Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  He looked out the window beside the front door. It was Phil, stroking his beard with one hand and ringing the doorbell with the other. Frank had a moment’s thought, which immediately struck him as unworthy, that he might pretend not to be home. Ignoring his friends would be a sign of total collapse and he wasn’t going to let it happen. He went up and opened the door. Recalling a habit of their high school days, they made deep Chinese bows and Phil came in.

  “Want some chili?” Frank said, leading the way down the hall. “I just got in from a pig show.”

  “Okay, if you got enough. A pig show?”

  “I got enough. Yeah, I had to ride a pretty big one. I stayed on, made the whistle.”

  Phil didn’t know what Frank was talking about. He didn’t like anything to do with farming, ranching, agriculture. His assumption was that every pig was a government rip-off, a harmless creature that occasioned subsidies and price supports and had no reality of its own. Until now, though, he didn’t seem to realize people rode them.

  In the kitchen, Phil looked into the cooking pot. “You got a salad or anything?”

  “Look in the fridge.”

  Phil got some tired-looking vegetables out of the refrigerator and began paring away the bad spots. “My old lady finally flew the nest for good,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize she was still technically around.”

  “We were legally separated, but I finally decided to tell her about Smokie.”

  “So, what’s going to happen?”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “That’s good,” said Frank, keeping it small. He didn’t know if he wanted to get into this. He thought Phil was a little premature on the Smokie issue. “Couples seem to be a thing of the past, which should help the housing market. Although I see new home starts are down.”

  “What did you think about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill?”

  “I wasn’t smart enough to follow it. I wouldn’t exactly call them a couple.”

  “Look at what I’ve salvaged,” said Phil of the neat pile of salad ingredients.

  The phone rang and Frank answered while gesturing approvingly at the vegetables. It was Jerry Drivjnicki calling to say that he realized that what happened wasn’t Frank’s fault.

  “What’s past is past,” said Frank philosophically, yet wondering if his regular dry cleaner would take umbrage at the pigshit embedded in the camel’s hair.

  “Olav Finberg won the darn thing,” said Jerry. “That’s when I began to think. He had two pigs in it and one was no good. In fact, that one pig was out of control. That was the one that took you for a ride. That pig couldn’t have won nothin’. After the wreck was over, Olav was standing there with his good pig, and the judge was so rattled he let Olav win.”

  “Was Olav that farmer standing right behind me?”

  “That’s Olav.”

  Frank sighed. “Well, I tell ya, Jerry, I’m all pigged out. They seemed to fit when my life was in a different place, but that time is gone.”

  “Frank, if the pigs ain’t doing for you what you want, I’ll get you back out. Just say the word.”

  “I took it from you that it was over with today, Jerry. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Okay, Frank.”

  Jerry hung up, then Frank hung up. Frank could tell by the way Jerry signed off that he was miffed. He hoped the next pig he saw was at a barbecue.

  Phil said, “You got anything to drink?” This was clearly about the drink itself and also about need in general. The request was accompanied by a brief, solemn gaze that was made forlorn by Phil’s long beard. Frank knew what to make Phil, a simple bourbon and water; and he made himself one too. He was glad to see Phil, glad to take a moment out with a friend, a moment away from the linearity of his recent life to just do some simple drinking.

  Phil wore a shirt that seemed to be made out of pillow ticking and Frank was reminded how he often thought Phil looked like a Gallatin County pioneer, maybe a small stock farmer or someone who sold whiskey to the Indians. He had that blank look he associated with local frontiersmen in photographs, which probably had more to do with the instructions of the photographer to not move and spoil the portrait than it did with the actual personalities of the subjects. From that, Frank, like most people, had surmised that a bleak view of the world prevailed a hundred years ago. If it weren’t for their written materials, which revealed a new Eden, this great technological breakthrough would have maligned them for all time. Phil looked like a victim of photography; Frank knew he was full of enthusiasms but he didn’t let them show very much.

  “Frank, I didn’t have a great week.” They were in the front sitting room, one of the fussy, semi-formal spaces in this Victorian house that Frank and Gracie had bought out of a piety about the olden days. It had one inconvenient room after another. They had never known where to put Holly, from infancy through childhood and high school years. It was an atmospheric setting for some thoroughly ersatz elements of their life as a family: tall-ceilinged rooms with heavy-metal band posters, a sewing room filled with sporting gear, family recipes on the word processor, microwave Cajun cookbooks, mountain bikes in the front hall. This evening, you could see the place eating at Phil in the form of discomfort as the poor bastard tried to find a soft spot in a seventy-two-year-old wing chair.

  “Smokie left too,” he said.

  “How are you taking all this?”

  “I’ll live,” said Phil.

  Frank saw a tremor in his face. “Phil, is there anything I can do?” he said after a moment. Abruptly, Phil began to weep. Frank felt an ache go through him, a helpless surge, and it was awkward. Through the racking sobs and streaming tears, Phil must have perceived Frank’s discomfort. He began waving at him. Frank thought he was being told to do something but he couldn’t make out what. The phone began to ring. Frank decided not to answer it. Phil clamped his hands on the arms of the chair and sank into it. His whole body was jerking while the phone rang. “Turn on the radio,” Phil moaned. “I gotta get out of this.”

