Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  Alpha male, that was a good one. Is that why he stared down from his bedroom window at the college couple as they waited for a summer shower to pass, jerking off into his curtain? Is that what an alpha male does? Frank knew perfectly well he was sinking into a pure shadow state as several of his dreams turned to dust. One was showing a faint glow of light, but mostly it was a broad flowering of shadow.

  “Anyway,” Gracie said, “I thought this was about Holly.”

  “It is.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “And?”

  “It’s none of our business.”

  “Gracie, I think that’s an abdication. No más abdicación.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. But I think that’s what you do. Abdicate. In fact, I’m going to get into it, on several fronts. I’m going to set an abdication track record.”

  “I tried that. They’re stripping me of my belongings.”

  “This must be a ball buster for you, champ.”

  “Not as much as you might think. As discussed, your comprehension of me was never as deep as you thought.”

  “Give me a call the day you learn to accept failure,” she said. “I’m in the book.”

  She looked down into the wilderness of her purse, found some Carmex and slicked it onto her lips. She reflexively glanced at him to see if he saw her finger touch her lips, and then averted her eyes sternly. “There’s a tone, Frank, almost like dictating a letter. It’s unbearable.”

  “They’re stripping me of my belongings. Tone’s the first to go. Plus, finding Holly infatuated with the Lord Haw-Haw of the northern Rockies —”

  “Let’s not make it worse than it is.”

  “Let’s not make it worse than it is!”

  A youth with a punk haircut, riding a mountain bike one-handed and drinking an orange soda with the other, shot past them a few inches from their toes and Frank told him to slow down. The youth wheeled around in a big circle, came back at higher speed, shaking the soda can, and hosed Frank in the face with it as he surged past. Frank jumped up in pursuit but it was hopeless. When he turned back to the park bench, his face and hair sticky and wet, Gracie was doubled over with laughter.

  Frank wiped his face on his sleeve and sat down. He decided not to discuss it. He indulged a little reverie wherein he ran down the boy on the bike, shoved his head through the spokes of his front wheel, then kicked him in the ass at his leisure. Frank smiled to think that he was making less of a distinction these days between what he imagined happening and what actually happened. His carefree jerking off had come to seem advantageous compared to the time-consuming alternatives. But it was laziness, really, or weariness, a collapse of the casual utopianism of his earlier days in which ecstasy was but a hop, skip and jump away.

  He watched a young woman in bombacha pants teaching her dog to chase a Frisbee, several robins stretching worms under a sprinkler. An extremely small Asian woman in her sixties set up an easel that faced the dun-colored hills behind the neighborhoods. He felt Gracie next to him. A robust and amiable erection tortured his chinos into an asymmetrical tent.

  “My God, what a problem I’ve got,” he said, accepting that it was inconcealable. Gracie gazed around, pretending to search for the object of his enthusiasm.

  “You’re all boy, Frank.”

  “Thanks, Grace. Now why don’t you come on home. The coffee pot’s on. I’ve hobbled the old goat —”

  “And what? We could make some feta cheese? I’m not following. The other thing is, an indecent-exposure rap would go a long way in weakening your case against Lord Haw-Haw.”

  Frank thought for a moment. “I have a lot of faith in Holly. She’ll go through this thing and right out the other side.”

  “I hope so. I also suspect it as something we’re using for our own purposes.”

  “Exactly.”

  Here was another ruse, the candid discussion, elevating essentials to a cooler altitude, often accompanied by bad acting and owlish solemnity. It was an ungainly moment. Frank wanted to fall upon his wife like a Saracen.

  Just then, Gracie began to sob. Frank said, “Oh, dear, what’s this,” and had no idea what to do. With any slip of control he was going to join in, but he held on and stared off into nowhere to contain himself, and felt sunk. His tear ducts ached under his eyes and a film dropped suddenly over the park as though the credits were about to run on the last scene. At that moment, the boy on the mountain bike shot past once more. Frank elevated his overwrought face in the boy’s direction in time to receive another blast of orange soda, and the can, which bounced off his head.

