you’re shipping as quick as you say, I need to show this stock paid in full. Get out your checkbook and start writing.” Frank was really saying, Don’t tell me you can’t write me a great big check for these cattle, I know you’re plenty stout.

  The older man slid his eyes to his companion, moved his chin very slightly. They were going to leave Frank his shred of dignity. It wasn’t costing them anything. The round-faced younger man reached under his coat without looking and elevated his checkbook from his shirt pocket.

  “I used to know a man who wrote checks for a million dollars,” Frank said, “then lit his cigar with them. Can you tell me who I can call to verify the funds?”

  Frank was back out of the cattle business again. If the check didn’t bounce, he could go to the bank and tell them that although they just lost fifty thousand dollars, it could have been way worse, blah blah blah. No surprise to them. Changing times, like an ice water enema. They sent these guys. They knew there was a loss. It was just a question of how bad a one a man could take. That evening, as he walked home from the office, he made his way over to Endrin Street, to the small storefront building he owned there, the former locale of Gracie’s restaurant Amazing Grease, a modest institution she referred to as a “bio-feedbag mechanism.” The very recollection of this phrase reminded Frank bitterly of the witless companionship he had enjoyed since. No, that was ungrateful; but it didn’t give him anything like the same feeling, to say the least.

  He let himself in and sat at one of the six tables. He looked around, taking things in by the light that came through the front window, past the small counter and the doorway to the kitchen. Next to the kitchen doorway, the blackboard still hung and he was able to make out a few words. He got up and went closer, peering at it. It said “Crawfish Etouffée” and it was written in Gracie’s hand in that powdery, fragile chalk script. He sat down at the table again and looked out through the window into the declining light of day.

  He had a sharp feeling that he had lost his touch, a feeling that once the slide reached a certain speed, it couldn’t be stopped until it reached the bottom. He felt a chill. “Gracie,” he said aloud, perfectly aware that it was not a great thing to begin talking to yourself. “I think I’m going broke.”

  30

  This feeling stayed with him so long that it was not exactly a surprise when his accountant asked to see him. John Coleman was one of the most reputable accountants in the city and Frank enjoyed going to his office for a sense of the pulse, a cool office with muted traffic sounds below and an undisturbed air. He showed Frank a chair, then swung sideways in his own after asking his secretary to hold his calls. He always gave Frank the feeling that he had set aside more time than they would ever need. “Are you all right?” he asked. John still wore wide, soft ties restrained in the middle by a tie clasp with a little chain.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You haven’t been by.”

  “Not much happening. It takes almost a year to absorb the blow of last year’s taxes.”

  “You’re a success, Frank. It’s expensive to be a success.” Coleman wrapped his hand around his forehead.

  “In more ways than one.”

  “Quite right. It’s either too much or too little, isn’t it? I mostly see too little. But Frank, you’ve always had a nice light touch, a nice feel for the situation.”

  “John, I appreciate the valentines. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I think I see problems.”

  “Are you talking about my cattle deal?”

  “Partly.”

  “I’ll tell you what that was. That was a bum deal and we all have them.”

  “The clinic?”

  “That was a case of drawing the line. Where’d those assholes go, anyway?”

  John said in the tone of an elementary schoolteacher, “They went elsewhere. They went to the new clinic.” He pursed his lips, raised and lowered his eyebrows.

  “There’s a new clinic?”

  “Out near Nineteenth.”

  “Oh. I thought that was a day care.”

  “See, Frank? You would have known that before.”

  “Anyway, we’ll fill the building.”

  “You will.”

  “I believe so.”

  John laced his fingers over the top of his head and looked straight at Frank. Frank thought it was a rather artificial gesture. He asked, “What about Gracie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Hear anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “She divorce you yet?”

  “Not yet. I don’t really care. I guess she’ll get around to it. I couldn’t give a shit less.”

  “I’m just trying to imagine its impact on your finances.”

  “I guess she’ll take me to the cleaners.” Frank yawned. “Little coaching from the boyfriend, they’ll see a big future. Takes money. Might want to make a hit in Sedona. Oak Creek Canyon. Strong showing in Scottsdale. I’m having trouble with the future. It’s my least favorite tense.”

  “Frank, I’m your accountant. Are you saying you don’t care?”

  “No, I’m saying my focus is elsewhere.” He wanted to get up. “Do what you can, John. I’m not much help just now.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Yeah, yeah I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m gonna drive around. Take in the sights.”

  Frank felt very heavy in his chair. John’s healthy interest was unbearable. His comfortable office had become a cell. Frank resolved to make a smooth, unjerky exit so that he didn’t seem disturbed or alarmed to John, who always had his best interests at heart. It was astonishing how the smoothness could go and leave an alarming jerkiness in its wake; it was astonishing how lightness could become heaviness. He was reduced to longing to be elsewhere. He thought he was within an inch of jumping out the window or breaking into a crippled trot.