  Frank turned on the country station. A reverent interview with Dolly Parton from Dollywood, her theme-park home, was in place. The two men began to listen. Phil had difficulty but he was paying attention. Evidently, “country” was where “family” counted; references to the Mama figure and the Daddy figure. You could feel her dimples come over the airways. And now for the vibrato that built it all, sassy and dramatic, equally at home in Appalachia and Rodeo Drive: “The Coat of Many Colors.” As though each man were assigned one of Dolly’s big breasts, the room grew calm. They gazed off in comfortable friendship, the ghastly weeping now subsided into tolerable ungainliness. They sucked down the bourbon.

  “How did we get in so many wrecks, Frank?”

  “Jeez, Phil, I’m stuck. How’s the chili?”

  “It’s good. I feel better. I mean, I feel like an asshole but I feel better. I didn’t mean to get so upset. I guess I figured I could. We been in a lot of corners before. I guess I had it coming. Before Kathy, I turned some nice kids into whores. Course, I had to be one too, to do it. Used to take them in the caboose all the way to Forsythe, supposed to be watching for fires along the track, and we’d be rolling numbers and having us a big old time. Lucky old Smokie didn’t give me the chance to do it to her. Part of me is proud of it. So, if you’re never gonna grow up anyway, might as well have a good cry.”

  “I’ve been reading where it’s supposed to be good for you,” said Frank. “Men are starting to get into it. All around the country.”

  “Do you do it?”

  “Not much.”

  Phil sighed. “I’m gonna get me a big, grateful, coyote-ugly type of gal one of these days and settle down for the long haul.”

  It was quiet for a moment.

  “I suppose we ought to eat something at some point.”

  “I don’t know about this chili. You can sort of taste the can.”

  Frank set two fresh drinks on the table with a significant clunk. A sudden lig
ht from passing cars shuddered on the walls. There was a pile of newspapers he hadn’t gotten to. These sorts of things acquired a strangeness when you were living alone. Your sense of adventure goes into your marriage, and when the marriage is gone you’re stuck with a hundred versions of a road map when you’re not planning a trip. Frank bobbed his ice cubes with his forefinger and smiled to himself. A lot of men in the news these days blubbering. It was supposed to be the sign of a real man, but it just didn’t look right to Frank. Although with Phil it seemed okay.

  Phil had been talking: “… Plus — plus — shit.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it’s hopeless with women, Phil?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Any women?”

  “That’s been my experience.”

  “Is your wife going to live with that doctor?”

  “I doubt it. She’s just graduated to one of his little somethings on the side. That’s a hell of a category, isn’t it? But that’s what she wants to be.”

  “You care for some of these newspapers?”

  “Naw.”

  “I don’t know what my wife is up to either. She just seems to be circling the airport. She’s sort of around again, and to be perfectly honest it makes me nervous.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck they want,” Phil said.

  “Nervous and sad and crazy. I don’t know quite what it means. I was going to think about it tonight. I always figure these things out just before I go to sleep. But with men and women, it seems everyone wants the authorities to intervene. You sort of picture lawsuits being the ideal relationships of the future. At least you can kind of let it happen.”

  “Run up some bills.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a way to cut costs in a relationship.”

  “My wife and I don’t have that kind of money,” Phil said. “We’re old-fashioned. We’d just like to kill each other.”

  “The last time I felt really close to Gracie, well, we were going to open a burger joint, something different, something with a slogan, and what it was going to be about was volume sales. I was just thinking numbers. But Gracie, who’s a great cook, thinks whatever you do should be good for the world, whereas I just like business. And I honestly mean it when I say that when Amazing Grease went upside down I didn’t gloat because she did serve really distinctive food while it lasted. And it was like anything she did for good reasons was doomed and anything I do for my usual money-grubbing motives would succeed. It was really humiliating to Gracie. We never actually said it. It was like her view of life was nowhere because she couldn’t face what a paltry, hopeless deal it was and I could. But the funny thing is, since she withdrew in defeat and just let the lesson speak for itself, I haven’t been able to do as well either. Or I don’t want to. Or I fail to see what it means. Or, whatever.”

  Phil wore a pinched, inward look. He had both hands around his drink. He seemed to be watching something inside himself. He lifted the drink up and finished it. “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Phil, is everything okay?”

  Phil was up and next to the door. “I really can’t answer that question.”

  Frank knew better than to follow him out the door. Instead, he brought the television in so he could see it while he ate. The Broncos. Elway goes back, back, uncorks a Hail Mary … incomplete. He finished his drink and made one more because he could just begin to feel that good old mellow feeling: the coexistence of life’s elements as so successfully seen through the bottom of a glass. He smiled at the wholesome chili. He thought with sweet sadness of his pain and Phil’s pain, all the while knowing they were learning something important. He forgot the overpowering sense that nothing is learned, that this is a circle and a headache in which the nerves of the abdomen are counterweighted by the capacity for remorse. For example, he contemplated with a faint, annunciatory smile the idea that nothing really was important.

