Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  When he was gone, Monika said, “My dream was of a new life here, but this may be impossible.”

  “I think Bob meant well,” I said.

  “Ah, make no mistake: that was not Bob speaking and bringing his symbolic gifts. That was America speaking through Bob.”

  Meanwhile, Karel teethed contentedly on his rubber drumstick, his little chin glistening as he hummed.

  * * *

  —

  As part of Monika’s first assignment on her return to architecture school, she began to design some alterations for our house, a wing here, a wing there: I was terrified that she would actually want me to have these things built.

  “Why do we need a loggia?”

  “Why do I even talk to you?”

  Bob continued to visit some mornings for coffee. If he arrived before Monika left for school, she fled to her car. “Always in a hurry, that gal,” Bob said. “Someday she’ll be designing skyscrapers, and we’ll brag we knew her back when.” Whenever Bob drove Monika from the house, it fell to me to care for Karel until the babysitter arrived in her white tennis shoes and loose shorts that made the vanishing of her thighs into them a matter of urgent mystery. I loved to start the day by playing with Karel in bed. He’d sit on my stomach, and we’d play hand games that always ended with this merry little boy tipping over onto the pillows only to arise and crawl on top of me again to resume the battle with a shout. If Bob was still there, we did this on the living-room rug, scurrying around until I had rug burns on my knees. When Bob wasn’t launching into some complaint about his overindulgent mother, he was wonderful with Karel. I could leave the two of them together while I dressed for work, and whatever Bob did always had Karel squealing with delight. The arrival of the babysitter, nubile Lydia, would put an end to all this: I went to work; Bob went home.

  I have lived in this town for a long time, but I was raised in Bakersfield, California, a town I was longing to flee by the age of ten. I coughed up out-of-state tuition, went to law school, then settled here, at first alone and then with Monika. I mention all this because my colleague, Jay Matthews, who has lived here all his life, told me that Bob’s mother could hardly be driving him crazy: she died when he was a boy. “Got to be fifty years ago.”

  “I must have misheard him.”

  “Yeah, Bob was an only child, and his mom was single. Ole Bob was a bubble and a half off plumb, even back then. That’s why he’s always fit right into this godforsaken town.”

  Life went on. Karel’s father, Olatunde, called every week, sometimes talking to me and sometimes to Monika. His attempts to talk to Karel came to nothing, as Karel drooled and stared at the receiver. Olatunde spoke in measured tones in a deep voice, which, combined with his cultivated, slightly fusty British accent, seemed to come from a tomb. Nonetheless, his melancholy over the absence of his little boy could be discerned. He wished me luck with Monika and said that I was going to need it. His, he said, had run out.

  Bob and Karel became so close—Karel singing in his presence and crying out in delight when he arrived—that Monika and I consulted about dispensing with the babysitter and using Bob instead. I wasn’t sure about this. The babysitter was getting ready to start college and needed the money, and, besides, I was sweet on her and thought she was starting to come around, recklessly bending over to pick up Karel’s toys in my presence. Monika noticed this once and started braying with sardonic and distinctly Slavic laughter. The time had come for me to take the bull by the horns. I followed Lydia to her car and told her that any fool could see how beautiful she was and I was no fool. She started but failed to reply. “You—you—you—” She got into her car and roared off. I thought it best to maintain a sphinxlike expression on my way back into the house. Monika smiled at me as I entered. “Turn you down?”

  “Seems to be running okay. I can’t think why she thought the ignition was going out.”

  Gales of laughter. “Oh, good one. Stick to your weapons.”

  The moment blew over, with the usual residue, but in the end I was furious with Lydia for having wiggled around the house on the assumption that I wouldn’t notice. Entrapment, pure and simple. Another few steps down that trail, and Lydia could have owned my law firm. These youngsters look right through you, unless their gaze falls on something they might need. I should have held my wallet aloft with one hand while pointing at my crotch with the other, but I simply lacked the nerve. So (a) babysitter leaves, and (b) here comes Bob. The convenience and economy of this arrangement appealed even to Monika, who allowed that he was “not a bad chicken egg after all.”

