Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  * * *

  —

  I was taken prisoner the fourth of July, a day that will live in infamy. My parents left for a long weekend on a cabin cruiser, which was really how summer always started for us, not flowers or south winds so much as cabin cruisers. The Emerys must have known because they took me right at the foot of our road. Dalton got my Barlow knife, and when we reached the canal, Bill threw my forage cap into the water and shot it full of holes with his .22. I was held in a piano packing crate from Mr. Emery’s haulage business.

  “If you escape, we’ll know where to find you,” said Buck, with his way of looking through me. Buck was the one who would, years later, live alone with his father and help keep up the trapline. Dalton was in and out of prison. And Bill was killed in a rocket attack on the Mekong Delta. “If we have to go looking for you,” Buck said, “we may finish you off.” I know all this was talk, but there was something to Buck that lay outside of all agreements. He had shoved girls at school and disrupted the most official fire drills. No one used the drinking fountain without the fear that Buck Emery might push their teeth down on the chromium water jet.

  “Just write a statement saying Abraham Lincoln was a coward and you go free,” said Bill excitedly.

  “But your knife is gone,” said Dalton, “never to be seen again.”

  They left me with a pencil and a lined tablet in case I wanted to make a confession. I was given matches, a saucepan, a jug of water, and a box of Quaker Oats.

  I saw the sun cross the sky and go into the swamp. The sound of frogs came up; not just the unpunctuated singing of the common green frogs but the abdominal bass of bullfrogs. The whip-poor-wills lasted an hour or two, and the screech owls came out. A cold spring moon mounted high above the piano crate, and I fell asleep as its white light poured through the slats.

  When I woke up I was chilled deep down. It was just first light and Buck was staring in at me. “Do any writing?”

  “No, and I won’t.”

  “It’s your funeral,” he said in his thudding way. He bent his face to better see me. Then he was gone.

  I dumped the oats into the saucepan and let them soak while I pulled down rough handfuls of splinters from the crate for a cooking fire. I had to have this to do. I was frantic inside the small box, getting close to battering myself against its insides. The morning light glittered on the links of chain holding the crate shut, and the frogs were silent in the cold. My hand shook when I lit the matches, not so much because I was chilled, or that I could not repudiate Lincoln, but because the box had seemed to shrink to an intolerable size and my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. When the fire was going, I threw the gruel that was meant for my breakfast out of the box onto the ground. It dripped slow and cold from the chain while the tongue of fire reached out from the splinters. I tore more wood loose and threw it atop the fire, forcing the flames to the side of the box and wishing it were the battlements of Vicksburg with the slavers inside watching their kingdom fall.

  The smoke rolled over me and I grew faint. I remember thinking as I hovered between terror and opportunity that the sparks were like a shower of meteors on a winter night. I was quite certain I was burning up for glory.

  The next thing I was in the Emery parlor, a plain room with antlers on the wall and a great painting of a waterfall so huge that the little tourists at its base seemed to cower at its majesty. I reeked of woodsmoke. The stairs to the second floor went up at a steep angle like a ladder. The carpet runner was just nailed to the risers. There were a lot of chairs, no two alike. Bill, Buck, and Dalton were in three of these chairs, and their father was standing over close to me where I was stretched out on the lumpy divan. Mr. Emery was little and hard and he had already cut a switch. He may very well have used it before I woke up, because the three looked like the most ordinary schoolboys you could picture. I was even scared of their old man.

  I tried to tell from the way we walked as we went outside what he thought of me, but all I knew was that he was thinking, as we used to say, “in his mind.” I caught a look of the boys watching. “They’re not like you, are they,” said Mr. Emery, almost to himself.

  “No,” I said, barely touching the word.

  “They have to go and show off. I’m out of work, and the boys act like they wasn’t all there.”

