The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  He went on all fours through the garden beds. He went, not like a man on his hands and knees, but with abrupt swinging motions of his limbs, head high for observation, hunting and on the move. This is the veldt, he thought, and this is how lions act.

  I am leading the game, he thought, or not?

  3

  During the night, Payne frequently woke up, overtaken by horror. But nothing happened. He should have foreseen that. Not calling the cops was a precise piece of Fitzgerald snobbery. One’s name in the papers.

  He had breakfast with his mother who came in from an early round of golf. Her hair in a smart athletic twist, she flapped down driving gloves beside a robust ox-blood purse. Radiating cold outdoor air, she brought their breakfast to the porch. Today she was a lady eagle, Payne noted. She reached for a croissant with her modeled Gibson Girl hand.

  They were able to watch the river from here. The table was surrounded by the telescope, bird books and freighter shipping codes with which Payne’s father kept track of profitable tonnage on the river. (“There goes Monsanto Chemical loaded to the scuppers! They’re making a fortune! Don’t take my word for it, for God’s sake! Read about it in Barron’s!”)

  Through the top of the glass table at which they ate, Payne could see both of their feet splayed on the terrazzo. He watched his mother probe daintily at her cheerless breakfast of champions awash in blue skimmed milk. And he knew by the warm detachment of her smile that she was about to spring something on him.

  “What is it, Ma?”

  Her smile soared up out of the wheat flakes, inscrutable and delicate. “You know Dad,” her voice rich with inflections of toleration, of understanding. “You know how he is, well, on the subject of you doing something a tiny, well, the tiniest bit regular or respectable, you know how he, how he, how he—

  “I know but stop that.”

  “What?”

  “How he, how he.”

  “How he wants you to simply take advantage of your most obvious advantages and join the firm; and it’s not—”

  “I will not subject myself to a career in lawr. I had my little taste of lawr in lawr skyewl.”

  “I see.”

  “Yass, lawr skyewl.”

  “Yes, well I do think you ought to know that if you repeat that speech to him—” She said this simply and very wisely. “—it would be useful to plan on your having your hash settled. Uh, but good, I’d say.” She raised one thin arm emphatically, holding aloft her spoon; and a drop of milk, like a drop from the pale blue vein on her arm, quivered on the hand then ran into her palm. She turned her eyes to it. “You sneer at a man who offered to give you—”

  “Strings.”

  “—to give you—”

  “Too many strings attached.”

  “To give you, never mind, to hand over to you the finest law practice in the entire Downriver.”

  “Altogether too many strings attached to the finest lawr practice in the entire Downriver.”

  “But no—”

  “But no I wanted to do something all by my lonesome possibly not even in the Downriver at all.”

  “Really, Nicholas, shut up, wouldn’t you.” Payne put a piece of hot glazed almond roll into his mouth and stopped talking. Maybe Duke Fitzgerald was hiring someone to kill him at this very minute and he was sending almond roll down a gullet that was doomed. He looked fondly on as his mother lifted her spoon again and dipped a chunk of bread and yolk from her egg cup.

  “You think that your allowance is to be resumed.”

  “Okay, please, enough. I always supply my own funds.”

  “I couldn’t go through it again,” she went on doggedly. “Like last Fall. Your father working and you duck hunting every day of the week and filling our freezer with those vulgar birds. And the year before riding up and down the country on the motorcycle. It makes my head swim. Nicky, it makes my head swim!”

  “I have to keep on the qui vive for spiritual opportunity.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “I do.”

  “And poor Ann. I sympathize with her and with her parents.” Little do you know, Payne thought. I’ve got to bear down hereabouts.

  “Mom,” he inquired. “You want my motto? This is some more Latin.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Non serviam. Good, huh? My coat-of-arms shows a snake dragging his heels.” His mother started giggling.

  There was nobody here to make him see the world as a mud bath in which it is right tough to keep showing a profit. He invented a joke to the effect that blood was always in the red and death was always in the black; and thought: What a great joke!