  Obviously, we made several forays into marriage counseling, during which we turned each of our counselors into helpless referees. I always felt that these sessions were nothing more than attempts by each side to win over the counselor, with charm, cajoling, whatever it took. In the end, Monika decided that everything that had led to the idea of counseling—Freud, Jung, Judeo-Christianity—was spiritually bankrupt. Therefore, she was going to look back thousands of years and seek the help of a shaman, now resident in Missoula. This shaman, she explained, had the benefit of ten thousand years of human spiritual experience, as opposed to the Johnny-come-latelies of psychoanalysis, and she intended to partake of that knowledge. I listened thoughtfully and replied that it sounded promising so long as she didn’t fuck the shaman.

  Thus began our decidedly parallel lives: Monika and her shaman and her architecture, me and my law practice, Bob and Karel. Monika came home in the evening with long rolls of paper under her arm, and I with my briefcase, containing few briefs in these straitened times, to the happy home of Bob and Karel. When Bob left for the night, I held Karel’s rigid little body as he wailed and reached frantically in the direction of Bob’s departure. “Give him something to eat,” Monika remarked on her way into the bedroom.

  One afternoon, Monika and I had a rather sharp exchange in the presence of Bob and Karel. I asked innocently if it was absolutely necessary for her to keep using her boarding pass as a bookmark.

  Monika said, “None of your business.”

  “I suppose it helps to remind you of that shithole where you grew up.”

  “It reminds me that they still have airplanes that go back there.”

  “Everyone wants to go to Yugoslavia,” I said, “where shooting your neighbor is the national sport.”

  “Oh, you’re awful. You’re just so awful. My God, how truly awful you are.”

  Karel started to cry, and Bob took him outside. Soon I could see the chains of the swing flashing back and forth and hear Karel’s delighted cries.

  Monika had recently undergone an abrupt sartorial change from dark Euro-style clothing to Rocky Mountain chic: hiking boots, painter pants, bright yellow down jacket, and a wool cap with strings hanging down the sides. Now screwing a mountaineer, I thought ungenerously. Her exhaustion, I assumed, owed more to her shagging the mountain man than to anything she was doing in the world of architecture.

  It should come as no surprise to anybody that the day came when Monika and I returned from work to find Bob and Karel missing. Having read Huckleberry Finn, she remarked that Bob had “lit out for the territory” with Karel. I don’t want to overstate the ghastly nature of our response, as we were both crying—though whether at the loss of Karel or at the feeling that we deserved to lose him and Bob deserved to have him, I couldn’t say. When I attempted to cheer Monika up by saying that when life gives you lemons you must make lemonade, she slapped my face. I almost fought back, and you can only imagine how that would have seemed under the circumstances.

  Instead, I called the police in town. Monika called Olatunde in Yugoslavia and put me on the phone. “You tell him.”

  “Good morning, Doctor. It’s afternoon there already? Well, I have news, well, not news exactly. One of our neighbors here has…kidnapped Karel.” Dr. Olatunde was understandably slow in absorbing this announcement but not in any other way, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport a day and a half later.
>
  These were terrible hours. Monika stayed home as we awaited word from the police, her drawings laid out on the kitchen table. She showered me with reproaches, the recurrent one being that Karel would never have “slipped through her hand” if I hadn’t chased the babysitter away with my ogling. Pointing at the drawings, I said, “I see the loggia stays.”

  “Yes, and a pergola.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

  * * *

  —

  I met Dr. Olatunde at the baggage claim though he had only a carry-on. He was the sole African among all the skiers, and he drew a bit of attention to himself for that and for the suit he wore, a nice English cut, rumpled from the long trip. He was not at all the big Mandingo glutton I had pictured but a small, precise man with a slightly receding hairline and a friendly but crisp manner. He said, “You were kind to come for me.”

