The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  Missus Fitzgerald had lost her rancor, temporarily, in the realization that Payne’s inroads had been made possible by a certain amount of cooperation if not actual encouragement from Ann. It was so dispiriting. A pastiche of lurid evidence made it clear what she had been up to. Infamy and disgrace seemed momentary possibilities. And though she took a certain comfort from such abstractions, there were dark times when she saw an exaggerated reality in her mind’s eye of Payne hitching in naked fury over her spread-eagled daughter or worse, the opposite of that. At those times, Missus Fitzgerald scarfed tranquilizers again and again until all she could think of was heavy machinery lumbering in vast clay pits.

  Fitzgerald was thinking he should have slapped the piss out of her in 1929, that rare crazy year. (Sixteen years before Payne was born when his mother and father were touring Wales in a rented three-wheel Morgan; and twenty years before Ann was born. Ann was conceived in 1948. Her mother, already Rubensian, to be generous about it, stood on an Early American cobbler’s bench grasping her ankles as the then-wasplike Dad Fitzgerald—so recently the squash champion of the D.A.C.—laced into her from the rear. As he had his orgasm, he commenced making the hamster noises that lay at the bottom of his wife’s subsequent sexual malaise. His legs buckled and he fell to the floor and dislocated his shoulder. What neither of them knew as they drove to the hospital was that Ann’s first cell had divided and begun hurtling through time in a collision course with Nicholas Payne, then knuckling around the inside of a Wyandotte playpen.) But he never did and now it was too late.

  “You wonder about old man Payne,” said Fitzgerald.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “He has the finest law practice in the entire Downriver.”

  “Yes he has.”

  “He’s right up there, you know, up there, and he throws this classic second generation monstrosity on the world.”

  “You wonder about the mother,” said Missus Fiztzgerald. “She was once the chairman of the Saturday Musicale. She got the Schwann catalogues sent to everybody. How could decent people develop a person in this vein? I ask myself these things.”

  “Yes, but like all women you fail to come up with answers.”

  “All right now.”

  Dad made his fingers open and close like a blabbing mouth.

  “I’m sick of the theory approach to bad news,” he said. “I’m a pragmatist. In my sophomore year in college two things happened to me. One, I took up pipe smoking. Two, I became a pragmatist.”

  Mom Fitzgerald began to circle the Dad, her neck shortening under the blue cloud of ’do. “Well, you little pipe-smoking pragmatic G.M. executive you,” she said. The hands which banished bad thoughts flew about in front of her. “You’re going to give us one of your little wind-ups, are you? Your college history, are you?”

  “I—”

  “I’ll pragmatize you, you wheezing G.M. cretin.”

  “Your pills, Edna, your pills. You’re getting balmy.”

  “Show me that little trick with your hand, where it tells me I’m talking too much.”

  “Get your pills, Edna.”

  “Go on, show it to me.”

  He showed her the blabbing motion with his hand at the same time he told her, “Get the pills, Edna.” She slapped his hand open. He made the blabbing motion again. “Get your pills I said!” Then she nailed him in the blaring red mug and ran for it. He galloped after her grunting and baying as he hauled her away from the desk. She turned then and raked his chest with a handful of ballpoint pens and a protractor.

  He tore open his shirt, revealing his chest, and seeing with his own starting eyes the blue and red lines all over it.

  “You maniac! You shitbird! Oh my God you piss-face you!”

  Wayne Codd, deliriously attracted to this compromising episode, sprinted across the immense living room. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, looking in on the extraordinary uproar of Dad Fitzgerald stripped to the waist, his wife sobbing on the couch, her bum in view, sheathed in a vast reinforcement of pink rubberized girdle and a systematic panoply of attachments; everywhere it was not held back, terrible waffles of flesh started forward. Codd felt he had them dead to rights.

  “Saddle my horse, Codd,” said Fitzgerald.

  “You want to ride horseback?”

  “Saddle that horse you God damn mountain bonehead.”

  Codd looked at the scrimshaw on Fitzgerald’s chest.

  “No one talks to me that way, Fitzgerald.”

  “Oh, of course they do. Now saddle the horse. No cheap talk.”

  Codd darted for the stable. It was the wrong time for a face-off. He meant to keep a low silhouette.

  Fitzgerald turned to Edna.

  “Duke,” she said. His chin rested fondly on his abstract expressionist chest. Their obsession with Payne was temporarily suspended in a vision of Instant Ralston, cobbler’s benches and happy squash tournaments at a time when Europe was beating its way into the Stone Age.

  “Edna,” he said.

