Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “I don’t know,” Louise said.

  I made good time on the pine flats north of the Snowmobile Capital of the World, and I wondered what it would be like to live in a town that was the world capital of a mechanical gadget. In Rigby, we had seen a homely museum dedicated to Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, which featured displays of Farnsworth’s funky assemblages of tubes and wire and, apparently, coat hangers—stuff his wife was probably always attempting to throw out, a goal Louise supported. “Too bad Mama Farnsworth didn’t take all that stuff to the dump,” she said.

  We had the highway to ourselves, and clouds of stars seemed to rise up from the wilderness, lighting the treetops in a cool fire. Slowly, the canyon closed in around us, and we entered its dark flowing space.

  The idyll ended just past the ranger station at Black Butte, when a car pulled in behind us abruptly enough that I checked my speed to see if I was violating the limit, but I wasn’t. When the car was very close, the driver shifted his lights to a high beam so intense that I could see our shadows on the dashboard, my knuckles on the steering wheel glaringly white. I was nearly blinded by my own mirrors, which I hastily adjusted.

  I said, “What’s with this guy?”

  “Just let him pass.”

  “I don’t know that he wants to.”

  I softened my pressure on the gas pedal. I thought that by easing my already moderate speed I would politely suggest that he might go by me. I even hugged the shoulder, but he remained glued to our bumper. There was something about this that reminded me strongly of my feeling of failure back in Rigby, but I was unable to put my finger on it. Maybe it was the hot light of liquidation, in the glare of which all motives seem laid bare. I slowed down even more without managing to persuade my tormentor to pass. “Jesus,” Louise said. “Pull over.” In her accent, it came out as “Pull ovah.”

  I moved off to the side of the road slowly and predictably, but although I had stopped, the incandescent globes persisted in our rearview mirror. “This is very strange,” Louise said.

  “Shall I go back and speak to him?”

  After considering for a moment, she said, “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is not normal.”

  I put the car in gear again and pulled back onto the highway. The last reasonable thought I had was that I would proceed to Bozeman as though nothing were going on; once I was back in civilization my tormentor’s behavior would be visible to all, and I could, if necessary, simply drive to the police station with him in tow.

  Our blinding, syncopated journey continued another mile before we reached a sweeping eastward bend, closely guarded by the canyon walls. I knew that just beyond the bend there was a scenic pull-off, and that the approaching curve was acute enough for a small lead to put me out of sight. Whether or not this was plausible, I had no idea: I was exhilarated to be taking a firm hand in my own affairs. And a firm foot! As we entered the narrows, I pinned the accelerator, and we shot into the dark. Louise grabbed the front edges of her seat and stared at the road twisting in front of us. She emitted something like a moan, which I had heard before in a very different context. Halfway around the curve, my tormentor vanished behind us, and although my car seemed only marginally under control, the absence of blinding light was a relief as we fled into darkness.

  When we emerged and the road straightened, I turned off my lights. I was going so fast I felt light-headed, but the road was visible under the stars, and I was able to brake hard and drop down into the scenic turnoff. Seconds later, our new friend shot past, lights blazing into nowhere. He was clearly determined to catch us; his progress up the canyon was rapid and increasingly erratic. We watched in fascination until the lights suddenly jerked sideways, shining in white cones across the river, turned downward, then disappeared.

  I heard Louise say, in a tone of reasonable observation, “He went in.”

  I had an urgent feeling that took a long time to turn into words. “Did I do that?”

  She shook her head, and I pulled out onto the highway, my own headlights on once more. I drove in an odd, measured way, as if bound for an undesired destination, pulled along by something outside myself, thinking: Liquidation. We could see where he’d gone through the guardrail. We pulled over and got out. Any hope we might have had for the driver—and we shall be a long time determining if we had any—was gone the minute we looked down from the riverbank. The car was submerged, its lights still burning freakishly, illuminating a bulge of crystalline water, a boulder in the exuberance of a mountain watershed. Presently, the lights sank into blackness, and only the silver sheen of river in starlight remained.

  Louise cried, “I wish I could feel something!” And when I reached to comfort her she shoved me away. I had no choice but to climb back up to the roadway.

  After that, I could encounter Louise only by telephone. I told her he had a record as long as your arm. “It’s not enough!” she said. I called later to say that he was of German and Italian extraction. That proved equally unsatisfactory, and when I called to inform her that he hailed from Wisconsin she just hung up on me, this time for good.

  WEIGHT WATCHERS

  I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling clouds on the horizon. My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore. She seemed to know he’d be heading my way: I had been getting obesity-cure solicitations over the phone, my number doubtless supplied by her. I was tired of explaining to strangers that I wasn’t fat and of being told that a lot of fat people don’t realize how fat they are or wrongly assume that they can do something about it on their own, without paying.

