The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  The affair of Payne and Ann had been curious. They had seen each other morning, noon and night for the better part of quite some time. Her parents, Duke and Edna Fitzgerald, were social figments of the motor money; and they did not like Nicholas Payne one little bit. Duke said he was a horse who wasn’t going to finish. Edna said he just didn’t figure.

  But Payne and Ann saw each other morning, noon and night. A certain amount of that time was inevitably spent up to no good. For Payne—and for Ann too—the whole thing seemed one of life’s maniacal evocations, a dimensional reach-through, heaven.

  Once, for instance, they were on Payne’s little boat; he was in the cabin, adjusting the flame on the parabolic butane heater. Ann was on the bunk beside him, Payne in a Jesuitical hysteria of cross-purposes. Ann, clearly, prettily, waited for it. And Payne gave her one too, just like that. He looked underneath as he mounted her: a herring leaping from bank to bank, a marine idyll. Ann, for her part, should have never told him to hold on to his hat; because for an alarming instant he just couldn’t get going at all. She patted him with encouragement and told him we were a big boy now. She slipped her ankles up behind his knees. Payne felt as though he were inflating, becoming a squeaking surface that enlarged getting harder and paler, a weather balloon rising through the stratosphere, merely a collapsed sack at the beginning, growing rounder and thinner with altitude, then the burst and long crazy fall to the ocean.

  Afterwards they watched a Lake Erie sunset together; a bleached and watery sun eased itself down on the horizon and broke like a blister, seeping red light over the poison lake. They could count the seven stacks of the Edison Electric Company. They smelled with affection the effluents of Wyandotte Chemical. They slept in one another’s arms on the colloidal, slightly radioactive swell.

  Next day, he had a little hang-over. He smoked grass and consequently had the notion his chair was singing in a languid Dick Haymes voice. Outside, he was convinced the sky had been vulcanized. He tried to call Ann and got her mother who was cool to him. She reminded Payne that the whole family was packing to go to the ranch in Montana and that maybe it would be better if Payne called at the end of the summer.

  Payne still could not believe that Ann would spend a minute with the other one. It broke his heart to think so. Her family hated him. She was always reluctant because of that to have him in the house at all. They knew he wasn’t working. They had seen him on motorcycles and felt he had thrown his education away. Now, on the phone, Ann’s porcine mother had it in her heart to tell him to wait until the end of summer to call. Payne doted on the pleasure it would bring to shoot the old cunt in the spine.

  “Bartender,” Payne said, “my glass is leaking.” He looked at the flashing sign of the Pontchartrain Bar, visible from in here. “Have you ever tasted cormorant?”

  He didn’t know George Russell, the other, but he didn’t hesitate to call him on the phone. “Listen George,” he said, “I demand a cessation of stupidities on your part.”

  “Oh, Payne,” George said with pity.

  “I want to help you.”

  “Ah, Payne, please not that.”

  “I remember you said once George that you could not live without lapels.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said George with a debonair tone.

  “I cannot live without lapels.”

  “That’s not true. Are you drunk or taking dope?”

  “Whether it’s true or not, why did you say it?”

  “I didn’t say it.”

  “What could it mean?”

  “I didn’t say it.”

  “What could that mean? ‘I cannot live without lapels’?”

  “Payne,” George interrupted. “Can you live with this: Ann has been seeing me. Can you?” All Payne could remember about George was that he was what dentists call a mouthbreather. He had decent teeth which he had bought at an auction of Woodrow Wilson’s effects. George hung up. Payne had one foot in the abyss.

  Someone put some change in the jukebox. Two couples who knew each other materialized in a sentimental jitterbug. It was the kind of thing sailors did with each other and with brooms when they were brokenhearted on aircraft carriers in World War Two, flight deck jitterbugs with the kamikazes coming in for the coup de grace; it was the very dance a bosun’s mate and a chief petty officer might have done a hundred and fifty-three miles out of Saipan with an eighty-five piece Navy orchestra playing Flatfoot Floogie on top of four hundred thousand tons of high explosives in a state of being approached by a religious Japanese in a bomb plane.