  Frank jumped up and began to race after the boy, who was riding on the rear wheel only and pulling away. He followed him out of the park and into traffic. The boy darted between oncoming cars to an intermittent song of horns, his green shirt shrinking, then wheeled to the right down a side street. Frank himself went to the right and walked a block and a half to an alley, then up it a short distance, where he climbed into a garbage pail and waited, surrounded by a deep vegetable stink, trying to reconcile his desire to kill the boy with his desire to be close to Gracie. He was close to retching but confident the boy would circle back this way for one more look. He meant to explode from the can into the boy’s face and do what he had to do. While he waited, he tried to remember what it was costing to hedge yearling cattle. No one else was doing that, but it was probably a good and original idea for this part of the world. You could certainly do it and the bank would help. Well, maybe not his chickenshit bank.

  Gracie wasn’t going to wait around indefinitely. He was beginning to cool down. He thought of Gracie’s tears and he wanted to see her now. He stood up in the garbage pail and found himself facing a screaming old woman in her bathrobe. The woman dropped the black plastic bag she was carrying and scurried into a door that opened onto the alley, yelling “Police!” in what Frank took to be an uneducated accent because she paused too emphatically between the syllables. He looked up to see the boy do a sliding U-turn on his bicycle and head out the opposite way.

  Frank made a rapid trudge to the street, where he tried to blend in yet knock the loose garbage from his clothes. He crossed the park from another angle, but their bench — he could tell it was theirs because he could line up the swings and the flagpole — was empty. Now, from a distance, he could see the boy leading two foot policemen his way. There was no time to think; he just had to run forward until he was out of the open space of the park, into an intimate blue-collar neighborhood, through back yards and under clotheslines, knocking a bird feeder out of his way in a spray of seeds, frantically navigating his way to Holly’s house, bursting through her front door and virtually into the arms of Lane Lawlor. Frank was acutely conscious of smelling like sweat and garbage. “Hello again,” he gasped, tilting his head and smiling, a gruesome shot at charm, ungainly in the extreme.

  Lane watched him for a moment before speaking. “Let me build you a drink,” he said, making a point of forcing a smile, like pressing his own weight. “I came back to use Holly’s phone.” He paused, as though there was no telling what to expect from someone standing in a slight crouch with an unmistakable tincture of back yard garbage.

  “Just catch my breath,” Frank said, moving to the living room and falling into a chair. He remembered seeing a redheaded man who had just had a heart attack at the airport, seated on the floor in a busy Salt Lake concourse, rushing travelers eddying around him, a look of perspiring embarrassment on his face, a morning newspaper at his side. Probably no one but his mother could have comforted him. His pupils were the size of dimes and he definitely seemed to be watching something coming his way.

  Lane brought him a drink, the kind of strong drink you made when you meant to let your hair down. Frank was going to be careful of it. And it was a relief to be here with a highly objectified creature like Lane. It had been too much with Gracie. Every attempt to modify his emotions recently had gone upside down. He had just felt wild, and that was too much. He didn�
��t want that wild feeling taking him off. He wanted the type of steadiness that is always praised, in sports, in life, everywhere. With Lane it could be strenuous yet polite, like an old-fashioned sea battle: gentlemen captains getting their guns into position and altogether out of the question to act or feel wild.

  Lane sat down. “Kind of a turbulent time for you,” he said.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Sometimes it helps having something to set all these tribulations against.”

  “Yeah,” said Frank, “like, we sleep for eternity or something.”

  “Not quite that dire. Maybe a few values.”

  “What kind of values, Lane?”

  “The kind you come in from the desert with, the kind that stand you in good stead. The kind that make you one with your own people.”