  8

  Ann troweled around the strawberry sets in her little garden, weighting the corners of each square of net. Sweet Wayne Codd had made her a little irrigating system, a miniature of those in the hayfield with its own little head gate and little canvas dam and little side ditches that went down all the little rows between the little strawberries. Each day Wayne came down and opened the gate, flooding the little garden with clear cold creek water that made the strawberries grow fast as wildfire. How sweet they would be too, she thought, bathed in mountain sunlight and floating in that heavy cream Wayne skimmed and brought up from the barn. Nicholas, are you thinking of my little strawberry garden?

  Mister Fitzgerald rode his strawberry roan across the creek, his chest stinging with strawberry-colored tincture of merthiolate. He was on the lookout. He thought of all the sauce the old broad still had in her.

  “… what those five feet could do

  has anybody seen my …”

  Payne towed the wagon up Bangtail Creek and, in an agony from his labors, sat waist deep in his sleeping bag. He leaned over to look at the vast strawberry evanescence that was ending the day and yelled at the sky, “I’ve had more heartaches than Carter’s got little liver pills!”

  Ann fluttered around her room in her nighty like a moth. It had come to be time to think again about George Russell. She had after all lived with this bird; and in the face of Payne’s luminous appearance the day before, it seemed well to review the options. She transported herself to a day on which they had traveled through reasonably intact swatches of Provence, rolling along conspicuous in their Opel sedan among the pie-plate Deux Chevaux. There were the usual laments about American towns not having trees like that; and, withal, a pinched whininess was their sole response to all that was demanded by towns accreted upon Roman ruins. That day they reached the border town of Irun where, over the questions of Spanish border officials and views of the varnished heads of the Guardia Civil, they gazed upon the gray-green wondermass of España.

  Through the efficiency of the crafty young executive, George Russell, they found themselves at the bullfights in Malaga, a mere day later. Ann’s knowledge of that came in pulses, there in the window over the garden, the garden in Montana:

  They watched the bullfighter set up the bull for the kill. The bulk of the fight—the queening and prancing—was behind them now. He put away the wooden sword and took the steel one and moved the bull with the cape to uncross his front feet. George beside her had been giving the most relentless play by play: The bull’s tongue was out because the picadors had stayed in too long and had piced the bull too far back. The placing of the sticks, George said, had been arrant dancing. The torero’s ringmanship had been questionable; he had allowed the fight to continue until the bull’s head lolled.

  “Nevertheless,” George summarized, “everything with the right hand, and I’m thinking especially of the derechazos, has been worth the trouble of getting here.” Ann nodded and looked back down onto the
sand; at once, depressed.

  The bullfighter had folded the muleta over the sword, reached out placing the cloth before the bull and, withdrawing the sword, rose up onto the fronts of his feet sighting down the blade. The exhausted animal remained fixed on the muleta. A moment later, it lifted its head from the cloth and the torero stabbed him in the nose to drive the head down. You can bet it worked. Ann looked away. Even art …

  “Listen to those English,” said George. “The bastards are cheering the bull!” The bullfighter went in. The bull made no attempt to charge him. The sword went all the way to its hilt and the bull did not fall over dead. Instead, he turned slowly from where he had taken the sword and began to walk away from the torero. He had his head stretched out low and far in front of himself, close to the ground. Part of the retinue joined the torero following the bull in its circling of the ring. The bull walked in agony, an ox driving a mill, the torero behind, patient, trailing the sword in the sand. The bull stopped and the torero and his retinue stopped as well. The bull heaved and vomited several gallons of bright blood on the sand and began plodding along again. Presently, the hind legs quit and the bull went down on its rear. The torero walked around in front of it and waited for the completion of its dying. The bull lifted its head and bawled and bawled as though in sudden remembrance of its calfhood.

  Laughter broke out in the stands.

  Then the bull just died, driving the one horn into the sand. The torero stretched an arm over his head in much the same gesture Payne had made in the bronc chute, and turned slowly in his tracks to the applause.

  “C-plus,” George Russell said. “An ear.”

  By then, anyway, it was not so easy to sleep. They had been in Spain some weeks now in the small house in the villa district of Malaga’s North End: Monte de Sancha. The days were not hot but still clear and the nighttime came prettily, zig-zagging up the sloped system of streets and passages. And when it was dark it would be quiet for a few hours. By midnight, however, the high-powered cars on the coast road would begin their howling at almost rhythmic intervals, now and again interrupted by the independent screams of the Italian machinery, the Ferraris and Maseratis.

  George, the employee of General Motors, and guarded car snob, dismissed the “greaseball hotrods”; but often paused in Torremolinos and Fuengirola to caress the voluptuous tinted metal or smile dimly into the faces of the drivers. Ann imagined the noise made him sleep even better; and in fact, coming in from the terrace, a sleepless middle of the night, the long cones of light pushed along beneath the house by a wall of noise rising and falling in sharp slivering of sound as the cars jockeyed for turn positions on the way to Valencia and Almeria, Gibraltar and Cadiz, she would see George, asleep on the big bed, his lip neatly retracted over the Woodrow Wilson teeth in something altogether like a smile.