  Payne headed back to his table, but some oddball had glommed it. “Who’s the oddball?” he asked the bartender.

  “You are.”

  “I saw a sign in the urinal that said ‘Please do not eat the mints.’ This goes for you.” The bartender forced a laugh, throwing back his head so that Payne could examine the twin black ovals divided by the stem of his nose. He went to his table anyway, carrying a fresh whiskey. “Tell me about your family,” he said to the oddball.

  “Three of us is all,” smiled the other, “two dogs and a snake.” Payne looked at him, feeling his brain torque down into its first focus of the evening. The man picked up one of his galoshes from the floor and held it to his own ear. “I can hear Akron, Ohio,” he announced. Payne was enthralled.

  The man was sloppy and stretched-looking. Seeing Payne look, he boasted of having been most monstrously fat.

  “Guess.”

  “Two hundred,” Payne said.

  “Close. Five years ago, I weighed four eighty. C. J. Clovis. You call me Jack.” He pushed himself up. He was missing a leg. Then Payne saw the crutches. Clovis was neckless, not burly, and his head just sat in the soft puddle of his shoulders. “I lost more weight than I can lift!” He directed Payne’s attention to the various malformations of his skeleton produced by the vanished weight. The hips were splayed, for example. “My feet went flat! I had varicose veins popping on me! Danger looked from every which way!” He told Payne about his two friends in the Upper Peninsula who both weighed over four hundred and who, like Clovis, were brokenhearted because at that weight they couldn’t get any pussy. Therefore, they took a vow to lose all their excess. He dieted under the care of a doctor; his friends went on crashes of their own design. In the beginning he had reduced too fast and, consequently, as his body fed off itself, gave himself gout.

  “Then I got this old fat man’s disease, gangrene, and lost my leg.”

  “How long ago was this when you lost your … leg?”

  “A month. But I’m going to get me an appliance and I’m as good as gold.”

  “They say a missing limb continues to hurt.”

  “Oh, naturally yes. Of an occasion.”

  “How did these other fat guys make out?”

  “How did they make out?”

  “I mean how did they reduce?”

  “They reduced all right,” said C. J. Clovis, looking angrily toward the bar.

  “What do you mean?” Payne asked.

  “They’re dead!” Clovis looked around fidgeting, looked out the window and fidgeted furiously before looking back at Payne suddenly. “I’m going to get me some appliance!” His hands flew aloft like fat birds.

  “I believe that you are, Jack.”

  “I’ll be rockin and a rollin,” he said with religious glee. “I’ll be good as gold! I’ll have a time! Do you understand, God damn it?”

  “… yes …”

  “Stay a while and see me smile! Give me a chance and I’m gone to dance! I’ll do the backover flip every trip! I’m gone to be reelin off the ceilin with a very happy feelin! I’ll be good as gold!” Jack Clovis locked his eyes in position throughout the recital. Payne was locked in a paroxysm of embarrassment. “That is my pome,” said Jack Clovis. “You take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I could turn pro, Buster. You remember that.” Being called Buster was the only part Payne didn’t like.

  “At what,
” he asked baldly.

  “Why after I get that appliance I might take up an instrument. I could go a hundred different ways. You’ll be able to hear me laughin a mile off and performin on some God damned instrument.” He swung his head angrily through a hundred eighty degree sweep. “When I think of them other two fat boys and what they’re missing. Shoot! they too smarted themselves that time.” Payne thought of the two fat boys ballooned against the insides of their coffins while his old friend schemed about an artificial limb, entirely magic in its pink plastic and elastic hinges.

  The two men sat in a field of formica and did not speak. Payne could not accept the relief of an electric pinball machine that bloomed for him. Even without his gratitude, it spilled its pastel clouds and rang its bells while an unmoved player draped two fingers on the plunger and waited for it to get his victory out of its system.

  “May I have your ear?” asked C. J. Clovis, a disturbing question from an amputee. “I need your confidence. You have heard haven’t you of farmers who bring ten citrus fruits to bear from a single tree. You have heard of winter wheat. You have encountered, possibly, forced vegetables. I cannot go into it at this time; but let me say only this. There is a special application of these wonders that applies to the life of bats. And the potential? Top dollar. I will say no more.