  I looked at the house. It seemed locked up like a dungeon. “You’ll always have something you can do,” said Mr. Emery. He had a way of holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and curling it in toward the palm of his hand. “My boys will go where they’re kicked. Anyway, why don’t you get out of here where I don’t have to look at you. I won’t tell nobody you tried to burn us out.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  TWO HOURS TO KILL

  It was about a mile by car to the corrals and kennels. The trees were as tall as the pines in the North, maybe taller. But there was Spanish moss on them and on the cables that held up the telephone poles going along the road and turning up toward the house. Off to the north there were strips of lespedeza and partridge peas and some knocked-down field corn with crows flocking in it, tilting wedges of black in the autumn light. The weather that fall afternoon was still and warm, though the sun had the muted feeling of late in the year.

  John Ray was waiting at the side of the corrals, a walking horse tied to an oak limb where he stood. He had called Hank at the dealership and given him the news of his mother. Hank had asked John Ray to get him a horse.

  “I know you’re shocked at me,” Hank said, “but they can’t get anyone out here for two hours, and I’m just not going to go up to that house. And there’s nothing anyone can do now.”

  John Ray always looked starchy in his khaki working clothes, but he twisted around in them in a self-deprecatory way, as if to say that it was all one to him. There was a big bell on the side of the tack shed, and Hank asked him to ring it when the ambulance came.

  “What did you find when you went up there?” Hank asked quietly.

  “It wasn’t no answer.”

  “So you just let yourself in?”

  John Ray worked the bill of his cap in his fingers. “Yes, sir.”

  “Seem to go quietly?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “In bed?”

  “No, off in the side room there.”

  Hank looked over at the kennels. Pointers were jumping up and down the chain-link sides of it and barking. “Get Tess and Night for me, John, and I’ll saddle up.”

  Hank went into the tack shed and pulled down an old worn trooper saddle with rings on it to tie canteens and check cords. There was a waterproof tied to it that hung down behind the stirrups like a shroud; dust had collected in the folds. Hank saddled the horse and put on its bridle. It was a great big dignified-looking shooting horse with a roached mane and a long homely head like you saw in old cavalry pictures, a smooth-mouthed bay that had been branded by four or five owners. Hank thought that when the courts were done with the estate, when his sisters came down from Cincinnati and his brother from Anchorage, this horse might collect some more brands.

  So John Ray brought Tess and Night on a forked check cord. The two lunged and stretched out on their hind legs as John Ray helped Hank tie the end of the check cord behind the saddle. The two dogs then jumped out in front of the horse at the end of the rope while Hank mounted and started down the road behind them. The dogs dug in and seemed to strive to tow the horse, who sauntered along, absorbing the jerks as he had done with hundreds of other broke and unbroke bird dogs in the course of acquiring the four or five brands on his hip.

  Hank went about a half mile off the end of the road. There was an overgrown sorghum field that practically abutted a stand of longleaf pine, and beyond that it was all broken-up little fields, some clear-cut; and where it had grown brushy, the hedgerows were laced up shut with vines and brambles of kudzu and wild honeysuckle. It was still too green and early. Hank normally waited until it had frozen and the frost-kille
d foliage had dried in the cold, because the dogs couldn’t smell as well when it lay on the ground and rotted.

  Hank got down off the horse, which stood empty-saddled, and held the straining dogs. He walked down the check cord and whoaed the two dogs, vaulting at the end of the rope toward the quail fields beyond. “Whoa, Tess,” he said. “Whoa up now, Night.” The dogs stood on all fours staring ahead and, except for the trembling that shook them, did not move when Hank unsnapped their shackles. He made them stand while he coiled the check cord carefully and walked back to the horse and tied the coil to the back of the saddle. They continued to stand while he remounted and sat for a long moment looking down at the waiting dogs and finally said, in a long-drawn-out utterance, “All night, now.”

  The dogs shot off on separate but somehow communicating angles, tails popping, heads high, as they ran through a small field of partridge peas and wire grass and shoemaker berries. They used up this field and cracked through a tall hedge, obliging Hank to canter along after them, losing them at the hedge and picking them up again in the next field, his shotgun slapping up under his left knee and coming out the far side with a strand of honeysuckle trailing from the trigger guard.

