Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  No one noticed exactly when Howie left, but he was gone by the time the party wound down. And if there was any worry over him, it was lost in the uproar of the Kaufmans’ discovering that the thirteen-year-old corgi the doctor had owned since his medical-school days was gone. Sylvan Lundstrom, who was everyone’s lawyer and Johnny-on-the-spot, called the police, the sheriff, and the radio station, carefully describing a generic corgi from the Kaufmans’ American Kennel Club guide to breeds. It would be morning before we could reach the drivers’ training group at the school; they were usually most successful in finding lost dogs. Mrs. Kaufman said she wished she knew less about the experimental purposes to which stray dogs were often put.

  The dog was not found.

  Monday I saw Howie in front of the Bar and Grill at the lunch hour. He was going out; I was going in. Howie is in insurance and busy as all get-out, and a good kind of family man. So the following seemed odd.

  “You’re on the phone with an old girlfriend,” said Howie. “Your wife is at your elbow. Your heart is pounding. Your old girlfriend says, ‘Just wanted to call and say I still love ya!’ ‘You too!’ I shout like I’m closing on a huge policy. How much of this the old lady buys, I can’t say.” Howie shoots off with a little wave. I am not painting Howie as an ugly customer but as a troubled guy who didn’t ever talk like this. It used to be you’d bump into him and he’d tell you something homely like the difference between whittling and carving (whittling you’re not trying to make something). Now everything seemed so final.

  Howie’s wife went back to South Dakota in September, for good. To show he wasn’t upset, Howie had his car painted JUST MARRIED. He went to a sales conference in Kansas City and forced a landing en route in Bismarck. He had to pay a huge fine for that, which he could certainly afford. But Dr. Kaufman assured his new admirers that forcing a landing was a well-known thing disturbed people do. When Howie finally got to Kansas City, his company made him Salesman of the Year.

  By October, Howie seemed completely his old self. The face finally seemed to be his own. His wife stayed away. We had another softball game after the fall rodeo. He was still driving the just married car, and he was wearing a sweatshirt copy of the Shroud of Turin. He was all over the field and drove in four runs.

  Dogs kept disappearing. It was making the paper. Dr. Kaufman was not building a practice as rapidly as he wished and he threw a Thanksgiving party, supposedly to introduce Diana, a yellow Labrador he had bought to replace the corgi. He said the corgi had left a hole in his heart that nothing could fill, but he let his pride in the new dog show. We all went to the party, even the other doctors. Howie was so disheveled looking we asked if he was in disguise. “To be the leading adulterer in a small Montana town,” he said mysteriously, “is to spend your life dodging bullets. It is the beautiful who suffer.” His whiskers pressed through the taut skin of his face. For the moment of our nervousness, in the central-heating itch of fall’s first frosts, it was as if the house were equipped with self-locking exits. We were quiet in the drifting cigarette smoke for just a moment, then went back to our carefree ways. Right out of the blue, Howie added, “What the hell, I forgive you all. Everything I know I learned from Horatio Alger.”

  The dinner was served buffet style, and we ate with our plates in our laps. The Kaufmans’ new dog was beautifully trained and took hand signals, retrieving everything from black olives to ladies’ pumps with a delicate mouth. When we’d nearly finished eating, Howie said to a young woman, a dental hygienist, in a voice all could hear, “That food was so bad I can’t wait for it to become a turd and leave me.”

  Dr. Kaufman diverted our attention by sending Diana on a blind retrieve into the bedroom. When she returned, Howie asked Kaufman what he had to “shell out for the mutt.” And so on, but it got worse. Spotting a pregnant brunette in her thirties, he said, “I see you’ve been fucking.” Mrs. Kaufman tried to distract Howie by describing the problems she had had keeping the grosbeaks from running every other bird out of the feeder.

  “You know what?” said Howie.

  “What is that?”

  “I wish you were better looking,” he said to Mrs. Kaufman.

  “Get out now,” said the doctor.