  “You must be tired.”

  “Not so bad, really.”

  “Well, I have marvelous news for you. Karel has been found.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I hope you don’t feel the trip was wasted.”

  “Nothing could compare to this. Is he well?”

  Bob and Karel had not gone far, at least not far enough to give plausibility to a charge of kidnapping. They were in the first motel on the way into town. Their loud music had given them away. Bob was belligerent about what he described as the hostile atmosphere of our home, and we felt that by pressing charges we would only bring his version into the public eye. Karel responded to his father, whom he could hardly have been expected to remember, much as he responded to Bob: he was always drawn to someone who looked straight at him as though making a delightful discovery. I spell this out because it was against all odds that we allowed Bob to come back again and let ourselves be compensated by Karel’s squeals of delight. More and more, he stays over at Bob’s anyway, which Monika and I hope will give us some room to work things out.

  GRANDMA AND ME

  My grandmother lost her sight about three years ago, just before she turned ninety, and because it happened gradually, and in the context of so much other debility, she adapted very well. Grandma’s love of the outdoors combined with her remarkable lucidity and optimism to keep her cheerful and realistic. And she could get on my ass about as good as she ever could. She was now greatly invested in her sense of smell, so I tried to put fresh flowers around her house, while Mrs. Devlin, her housekeeper of forty-one years, kept other things in the cottage fresh, including the flow of gossip and the newspaper under Chickie, a thirty-year-old blue-fronted parrot that had bitten me several times. When Grandma goes, Chickie is going into the disposal.

  Grandma did a remarkable job of living in the present, something I’d hoped to learn from her before going broke or even crazier than I already was. I’d been away for over a decade, first as a timekeeper in a palladium mine, then dealing cards, downhill all the way. Three years in a casino left me so fucked up I was speaking in tongues, but Grandma got me back on my feet with pearls of immortal wisdom like “Pull yourself together.” And while I waited for her to give me a little walking-around money, a pearl or two would come to me, too, like “Shit or get off the pot.”

  Grandma owned several buildings in the middle of our small town, including the old hotel where I lived. I looked after them, not exactly as a maintenance man—I don’t have such trade skills—but more as an overseer, for which Grandma paid me meagerly, justifying her stinginess with the claim that I was bleeding her white. Another building housed an office-supply shop and a preschool, where I was a teaching assistant. That is, a glorified hall monitor for a bunch of dwarfs. I also tended bar two nights a week—the off nights, when tips were scarce, but it was something to do and kept me near the hooch. Grandma had bought the bar, too, back when it was frequented mainly by sheepherders. Sheep have mostly disappeared from the area since being excluded from the national forest, which they had defoliated better than Agent Orange. I didn’t see much point in tending an empty bar, but Grandma required it. It was part of my “package,” she said, and besides she was sure that if we closed it down, it would become a meth lab. Grandma was convinced every empty building housed a meth lab.

  The preschool thing was another matter. Mrs. Hessler, the teacher, considered me her employee, and I played along with this to keep the frown off that somewhat-shapeless face she had crowned with an inappropriate platinum pixie. I regularly fed her made-up news items from imaginary newspapers, and she always bought it.

  “Drone Strike on a Strip Club,” for example. In return, Mrs. Hessler made me wear clothes she supplied and considered kid friendly: loud leisure suits and sweatpants, odd-lot items that gave me the feeling I was at the end of my rope.

  Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma someplace that smelled good. I was often in rough shape on Sunday mornings, so a little fresh air helped me dry out in time for work on Monday. We’d have our picnics in fields of sage and lupine, on buffalo-grass savannas north of town, on deep beds of spruce needles, and in fields of spring wildflowers. I’d have enough of nature pretty quick, but we stayed until Grandma had had her fill; she told me it was the least I could do, and I suppose she’s right.