  A big runoff ditch came up in the red soil, a place Hank normally rode out around, but he took it at a canter today and vaulted over it, seeing the big dark channel fly under him as he sailed into the rough growth. Hank thought about that ditch and wondered if he would jump it coming back. I’ll jump it at great speed, he concluded.

  When he came into the next field, the dogs were on point, Tess forward and Night behind at an angle, honoring. When Hank reined the bay past the low sun, the light flared red at the edge of the horse’s nostrils. He stopped and got down, pulling the double-barreled gun from its scabbard, breaking and loading it while he kept one eye on the dogs. Night cat-walked a couple of steps, and Hank made a low sound of disapproval in his throat, and the dog stopped. Hank walked past the dogs, watching straight ahead for the covey rise. He presumed the birds were on the little elevation of ground under the old pines.

  No birds, but the dogs were still on point, and Hank pulled off his hat to run his hand across his forehead. He didn’t understand it. He went back and stood next to Tess and tried to figure out what she was pointing. Both dogs were quick to honor any shape that might be another dog on point. He got down on one knee and saw the gravestones. Tess and Night were absorbed in distant knowledge backing the grave markers just as they would back a shopping bag blown in off the highway. Hank shouted at them and gestured harshly with the gun. “Get out!” he shouted, and the dogs cowered off and watched him. He got back on the horse and pointed out ahead. The dogs resumed, a little slow at first.

  Hank felt the blood recede from his face. There had been a community of tenant farmers here raising shade tobacco. The town was gone, the tobacco was gone, the church burned. Except for the graves, the people were altogether gone. Maybe they have heirs, he thought angrily, maybe they have rich sons of bitches living in Boca Raton who’d never fuss if I threw those headstones away.

  There was a clear little swamp a mile or so farther on. It was circled by trees, and lily pads floated with their entirely green stems clearly visible for many feet underneath them. Quail had come out to feed, and the dogs pinned them down forty yards south of it. Hank got off his horse once again, prepared his gun, and walked the birds up. When the quail roared off, he dropped two of them. The rest of the covey made a whirling crescent into the trees. He tried to watch them down, at the same time calling Tess and Night in to retrieve—“Dead birds! Dead, Night; dead, Tess”—and, as they worked close, coursing over the ground the birds had fallen on, “Dayyyid” and “Dead!” when Tess picked one up and a triumphant “Dead!” when Night found the other and the two dogs brought them to hand.

  He was sure he had watched the covey down fairly well when the bell began to ring, carrying pure as light turned to sound in the still trees. He stopped and gave it a listen. The music resumed, and he felt its pressure, a pressure as irritating as a command to begin dancing. He climbed on the horse and reined him toward the down covey.

  Then the bell came again, this time without any of the music, like a probe or like the light that went on in his office, in the roar of the air conditioner that meant “Customer.” I don’t want this customer, he thought. He rode toward the swamp and felt a wave of courage that quickly receded. He wheeled the horse and yelled, “Tess, Night! Come here to me!” It’s nearly dark, he thought, too dark to see that ditch. The dogs shot past, and in a moment he could not see them. He broke the horse into a rack until he saw the brush irrigated by the runoff. He pricked the horse lightly to set him up, released him, and felt as if he were going straight to heaven. The horse went down into the ditch, and Hank was knocked cold by impact as the horse scrambled without him, scared backward forty feet, and then turning to run home, dragging the broken reins.

  He woke up in the ambulance. The driver was straight ahead of him, a black silhouette. The paramedic was next to him, a woman with a braid pinned up under a cap. Beside Hank was another figure, entirely covered.

  “Don’t drop me off first,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but it is important that we drop you off first.”

  “I don’t want to be dropped off first,” said Hank.