  47

  The wind had swung around to the northwest and the bright summer clouds were replaced by the slanting, lead-shot systems of somewhere over the Divide. It was still warm, but for the first time they were getting other people’s weather. Frank wondered if he was imagining a bustling, slightly worried quality of people in the street. For his own part, he craved to be out in the country.

  He might only have wished to escape. The bank had begun proceedings against him and had suggested that he might “opt for the quiet alternative” and hand over several things that they had identified, including his house. The house’s value increased suddenly to him. It had belonged to his grandfather. His father had sold it and Frank bought it back twenty years later. In the meanwhile, it had become a duplex. Frank and Gracie converted it back into a single-family home and raised Holly in its multiplicity of steam-heated rooms. The old house had seen some unhappy moments, but Frank thought there was a chance that things would change, and he still wanted to hang on to it in case they did. He did not necessarily hope that he and Gracie would get back together but that he would find some accommodation with his situation and that would approximate happiness, or absorption in something, maybe a renewed absorption in business. But the bank going after his home affected him viscerally.

  His success had once consisted in an ability to mix himself in the throng wholeheartedly while maintaining a kind of detachment that told him what the general currents were in what seemed to be pure Brownian movement. For example, he long knew where people were getting ready to move to. When they got there, they’d find he owned much of the land and would have to buy it from him. He had built the clinic before there were enough doctors to fill it. They were still coming to ski or fish from their homes and practices in Texas, California and New York. He knew they were getting ready to move; they didn’t. As people relatively exalted in their own minds, they resented his having foreseen this. A few tried renting offices or practicing out of private dwellings. It didn’t last. They ended up renting from him.

  Something about professionals made Frank enjoy gouging them, a quality in himself that explained the popularity of people like Lane Lawlor. It was interesting to see what it would take to get the doctors to band together and build their own clinic. Now the bastards were gone. Still, it was zoned light industrial over there. He was thinking of moving a little electronics thing in from its dismal headquarters in Three Forks; they made position-indicating radio beacons to be worn by skiers in avalanche areas, a little like the one worn by that poor old wolf. It was a good product, but he just didn’t care right now. He had no idea where people were headed or what they wanted. He was like a hawk that was losing its eyesight.

  He tried an experimental weekend at the ranch. He fully expected to find ghosts there, of his family and himself; but what he found was that it was empty except for Boyd Jarrell, who was back at his old job. Boyd actually waved to him, though it was a dismissive wave, as he dragged a set of tractor chains from the barn. Everything was familiar but it was without any further resonance. He could locate, room by room, scenes of important early events, but they not only failed to enhance those memories, they reduced them. The room off the kitchen with the ironing board mounted to the wall, where his father had had his first heart attack, was just a cold, empty room. It seemed insufficiently inviting to accommodate a heart attack. The front room, where as a family they had watched Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, failed to bring back memories. To Frank’s dismay, it only brought back memories of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

  The attic contained two Flexible Flyer sleds and the camping equipment that had gotten such complete use. Frank’s father was a skillful packer of horses and the outings with his sons were lessons in diamond hitches and squaw hitches, demonstrations of the driving of a picket pin and of jackknife cookery, mantying gear, Decker versus sawbuck pack saddles and the language of trailblazing. Frank recognized his gratitude now. How much better to recall a parent in action than in statements. In fact, most of the statements Frank remembered from his fath
er, he remembered unhappily. The actions he remembered were among his treasures.

  Mike had sold off the timber. He had that right under their partnership agreement: Frank had the grazing, Mike had the timber. Frank had leased his grazing and Mike was now irrevocably cutting down the trees. Through the long weekend, Frank listened to the hot-rod snarl of the chain saws. It took many years for those trees to stand up like that and just a minute to be killed. From the house, Frank could see parts of the bristled surface of forest above the ranch folded over flat. He could hear the skidder making its terrible sound in the living trees and he could see smoke from the trucks. He could even see the safety orange of the hard hats. More than anything, he heard the doleful howl of the saws in the shattered forest. He knew how the soil would be rent in hauling off the trees and decided to skip that part and go back into town. It was probably time, he thought, for Americans to learn to love pavement with all their hearts.

  48

  Tonight, finally, was the Branding, featuring Lane Lawlor. Seven people called and made sure Frank didn’t miss it.

  Frank wore the old belted Aquascutum overcoat that had belonged to his father, for the simple reason that he, Frank, was never seen in it. He wore his new Air Jordan high tops and his John Deere billed cap pulled low over his forehead. He was in disguise. He paid his admission to one of the five women seated behind a low folding table and got his hand stamped with the image of a spur. Then he entered the already crowded Earl Butz Kiva, a room that had once filled with the cries and ecstasies of an audience in actual physical sight of the gleaming head of James Watt, who had taken to the lecture trail with the fallen warriors of Watergate and Iran-Contra. Frank thought of an earlier generation, when Billy Sol Estes, born too early, languished in prison instead of traveling the rubber chicken circuit. “All you need is love,” said the Beatles. “Love is all you need.”