Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  He took her in his arms and let the passengers find a way around them. He didn’t quite understand his present desperation. His excitement to show her his house in the country, to introduce her to his daughter and grandchildren, had coalesced into uncomfortable urgency. The vacuum filled with a roar.

  Madeleine had not been there long before she discovered Homer’s neglect of the flower beds around the house, not that they amounted to much, nearly odorless rugosa roses for the most part. But she was not happy about the weeds in the hard ground that resisted her arthritic fingers, or about the signs of careless pruning. She could see that this was not anything Homer cared about. “I care about it,” he protested, “but I’m not a gardener.”

  “We’ve got to get some water on them before I can do a single thing.”

  Homer tried to think of the implied time span of an improved rose bed and was apprehensive. “You see this,” he said, indicating a faint ditch running around the perimeter of the beds. “This is how they were always irrigated. But it’s a bit of trouble.”

  “How much trouble can it be?”

  “You have to go up the river and turn some water into the ditch.”

  “And after that you’ve got water down here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s the problem? These roses are being tortured, and I can’t get the weeds out of the ground.”

  Madeleine walked ahead of Homer as the trail progressed along the river and up through a chokecherry thicket. He was fascinated at her forthright progress, given that she did not know the way. He slyly let her lead them down a false trail that ended at the bottom of an unscalable scree slope, fine black rock shining in mountain light. She smiled to acknowledge that he probably knew the route better. At length they reached the headgate, an old concrete structure with 1927 scratched into the cement. In the bend of the river, it diverted water to ranches in the area, and in its steel throat snowmelt gurgled off to the east to meet with crops and fertilizer. Homer’s place was not a ranch, but it still retained its small right to a share of water, just enough for a garden and a few trees. He seldom used it, but when he did he usually got a call from one of the neighbors who also used the ditch regularly and invariably addressed him as “Old-Timer.”

  Downstream from the headgate, another ditch branched off, back toward Homer’s place; he pulled the metal slide that held back the water, and a small stream headed for his house. “This will be nice for the trees and flower beds.”

  “If it softens the ground, I can do something with it,” said Madeleine. “You’ve just let things go, Homer. It looks like a transient has been squatting there.”

  “Madeleine, I’m doing something about it right now.”

  “How long will it take for the water to get there?”

  “Not long.” Actually, he didn’t know.

  Homer went back to the headgate, followed by Madeleine, hurrying along the path. He thought of that awful word “spry” and wondered why he imagined he might be exempt. “Spry” was supposed to be positive. It was awful.

  A truck stopped on the road above them, a blue-heeler dog in back and rolled fabric irrigation dams piled against the cab. By the sound of the truck door being slammed, Homer knew this would not be a friendly visit. But he continued his adjustments, meant to preserve the water level of the ditch even after he had extracted his small share for the garden. Madeleine was looking up at the truck as its driver wheeled around the tailgate and started toward them. This was Homer’s neighbor, Wayne Rafter, who raised cattle and alfalfa on the bench downstream. Wayne had a round red face, surmounted by a rust-brown cowboy hat with a ring of stain above its brim. He wore irrigating boots rolled down to the knee and carried a shovel over his shoulder.

  He said, “What are you doing with the water?”

  “We’re sending a little down to the garden.”

  “You need to leave my headgate alone. You’ve got the whole valley screwed up.”

  Madeleine said, “That little trickle?”

  “Stay out of this,” said Wayne, without looking at her at first. When he did, he said, “What’s wrong with your face?”

  Homer answered that she’d had a stroke and was immediately sorry he’d said anything at all. Wayne dismissed the explanation, saying that a lot of folks had had strokes. Homer felt a pressure he might not have if Madeleine had not been looking on.

  “I do have a small water right attached to my property.”

  “Very small.”

  “But it is a right.”

  “Not if you don’t use it. It reverts.”

  “I’m using it now.”

  “You’re in the goddamn way.”

  “I wonder if we should get a ditch rider to allocate this water and not argue about it.”

  “Do you have any idea what that costs?”

