Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Neville Junior worried him. The boy had been raised by a television set, as his father readily admitted. It was bad enough that his language and attitudes came directly from shows he’d seen; he seemed to have found sufficient like-minded companions to keep him from questioning his way of life. What was unsettling was that long after his age would have made it appropriate, Neville Junior had failed to show any interest in girls. As the nice-looking son of a bank president, he should have been cutting a wide swath. Girls liked him and came around to watch TV with him; girls that sent his father’s mind meandering in ways inappropriate to his age and state. His frequent attempts to catch his son in flagrante delicto resulted only in an invitation to join the couple innocently watching the late movie. It was not so many years ago that he himself had boogied under the strobes of big cow-town discos where today’s dowagers once wriggled in precopulatory abandon.

  For a banker, Neville Senior was remarkably free of malice, and his great wish was to overcome the gap of loneliness that lay between him and his heir. It’s possible that he imagined that bringing Neville Junior into the randy orbit that seemed to include everyone but Neville Junior would have the effect of giving the two some ordinary common ground upon which they could begin to talk like a couple of guys. Boning up on TV Guide, as he had once done, proved futile. Real watchers like Neville Junior had a subtle language not easily penetrated by poseurs. He just stared when his father asked if there was anything good on tonight.

  “Neville,” said the father, “two things: I wish I’d been a better parent.”

  “You’ve been all right. Don’t sweat it. What’s the second?”

  “Sex,” barked Senior. “Why aren’t you interested in sex?”

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dad. Virginity is no disgrace. At least it keeps you from weighing sixty pounds and being covered with giant sores.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “It only has to be that way once, and you can count me out.”

  “It should be seen as a gift, a gift of love and joy that perpetuates the race.”

  “Perpetuates the race? Are people still in favor of that?”

  “I don’t know how you’ve become so cynical at your age.”

  “You can’t accept that I’m happy, can you?”

  “Are you?”

  “Considering the cards I’ve been dealt.”

  “Have they been such bad cards?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I guess I can’t.”

  “Just because you named me after yourself doesn’t mean I have to turn out like you.”

  “No, I suppose that wouldn’t be any good.”

  “I’m not saying that. Different isn’t good or bad. It’s different is all it is. Get it?”

  “You could change your name. I’d understand.”

  “I’ve thought about it. I’ve never thought of myself as Neville.”

  “What have you thought of yourself as?”

  “Karl.”

  “With a C?”

  “With a K.”

  Much later, when Neville Senior had decided that life was not worth living, he would give this Karl-with-a-K idea a final thought.

  * * *

  —

  From his suite at the Northern Hotel, as a summer sun descended on city streets blue with heat, pressed in upon by angular storefronts and shade-hunting pedestrians, Neville Senior called an escort service. Given that the city police had been recruiting undercover officers lately to nab concupiscent johns, this was risky business, but Neville Senior believed the scrutiny was directed at streetwalkers, and so he felt relatively safe, if a bit frightened. Anyway, when it came to your own flesh and blood, risk was unavoidable. He had cash, plenty of it, and he intended to buy Neville Junior out of his dubious virginity and joyless view of things. More than that, he wanted to buy him the high road to the human race, which in his view was bound together more by fornication than anything else. In his life, courtship was fornication, life was fornication, and grief revealed but one road back to the light of day and that was fornication. The only answer to life’s complexity: fornication.

  Dulcie arrived straight from her shift at the optometrist, and Neville Senior welcomed her in his most courtly manner. “Came right away,” she said. “Two saps in the waiting room with drops in their eyes.” She seemed taken aback at first by his nervousness and perhaps foresaw the long hard work sometimes necessary to overcome the anxiety of skittish customers for the sake of the almighty dollar. Bummer.

  Dulcie kept her purse beside her; the cell phone inside it required only a single key to be pressed and her mission would be accomplished, either by an arrest or the heading off of an assault. It seemed she would have to buy time to size up the transaction. Some adjustment of plan was required because unexpectedly this geezer had a plan of his own. After a long day at the optometrist’s shop, Dulcie was glad to learn that the heavy lifting would come later, but at the very least they had old man Neville for procuring. That it was for his own flesh and blood was hardly extenuating, and one way or another she’d get paid. Anything to get away from dreary folks reading the acuity chart: “P…E…C…F…D—I can’t read that last line…” Of course you can’t, you need glasses!

  He gazed at Dulcie with admiration: at first lustful but, when she noticed, adding avuncular overtones and calling her “dear” so as to assure her he wasn’t getting ready to whip it out. She might have been touched if she’d known this modest transaction would later in the year result in his suicide—though it was not easy to say what might get through to Dulcie Jones, barrel racer.

  * * *

  —

  While Dulcie went off to spruce up in the bunkhouse, Orval gave Neville a tour of the place, apologizing for the disorder of the kitchen as they passed through. “It takes a heap of living to make a home a heap!” he said merrily. Neville said he bet Orval had a million more where that one came from. When they were out of earshot, Orval said, “You’re kind of a smart-ass, aren’t you?” He got right in Neville’s face.