  By the time my father got to me, he was well over Mom’s limit, and he wanted to go somewhere to eat as soon as he got off the plane. He was wearing a suit, rumpled from his travels, but his tie was in place: a protest against the rural surroundings. I took him on a little tour of the town—the rodeo grounds, the soccer field by the river, the old-car museum. He was happiest at the railroad shops, the smell of grease rising from a huge disabled locomotive, mechanics around it like Pygmies around an elephant. “When’s she go back to work?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. The mechanics didn’t look at him; they looked at one another. My father was undismayed: they assumed he was management, he said.

  At the diner, he asked if the chicken sandwich on the menu was actually made of chicken or was “some conglomerate.” A blank stare from the waitress. He ordered the sandwich. “I’ll just have to find out myself.” He insisted on buying our lunch, but when the cashier counted the change too rapidly for his taste he pushed it all back toward her and said, “Start over.”

  A man in a suit was an uncommon sight around here, and the responses to him indicated bafflement. In the afternoon, I rowed him down the river, still in the suit. He brought along some pie from the restaurant and asked me not to hit it with the oars; he held both hands over the pie as though to protect it.

  I made dinner at my house, a place he plainly considered a dump. He sat at the card table in a kind of prissy upright way that indicated a fear that the dump was about to rub off on him.

  “What’s this stuff?”

  “Tofu.”

  “Part of the alternate lifestyle?”

  “No, protein.”

  I hated to tee him up like this, but he couldn’t go home unless I got some weight off him.

  Dad owned a booking agency for corporate and private aircraft and had to act as if he could afford what he booked, but just watching him handle my thrift-shop silverware you could tell that he was and always would be a poor boy. He felt that he had clambered up a few rungs, and his big fear was that I was clambering back down. As a tradesman—I run a construction crew—I had clearly fallen below the social class to which my father thought I should belong. He believed that the fine education he’d paid for should have led me to gr
eater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts. I had friends who’d trained as historians, literary scholars, and philosophers who were now shoeing horses, wiring houses, and installing toilets. There’d been no suicides so far.

  My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism, except, of course, when it came to seducing his secretaries and most of my mother’s friends. He and my mother had been a glamorous couple early in their marriage; good looks, combined with assertive tastemaking, had put them on top in our shabby little city. Then I came along, and Mother thought I’d hung the moon. In Dad’s view, I put an end to the big romance. When I was a toddler, Dad caught Mom in the arms of our doctor on the screened back porch of the doctor’s fish camp. (Though there must have been some ambivalence about the event, because we continued to accept perch fillets from Dr. Hudson’s pond.) A few years later, when the high-school PE teacher caught the doctor atop his bride and shot him, Mother cried while Dad tilted his head to the side, elevated his eyebrows, and remarked, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

  As an only child, I was the sole recipient of my parents’ malignant parenting. Their drinking took place entirely in the evening and followed a rigid pattern: with each cocktail they became increasingly thin skinned, bristling at imaginary slights. When I was young, they occasionally tried to throw me into the middle of their fights (“I don’t believe this! She actually bit me!”), but I developed a suave detachment (“The Band-Aids are in the cupboard behind the towels”). In a real crisis, my mother brought in our neighbor Zoe Constantine for consolation, unaware that Pop had been making the two-backed beast with Zoe since I was in fifth grade—which happened to be the same year that my mother superglued Dad to the toilet seat, so perhaps she had her suspicions.

  I asked about her now, not without anxiety. “She’s in bed with a bottle and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” my father said. He was proud of this remark—I’d heard it before. Although my mother read a lot, she was never “in bed with a bottle.” Most likely, she was out playing golf with her friend Bernardine from the typing pool over at Ajax.

  My mother comes from a southern family, though she’s always lived in the North, and she has a tiny private income that has conditioned the dialogue since my childhood. Like a bazillion others of southern origin, she is a remote beneficiary of some Atlanta pharmacist’s ingenuity: Coca-Cola—not a big remittance but enough to fuel Dad’s rage against entitlement. That money had much to do with his determination to keep my mother within sight of smokestacks all her life. As did his belief that everything outside the Rust Belt was fake. To him, the American Dream was a 350-pound interior lineman from a bankrupt factory town with five-second forties, a long contract with the Colts, and a bonus for making the Pro Bowl.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, we went out to my job site, and I felt happy at once. Everything there seemed to buoy my spirits: the caked mud on the tires of a carpenter’s truck, the pleasant oily smell of tools, the cool wind coming through the sage on the hill, a screaming Skil saw already at work, the smell of newly cut two-by-fours, a nail gun going off in the basement, three thermoses on an unfinished ledge.

  The doctor who’d hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house excavated for a pond, and I had my Nicaraguan, Ángel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out. So far, all we’d found was mud and buffalo skulls, which Ángel was piling to one side. I told Dad that this had once been a trap made by Indians, but he wasn’t all that interested. He was drawn to the Nicaraguan, whom he considered someone real on a machine—despite the heavy Central American accent, Dad had found his Rust Belt guy out here among all the phonies in cowboy hats. And Ángel was equally attracted to Dad’s all-purpose warmth. He slid back his ear protectors and settled in for a chat.