  “It might be necessary if you prevent me from taking my water. Shall I arrange it?”

  “No, don’t ‘arrange it,’ Old-Timer. Just play with the water if that’s what turns you on.”

  At this, Wayne marched off with his shovel over his shoulder, and soon his truck was gone, the dog barking and running around in the bed.

  Madeleine said, “Wow.”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that how they are?”

  “Can be.” Homer’s insouciance concealed his humiliation.

  Madeleine stared around herself into immediate space. Homer knew the remark about her face must have stung. Long ago, she’d been so careful about her looks, a little fashion driven for Homer’s taste but always ready to be seen, always lovely. They started back toward the house quite depleted by the encounter.

  “Harry was truculent,” said Madeleine. They found candles and Madeleine made their meal, a nice salad and cold cucumber soup, good for a warm summer evening. “But I wouldn’t say abusive. Abusive is when they focus on you. He just raged around, and whatever he might have done to me he did equally to the furniture.”

  In the sixties when, for whatever reason, CeeCee had started tying a scarf around her head, she acquired a reputation for heightened spirituality among acquaintances who didn’t realize she was drunk. For them, she never passed out but was “transported.” Part of this was abetted by CeeCee as an apparatus for her illness, and her conversation was increasingly ethereal as she discovered the allure of non sequiturs. Their neighbor, Dick Chalfonte, a thoracic surgeon, was enchanted, and Homer suspected that days spent out of town—some surreptitiously with Madeleine—allowed Chalfonte’s fascination to be transmuted into something more tangible. Homer didn’t like this thought at all but, because of Madeleine and his own fair-mindedness, found indignation unavailing; anyway there was some consolation if Dick Chalfonte was able to make contact with a soul drifting slowly to another world. It might have been that Homer wished he would take her away altogether, but of course this was unthinkable.

  Madeleine rolled her napkin ring from side to side with her forefinger. “We used to think it was an affectation when you wore cowboy boots with your suit.”

  “And my Turnbull and Asser shirts. Of course it was an affectation. What else does a young man have? I was trying to make a name for myself, and in that town there didn’t seem to be many possibilities left. Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”

  “Harry and me, I guess. Harry thought you were a phony.”

  At night, they talked about poetry. Madeleine had a particular aversion to the poet H. D., whom she called “I. E.” for what she thought was a perverse inability to say anything plainly. Homer feebly recited Wordsworth, to which Madeleine remarked she greatly looked forward to getting, spending, and laying waste her powers. And when Homer remarked that General Wolfe would have preferred to have written “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” than to have conquered Quebec, she urged him to stop thinking of poetry in terms of its public currency.

  “I just read the funnies,” said Homer.

  They had twin beds with a reading lamp and nightstand between them, an easy distance for holding h
ands. The lamp could be adjusted so that Madeleine could read while Homer drifted off. She looked up from her book.

  “Homer, are you afraid to die?”

  “No.”

  “The Day of Judgment?”

  “Nope.”

  “Homer, are you afraid of anything?”

  “I’m afraid of rigor mortis.”

  She chuckled—“But exactly”—and went back to her book. It soon dropped to her lap. He watched her until she fell asleep, then slipped his hand free of hers and turned off the lamp.

  Homer’s daughter, Cecile—named for her mother, though unlike her in every way and never called CeeCee—phoned at about ten o’clock at night. Madeleine was asleep and Homer was setting out mousetraps, one for the cereal cupboard, one under the stove, and one in front of the refrigerator he hoped he would remember when he was barefoot in the morning. He didn’t like this, but the humane traps were too humane to catch mice. He rotated the geranium on the windowsill to equalize its sun exposure and watched the grosbeaks and juncos scouring the ground under the empty feeder. Hawks sometimes killed juncos at the feeder; while nature might be red in tooth and claw, Homer worried about being complicitous in the death of the juncos. In fact, he’d twice moved the feeder to give the songbirds better cover from overhead but underestimated the hawks’ capacity for swooping.

  “Father, I’m having a yard sale tomorrow morning at ten. Can you help me look after the kids?”