  “If you say so,” Neville said, as though trying to help Orval in the best way he knew how. Orval was thinking of slugging him and stared at the spot on Neville’s face where he imagined landing the blow. Overcoming the temptation, he asked how Neville had met his daughter, making it clear by his tone that he was sorry it had ever happened. He’d been counting on a cowboy or someone in law enforcement.

  “My dad introduced us. She’s going to be our new vice president. He wanted me to get to know her on behalf of our business.”

  “Vice president? Vice president of what?”

  “Of our bank, Southeast and Central Montana Bank. Member FDIC.”

  “What about the optometrist?”

  Neville remembered her looking without glasses at the road map that morning.

  “I guess she doesn’t need him,” he said, suddenly wondering if Dulcie was farsighted. He might not feel as safe with her at the wheel. He’d been so relaxed watching his day go by in the rearview mirror, never going rigid against his seat belt as he did whenever he distrusted the driver. He so looked forward to what he expected from Dulcie, and yet he felt the responsibility of considering her as a candidate for vice president of the bank. He realized he didn’t quite understand the situation but knew he would do anything in the world for his father, to whom he helplessly longed to reach out. But this was different. The bank had always been kept from him, so that his father’s asking him to do something connected with his livelihood suggested a change.

  “You want to drive the tractor?” Orval asked. Neville understood he was being humored, but he hadn’t expected Orval to go rural on him this quickly.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, what would interest you, Neville?”

  “You got any archaeological sites?”

  Orval went outside, started the tractor, and backed it up to the loaded manure spreader. It was clear he had decided to go about his business, but Ne
ville followed him innocently as he drove out into the pasture and then activated the PTO, showering the youth with turds. Neville saw right through his apologies and walked back to the house, looking for Dulcie. He had a mean-spirited impulse to tell her that her father would not be welcome at the bank. But all that was tempered by the attraction he felt for her, aroused by her various provocations and double entendres. His girlfriends had always acted as if being available was enough. It wasn’t; he required much more. Neville enjoyed this sense that Dulcie was after him like a bad dog, and knowing she was just trying to get the vice president’s job made it all oddly spicy.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, when he caught up to her in the yard.

  “I’m not too sure.”

  “I think it’s time we got us a room.”

  “Amen to that,” Neville said, with a look of terror. She was flicking at him with the backs of her fingernails, loosening some of the debris.

  Neville leaned well out the window as he drove to wave goodbye. Orval’s return wave seemed to say Good riddance and confused Neville, who thought they’d hit it off.

  Once out of the driveway, Dulcie made the gravel swirl under the tires. They were heading now for the Absarokee cutoff; she told Neville she had a good spot in mind. She held his gaze until he said, “Watch the road.”

  They wound along well-kept hay meadows, tractors in the field spitting out bales, swathers moving into the dark green alfalfa and laying it over in a pale-green band close behind the standing grass. The road flattened, and in its first broad turn was the small, tired motel. Dulcie pulled up in front of the office. As she got out of the car, Neville asked her to be sure there was TV. A crevice of irritation appeared briefly between her eyebrows and she turned to the entrance. When she came back, she climbed in brusquely and threw the key on the seat. She gave him a long look and said, “Room seven,” allowing her tongue to hang out slightly. Neville gave a small bounce to show he understood.

  When the door closed behind them, they surveyed the room, its brown pipe bed, plastic curtains, and gloomy prints of the Custer massacre and the Blizzard of ’86. Dulcie took it all in, and when she turned to Neville he was holding up one of his new condoms. “Americans are coming together to stamp out HIV,” he said, with touching sincerity. “Can you help me with this?”

  Not at all self-conscious, Neville stripped and stood naked next to his pile of clothes, instantly erect. Dulcie lit a cigarette and knelt in front of him. There was nothing to do but apply the condom. Cigarette held in the V of her teeth, squinting against the rising smoke, she rolled it on deftly. “Now,” she said, standing up, “I’ll just go into the bathroom and get ready.”

  “Take your time,” said Neville, moving instinctively for the television. As he watched it, she opened the door to the bathroom for an instant and took his picture.

  “Memories.” She smiled and closed the door again, wondering what the cops would make of a guy with nothing but a channel changer and a rubber. She created a bit of noise with the shower curtain, the faucets, and a cupboard door. It seemed like enough. She stood stock-still and listened. She thought someone else was in the room; then the realization that it was only the television made her doubt her sexuality.

  Downhill Racer. Neville was Robert Redford. He locked his knees together and bent into every slalom, concentrating so thoroughly that the condom fell off. After a while, he began to miss Dulcie and rapped politely on the bathroom door. Neville wasn’t stupid. He smiled to himself; he knew she wasn’t in there. He got dressed and went outside. The bathroom window was wide open, the curtains hanging against the wall of the motel. The car was gone. He returned to the room and tried to kick the condom across the rug, but it just rolled up under his foot. He carried it dangling to the wastebasket and then stretched out to enjoy something reliable. Even the light of the TV flashing on the ceiling seemed pleasant. During the slow parts of the movie, he luxuriated in his relief. He couldn’t fathom Dulcie and he wasn’t even going to try. Nevertheless, out of fealty to his father, he would confide his intuition that she’d make a poor vice president. It was not out of a sense of having been betrayed but the unseemly picture of a vice president crawling out the window of a cheap motel. In this, he was well brought up, and he loved his poor, confused papa.