  “You we drop first,” the woman said in a voice that had turned ugly.

  City lights licked across the two in front. They arose, penetrated the windshield, and passed. Hank tried to anticipate them, and once when the ambulance was flooded at a stoplight, he looked over.

  They wheeled him inside. He was in a room that sounded like a lavatory. People walked around him. When a doctor put a needle in his arm, he explained, “I really didn’t want them to drop me off first.” And then it came, a miracle of boredom.

  PARTNERS

  When Dean Robinson finally made partner at his law firm, his life changed. Edward Hooper, one of the older partners, did everything he could to make the transition easier. Between conferences and dinners with clients, the days of free-associating in his office seemed over for Dean. “You’re certainly making this painless,” Dean told him one hot afternoon when a suffocating breeze moved from the high plains through the city. Dean had felt he ought to say something.

  “An older lawyer did the same for me,” said Edward.

  “I hope I can thank you in some way,” said Dean, concealing his boredom.

  “I thanked mine,” said Edward, “by being the first to identify his senility and showing him the door.” Dean perked up at this.

  Edward Hooper’s caution and scholarly style were not Dean’s. Yet Dean found himself studying him, noting the three-piece suits, the circular tortoiseshell glasses, and the bulge of chest under the vest. It fascinated Dean that Edward’s one escape from his work was not golf, not sailing or tennis, but the most vigorous kind of duck hunting, reclined in a layout boat with a hundred decoys, a shotgun in his arms, and the spray turning to sleet around him. At Christmas, Edward gave the secretaries duck he smoked himself, inedible gifts they threw out every year.

  Friday evening, Edward caught Dean in the elevator. Edward wore a blue suit with a dark blue silver-striped tie, and instead of a briefcase he carried an old-fashioned brown accordion file with a string tie. He had a way of shooting his cuff to see his watch that seemed like a thrown punch. One side of the elevator was glass, affording a view of the edge of the city and the prairie beyond. Dean could imagine the aboriginal hunters out there and, in fact, he could almost picture Edward among them, avuncular, restrained, and armed with an atlatl. Grooved concrete shot past as they descended in the glass elevator. The door opened on a foyer almost a story and a half high with immense trees growing out of holes in the lobby floor. By this arrangement, award-winning architects had made the humans passing through denizens rather than occupants.

  “Here’s the deal,” said Edward, turning in the foyer to genially stop Dean’s progress. He ha
d a way of fingering the edge of Dean’s coat as he thought. “One of my clients wants me for dinner tomorrow night. Terry Turpin. He’s not much fun, and I’d like you to walk through this with me. He’s the biggest client we’ve got.” Edward looked up from Dean’s lapels to meet his eyes with his usual expression, which hovered between seriousness and mischief. For some reason, Dean felt something passing from Edward to himself.

  “I see you massaging this fellow’s great big ego,” Edward went on, “forming a bond. It’s shit work, but it’s unique to our trade.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Dean, thinking of his ticket to elevated parking. It occurred to him that being the only unmarried partner was part of his selection, part of his utility as a partner. But being singled out by the canny and dignified Edward Hooper was a pleasure in itself. Actually, it didn’t make sense.

  * * *

  —

  Dean left his car in town on Saturday night and rode out to the Turpins’ with Edward. The house was of recent construction, standing down in a cottonwood grove where the original ranch house must have been; the lawn was carefully mowed and clipped around the old horse corral and plank loading chute. There was a deep groove in the even grass where thousands of cattle had gone to slaughter in simpler times. Dean and Edward stepped up to the door, Edward giving Dean a little thrust of the elbow as though to say Here goes and knocked. He had a lofty way of treating important moments as gags.

  There came the barking of deep-throated dogs, and the door parted, then opened, fully revealing Gay Nell Turpin. She flung her arms around Dean, then held him away from her. She was an old girlfriend, actually his favorite one, and this hearty greeting concealed some lurid history, an old trick of well-situated women.