Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  RIVER CAMP

  “Anytime you’re on the Aleguketuk, you might as well be in heaven. I may never get to heaven, so the Aleguketuk will have to do—that, and plenty of beer! Beer and the river, fellows: that’s just me.

  “Practical matters: chow at first light. If you ain’t in the chow line by oh-dark-thirty, your next shot is a cold sandwich on the riverbank. And don’t worry about what we’re going to do; you’ll be at your best if you leave your ideas at home.

  “Now, a word or two about innovation and technique. You can look at these tomorrow in better light, but they started out life as common, ordinary craft-shop dolls’ eyes. I’ve tumbled them in a color solution, along with a few scent promulgators distilled from several sources. You will be issued six of these impregnated dolls’ eyes, and any you don’t lose in the course of action will be returned to me upon your departure. I don’t want these in circulation, plain and simple.

  “The pup tent upwind of the toilet pit is for anyone who snores. That you will have to work out for yourselves. I remove my hearing aid at exactly nine o’clock, so snoring means no more to me than special requests. From nine until daybreak, a greenhorn can be seen but not heard.

  “Lastly, the beautiful nudes featured on the out-of-date welding-supplies calendar in the cook tent are photographs of my bride at twenty-two. Therefore that is a 1986 calendar and will not serve for trip planning. Besides, she left me and I’m only a little suicidal. Ha, ha!”

  Marvin “Eldorado” Hewlitt backed his huge bulk out of the tent flap, making a sight gag of withdrawing his long gray beard from the slit as he closed it. Sitting on top of their sleeping bags, the surgeon Tony Capoletto and his brother-in-law Jack Spear turned to look at each other. Tony said, “My God. How many days do we have this guy? And why the pistol?”

  Tony, the more dapper of the two, wore a kind of angler’s ensemble: a multipocketed shirt with tiny brass rings from which to suspend fishing implements, quick-dry khaki pants that he’d turned into shorts by unzipping them at the knee, and wraparound shades that dangled from a Croakie at his chest. His pale, sharp-featured face and neatly combed hair were somewhat at odds with this costume.

  “I have no idea,” Jack said. His own flannel shirt hung loose over his baggy jeans. “He seemed so reasonable on the Internet.”

  Some sharp, if not violent, sounds could be heard from outside. Tony crawled forward in his shorts, carefully parting the entry to the tent to look out. Jack considered his friend’s taut physique and tried to remember how long he’d had his own potbelly. Tony was always in shape—part handball, part just being a surgeon.

  “What’s he doing, Ton’?”

  “Looks like he’s chopping firewood. I can barely see him in the dark. Not much of the fire left, now.”

  “What was that stuff he made for dinner?”

  “God only knows.”

  The tent smelled like camphor, mothballs; the scent was pretty strong. When Jack let his hand rest outside his sleeping bag, the grass still felt wet. It made him want to take a leak, but he didn’t care to leave the tent as long as Hewlitt was out there.

  Tony went back to his sleeping bag. It was quiet. A moment later his face lit up with blue light.

  “You get a signal?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Tony. “That would only inspire hope.”

  Tony’s wife—Jack’s sister—was divorcing him. There were no kids, and Tony said the whole thing was a relief, said that he was not bitter. Jack was quite sure Tony was bitter; it was Jack’s sister who was not bitter. Jack had seen Gerri at the IGA, and she’d been decidedly unbitter—cheerful if not manic. She’d hoped they would have an “outtasight” trip. This was part of Gerri’s routine, hip and lively for a tank town. Tony might have been a bit serious for her, in the end. Maybe he needed to lighten up. Jack certainly thought so.

  Jack’s wife, Jan, was one of the sad stories: having starred, in her small world, as a staggeringly hot eighteen-year-old when Jack, half cowboy and half high-school wide receiver, had swept her out of circulation, she had since gone into a rapid glide toward what could be identified at a thousand yards as a frump, and at close range as an angry frump. Gerri and Jan had driven “the boys” to the airport for their adventure together, each dreading the ride home, when in the absence of their men they would discover how little they had to talk about. In any case, they could hardly have suspected that they would never see their husbands again.