  Lane probably had him here. The people who wanted to stop every river, kill every inconvenient animal and reduce every forest to usable fiber had a remarkable solidarity. They believed that every thing in the natural world was part of a conspiracy against the well-filled lunch bucket, the snowmobile with its topped-off fuel tank and the proper utilization of a deep clip of cartridges. Frank looked at him and tried to imagine him as a child, concluding that Lane had never been a child. He was born a full-sized spokesperson.

  “You know,” Frank said, “I have a feeling if we share our philosophies we’re going to end by tearing this apartment up and it doesn’t belong to us.”

  “Ha ha ha,” said Lane.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Okay, so another tack. Frank. You’re a businessman. You share my climate.”

  “I’ve become a worse and worse businessman.”

  “I’ll lay you three to one it’s because of the negative climate that we operate in — workmen’s comp, et cetera.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s something else. It’s closer to chronic fatigue syndrome.” He didn’t tell Lane about his flat-earth theory or the exhilaration he sometimes felt when he thought of the big, brusque, variegated planet going on without him, like a Spanish galleon leaving a swimmer who had just walked the plank. This vision always ended like an old comedy going into reverse, with him rising from a big splash to run through the air back up to the end of the plank, run back down it into the crowd of sailors on deck. He wouldn’t leave earth voluntarily, given the paltry stats on the other shit-planets with their faded canals, daffy moon rings.

  “I’m very motivated toward having a pleasant relationship with you,” said Lane. “I’m very drawn to your daughter.” Frank got the awful feeling again. “I’m not getting much encouragement from her.” He laughed. “It’s a credit to you and your wife that she has grown into such an intricately developed personality. I wish she would give me stronger indications of our future together.”

  “That’s good,” said Frank. “It’s an inappropriate relationship.”

  “I think the principals, and the principals only, are entitled to that view.”

  “Couldn’t you find a conservative American your own age?”

  “I could.”

  “You could?”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Frank, your daughter is getting more conservative by the minute. And that’s not bad. We’re the ones who look around our nation and want the same thing: swift, retributive justice.”

  Frank thought about this alarming and obviously premeditated phrase, without picturing where it could lead. “Anyway, do you know when they’ll be back?” he asked.

  “They won’t. Mrs. Copenhaver has gone down to Deadrock, I think, and Holly’s at class.”

  34

  The streetlamps streamed slowly past as he headed to a downtown Deadrock bar on foot, the lovely curves of automobiles with intricate paint jobs and personalized license plates displaying the state’s pride in the Big Sky. An elderly cripple made his way along the sidewalk with gritty determination and shouted at Frank, “Watch where you’re going, you crazy jerk!” This filled Frank with a reassurance of the indomitability of man. He stopped to look up and down a cross street, noting a conspicuous whistle from his nose and shadowy rings around his vision. He gave a loud laugh and a car slowed down to look at him. Wave to those people! They didn’t wave back. We don’t care! Another big laugh. Ha, ha! More waving …

  Frank found himself in the bar. He didn’t know how long he’d been in here, or how many drinks he’d had, but he decided to make a request by tracking the bar to the dance floor, pushing through all those dancers to the bandstand and asking the singer, who was usually the leader of the band, to play something special. There was Lucy Dyer! Hey, talk about special!

  Lucy sat at the bar turned around on her stool so that she could watch people dancing. There were men on either side of her when Frank approached to take her request. No matter how he pressed her, he couldn’t get her to name that tune. Finally, the man on her left, a tall and unsmiling cowboy in a black shirt, said, “She doesn’t have a song to request. Hadn’t you been listening?”

  “Frank,” said Lucy, “I’d like you to meet my honey, Darryl Pullman.”

  Frank was right in his face with a warm greeting and a handshake. “What do you do, Darryl?”

  “I’m a spray pilot.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “And a big-game guide.”

  “Well, what about you, Darryl, anything you’d like to hear?”

  “If they knowed any Dwight Yoakam, be okay.”

  “Dwight Yoakam it is.”