  “My own appliance,” he continued to say, “which I mean to have in no time flat will be itself a natural wonder. I have confidence in it. It will have more actual articulations in it than a real limb. Though I will still be a monopod, this aluminum wonder will fetch me from spot to spot. Your name and address?” Payne gave it to him. “Let me drink in peace, sonny. And one last thing. Remember, won’t you, that I am in the Yellow Pages.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  You do meet some people in a bar, thought Payne who continued drinking. Gradually, he ceased to think of the unimaginable C. J. Clovis; and to nurse, instead, his obsession with the possible infidelities of Ann. He thought of calling the house but knew his fears would be heard in his voice. He was, moreover, a little intimidated by her parents. They were good at their world at least; and he seemed bad even at his. Darling be mine I love you. More Black-Jack Daniels, he said, and make it snappy. I am the customer. It was brought. “I pay,” he said lashing simoleons to the countertop. “I own a chain of wurlitzer chicken parlors and every Grade-A fryer has my brand on its ass.” Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air. Payne reeled into the night.

  He was standing in front of the Fitzgeralds’ door, in the dark, with no good in mind. Ann would be asleep. Inside of him, where all secrets were borne in darkness, a kind of Disneyland of the intestines went into operation, throwing forth illusions, mistimings and false alarums. Payne had a moment of terrible littleness. He pulled his sleeve back to learn the time and discovered he no longer owned a watch. He felt better. He saw again how he might be illustrious. The wrought brass knocker on the recessed oak door said FITZGERALD in stern, majuscule letters; above, heraldic devices worked in the metal itself proclaimed the Fitzgeralds rampant animals of one sort or another; while below—a pause while Payne goes completely out of focus, considers his mortality, our times and the music of the spheres, and refocuses—while below, then, a semicircle of smaller English uncials warned, “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.” It had been made to order, Payne surmised, by a microcephalic pump jockey from Burbank.

  A stern Payne lifted the knocker as to announce himself, stopping on the upstroke. Its squeaking changed his mood. His thoughts were awash with all the noises he hated; especially Pomeranian dogs, wind chimes and windowpanes wailing under soft cloths. He lowered the knocker and released it.

  Then he thought very hard. He stood without moving for a long moment and he thought quite as hard as he could. And when he had absolutely enough of that he turned the door knob slowly and firmly, opened the door, stepped inside and closed the door behind: a felon.

  All of the lights were turned out on the first floor and in the living room, though there seemed to be light enough in the air for him to see his way; and crystal shone dully on the end tables. He wandered out of the living room and into the den, shutting the door behind.

  In almost the first cabinet he rifled, he found brandy and the most magnificent Havana cigars he had ever seen, the legendary coronas, Ramon Allones Number One. His mouth was watering before he had one lit. With the first blue puff unraveling in the air, he poured himself a tall slug of brandy. He pulled Fitzgerald’s Holland-and-Holland shotgun down from its cabinet, threw it up to his shoulder and, in his happiness, believed he saw the big canvasbacks coming in flat, slipping just under the wind and flaring all around him.

  Could the Fitzgeralds have heard? Could they have heard him making shotgun noises with his mouth? Big ones? Like a twelve-gauge makes? He went to the door, stood behind it, pushed it open with his foot and jumped into the opening, brandishing the shotgun in the darkness. If anyone had been there, the situation had been clear and they had chosen not to show themselves. Payne pulled the door shut again and, holding the shotgun by the barrels, rested the butt on his shoulder and sat down, staring out of the dark window at the darker branches against it. “Pleasure is not the absence of pain,” he said aloud and swallowed all of the brandy. Instantly his eyes brimmed with tears and he ran around the room crying, “I’m dying, Egypt, dying!” Then he sat down again, took off his shoe, put the barrels of the Holland-and-Holland in his mouth and, sight unseen, pulled the trigger with his toe. There was a single, metallic, expensive and rather ceremonial English click. He took the barrels out of his mouth and thoughtfully replaced the cigar.