  Frank feigned a smooth tone. “John, you know about thick and thin. This is thin. We’ll be fine.” He lifted his hands and dropped them to the desk with a dead-fish sound. It was not really smooth, a geekish gesture actually. It was as if he had emptied a couple of detached hands from a basket.

  “I know we will,” John said in a warmly formulaic tone that indicated the numbness was catching.

  “Well, I gotta go,” said Frank, not knowing where to put his gaze.

  “It was good of you to come,” said John with an averted look of his own. This was torture for both of them.

  “So long, John,” said Frank. He was sweating bullets.

  “So long, Frank. Hope everything goes okay.”

  “It will, John.”

  “Good, Frank.”

  “This is me, then,” Frank bleated, “heading on out.”

  He made it through the door with a sense of rebirth, went down to his car and was suddenly fatigued again and wanted to curl up and sleep in the back seat.

  He drove back to his office. Eileen did a cute little number about not knowing who he was. Wanting to fire or kill her, he laughed amiably. He closed his door and gazed at the surface of his desk with its notices and mail. The short-term interest rates that were presumed
to stir a recovery weren’t doing that, and of course they couldn’t save as bad a calculator as Frank was on his cattle. Shell Oil and Chrysler posted losses so huge Frank felt his didn’t matter. A human rights group was disturbed by its tour of China, and Canada’s ban on tobacco advertising was overturned. Israel declared itself unpersuaded of the need for peace talks. Makes my failed marriage seem like a small thing, Frank thought. We never indulged in penny stock fraud, and unlike the Ceausescus, we never built underground mazes or had group sex with Nazi soldiers. But while I was buzzing around in a stolen car, Cadbury Schweppes enjoyed some modest gains on the strength of North American operations. Charles Keating’s exciting new show, a securities fraud trial, would be opening to standing room only in beautiful, easygoing Los Angeles, California. Indeed, Frank’s follies notwithstanding, Deadrock, Montana, seemed fairly quiet, with street scenes innocent of arbitrageurs.

  The bank agreed to treat the loss as a simple debt, to be repaid over the year at simple interest, one point above prime. At first they wanted to exploit their position on the clinic, and Frank told them where they could put their position. He felt so blue, he looked at the stream of receipts for the mini-storage. It didn’t matter that it was chicken feed; it was steady. He began to think about an entirely new life, fueled by mini-storage facilities scattered around in midsize towns in Montana. He thought this new life could be in the Tongass wilderness in Alaska, a de Havilland Otter to get him around the half-drowned climax forest. This perked him right up.

  Holly called while Frank, with forensic calm, was trying to clean out the refrigerator — a single olive floating in a quart jar of brine, cheese slipping into decay, a plastic dispenser with old ketchup running down the side, a carton of whipping cream with a vicious odor, a huge wedge of angel food cake folding in on itself in desiccation. He had the willies.

  “Will you buy me a little computer? I’ll pay you back.”

  “Sure,” he said, and closed the refrigerator door.

  “I took some lessons to see if I like it, and I like it.”

  “Sure, if you think you need it. I guess everyone is using them.”

  “Thanks, Daddy. Also, I’m in love.”

  “Oh no, not again. This one got a ring in his nose?”

  “Nope. I’m not going to describe this one. You never get the picture from my descriptions. You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  “No hints?”

  “I’ll give you just one: he’s older than you are.”

  “Older than I am!”

  “Mama’s meeting him tonight. She’s not too happy.”

  Frank walked around the block, then down toward town, where he thought he glimpsed Smokie coming out of Sage Records. When the wolf was extinct, you could go to Sage records and get a wolf tape. Frank even felt that he would feel less dolorous about his situation if there was a good tape of himself.

  It was early Friday evening and Frank walked along the sidewalk in front of his building, formerly the clinic. It was a cool, low, sanitary shape with an even hedge of potentillas along the front and specimens of paper birch and seedless cottonwoods in bark-filled beds. An old man was running a Weed Eater along the base of the building with a fanatical small-engine raving, a monofilament hiss as the weeds tumbled neatly. The building was pale ocher brick and overhead the sky was deepest cobalt, the clouds white, white, white. The street seemed to climb into a magnificent cloudland.

  The Weed Eater man watched Frank let himself in with a key. The doors were self-closing and made a soft cushioning sound as they shut off the outside and exposed the silence of the interior. Frank hiked himself up on the receptionists’ desk and looked out into the waiting room. Magazines, fireproof curtains, green naugahyde (“unborn naugahyde,” Gracie called it) chairs, shin-high tables; no anxiety, nobody waiting to hear what was wrong with them, no news of a baby they weren’t supposed to have, no maintenance reports on wearing-out bodies, no heartbroken fat girls waddling back to the doctors’ offices carrying their own records. It was a true dead zone, with decorations by Cézanne, Matisse and Charlie Russell. He picked up the phone, also dead. The Rolodex was opened to Bungalow Pharmacy and some wag had written on the desk blotter, “Eat Shit and Die, Motherfucker.”