  “Suits me,” said Howie, once the mildest of our chums. “I’ve monkeyed around here long enough. I prefer white people.” So Howie left and the party went on. Actually, the relief of Howie’s departure contributed to its being such a terrific party. We all told stories that, for a change, weren’t deftly to our own credit. I thought once or twice of making a plea for Howie—we’d been friends the longest—but thought better of it. Dr. Kaufman had had to be restrained, once.

  When the time came to go, it was discovered that Diana was missing. Mrs. Kaufman cried and Dr. Kaufman said, “I guess it’s pretty clear that crazy son of a bitch has my dog.”

  In order to keep the police out of it, I agreed to go see Howie. At first I tried to get someone else to do it, but when I saw how anxious some of the others were to call in the authorities, I got a move on. He really had been a friend to all of us. But the pack instinct, whatever that is, was on alert. I think I felt a little of it myself, sort of like “Let’s kill Howie.”

  Anyway, I made the feeling go away and drove up to Howie’s house, a cedar-and-stone thing of the kind that went through here a while back. Diana met me at the door. Howie turned and wearily let me follow him inside. Various dogs gathered from the hallways and side room and joined us in the living room. Howie made drinks.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” Howie said, handing me my Scotch. “The bubble had to break. Margie gone. Salesman of the Year. Every breed I ever dreamed of.” He gestured sadly at our audience: Diana, a black Lab, an Irish setter of vacant charm, a dachshund, a few mixed breeds who seemed to have a sheepdog as a common ancestor, all contented. And the old worn-out corgi.

  “We didn’t know what you were going through,” I said. I didn’t know who I meant by “we,” except that I thought it was in the air when I left the party that we were pulling together over a common cause. “It started I guess when you got beaned.” Howie looked at me for a long time.

  “That wasn’t it. I admit the beaning was what gave me the idea. I fell down to gain time to think. I lay there and thought about how happy I was that my marriage was on the rocks. The time had come to be off my rocker whether I felt like it or not. Margie had a guy, but it wasn’t enough. Then the company saying the future belonged to me. It was too much. I did the fainting business because I needed a jinx, I was superstitious.

  “One thing led to another and I started grabbing dogs. It sounds crazy, but I felt like Balboa when he saw the Pacific. I’d never known anything like it. By the way, getting caught is no disgrace.”

  I took Diana down to the Kaufmans, and Dr. Kaufman, who is such a young man, made a seemingly prepared speech about how much Diana had cost and how in a practice that was starting slowly, you cannot imagine how slowly, Diana had been a crazy sacrifice both for himself and for Mrs. Kaufman. Among the party guests there was the gloom of drama slipping away, of a return to the everyday.

  In another two hours I had restored each dog but one to its rightful owner. The doctor and his wife said they were glad to be shut of the arthritic toothless corgi, hinting it was Howie’s punishment to keep it. Howie said it suited him fine.

  Anyway, as things go, it just all blew over. And in fact, by spring, when Howie started having some chest pains, probably only from working too hard, he went to Dr. Kaufman, joining our new doctor’s rapidly growing list of devoted patients.

  A SKIRMISH

  The schoolroom was small, and we had the same teacher all day long. You could smell the many coats that hung in the back of the room. The burr-headed boys sat on one side and the girls with their elaborate hair sat on the other. Between the two there was an idle hostility, which did not seem to have anything to do with sex but, rather, a plain and small hatred awaiting transmogrification and secrecy.

  Our lunc
hes were all stored on a table in black pails. We lived in such proximity and confinement that we had powerful attitudes about what constituted a proper lunch. Freakish lunches—imaginative preparation, ethnic hints, dainty wrappings—singled out the hapless owner as a pampered twit. I vividly remember how we silently accepted a trick miniature pie that was going the rounds of the grocery stores and could be eaten one-handed. A heartbeat from being singled out, each one of us seemed to arrive the same day with an identical pie.