  Today’s nature jaunt turned out to be one for the ages: we went to a bend in the river near Grandma’s and set up our picnic under the oldest of cottonwoods, so that the eastbound current raced toward us over pale gravel. It smelled wonderful. Once out of the car, I led Grandma with a light touch on the elbow, marveling at how straight and tall she was—how queenly she looked with her thick white hair carefully piled and secured by Mrs. Devlin with a broad tortoiseshell comb. I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by. Though facedown, he seemed formally attired, and the tumult of current at the bend was strong enough to make him ripple from end to end, while his arms seemed lofted in some oddly valedictory way, and his hair floated ahead of him. The sunlight sparkling on the water made the picture ghastly.

  “Oh!” said Grandma as though she could see it.

  “What?”

  “That divine smell, of course! I can still smell snow in the river!”

  The corpse had rotated in such a way that I could now see the heels of its shoes and the slight ballooning of its suit coat. Just then I remembered that cheap Allegiant flight I’d taken back from Las Vegas. I’d lost so much money, I got drunk on the plane and passed out, and someone scrawled LOSER on my face in eyebrow pencil, though I didn’t see it until the men’s room at the Helena airport. Was I so far gone I was identifying with a corpse?

  “What an awful child you were,” Grandma said. “Already drinking in the sixth grade. What would have become of you if I hadn’t put you in Catholic school? It was your salvation and thank goodness the voodoo wore off in time. It wasn’t easy humoring those silly nuns. They never took their hands out of their sleeves the whole time you were there.”

  “Uh, Grandma, excuse me, but I have to see a man about a horse.” I jogged along the riverbank until I was well out of earshot, and lighting a cigarette, I called the sheriff’s office on my cell. I let the dispatcher know who I was and asked if the sheriff or one of the deputies was available. “I’ll check. What’s the topic?” The dispatcher’s tone let me know how they felt about me at the sheriff’s office.

  “I’m down on the river, and a corpse just went by. Across from the dump. It’s going to pass under the Harlowton Bridge in about ten minutes.”

  “There’s no one here right now. Marvin has a speeder pulled over at the prairie dog town. Maybe he could get there.”

  “Next stop after that is Greycliff. Somebody’d have to sit on the bridge all day.”

  “Please don’t raise your voice. Any distinguishing features?”

  “How’s ‘dead’ sound to you?”

  I went back to
find Grandma lifting her face in the direction of the sun and seeming contented. A few cottonwood leaves fluttering in a breath of wind onto the surface of the river revealed the speed of the current. Every so often people floated by on rafts, blue rafts, yellow rafts, their laughter and conversations carried along on the water like a big, happy wake following a corpse.

  “Are you ready to eat?” I asked.

  “In a bit, unless you’re hungry now. It smells different than when we were here in August. I think something happens when the leaves begin to turn, something cidery in the air, and yesterday’s rain stays in the trunks of these old trees.” It had rained for about two minutes yesterday. Grandma’s got all these sensations dialed in as though she’s cramming the entire earth before she croaks.

  I walked down to the river, took off my shoes and socks, and rolled up my pant legs. I waded in no more than a few inches when I heard my phone ring. I turned just in time to see Grandma groping for it next to where I left the box lunches. Oh, well. I kept wading and noticed three white pelicans standing among the car bodies on the far side of the river. I’d have thought they’d have gone south by now. I dug a few flat stones off the bottom and skipped them toward the middle of the river. I got five skips from a piece of bottle glass before going back to Grandma.

  “That was the sheriff’s office.”

  “Oh?”

  “They wanted you to know that it was a jilted groom who jumped into Yankee Jim Canyon on Sunday. What day is today?”

  “Wednesday.” Must have averaged a couple miles an hour.

  “Why would they think you’d care about a jilted groom jumping into Yankee Jim Canyon?”

  “Idle curiosity,” I said sharply.