Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  “If I’m right about what’s ahead, we go for the protein,” Tony said.

  It was getting darker and colder; the flames danced over the splinters of firewood. Jack was quite still.

  “What’s ahead, Tony?”

  “The boat trip.”

  “Oh, is that what you think?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  Jack looked up at the sky for a moment but didn’t reply. Instead, he lifted two of the steaks out of the cache and dropped them onto the grill.

  * * *

  —

  The bedrolls became cocoons without refuge. They were in a dead camp with a dead fire and a corpse in a tent. They thought about their wives—even Jan’s misery and Gerri’s demand for freedom seemed so consoling now, so day-to-day. Tony’s small slip with the scalpel was now nothing more than a reminder of the need for vigilance—a renewal, in a sense. Jack had a home and all his forebears buried on the edge of town. He could wait for the same. No big deal, wink out. Nothing about this bothered him anymore. He had sometimes pictured himself in his coffin, big belly and all, friends filing by with sad faces. He belonged.

  They couldn’t sleep, or they barely slept; if one detected the other awake, they talked.

  “I don’t know what the environmentalists see in all these trees,” Jack said.

  “Nature hates us. We’ll be damn lucky to get out of this hole and back to civilization.”

  “Well, you want a little of both. A few trees, anyway. Some wildflowers.”

  “You try walking out of here. You’ll see how much nature loves you.”

  There was no point worrying about it, Tony said; they would have the whole day tomorrow to work on their problems.

  “So what do we do with the body?” Jack asked.

  “The body is not our problem.”

  It couldn’t have been many hours before sunrise by the time the bears came into the camp. There were at least three; they could be heard making pig noises as they dragged and swatted at the food that had been left out. Tony tried to get a firm count through a narrow opening in the tent flap while Jack cowered at the rear with Hewlitt’s gun in his hands.

  “It’s nature, Tony! It’s nature out there!”

  Tony was too terrified to say anything. The bears had grown interested in their tent.

  After a moment of quiet they could hear them smelling around its base with sonorous gusts of breath. At every sound, Jack redirected the gun. Tony tried to calm him, despite his own terror.

  “They’ve got all they can eat out there, Jack.”

  “They never have enough to eat! Bears never have enough!”

  Tony went to the flap and tied all its laces carefully, as though that made any difference. But then, as before, the sound of the bears stopped. After a time he opened a lace and looked out.

  “I think they’re gone,” he said. He hated pretending to be calm. He’d done that in the operating room when it was nothing but a fucking mess.

  “Let’s give them plenty of time, until we’re a hundred percent sure,” Jack said. “We’ve got this”—Jack held the gun aloft—“but half the time shooting a bear just pisses him off.”

  Tony felt he could open the flap enough to get a better look. First light had begun to reveal the camp, everything scattered like a rural dump, even the pages of the girlie magazines, pink fragments among the canned goods, cold air from the river coming into the tent like an anesthetic.

  Tony said, “Oh, God, Jack. Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  “The bears are in Hewlitt’s tent.”

  Jack squealed and hunkered down onto the dirt floor. “Too good, Tony! Too good!”

  Tony waited until he stopped and then said, “Jack, you need to take hold. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

  Jack sat up abruptly, eyes blazing. “Is that how you see it? You’re going to tell me to behave? You’re a successful guy. My wife thought you were a big successful guy before she was fat. So tell me what to do, Tony.”

  “Listen, start by shutting up, okay? We’re gonna need all the energy in those big muscles of yours to get us out of this.”

  “That’s straight from the shoulder, Tony. You sound like the old guinea from down by the meat processor again.”

  “I’m all right with that,” said Tony. “Up with the founding families, piss poor though you all are, it must have been hard for you and Jan to know how happy we were.”

  “Somebody’s got to make sausage.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Linguini, pepperoni, Abruzzo. Pasta fazool.”

  “I can’t believe you know what pasta fazool is, Jack.”