  That year, reproductions of Civil War forage caps, blue or gray with crossed sabers, came into our world. Every boy bought one. Just three boys got the rebel model, because where we lived, the indigenous saint was Abraham Lincoln and he took care of the slaveholders years ago, the men in gray. The three who bought the rebel model were the Emery brothers: Bill, Buck, and Dalton. They had nothing to do with the South. They were what was called common-ass hoodlums, who already had a running battle going with the game warden and a flourishing business in stolen hubcaps. But these hats drew the brothers close for the first time, and entirely away from the rest of us. Bill, the youngest, was thin and humorless and the most daring thief. Buck was feebleminded and got his crewcut by the calendar so he always looked the same. He didn’t appear to have had the same mother as the other two. Dalton, ready to graduate, charming and crooked, was prison bound. When the Emerys found out about my big Lincoln Logs set, they decided I was the brains behind the Union forces, the men in blue.

  When the school bus dropped us off that night, I took the route past the old stone quarry, a place we caught sunfish in summer. A path went around the back of the quarry, so close to the water you could see the shear of stone that dropped into vertical invisibility at the shore. I could see the Emerys drifting along slowly behind me, but I was sure I could make the shortcut to my house before they caught up to me. I was wrong; they made a rush and overwhelmed me at the edge of the sumac.

  Buck stood flat on the end of my foot while Dalton and Bill pushed me over backward.

  My leg was in a cast for two months. But the torn ligaments didn’t really heal until after summer began. My schoolwork suffered because the Emerys stared at me while I studied and asked to sign my cast, forcing me to refuse, making it appear that I was hostile toward them and the one causing all the trouble.

  When my cast was cut off, my leg was thin and white.

  Across the windblown playground where deer tracks appeared in the muck, Buck Emery watched my crooked walk.

  Buck often rode the bus with me, never taking his dark, stupid eyes off my face. His straight stiff hair was even and short. From any angle there was always a spot where you could see straight through to his white scalp, luminous under the hair with a gristly glow.

  There was a sentimental attempt to rehabilitate Dalton in his last term at school. He was so clearly going to do badly in life because of his suave and malicious disposition that it seemed appropriate to put him in a position of authority. It was hoped that a day would come when he would not see petty theft or feeling up girls as the be-all and end-all he viewed them as now. The principal appointed him one of the safety-patrol boys and gave him the crossed white shoulder straps that identified the officers. He wore them with his Confederate forage cap and supervised the boarding and exiting of the bus. One day when we stopped at the end of our road, he got off the bus with me and stared fixedly at my blue cap. He asked if I was still loyal to the boys in blue. I said that I was. But I knew he could see I was shaking. He said that if I was interested in my health, I would desert. As scared as I was, I thought of Abraham Lincoln and said, “Never.”

  “Have it your way.”

  * * *

  —

  My bedroom was an unfinished addition over the attached garage. The walls were made of what was called beaverboard. I could step through a window at the far end of the room and into a huge, humid elm, go up and see the tops of the woods around us or climb down into the yard. I had a crystal set in my room and spent long hours wearing the earphones, moving the whisker of wire over the nugget of crystal in its lead enclosure trying to catch the radio signals borne through the air around me. The room had no heat. Instead I had a thin electric blanket whose wires stood through the fabric like varicose veins. The blanket had a white plastic control with a wheel, numbered 1 through 9. In January, 9 just got me through the night; by April I’d be down to 4; then in October I’d start back up the dial again. I think the crystal set and the electric blanket supplied me with the largest general ideas about the world I would acquire in my grammar-school years, vastly bigger than anything discovered in class, where the glacial communion of the three R’s was held.

  The last time that I used the 5 setting, Buck appeared in my window on a clear night and hung there, arms and legs spread to the corners of the window frame, wearing his cap and staring in at me in my bed. I didn’t move throughout the long time he hung there, and I don’t recall his climbing down. Instead, he seemed to disappear from the hypnotic center of the very fear I felt. I spent the rest of the night watching the same empty window in which I expected one day see the atomic flash marking the end of the world.