  “Cecile, I’m not so good at that.” His tone was pleading.

  “You’ll be fine. They like you.” This was a command. In fact, the children were quite distant with him. He thought he detected acid in her next remark. “You can bring your friend to help you.” Cecile knew Madeleine’s name perfectly well.

  Homer was afraid of children. He could barely remember being one, and he really didn’t understand them or why they acted as they did. He certainly didn’t dislike children, but he found them emotionally opaque except when tribal or violent. Actually, he longed for Cecile’s children to like him. But he was not always ready to test the idea, and they had rather peered at Madeleine on meeting her.

  “You’ve got to do this. What’s-her-name can help me with the sale. She’d just scare the kids. They don’t know her.”

  “Why are you having a yard sale at all? Your furnishings are sparse now.”

  “Not sparse enough, buddy, not by a long shot. So get it together, Grandpa, and head on down here.”

  Cecile was always lightening her load, paring away at things, fixing a car that should have been traded, and he knew why: she was preparing for flight. She was readying herself for the moment when her life would change and she could escape. She had lost all her former levity, no longer introducing her father as a “forensic barber,” and had recently had her breasts dramatically augmented, a move he viewed as panic inspired by those magazines at the checkout.

  He helped Cecile prepare the yard sale while Judy and Ralph, seven and two, still slept inside and Madeleine waited for them to awaken. Cecile, a rag tied around her head, grunted enthusiastically as they hefted the NordicTrack to the sidewalk. A low egg-yolk-yellow September sunrise was stretching shadows across the street to lawns with uncollected morning newspapers. On the pavement an old steel porch glider rested, his lower back pain reminding Homer how it had arrived. Also: a bread box, an early microwave, percolator, a run of National Geographics, a yoga mat, a cactus, a birdcage, several of Cecile’s college paintings in the once-universal style of Georges Rouault, a child’s English saddle with jodhpurs and boots (Cecile’s), scenic place mats, a standing ashtray with a lever that flushed the butts and ashes down a trapdoor, a silhouette of an Indian chief made with bullets, several rugs, a Monopoly game, a Parcheesi set, a Mille Bornes set, a double-deck card holder for canasta, a checkerboard—these last worried Homer, as it was hard to imagine Cecile without her games—incidental venetian blinds, canoe paddles, a Dutch oven, and a mosquito net. Here we hit the strata of the ex-husband, where lay the heart of the yard sale, as they announced Cecile’s single status: commemorative whiskey bottles from Old Fitzgerald, I. W. Harper, Jim Beam, Ezra Brooks, and others, depicting Man o’ War, a largemouth bass, a fire truck, Custer’s Last Stand, the OK Corral, Elvis, W. C. Fields, a cat-and-dog, a rooster, a turtle, an Indian with a tomahawk on a white horse, a Florida gator, a black rotary phone, the Run for the Roses, a Siamese cat, a kachina doll, the Wyoming bronco, a raccoon, the Chevy Bel Air, Ducks Unlimited, Van Gogh’s Old Peasant, and there was also a set of train-related decanters: engine, mail car, caboose, water tower. Homer found it dizzying, but Cecile assured him it would be the big draw, and she was right. One customer drove from Yakima, Washington, for the rotary phone, while a few more, drawn by the bottles, bought other items, mostly small cheap things to satisfy the urge for a transaction aroused by the bottles.

  Cecile wanted to stay outside to guard the merchandise, so Homer waited in the living room with Madeleine for the children to awaken. They felt so apprehensive they hardly spoke, and Homer looked around at the room as if through Madeleine’s eyes. Only the front window admitted much light, enough to bleach the rug but not enough to lend any cheer. The living room of a single mother, he reflected, is a sad room. This one, containing so many things CeeCee had sent from Rhode Island, hoping for a response from Cecile, was especially sad. Even the old Aeolian player piano seemed to refer to cheerful times long gone by. The furniture was sad, the curtains were sad, the strewn toys were sad, the chandelier was utterly sad, but the china cabinet with its unemployed crockery was tragic. Over the fireplace there was still a color-saturated photograph of Dean, Cecile’s ex-husband, in a classic football pose: knee raised, twisting off the opposite foot, ball tucked under one arm, the other projected, fingers spread wide, barreling toward an imaginary tackler.