  Dulcie was at the station house turning in her expense receipts, principally gas, motel, along with film, when they brought Neville Senior in for booking. He stared at her as they tugged him past. The cop at the desk didn’t even look up as he stapled her chits to a large sheet. So Dulcie in effect spoke to no one when she said, “He bonds out, he settles, the beat goes on.”

  When Neville Senior dragged himself through the front door that night, Neville Junior was there to console him, having heard all about what had happened to his father on the local news. They fell into each other’s arms. Senior’s heart was overflowing, while Junior felt he was in a school play in which he had memorized the lines without knowing what he was saying.

  Finally, Senior spoke. “I was lonely.”

  “Mom’s dead,” said Junior, in his odd blank way.

  Neville’s father explained his scheme so that his son at least would know that he hadn’t been on some unseemly quest for his own carnal pleasure.

  He had offered Neville Junior numerous pets in the years since his mother’s death, hoping that greater familiarity with animals might help him understand his father’s urges—and expenses!—but that had come to nothing, as Neville Junior found animals to be little more than a stream of unpredictable images and therefore unsettling. The dog was given away, the cat was given away, and the hamster bit an extension cord and was electrocuted.

  “That Dulcie sure is mean!” he now cried. “It’s just not right, Dad. I’m going to pay her back.”

  When the newspaper published his name as a patron of whores, Neville Senior lost his job at the bank. We’ve all been there, his friends and former colleagues told him, but they hadn’t, nor had they forfeited their homes to their own bank as he had, though he was allowed to keep the rather fussy furniture his late wife had chosen. In time, that too would be sold and the funds applied to a rental house on the south side of town, where the homeless walking on their battered patch of lawn reminded the Smithwicks of just what might be next.

  Senior’s friends had gotten him a job as assistant greenskeeper at his old golf club, where the summer heat frequently laid him low as he tried to perform work for which he had little training. He was one of eighteen assistants, and when the chief learned the bunker crew on which he’d placed Neville Senior was ridiculing him with requests for car loans or mortgages, he reassigned him to moisture sampling, which allowed Senior to wander the golf course alone with probe and notebook under a hard prairie sun. The greenskeeper himself took subtle pleasure in lording it over someone who had fallen through the invisible ceiling that had separated them for so many years. A former caddie replaced by electric carts, he understood perhaps better than Neville Senior ever had how perilous is all employment, though as a workingman it was unlikely society would bother to take away his job for consorting with prostitutes, as there wasn’t enough class separation to produce a stirring fall. In many places, whores were now “sex workers” moving freely between golf courses and no-tell motels like any other independent contractors.

  Neville Junior’s habits remained little changed, except that because of the danger of muggings his former acquaintances were reluctant to visit him. Since his father had not shared his plan to commit suicide, there was no reason for Neville Junior to imagine a time when the television would be shut off and he would have to bestir himself should he wish to eat or be sheltered from the weather. His father’s decision was based equally on his failed career and his now-accepted inability to communicate with his son at any level.

  He made his departure as uneventful as possible. For two straight days he watched shows with his only child, including uplifting sitcoms, sitcom reruns, and sitcom pilots that were seeing th
e light of day that very night. An agnostic, he retained a faint hope, magnified by overpowering loneliness, of meeting his late wife, and that gave him the courage—indeed, a certain merry determination—to gas himself in the garage. Before he went there to seal the windows and start the car, he needed final confirmation, and so he returned to the living room, whose shabbiness was emphasized by the prissy furniture. Neville Junior’s head was outlined against the square of light of the television. “Tomorrow, I’ll be gone,” he said, but his son didn’t hear him. “Goodbye, Karl.” The consequences began: the discovery of the body, the unattended funeral, the eviction of Neville Junior, and the loss of all things familiar to him, including those he cared for most: the smell of lilacs and spring perennials filling the air, the sounds of pickup baseball in the park a few blocks away, and television.

  Dulcie Jones’s days were numbered.

  * * *

  —

  On the fourth of July, four months after the passing of Neville Senior, Orval looked up the dirt road in front of his house toward the Cheyenne car garden, the crooked line of telephone poles, the mud puddles mirroring blue sky and thundercloud silhouettes, the watchful hawk in the chokecherry thicket, and saw a willowy man in old clothes coming toward him, a man whose bounding gait marked him as younger than his apparent circumstances might have suggested. Orval sensed he was coming to see him, and indeed he was. There was no reason for him to know that this was Neville Junior, or to know what brought young Neville to his ranch.

  He removed his hat rather formally on arrival at Orval’s porch, the hair under it looking wet and plastered down close around his small skull, while Orval eyed him suspiciously from his rocking chair. Neville’s well-cared-for teeth gleamed through his beard, whose black bristles falsely suggested a hard life. “Mister,” he said, “I’m in a bad way. Throwed a rod here a mile or two back and didn’t have the do-re-mi to get it fixed. I need a job.” Neville had the Appalachian accent routinely heard in westerns down pat.