  * * *

  —

  Suddenly it was springtime. Frogs roared in the woods. Jack-in-the-pulpits sprang from black mucky soil in secret. Pike appeared from the big lake and sought the muddy canal that crossed our woods and swamps. I could see them from the high bank, gulping water into their wolfish jaws and finning indolently beneath the undercut bank.

  I started my paper route, learning all over again to put the three-way fold in the daily edition so it could be thrown like a piece of kindling. Among my newest subscribers were the Emerys. “I didn’t know they could read,” said my father jauntily.

  I delivered their paper first. It completely threw my route off. If I rolled my papers before school, I could deliver the Emerys’ paper immediately after school was out and while they were still finishing the chores their father required of them. Their father was in “haulage,” his term for intermittent employment. Chores in haulage might consist of stacking scrap iron or salvaged copper pipe, and it might mean cutting down a wild honey tree the old man had found in the woods while the boys were in school. The Emerys ran a line of muskrat snares and gigged bullfrogs. They could take a copperhead in their hands with impunity and make it strike through a piece of inner tube stretched across the mouth of a mason jar, spitting its poison inside. My father said that the Emerys had ability, which was his way of accounting for those who, though doomed, were undeserving of remorse.

  Some days there were no chores. Bill, Buck, and Dalton would be lined up silently on the lawn. I pitched the paper, sailing it past their expressionless faces. Then I made off on my bike, putting all my weight on first one pedal, then the other.

  Summer was making its way right over the top of us. I played baseball after dinner, every one of the players sick on Red Man. I caught turtles. Because I hated books, my mother bribed me to read the Penrod stories and The Master of Ballantrae. Later, in the hope that I might be an entertainer, she drove me to play Mr. Interlocutor in the annual minstrel show. Wearing a swallowtail coat, I read in a hysterical voice from cards she had typed, crazy questions to Mr. Bones and others.

  When the slow-moving green-to-brown water of the canal got warm enough, we swam in it. We drifted under the fallen trees that stretched over its mirror surface and caught the sunning turtles when they tumbled off. I had five of them, small painted and mud turtles whose cool weight in my hands and striving far-focused eyes thrilled me. The flare of shell, the arrangement of openings for head and legs, their symmetry and gleam of burnished camouflage, were aching to comprehend. I didn’t deliver papers that week. It seemed half the town called my father about it. I wouldn’t explain myself; I guess I had the feeling that others might be listening. My father looked on in confusion as my paper route was turned over to an Estonian boy down the canal who had recently joined the Confederacy.

  I had a path in the sumac
that wound through low ground to a bank of cattails where red-winged blackbirds flickered and sang. The maroon seeds had a salty taste, and to be undaunted by their rumored poison was part of the heroism of sojourning in the low ground. This same path crossed stands of milkweed with its pods of pagan silk and drew me close to the paper globes of hornets suspended in shadows. On the path I sometimes found a mother opossum with her infants stuck to her underside like stamps. The sumac path wound around and forked into itself. It seemed never to be the same from day to day. I now spent all my time in either the gravity of school supervision or close watching in my own home. My disappearances into the sumac were the only exception to all the unwelcome order.

  I always wore my Federal cap on these junkets and carried a Barlow knife. I had wedged a piece of wood inside the knife that kept the blade point slightly exposed, so that it could be flicked open against the seam of my dungarees.

  * * *

  —

  On the ninth of June, I placed my unsatisfactory report card on the kitchen table and headed for the sumac. I wandered down in it until I couldn’t feel the heat of the sun but instead felt the cool breath of air from the mudbanks and sinkholes around me. A small hawk used my path for a whirling departure that cleared cobwebs at face level for fifty yards. At the first fork I found a snare that was meant for me. A powerful elm bough had been drawn down with a piece of old rope, the rope wound with vines, and the loop staked to the ground and covered with last year’s brittle leaves. I tripped the snare with a stick, and the report of the bough carried through the bottom. I sat down and watched the rope snare turn in the air ten feet above me. In the climbing ground, I could hear the diminishing whisper of shrubs against pant legs. Then it was still.