  Frank hated the way he seemed so sprightly in the presence of these salt-of-the-earth types, but he succeeded in getting in the request and the band played “Guitars and Cadillacs.” Up till then, he thought Darryl was kidding him, requesting some relation of Mammy Yoakam. He went back to Lucy and Darryl and said, “Would I be pushing my luck if I asked Lucy to dance?”

  “Whatever blows your dress up,” said Darryl.

  “Thank you, Darryl. Thank you very much.”

  It was crowded on the dance floor and seemed to be no more than a large disorganized group of people. Frank couldn’t detect any relationship between the music and the movements of the dancers. The large number of cowboy hats seemed to cut down on the available space. But Frank was enjoying the familiar weight and heat of Lucy in his arms. He knew it as common lust, a profound simplicity. The prominent bulge in his trousers spoke reams.

  “You’ve got your nerve shoving that thing at me,” said Lucy.

  “The worst hanging judge in the world doesn’t penalize folks for that which is involuntary.”

  Frank danced her around the room, feeling loose enough to fall on her. It was swell. When the song finished, Lucy pushed off and Frank went back to the bandstand. The singer leaned over his guitar and moved the microphone away from his face to listen to Frank.

  “Do you do ‘Happy Birthday’?”

  “Sure do. Who’s it for?”

  “Darryl Pullman. He is one hundred years old tonight and he came just to hear y’all play.” He had filched Gracie’s accent.

  “Be tickled to death,” said the singer, reverberating the familiar six notes that punctuate the annual walk off the flat earth: “Happy bir-thday tew yew!” He leaned toward the microphone to talk out of the side of his mouth as Frank made his way back to Lucy. “Don’t often in our business get to celebrate somebody’s turning one hundred years old like we’re fixing to do right now. This one’s for Darryl Pullman, who’s with us tonight. Darryl, here’s to a hundred more!”

  Frank looked Darryl right in the eye and said, “I didn’t think they’d even invented the name Darryl a hundred years ago.”

  “They hadn’t,” said Darryl, who began to sing along with his own birthday song. “But this is a great opportunity for me to look forward to what it’ll be like, you sorry little shit.”

  When the song came to an end and the applause died down, along with the back-pounding that forced Darryl to act happy about it all, Frank said, “Darryl, let me l
ay it on the table. This may be too much for you, and if it is, I don’t blame you. Can you reach me my drink?” He gulped it down. “But I have absolutely got to have a word with Lucy and it will not take but a minute. I’ve absolutely got to.” Darryl didn’t say anything. “Darryl, I gotta. I’ve absolutely got to. We’re right down the hall from each other. It’s not that whatever. Please.”

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “Yes! That’s exactly the word I was looking for. Emergency.”

  “How long?”

  “Six minutes, twenty-one seconds. There will be no time-outs or delays for commercials.”

  “I ain’t too worried about it,” said Darryl, “if you want to know the truth.”

  As soon as they stepped outside, Frank began to struggle with himself. He looked up at the theater marquee across the street and saw its perennial sign, “Closed for the Season.” He discovered the unsteadiness of his limbs. “Is there anywhere we can sit down for a moment?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy in a firm and businesslike voice, “we can sit in Darryl’s truck. I know he wouldn’t mind because he is not petty. He is not petty and he is not inconsiderate.”

  She directed Frank to the Dexter Hotel’s parking lot, where they found the three-quarter-ton Ford with a stock rack. Frank got in behind the wheel and Lucy went around to the other side. Frank smiled at her and pretended to steer down the road, mashing the brake at the same time. Lucy said, “What’s on your mind?” Frank saw the keys and started the truck. Lucy gave him a look, but he just turned on the heater to cut the chill.

  “I just hadn’t seen you. I haven’t been to the office.”

  “So we’ve noticed.” “We” was Lucy and Eileen. He knew the subtext here was that Gracie was back in town.

  “Oh, Lucy.”

  “And don’t ‘oh, Lucy’ me, either.”

  “At least don’t treat me mean. I’ve built an empire.”

  “And you’re letting it fall apart.”

  “That’s what they do. Read your history. None escape.”