  Jack imitated Dean Martin. “ ‘When the stars make you drool, just like pasta fazool.’ Asshole. Your mother made it for me.”

  He was gesturing with the rifle now. When the barrel swung past Tony’s nose, the reality of their situation came crashing down on them as though they had awakened from a dream. Jack, abashed, went to the front of the tent and peered out. After a moment, he said, “All quiet on the western front.”

  Tony came to look over his shoulder, saw nothing.

  “They’re gone.”

  The two men emerged into the cold, low light, the gray river racing at the edge of the camp. There was nothing left of the food except a few canned goods scattered among the pictures of female body parts. The vestibule of Hewlitt’s tent was torn asunder, to the point that the interior could almost be inspected from a distance. Jack clearly had no interest in doing so, but Tony went over gingerly, entered, then came out abruptly with one hand over his eyes. “Oh,” he said, “Jesus Christ.”

  They picked through the havoc the bears had left until they’d found enough undamaged food for a day or so in the boat. They put their bedrolls in there, too, but the tents they left where they were. Any thought of staying in camp was dropped on the likelihood of the bears returning at dark.

  “We’ll start the motor when we need it,” Tony said. “All we’re doing is going downstream until we get out.”

  Jack nodded, lifted the anchor, and walked down to the boat, coiling the line as he went.

  * * *

  —

  The river seemed to speed past. As they floated away, Tony thought that this was nature at its most benign, shepherding them away from the dreaded camp; but Jack, looking at the dark walls of trees enclosing the current, the ravens in the high branches, felt a malevolence in his bones. He glanced back at their abandoned tents: already, they looked like they’d been there for hundreds of years, like the empty smallpox tepees his grandpa had told him about. This might be good country if someone removed the trees and made it prairie like at home, he thought. With the steady motion of the boat, he daydreamed about the kinds of buildings he’d most like to see: a store, a church, a firehouse.

  Tony said, “My dad was a butcher, and I’m a surgeon. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of jokes about that around town.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a surgeon—I wanted to be a butcher. The old second-generation climb into some stratosphere where you’ll never be comfortable again. Where you never know where you live.”

  “I don’t think you’d like it back there at the packing plant.”

  “Not now—I’ve been spoiled. But if I’d stayed…I don’t know. Dad was always happy.”

  “And you’re not?” Jack asked.

  “Not particularly. Maybe after Gerri goes. Now that I’m used to the idea, the divorce, I can’t wait. I think I’m overspreading my discomfort around.”

  “Jan and I don’t have the option,” Jack said. “There’s not enough for either one of us to start over on. We’re stuck together whether we like it or not.” He was thinking of how life and nature were just alike, but he couldn’t figure out how to put it into words.

  Boulders, submerged beneath the water, could be felt as the boat rose and fell, and the river began to narrow toward a low canyon. In a tightening voice, Tony
said, “Most of humanity lives beside rivers. By letting this one take us where it will, we’ll be delivered to some form of civilization. A settlement, at least.” He reached inside his coat and pulled out a wallet. “I thought we better bring this.”

  “Is that Hewlitt’s wallet?”

  “That’s not his name. There are several forms of identification, but none of them are for a Hewlitt.” He riffled it open to show Jack the driver’s licenses and ID cards, all with the same picture and all with different names.

  “He had a lot of musical talent,” Jack said, and let out a crazy, mirthless laugh.

  “See up there? I bet those are the rapids he was talking about.”

  “Oh, goody. Nature.”

  Indeed, where the canyon began, and even from this distance, the sheen of the river was surmounted by something sparkling, some effervescence, a vitality that had nothing to do with them. Shapes appeared under the boat, then vanished as the river’s depth changed, the banks and walls of trees narrowing toward them and the approaching canyon walls. You couldn’t look up without wanting to get out through the sky.