  But the divorce wasn’t the reason that Tony was so bent on a trip. He’d made some sort of mistake in surgery, professionally not a big deal—no one had even noticed—but Tony couldn’t get it out of his mind. He’d talked about it in vague terms to Jack, the loss of concentration, and had reached this strange conclusion: “Why should I think I’ll get it back?”

  “You will, Ton’. It’s who you are.”

  “Oh, really? I have never before lost concentration with the knife in my hand. Fucking never.”

  “Tony, if you can’t do your work in the face of self-doubt, you may as well just quit now.”

  “Jack, you think you’ve ever experienced the kind of pressure that’s my daily diet?”

  Jack felt this but let it go.

  Marvin Eldorado Hewlitt was now their problem. Jack had tried plenty of other guides, but they were all either booked or at a sportsmen’s show in Oakland. He’d talked to some dandies after that, including a safari outfitter booking giraffe hunts. At the bottom of the barrel was Hewlitt, and now it was getting clearer why. So many of the things they would have thought to be either essential or irrelevant were subject to extra charges: fuel for the motor, a few vegetables, bear spray, trip insurance, lures, the gluten-free sandwich bread.

  “But Marvin, we brought lures.”

  “You brought the wrong lures.”

  “I’ll fish with my own lures.”

  “Not in my boat.”

  Lures: $52.50. Those would be the dolls’ eyes.

  “Marvin, I don’t think we want trip insurance. I’m just glancing at these papers—well, are you really also an insurance agent?”

  “Who else is gonna do it? I require trip insurance. I’m not God, but acts of God produce client whining I can’t deal with.”

  Trip insurance: $384.75.

  “Tony, give it up. There’s no signal.”

  Tony looked up. “Was that a wolf?”

  “I don’t think it was a wolf. I think it was that crazy bastard.”

  The howl came again, followed by Marvin’s chuckle.

  “You see?”

  Tony got out of his sleeping bag and peered through the tent flap.

  “He’s still up. Sitting by the fire. He’s boiling something in some kind of a big cauldron. And he’s talking to himself, it looks like. Or it’s more like he’s talking to someone else, but there’s no one there that I can see. We’re in the hands of a lunatic, Jack.”

  “Nowhere to go but up.”

  “You could say that. You could pitch that as reasonable commentary.”

  Jack felt heat come to his face. “Tony?”

  “What?”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “Ah, consistency. How many times have I prayed for you to smarten up?”

  Jack thought, I’ve got him by forty pounds. That’s got to count.

  The two fell silent. They were reviewing their relationship. So far, Tony had come up only with “loser,” based on Jack’s modest income; Jack had settled for “prick,” which he based on the entitlement he thought all doctors felt in their interactions with others. This standoff was a long time coming, a childhood friendship that had hardened. Probably neither of them wanted it like this; the trip was supposed to be an attempt to recapture an earlier stage, when they were just friends, just boys. But the harm had been done. Maybe they had absorbed the town’s view of success and let it spoil something. Or maybe it was the other thing again.

  Outside, by the fire, Marvin was singing in a pleasant tenor. There was some accompaniment.
Jack said, “See if he’s got an instrument.” Tony sighed and climbed out from his sleeping bag again. At the tent flap, he said, “It’s a mandolin.” And in fact at that moment a lyrical solo filled the air. Tony returned to his bag, and the two lay quietly, absorbing first some embellishment of the song Marvin had been singing and then a long venture into musical space.

  Shortly after the music stopped, Marvin’s voice came through the tent flap.

  “Boys, that’s all I can do for you. Now let’s be nice to one another. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us.”

  In a matter of minutes, the camp was silent. Stars rose high over the tents and their sleepers.

  * * *

  —

  Morning arrived as a stab of light through the tent flap and the abrupt smell of trampled grass and mothballs. A round, pink face poked through at them, eyes twinkling unpleasantly, and shouted, “Rise and shine!”

  “Is that you, Marvin?” Tony asked, groggily.

  “Last time I looked.”

  “What happened to the beard?”