  By the time his father got to him that evening, Payne, by careful examination, found himself adrift. The two men each had a drink in hand. His father had had his annual physical and was in an already exacerbated mood. He’d had a barium enema. If you had an intestinal impaction, he claimed, “that barium bastard would blow the son of a bitch loose.” Payne said he would keep it in mind.

  There had been trouble with the furnace. Since the house had been in his mother’s family for four generations, that whole sector was implicated by the mechanical failings of the furnace. Mister Payne presently insisted that the machine had been salvaged from the English Channel where it had received the attentions of the German U-boat corps in 1917. “It was installed in our cellar with all its brass and corrosion intact and in its earliest glory. The touching ships’ wheels by which the heat is adjusted have all seized in position so that the only real regulatory control we have is opening the doors and windows. I have been increasingly unamused during winter months in creating a false Springtime for six cubic acres around our house. The Socony Vacuum and Oil Corporation’s fee for this extravaganza customarily runs to three thousand per diem.”

  “I understand how you feel,” said Payne lamely.

  “No you don’t. I learned yesterday that the breakwater is sloughing at inconceivable speed into the river. I’m afraid if I don’t pour a little concrete in there, we’ll lose the pump house this winter.”

  Payne held his cold glass to his forehead. “I saw it was crumbling myself.” He crunched an ice cube; an illusion of his own teeth shattering.

  “You don’t realize the cost of these things,” his father mentioned drily, his eyes leaden with authority.

  “But if it has to be done.”

  “Of course it-has-to-be-done. But you regret the cost of it. The cost almost overshadows the value of the pump house you’re trying to save.”

  Payne gave this a moment’s quiet thought.

  “Perhaps you’ll let it go then,” he said.

  “And lose the pump house! With an irreplaceable pump!”

  “Just what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to advise me. I would like to hear your ideas.”

  “Sell the house and buy an A-frame somewhere very far inland.”

  “Oh, well, if you’re laying for something.”

  “How much sense does that make?”

  “And maybe you ought to go easy on that stuff,” said his father, lordly in the precision of his tailored livery. He jabbed a finger at Payne’s drink, now splashing, then running, off the wall. “And if you don’t want a drink, don’t pour yourself one. The solution is not to pour yourself a drink and then throw the drink against the wall. It may be a solution in some circles; but it is not one I mean to finance.”

  “I bought this drink in a bar. I am its proprietor.”

  “I have attempted to talk about this breakwater, this ailing breakwater which, if it isn’t healed, is going to drop my high-priced pump house into the Detroit River, irreplaceable pump, tightly built clapboard shed and all. I scarcely need mention that it will break your mother’s heart. Her family has been in that joint for ten generations; and that pump house has borne witness to a hell of a lot of their hopes and fears. And I’ll be God damned if I am going to play host to a squadron of union cowboys at six bucks apiece per hour just to keep
the Detroit River out of the lawn and I suppose, ultimately, the basement.”

  “All right,” Payne said, “I’ll fix the breakwater.”

  “Don’t do anything that’s too rough for you.”

  “I’ve had enough hectoring now,” Payne said. “I’ll fix your breakwater but I’ve had enough of the other thing as of right now.”

  “You do as you wish, my boy.” He gave the smile of love and understanding that is done primarily with the lower lip. “You have your life to live. Otherwise—”

  “Other than what?” Payne interrupted, having become, some time ago, an expert on these lawyers’ jumps by which a grip is obtained upon the testes, an upper hand as it were.

  “Other than your performing some reasonable duties around here as a basis for our providing, gratis, your keep, I don’t see how we can let you go on.”

  “You’ve muffed it now,” Payne said. “I would have done it anyway. That’s too bad.”