  As he walked back through the hall past the receptionists’, looking into the denuded lab and trying out the scales, peering at an anatomy poster and, finally, stretching out on an examining table, he asked himself what else you could do with a clinic, for Christ’s sake; acoustic tile ceiling, nonglare lights: time for self-examination. Oh, no, wait a minute, not just now. Let’s rent the building first.

  It was such a nice little cash cow, when you matched up its receipts with its credits and depreciations. In low moments, he had waved the records in Gracie’s face while she struggled with Amazing Grease — its moody pothead cook, its recalcitrant swampers and dishwashers, the steam heating system, the hot sauce whiners and check bolters, the food and wine experts, the academics who weren’t sure if they were out on the town or ironically observing those who were. Quietly, throughout this mayhem, the cash cow clinic went on. Now? Dead in the water. The boats gathered ’round the carcass; flensing knives drawn … Helplessly, Frank had started rotating his equities through his head, noting the pattern of erosion. He was in need of an introspective convalescence. Too much was going wrong and he hadn’t taken the time for lamentation or simple worry. Worry took time, and it must have taken energy because it often produced a terrific appetite. Heartbroken chow hounds were familiar figures. But he would have to take that time before things turned to powder.

  It was interesting to ponder the meat color of the arm-spread man in the anatomy poster. He looked at all the little parts doctors have to memorize or they don’t graduate. This poster was supplied by the makers of Valium and this big muscular fellow with the cutaway face that seemed like a fierce smile didn’t look like he was the tranquilizer sort. Yet no one was above tranquility, however it was achieved. Frank imagined that this was Holly’s boyfriend, flayed for science, howling at the very movement of air, cradle robbing the baldest crime.

  Frank sensed that he was not alone. He listened and heard someone walking in a neighboring office, more than one person. He opened his door an inch or two and watched. In a moment, he made out the forms of men carrying out the scales — the doctors, in jogging spandex. He couldn’t quite remember who actually owned the scales and so he hesitated before stepping into the corridor, but finally he did emerge and the doctors hesitated for a second, played it as if they knew he was there all along. Then when they steadied the scales on their shoulders, the weights ran across the bars and clattered to a stop, and Dr. Frame said, “Frank.”

  “Get ’er all, boys,” said Frank. “She’ll never be a clinic again.”

  Dr. Jensen said from beneath his bangs, “We’ll only get what belongs to us.”

  “My lucky day,” said Frank. He waved them on in their work and seemed to mean it.

  31

  He drove five hard hours to Whitefish, where he took a room on the lake. For most of the next day he watched the cat’s-paws move across the blue water and listened to a train travel through the woods above the dark, stony beach. He lay out on the dock and watched the cutthroats fin around the pilings. There were numerous smoke-blackened fireworks fragments and Frank, lying face down with his nose between the boards, smelled gunpowder. He loved that smell. He occasionally thought it would be pleasing to shoot several people in particular, accompanied as that would be by this fine smell. A plane went by overhead; no reason he couldn’t be in that plane. A boat glided past and there was no reason he couldn’t be on that boat.

  Just at sundown he paddled a floating cushion out to the middle of the lake, legs dangling in the cool green water, where he met a radiologist, a woman in her forties, also on a cushion, hers with parti-colored seahorses and an inflated pillow. She worked in Kalispell and came here, she said, anytime she found a cancer, to float between earth and sky and to sustain, on
her seahorse floatie, a sense of deep time that could accommodate life and death. Frank looked at her long, melancholy face with its thick, seemingly puffy lips, stringy hair and short square brow and said, “You have a hard job.”

  She took a moment to consider. “Yes I do. My job is to search for something I hope I don’t find. That is a hard job, mister.”

  Darkness seemed to be forming, a circle of contracting shadows from the shoreline and faint stars overhead. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when Frank reached out to take the tip of the radiologist’s finger, he was able to draw her raft to him with an ounce of pressure. Her face was now an inch away and they both moved imperceptibly toward each other to kiss. Her mouth was open and he tasted a mentholated cough drop. He slipped his hand a small distance inside the top of her bathing suit and felt a hard nipple. He opened his eyes and thought he could make out trembling water around her raft. The bottom of her bathing suit was drawn across the points of her hips and a flat stomach.

  Very quietly, Frank moved to board the radiologist’s raft, a delicate matter that worked, right up to the point that it didn’t work; and with a sudden rotary motion the radiologist shot out of sight. “Hey!” Frank shouted impulsively, and trod water between the plunging shapes of the floaties. He felt the radiologist’s head under the arch of his foot and struggled to get a hold of her. She came up spraying water from her mouth and with a minimum of floundering she got onto her raft again, on her stomach, and began to paddle toward shore. Frank followed her.

  “What’s your problem?” she said when he overtook her.

  “Same problem as everybody else.”

  “Oh, this’ll be good,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I’m just trying to get some meaning in my life.” Frank felt he was leaping from line to line.