  “Shaved it off and threw it in the fire. When you go through the pearly gates, you want to be clean-shaven. Everybody else up there has a beard.”

  The flap closed, and Jack said, “I smelled it. Burning.” Then he pulled himself up.

  Jack fished his clothes out of the pile he’d made in the middle of the tent. Tony glanced at this activity and shook his head; his own clothes were hung carefully on a tent peg. He wore his unlaced hiking shoes as he dressed. Jack was briefly missing a shoe, but it turned up under his sleeping bag, explaining some of the previous night’s discomfort.

  Tony said, “It’s time for us to face this lunatic if we want breakfast.”

  The sunrise made a circle of light in the camp, piled high with pine needles next to the whispering river. Hewlitt had hoisted the perishable supplies up a tree to keep them away from bears; a folding table covered by a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth was set up by the small, sparkling fire. Stones on either side of the fire supported a blackened grill, from which Hewlitt brought forth a steady stream of ham, eggs, and flapjacks.

  Jack rubbed his hands together eagerly and said, “My God, it’s like Chef Boyardee!” Tony rolled his eyes at this and smiled at Hewlitt, whose surprisingly mild and beardless face had begun to fascinate him. The beard, it was explained, was something Hewlitt cultivated for sportsmen’s shows: he hated beards.

  “I’m not ashamed of my face,” he said. “Why would I hide it?”

  Hewlitt had already eaten, and so Jack and Tony sat down at the table while he headed off toward the trees. Halfway through the meal, Jack noticed the man making slow, strange movements. Tony, thoroughly enjoying this breakfast, which was miles off his diet, hadn’t looked up yet.

  Finally Jack said, “I think the guide is having some kind of a fit.”

  Tony glanced up, mouth full of unsaturated fats.

  “No, Jack, that’s not a fit. That’s Tai Chi.”

  “Like in the Kung Fu movies, I suppose.”

  “No, not even.”

  They continued to eat in a less-pleasant silence until Hewlitt bounced over and joined them. Tony smiled as though they were old friends and asked, “Chen?”

  “Uh-uh,” said Hewlitt.

  “Yang?”

  “Nyewp.”

  “I’m out of ideas,” Tony admitted modestly.

  “Wu,” said Hewlitt, in subdued triumph.

  “Of course,” said Tony. “What was that last pose?”

  “Grasp-the-Bird’s-Tail.”

  Jack listened and chewed slowly. He let his eyes drift to the other side of the river: an undifferentiated wall of trees. The water seemed so smooth you’d hardly know it was moving at all if it wasn’t for the long stripe of foam behind every boulder. Invisible behind the branches, a raven seemed to address the camp.

  Fried eggs on a metal plate. Jack ate more cautiously than usual: Tony was always on him about his weight. But then Tony was a doctor, and Jack felt he had his well-being in mind despite the often-annoying delivery. It was pleasing to notice these signs of old friendship, such as they were. Jack knew he should take better care of himself, and he had complied when Tony had wanted him to give up the cigarettes. It had been hard, and they were never completely out of his mind. In an odd way, that had been his own gesture of friendship, despite Tony’s main argument having been that financially Jack really couldn’t afford to smoke.

  Tony was telling a story to Marvin that Jack already knew. He’d heard it a hundred times.

  “We went on vacation to Mexico one year, and I brought back these little tiny superhot peppers to cook with. We had Jack and his wife, Jan, over for dinner one night, and I told Jack what I just told you, that these were the hottest little peppers in the world. Well, Jack, he’s had about five longnecks in a row, and he says, ‘Nothing’s too hot for me!’ right before he puts a spoonful of them in his mouth. Buddy, that was all she wrote. Tears shoot out of his eyes. His face turns…maroon. His head drops to the table, and what do you think he says?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hewlitt.

  “He says, ‘Why is it always me?’ ”

  Hewlitt stared at him for a moment. Then he said, “What’s the punch line?”

  Tony’s face fell with a thud. Hewlitt got up to feed the fire.

  “Our host doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor,” Tony said, when the man was gone. Jack just smiled at him.