  At the mouth of the canyon was a standing wave. Somehow the river ran under it, but the wave itself remained erect. A kind of light could be seen around it. Tony thought it had the quality of authority, like the checkpoint of a restricted area; Jack took it for yet another part of the blizzard of things that could never be explained and that pointlessly exhausted all human inquiry. Carrying these distinct views, their boat was swept into the wave, and under; and Jack and Tony were never seen again.

  LAKE STORY

  Glendive was unbearably hot in August, and for half of it I rented a cottage on the western shore of Flathead Lake, a little getaway in sight of Wild Horse Island and built a long time ago between two rocky points barely thirty yards apart, the lawn between them leading down to a pebbly shore and the deep green water in a kind of pool. The place was only available because the neighbor whose starter castle towered over the next small bay had died in the spring. A Kansas City resident who had made a fortune trading carbon credits and ringtones, he owned the kind of craft normally at the service of drug runners, a vastly powerful cigarette boat whose daily thunder made the nearby rental cottages uninhabitable. Pleas went unacknowledged, the petition thrown out as the smell of fuel continued to drift up from his dock. So after the boat owner died, concluding a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, Memorial Day in the small surrounding neighborhood was given over to celebrating his death. The jubilant air persisted as FOR SALE signs appeared on his property, then through its deterioration, especially as islands of quack grass started pushing up through the clay tennis court. Suddenly the small cottages, each with its tiny green bay and an evergreen-crowned rocky ridge running to the lake, were all back in business. I felt very lucky to have scored one of them on short notice, a one-bedroom clapboard house with a mossy shingled roof and overstuffed chairs fished out of winter homes elsewhere, before the age of dedicated cottage furniture. The fireplace was made of round stones from the lakeside, and a huge incongruous print of Niagara Falls was the main room’s only decoration. “Were these people all short?” Adele asked, noticing that every lamp lit us at waist level unless we slumped into one of the low-slung chairs to thumb the swollen copy of Redbook. At night, above these lamps, all was darkness.

  I was having an affair with Adele, a married woman whose availability was also made known to me at the last moment. We’d been doing this for nine years, nine short-term rentals, each begun just as her husband finalized his schedule, which included an annual visit to his mother in rural South Africa, where communications were conveniently, if uncertainly, faulty. Adele and I otherwise avoided deceit of any kind, operating on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis, each suspecting that ours was the kind of flourishing relationship that would wither in the full light of day. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but it fades passion like everything else. I’m a widower with grown children, but Adele’s were of an impressionable age, and God forbid they ever found out about us. They couldn’t possibly have understood. We relished this covert life and didn’t mind in the least that we could be deceiving ourselves, lost as we were in its pleasures and logistics.

  Usually, we arrived in separate cars, but this time Adele came on the train from Seattle, where she’d gone for a design show. I picked her up at the station in Whitefish, observing our customary artifice—“You never know who you’ll run into in Montana”—before we took a look around from inside my car and began kissing. By now, there was no need for any foreshadowing in these early pecks: we knew what was coming. As I drove out and turned onto the highway for the lake, Adele said, “Seattle was wonderful, but then it’s summer. You smell salt water, and there are cranes and freighters and container ships like a real seaport. You don’t get that in San Francisco. And I met the coolest cowboy, a professional rodeo cowboy, and he could talk about anything. He was reading a book!” Adele looked great in a cotton summer dress, this one blue with tiny silver zigzags.

  “And?” I asked.

  “He was too big for a Pullman berth.”

  I didn’t know if she was serious. I don’t think she was. It’s possible she had a wild side, but you wouldn’t know it by our relationship, which had almost nothing wild about it. Perhaps monogamous cheaters were commoner than I thought.