  “That’s my son-in-law.”

  “What became of him?” asked Madeleine.

  “Still in town. He’s a bit impaired. He had an accident. They’re separated.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  Homer thought. There was a long version and a short version. He elected the latter. “He fell off a building.”

  “Good grief. But he’s out of the picture?”

  “Sort of,” said Homer, with meaning.

  “I see. Once they’re in the picture,” said Madeleine, “they’re never really out of the picture, are they?”

  How could my daughter have all this weight on her shoulders? His view might have been colored by his relationship with his grandchildren. He tried hard to charm and amuse them despite their lack of fondness for him. Still, he gave Cecile credit for an outstanding job: Judy and Ralph were lively, curious, and confident. Also, they were calm. Judy was even a bit lofty. And why should they know him better? He never seemed to know exactly where he was, and the children could sense it. Ralph once asked him if he was an alien.

  “Why are you here, Grandpa?” Judy stood in her doorway, wearing her pajamas. She had chosen not to see Madeleine at Homer’s side, another alien. Homer had imagined a situation in which the children adored her on sight.

  “I’m looking after you and Ralph while your mom has her yard sale.” She was small with an oval face and burning black eyes. Homer’s attempt to explain things had a whiny edge that he could tell annoyed her. Ralph wasn’t paying any mind and looked dopey. “Can you say hello to Madeleine?” He wondered whether he should have introduced her as Mrs. Hall, but he was somewhat jealous of Harry Hall, long dead though he may have been.

  “Me and Ralph are against the yard sale.”

  “Of course you are,” said Madeleine merrily. “I dislike change, too. But how can we stop it?”

  Judy stared at her as though she were nuts.

  Ralph stood at Judy’s side, still half asleep. To Homer, he resembled all two-year-old boys, though not nearly so fat as some. He had dark hair as his father once had, and it stuck out in a burr. He stared at Judy, awaiting her leadership. Then, as it was not forthcoming, he
wandered to Madeleine and reached for her hand.

  “Well, how does breakfast sound?” asked Homer, immediately recognizing the absurdity of the question, as breakfast had no sound. The new acuteness about diction, with Madeleine listening, produced this odd thought.

  “Cheerios for me. Cap’n Crunch for him. Honey on mine. Sugar on his. The honey bear is over the toaster. It’s on a paper towel because it was sticking to everything. The bowls are still in the washer. We don’t use napkins, we use paper towels. Regular spoons, not soup spoons, and not too much milk.”

  It didn’t take much for this to seem like drudgery. He was displeased by the cereal rustling from the waxed-paper liners of the boxes into the bowls. It looked like packing material. “You don’t have to sit here and stare at us,” said Judy pleasantly. Madeleine strayed back out to the yard sale, doubtless to warm things up with Cecile. Homer watched her go.

  “I didn’t mean to stare. My thoughts were wandering.”

  “Do you find us obnoxious?” Judy asked.

  Now Homer was wide awake and attentive. “Judy, how can you ask such a thing?”

  This was too plaintive. Her gaze darted over his face. “You seemed off in the clouds, Grandpa, probably thinking about your new girlfriend.”

  “It doesn’t mean I find you obnoxious.”

  Ralph poured his cereal into Homer’s lap and, when Homer jumped up, started wailing as if his grandfather meant to attack him. In a moment, while Homer knelt on the floor, a rag in his hand and an icy feeling in his crotch from the milk, Cecile came in with no particular look of concern, quieting Ralph and organizing another bowl of cereal. She pushed Ralph’s chair very close to the edge of the table, which seemed to make his movements less random. Ralph just stared into his bowl, unsure what to do with it. Homer got up indecisively. Cecile said, “Your new friend is working the crowd.” Ralph waved his spoon jubilantly and then looked around to gauge its effect.