  There were a lot of Italians around the meatpacking plant, and that’s where Tony’s people had settled. He had come a long way. Jack’s family was cattle, land, and railroad: they’d virtually founded the town but hadn’t had a pot to piss in for generations. Gerri liked to point out that half of her and Jack’s relatives were absolute bums, which generally made Jack’s wife respond that Tony’s family was right off the boat. Nobody crossed Jan: she wasn’t witty; she was angry. He may be a doctor to you, but he’s a wop to me. Jack was fundamentally too fragile for this kind of badinage, unfortunately, because he had to admit that Tony and Gerri were far less snippy when Jan was around. She’d say to Jack, “You want respect, you better be prepared to snap their heads back.” Or she’d put it the way Mike Tyson did: “Everybody’s got an attitude until you hit them in the face.”

  Jack’s roots in town were so deep that he thought that Jan’s bellicosity was just a result of having grown up somewhere else. She was from Idaho, for crying out loud. This was before he found out Jan had had a slipup with Tony back in the day, while Jack was off doing his time with the National Guard.

  When Tony and Gerri took them to New York to see Cats, that’s when it really hit the fan. Tony had made a big thing about Cats winning a Tony Award, which Jan thought was such a hoot because Jack had no idea what a Tony Award was. He’d thought Tony was flirting with Jan again, with his so-called humor. Jack and Jan moved to their own hotel, leaving the room Tony had paid for empty. In their new room, Jan went on the defensive and blamed alcohol for the flirtation. She seemed to think that with this citation, the issue was settled. Jack didn’t buy it, but he’d never been willing to pay the price for taking it further. Instead, he absorbed the blow. Having Tony know he just took it was the hardest part.

  But somehow the problem between the two of them evaporated when they were back in town. “New York just wasn’t for us,” Tony said, and Jack accepted this gratefully. Jan, however, twisted it around; she took it to mean that she and Jack just weren’t good enough for New York.

  “Who wants to go there anyway?” she’d say. “All those muggers, and that smelly air!”

  Meanwhile her slipup was consigned, once again, to history. Full stop. Jack couldn’t stand any of it.

  * * *

  —

  They all pitched in to tidy up the camp, and then they headed for the boat. It was tied to a tree, swinging in the current; a cool breeze, fresh and balsamic, was sweeping up the river. Hewlitt carried a Styrofoam chest—their lunch—to the shore and pu
t it aboard. Fishing tackle had been loaded in already.

  A moment later the three men climbed in, and Hewlitt started the engine. Once he was sure it was running properly, he stepped ashore and freed the painter from the tree, sprang aboard again, and turned into the current. Tony said, “This is what it’s all about.”

  Jack nodded eagerly and then felt a wave of hopelessness unattached to anything in particular. Maybe catching a fish, maybe just the day itself. Hewlitt gazed over the tops of their heads, straight up the river. He seemed to know what he was doing.

  He had looked more competent when he’d still had the beard. Now he looked like a lot of other people. God was always portrayed with a beard—for Jack it was impossible to picture him without one, even if he strained to imagine what he assumed would be a handsome and mature face. The only time you ever saw Jesus without a beard, he was still a baby. Tony had grown his own beard right after med school. Sometime later Jan had told Tony that he needed to get rid of it; that was one of the worst arguments Jack and Jan had ever had. Jack had said it was for Gerri to say whether or not she liked the beard, since it was her husband. Jan said that a person was entitled to her own opinions.

  “Who taught you to cast?” Tony said. They had started fishing.

  “You did,” Jack replied.

  “Obviously you needed to practice.”

  Jack just shrugged it off. He was still getting it out there, wasn’t he? Maybe not as elegantly as Tony, but it shouldn’t have made any difference to the fish. The casting was just showing off. It seemed to have impressed Hewlitt, though, because he took Tony upriver to another spot, leaving Jack to fish where he was, even though nobody had gotten a bite. Jack thought it was probably a better spot, this new one, and of course it was perfectly natural that Hewlitt would take Tony there, since it was Tony who was paying for the trip. Nevertheless, after another hour had passed, he felt a bit crushed and no longer expected to catch a fish at all. He thought, None of this would be happening if I had more money.