  I loved Adele, and Adele loved me, but we were not in love, and she couldn’t make me jealous, though that principle was untested. I once pretended to be in love with her, and my saying so was greeted by silence arising from contempt. It was instructive. I barely made up for it by deferring ejaculation for about ninety minutes, which left me stooped for two days with lower back pain. I took some ibuprofen, and Adele read to me from Tartarin of Tarascon in recognition of my sacrifice. When we got to the part where Tartarin is unable to decide whether to cover himself with glory or with flannel, we closed the book and fell asleep with plenty of room between us on the bed, where we always left whatever we’d been reading and, lately, our reading glasses.

  That evening at the lake, we sat out on the weathered deck and watched the blue twilight dwindle until the broad silver of its surface was lit with stars. Perhaps Adele glanced at me, or I at her, but some wordless signal passed between us, and we entered by the screen door, just a crack, so as to exclude the moths, and made for the bed, which proved a squeaking seismograph that registered the tiniest movement. Even reaching to turn off the lamp produced a cacophony. This bed was good for nothing, and so we dragged the mattress to the floor, where there were only our own sounds to contend with. I touched her with my fingertips.

  “You’re tracing. You can’t remember me from one year to the next?”

  “I like being reminded.”

  “You’re looking for change.”

  “Nope.”

  In the morning, I caught several very small cutthroat trout from the dock, using a child’s rod found in the garage and worms from beneath the paving tiles that ran from the house to a tiny garden shed. Adele woke up to fried eggs, fresh trout fillets, and sourdough toast served in bed. This was all a bit easier for me, as I lived alone, while Adele was married, happily married, to a very nice guy about whom I should have felt some guilt except that he was known for straying himself and had caused Adele a bit of pain over this. I mean, you looked at these things and you could see possible retribution in every direction, if that’s what you wanted, but I didn’t. Besides, some of my pleasure consisted in just having company.

  * * *

  —

  We read on the shore until late morning, when it was warm enough for a swim. That is, the air was warm enough: the lake is never warm, but we dove in naked, paddled for a very short time, floating on our backs and gazing up at the cheerful little clouds over the Mission Range, then clambered out into the warm air, and had dried off by the time we fell into sex on one of the Adirondack chairs at the bottom of our sunny ravine, the glare on the cottage windows suggesting a steady stare. When we stood
up, we laughed at the sight of each other before Adele, glancing back at the chair, said, “Eww, I’ll get it.” That’s when I had the idea that ruined everything.

  The cottage came with a battered aluminum boat, an old Scott-Atwater motor on its transom and a litter of things strewn in its bottom, life jackets, a mushroom anchor and line, a net with a broken handle, a Maxwell House bailing can, one oar, and a sponge. I looked into the red gas can; it was full, and the fuel smelled fairly recent. “I say we make a run across the lake and have lunch in Big Fork.” In my defense, it was a perfect day for it, windless and sunny, the mountains to our east wonderfully green and regular. Summer traffic glinted from the highway for miles across the water and along the ripening cherry orchards.

  The motor started on the first pull. Adele in her summer dress and white-framed sunglasses sat facing forward atop a life jacket, while I, with an arm behind me on the motor’s handle, maneuvered us out of our little bay into the open water. I tried to memorize the position of the cottage in the landscape so we could find our way home, knowing as I did it wouldn’t be long after lunch that we’d be longing to drag the sagging mattress onto the floor again. We tended to overdo these exertions in what time we had, even though, as Adele reminded me, it’s not something you could store for later. I supposed that was true, as there was nothing routine about each renewal of ardor, though we did get better at it every year. If we were not as attractive as we once had been, we had the advantage of knowing what we liked with greater certainty, even as it had grown more unmentionable in polite company.

  The surface of the lake sparkled green, and its placidity belied the occasional squall that popped unexpected out of the mountains, drowning kokanee fishermen, whose bodies sank like stones in the cold water. Now it was as delightful as a rain forest on a sunny day. I gave the pressure bulb on the gas line an extra squeeze, and Adele, sensing my movement, turned to smile, then rolled her eyes heavenward in bliss over our surroundings. Leaving a bubble trail and a straight wake, the little Evinrude pushed us slowly to the other side.