  Evidently, I’d had a flat tire as I pulled up to the site, left front, and it was a motherfucker getting the spare out of a three-quarter-ton Ford, the Ford jacked up on the soft ground, and the whole muddy wheel into the bed to take to town. At the tire shop, Dad looked weird in his slacks and loosened tie, amid all the noise from impact wrenches and the compressors screaming and shutting down, but nobody seemed to notice. He gazed admiringly at the big rough kid in a skullcap running a pry bar around the rim and freeing up the tire. The kid reached inside the tire, tugging and sweating, and presented me with an obsidian arrowhead. I nearly cut myself just taking it from his hand. “Six plies of Jap snow tire and it never broke,” he said. I went up front and paid for the repair.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, a cold, rainy day, Dad stayed at my place while I took my crew up to Martinsdale, where we’d hired a crane to drop the bed of an old railroad car onto cribbing to make a bridge over a creek. We’d brought in a stack of treated planks for the deck, and I had a welder on hand to make up the brackets, a painfully shy fellow with a neck tattoo who still had his New York accent. Five of us stood in the downpour and looked at the creek rushing around our concrete work. The rancher stopped by to tell us that if it washed out he wasn’t paying for anything. When he was gone, Joey, the welder, said, “See what a big hat can do for you?”

  I’d left Dad at loose ends, and I learned later that he’d driven all the way to Helena to see the state capitol and get a lap dance and then slept it off at a Holiday Inn a half mile from Last Chance Gulch.

  I’ve been told that I come from a dysfunctional family, but I have never felt that way. When I was a kid, I viewed my parents as an anthropologist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, trying to imagine where on earth they came from. I was conceived soon after Dad got back from Vietnam. I’m not sure he actually wanted to have children, but Mom required prompt nesting when he returned. I guess Dad was pretty wild back then. He’d been in a lot of firefights and loved every one of them, leading his platoon in a daredevil manner. He kept wallet pictures of dead VC draped over the hood of his jeep, like deer-camp photos. His days on leave had been a Saigon fornication blitz, and it fell to Mom to stop that momentum overnight. I was her solution, and from the beginning Dad viewed me skeptically.

  One night, I crept down the stairs in my Dr. Denton footies to the sound of unusually exuberant and artificial elation and, spying from the door of the kitchen, saw my father on his knees, licking pie filling from one of the beaters of our Sunbeam Mixmaster, tearful and laughing, his long wide tongue lapping at the dripping goo. The extraordinarily stern look on my mother’s face above her starched apron, as he strained upward to the beater, disturbs me to this day.

  I have a million of these, but disturbance, as I say, is not trauma, and besides I moved away a long time ago. I came to Montana on a hiking trip with my girlfriend after college and never went back. I’ve left here only once, to join a roofing crew in Walnut Creek, California, and came home scared after two months. I saw shit at parties there that it’ll take me years to forget. Everyone from the foreman on down had a crystal habit. I had to pretend I was using just to get the job.

  * * *

  —

  Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate and veering into real outback within a quarter mile. I was building the Folsoms’ first house, on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him. Not a nice piece of ground: it’d be a midwinter snow hole and a midsummer rock pile. The Folsoms were old enough to retire, but, as I mentioned, this was their first home. They were poor people. Dee had spent forty years on a fencing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food. I could see that this would be a kind of delayed hone
ymoon house, and I wanted to get it right.

  The house was in frame, and Helen stood in what would be the picture window, enchanted by not much of a view—scrub pine, a shale ledge, the top of a flagless flagpole just below the hill along the road. Her expression would not have been out of place at the Sistine Chapel or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. One hand was plunged into the pocket of her army coat while the other twirled a pair of white plastic reading glasses. Dee just paced in his coveralls, happy and worried, pinching the stub of his cigarette.

  I had cut this one to the bone—crew salaries and little else. The crew—carpenter, plumber, electrician—sensed the tone of things and worked with timely efficiency. Dee had prepared the site himself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. We had a summer place for a plastic surgeon under way at Springhill, and if I’d looked a little closer, I might have seen it bleeding materials that managed to end up at the Folsoms’.

  While I was at work, Dad was wandering the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors. After a few days, he knew more of them than I did, and I would forevermore have to be told what a great guy he was. But by the time I got home, he was in his underwear with the portable phone in his lap, nursing a highball and looking disconsolate. “Your mother called me from the club,” he said. “I understand there was some dustup with the manager over the sneeze shield at the salad bar. Mom said she couldn’t see the condiments, and it went from there.”

  “From there to where?” I inquired peevishly.

  “Our privileges have been suspended.”

  “Golf?”

  “Mm, that, too. Hey, I’ll sort it out.”

  I nuked a couple of Rock Cornish hens, and we sat down in the living room to play checkers. Halfway through the game, my father went into the guest room and called my mother. This time she told him that she’d bought a car at what she thought was the dealer’s cost. Dad shouted, “Asshole, who got the rebate? I’m asking you, goddamn it, who got the rebate?” I heard him raging about the sneeze shield then, and after he quieted down I heard him say plaintively—I think I heard this—that he no longer wished to live. I always looked forward to this particular locution, because it meant that they’d get back together soon.