  Feeling his way along with the shotgun, he began to explore the house. He went upstairs in the streaming moonlight. The first room on the right was a bathroom with a sunken tub and a shower nozzle on a pivoting arm. Payne unzipped his fly and began to urinate into the toilet, carefully shooting for the porcelain sides of the bowl. Then—and the gesture was perfectly aristocratic—he shifted his stream to the center of the bowl. It made a lot of noise. Then he flushed the toilet.

  Payne tucked the end of the toilet paper in his back pocket, without detaching it from the roll, and returned to the hall. The paper quietly unwound behind him like a cave-explorer’s twine. Over his shoulder, he could see its reassuring stripe in the darkness.

  At the first bedroom door, he turned the knob. The door caught and would not open freely. He hesitated, then gave it a good jerk. It came free with a small creak. In the gaping space was an enormous double bed, Fitzgerald on his face, his wife on her back facing the ceiling. The enemy. It was some moments before he realized that the door was letting the wind pass through uninterrupted and the organdy curtains were standing into the room and fluttering and making noise. When he shut the door behind, he felt the unmistakable hum of fear. It had set up headquarters under his sternum. He lost track of what he was doing. His coordination departed and he made unnecessary noise with his feet. He still bravely managed to get to the edge of the bed and look down at the muzzle of the shotgun bobbing under Missus Fitzgerald’s nose. He had occasion to recall the myriad exquisite ways she had found to make him uncomfortable. He remembered too—looking at her laid out like this—that Saint Francis Borgia had been impelled to his monkhood through horror at the sight of the corpse of Isabella of Portugal. Beside her, and invisible in a ledge of shadow, her husband rotated in the blankets and unveiled his wife. Wearing only a pair of floppy prizefighter’s trunks labeled Everlast, her gruesome figure was revealed. It upset Payne to see such a thing. She began to stir then, and he withdrew the gun. In the moonlight, he could see where her nostrils had fogged its blue steel. The room was filled with cigar smoke now. Under Payne’s eyes, the two Fitzgeralds blindly and in slow motion fought for the covers. She won and left him shivering and naked. He was
as fuzzy and oddly shaped as a newborn ostrich.

  A discovery that Ann was not in her room wrecked everything. Now the toilet paper, in snarls and strips forever, angered him. He thought balefully of climbing the old lady just to fix them; but felt, all in all, that he’d rather not. Free of the paper, he sauntered gloomily through the blue light tapping ashes on the rug, heartbroken. The bitch.

  He bashed around the upstairs, not hearing the Fitzgeralds stir this time, and headed down to the den moaning a little. He poured another brandy, relit his cigar, gulped the brandy and smashed the glass against the far wall.

  Finally, the throwing of light switches and the wily flap of carpet slippers came to his attention. A tongue of light advanced to the foot of the stairs. Payne scampered around the room repeatedly imagining he would get off with a spanking.

  It was both of them. Payne was now crouched on the shelf beside the door. He turned at their sudden voices and rammed the gun cabinet door with his nose, actually slamming it. He knew paralysis. A voice: “Is this, is this, do they, where’s the—?”

  Then Missus Fitzgerald was in the den fixing instantly upon the smashed glass, the shotgun on the floor and the stain of brandy. Her eyes met those of Payne. Startled, she soon let her joy upon this ruin of him as a suitor be perceived.

  “I’m a person you know,” Payne claimed.

  “Come.”

  “With valves.”

  “You’re going to get a crack at cooling your heels in our admirable county jail,” she said, moving toward him. “Do you know that?”

  “I want my walking papers.”

  “No. You’re going to jail you shabby, shabby boy.”

  “Back off now,” Payne said, “or what I leave of your head won’t draw flies at a raree show.” He turned around and faced the bookshelves from five inches. “When I look I want you to have given me room to clear out. I’ll count three.” In the bookcases he saw, once he had focused at this close range, numerous volumes of interest, not the least of which was Borrow’s incomparable Lavengro. But he was distracted by La Fitzgerald. By the time he turned and started out, she was screeching and hauling at the telephone. He wormed his way out of the narrow window into the garden; every pleached bush biting at once; dark, bark-packed, red meat bites all over him.