  “I’ve smiled through any number of months of your aimlessness, punctuated only by absurd voyages around the country in motorcycles and trash automobiles. I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. I want you to know that I won’t let you lie doggo around the house awaiting another one of your terrible brainstorms. My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure. I, of course, stupidly imagined that this leisure has been not possible without my going to work. Once I had seen that I knew I could at least have the pleasure of being the boss. I know it’s idle; but it gives me a cheap and real thrill.”

  “You make it pretty clear,” said Payne with admiration.

  “In other words,” his father said pleasantly, “fix the breakwater or get out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you going to fix it?”

  “Oh, not at all.”

  “You’ll have to go,” his father said, “you’ll have to get out.”

  They strolled around. It was a pleasant evening and the garden beds smelled better than they would later on when they were grown over with summer vegetation.

  The next morning, they talked in the driveway. Now his father’s mind was on his briefs again. And the talk didn’t please Payne as the one the day before had. His father, then, stood, hat in hand, bored to tears. “You’re through here now,” he said with muffled alarm. “Now what are you going to do? I mean … what? In terms of your education you’re perfectly set up to …” His face looked heavy and inert as though you could have carved from eyebrows to chin and removed the whole thing without hitting bone. “… to …” He looked away and sighed, rotated the hat ninety degrees in his hand and looked at the door. “… you could …”

  The boredom was infectious. “I could what?”

  “I could find you a slot as a publicist.”

  “Non serviam,” Payne said, “I’ve been reamed.”

  “What in God’s name do you mean?”

  “I actually don’t have a clue.”

  They kissed like two Russians. “Goodbye.”

  The minute his father drove off, Payne’s hemorrhoids began hurting. The same thing preceded the last motorcycle trip, commencing with a gruesome fistula that fought eighty dollars worth of Cheyenne penicillin to a draw. Interminable Sitz baths in flimsy flophouse sinks had given him the legs of a miler. Payne knew the showdown was not far away.

  Payne felt that he was wrong to always hang in to bitter ends. The current declining note was an instance. He had lived too long with all the irritants of life at home, small contestations and rivalries which inconvenienced his happiness pettily. A kind of drear mountainous persiflage always accompanied such encounters. He ended by being buried in the piss-ant social inclemencies which turned him into the petulant loafer par tremendoso he himself regretted being.

  In the past, he had run up and down America unable to find that apocryphal country in any of its details. His adrenalin cortex spumed so much waste energy that a lot of amazing things happened. And he deliberately changed his highway persona day by day; so that, across the country, he was variously remembered for his natty dress, for his opposite of that, for his persistent collection of “data,” for his arbitrary and cyclonic speechmaking, for his avowed devotion to his mother and father, for his regular bowel movements, for his handsome rather loosely organized mock-Magyar face, for his tiny library and transistorized machines locked away in ammunition tins, for his purported collection of the breakfast foods of yesteryear, and for his habitual parabolic coursing through the U.S.A. with attendant big trouble, pursuits and small treasured harbors of calm or strange affections along traveling salesman lines, facing enemies with billboard-size declarations of a dire personal animus, cluttering hundreds of small midland streets with regrettable verbs and nouns, sharp ones, heavy ones and ones which made barricades and tanktraps in peaceful summer villages where no one was asking for trouble.

  In most ways it had been an awful strain, one he’d been glad to finish. Now, being on the verge of it again, he felt an uproarious tension in his mind.

  4

  People turn up.

  For much too long, he continued to appear dazed. He often thought, “I couldn’t have been more of a pig.” Interested only in things that provided no morning after, he paid out deceptive conversations that made everyone in earshot fidget.

  When he closed his eyes, Ann seemed to speed through a cobalt sky, a lovely decal on the rigid Ptolemaic dome. Every room gave at the corners. And why should anyone in the fat of late spring imagine that winter was not far away, scratching its balls in some gloomy thicket?

  He dreamed and dreamed of his adolescence when he had spent his free time watching medical movies, carrying a revolver, and going around, for no reason, on crutches.

  He was interested these days in how people listened.

  He heard them. Completely buggy in the frame bed, he pawed the wall for the switch. They were down there: dogs. He climbed out of bed, driving a putty-colored shadow to the stairhead. At the bottom, a sea of fur flowed toward the toilet. He heard them taking turns drinking. He was excited and frightened. He felt a long, terrible oblong of space standing out from his chest and going all the way to the first floor.

  The next day, he went to see a World Adventure Series movie of Arabia and talked for hours about Death In Africa. Two thousand years of desert heat turns a man’s body into a weightless puffball which can be made into a useful kayak by slitting the paunch. Take it fishing. Show your friends.

  He called Ann at the ranch. “Have you been arrested?” she inquired.

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh, well. I didn’t know what they were going to do.”

  “I’ll never forget it, Ann.”

  “I wouldn’t think so, no.”

  “I couldn’t have been more of a pig.”

  “… well …” she said equivocally.

  “Things good there on the ranch?”

  “There’s this new foreman,” Ann answered, “he’s sort of beautiful and mean.”

  “I can handle myself,” Payne said.

  “You apparently thought so,” Ann commented, “when you perched on the mantel that night—”

  “On the shelf actually.”

  “—and screamed like a crow—like a crow—at mother. That’s something, all in all, for a prize.”

  “I got one,” Payne said mysteriously.

  “Nicholas, oh …”

  “You’re crying.”

  “This call … is getting expensive.”

  “You are crying aren’t you?”

  “… I …”

  “I see you,” Payne began clearly, “almost as a goddess, your hair streaming against the Northern Lights. And you tell me that this call is getting expensive. When there’s a picture of you in my head which is an absolute classic. On the order of something A-1.” In front of Payne’s chin three holes: 5¢, 10¢, 25¢; a tiny plunger dreams of a plungette; glass on all four sides, circles of hair oil printed wit
h a million hairlines and underneath, a tan-colored tray, scratched with names, a chain and a directory.

  “Nicholas,” Ann said, “try to train yourself to have a healthy mind.”

  “To what end?”

  “Happiness and art.”

  “Oh my God.” He concluded swiftly and hung up.

  Hit the door and it folds. Fumes and automobiles. I’ve landed in a part of the American corpus that smells bad. The body politic has ringworm. These women. Really. All of them perfect double-headers. Smile at both ends. Janus. Make their own gravy like dogfood. I’ve been up against all kinds. Some of them lift an arm and there is the sharpishness of a decent European cheddar. And that art talk. I know what it leads to: more of her excesses in its name. And things like relinquishing underwear to protest the bugging of her phone by the CIA.

  Appropriately, a hand-painted sign adorns an opposing brick wall: a weary Uncle Sam in red, white and blue stretches abject, imploring hands to the beholder; a receding chin has dropped to reveal the mean declivity of his mouth, which says “I NEED A PICK ME UP.” Payne approached, saw with shock the signature: C. J. Clovis Signs. Back in the booth, he splashed through the Yellow Pages and found his name.

  Fascinated, Payne started, seeing another, up the alley which ended a quarter mile ahead with a blue gorgeous propane tank; the other end, a little white gap of dirty sky like the space between the end of a box-wrench held, for no reason at all, to the eye, a little space and, in the center, a red quaint telephone booth, where he had spoken. A radio played, its fell music contested by a rabid squabble of “electrical interference.” Here was no scene for a happy boy. This was a land of rat wars, a dark fiefdom of bacteria, lance corporals with six arachnid legs.

  The far wall, over the propane tank, between drain pipes spangled with oxidation, another sign, this depicting a dark Andalusian beauty, possibly a bit literal. Behind her the municipal skyline arises, tendrils and building pieces, in a total nastiness of habitat; the barest tips of her fingers, palpitant and patrician, rise barely over the lower frame; cheap day-glo letters proclaim her message: “My hosbin’s frans dawn lok me percause I yam an Eespanidge voomans.” The signature—ye gods!—C. J. Clovis. Beneath it, his marque, a naugahyde fleur-de-lys.