  That day they returned from Seville where George had taken four hundred and nineteen photographs of Diego Puerta killing three Domecq bulls which he dismissed as brave but “smallish.”

  “Small but bravish?”

  “Brave but smallish, I said.”

  “Then why do you take their pictures.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  She had seen in George an unusual, even troubling, interest in the bullfighters, passed off with the same misleading sneer as the greaseball hotrods; but once she had caught him pinching his hair behind between thumb and forefinger, looking at himself sideways in the mirror, and she knew he wondered how it would be to wear the bullfighter’s pigtail—even in the clip-on version of the modern “swords”—and cruise the Costa del Sol in his Italian auto-meringue all the way from Malaga to Marbella where sleek former Nazis teased the flesh on the sun-dappled concrete of the Spanish Mediterranean and sent cards to Generalissimo Francisco Franco on his birthday.

  With none of this to endure, the sight alone of George throwing the absolutely limp and filthy wads of Spanish bills at waiters, at the African who bent iron reinforcing rods with his teeth in front of the Cafe España, or at the concierge of the Plaza de Toros in Seville whose under-shirted laborer son came to the door inopportunely as George highhandedly tried to bribe the mother; so that George very nearly got it, then and there, just got it; and when at the bars he would say in a loud voice, “Another Ciento Three para me,” she would begin vainly to plot her escape and was only stopped when she could not think of any place she wanted to go. Sometimes, too, she stayed because she felt that suffering was good for an artist, the source of his wisdom.

  So, then, ever since the grave of Cristobal Colon, and intermittently before, her escape had been to think of Payne. She could not, in her thoughts even, avoid the very beastly and useless things he did. But somehow the thought of his bad drinking, the spilling train of cigar ash always on his front, the ardent nonsense and volcanic cascade of lies and treachery, seemed now, as it had not when the two had been side by side to compare, unobjectionable next to George’s calculations.

  George was planning another trip now. Starting in Sicily they were going to follow thermoclines all worked out on a thin pad of tissue maps so that they would stay at a temperature and humidity least likely to rouse George’s sinuses. Only the scenery would change.

  But George was everybody’s dream. Once her father and George were talking in the den and Ann listened in.

  “How are they treating you at G.M.?” her father had asked.

  “Oh, God,” George grinned.

  “That’s a boy!”

  “Trying to work me to death,” George allowed.

  “You ought to know why!”

  “Trying to do five jobs at once. They think I’m—”

  “You’re going to go, George! You’re going to go big!”

  “—think I’m atomic powered or some damn thing.”

  “Atomic powered! Oh, God kid, you’re gonna go.”

  Unable to think of it any more, Ann went out onto the terrace in the dark. Overhead, the standard decal moon of Spain hung under the auspices of the Falange. Under such circumstances, it was scarcely a bustle of nard.

  She had fallen in love with Payne; or at least with the idea of that.

  • •

  Payne dozed achily in his wagon, the roar of Bangtail Creek nearby. When Ann had come home from Europe she found Payne crazy. They rented a little house for a week. And stayed together.

  Payne dozed and woke in completely unspecific exhaustion. Every night the dogs had come into the house. He knew they were down there. He always knew. He watched them for months. He looked for heads but could only see a glitter of eyes in his penlight. He never knew their number. He was not afraid. He let them drink from his toilet. He kept it clean for them. He left food but they wouldn’t take it. He was never afraid. One week. She stayed and saw them. She held the penlight and they both saw them. They figured twelve feet and they divided that into four dogs. It could have been three dogs. They thought with terror that it could have been two dogs. Sometimes they giggled and talked about it being one dog. They heard them drink. They didn’t know. It made them fastidious about the toilet. They didn’t forget to flush in times like that. They knew the dogs were coming. They kept it clean. They made love and talked about the dogs. Payne was trying to put his suspension system back in order. For quite a while there it was okay. He needed to get in touch there again though. It was like some kind of middle ear trouble. He woke up and couldn’t tell which way he was pointing, whether it was his head or his feet that were pointing toward the door. When the dogs came he would really start whirling. Maybe he should have shooed them out. He didn’t see the point of that. Neither did Ann. He was awfully crossed up and the dogs didn’t hurt and later Ann said that there had not been any dogs. He was fielding grounders. It had been hot all day. He imagined that all the leaves had turned. That everything outside was bright with frost. That winter was not far away. He did not know about that. It wasn’t that he wanted winter. He wanted to get his white Christmases off a bank calendar.

  “It’s all in your head,”
Ann said. Which was exactly right. Not that anyone was ever helped by that kind of idle information. But she tried so hard, so awfully hard. No she didn’t. She didn’t try all that hard. She always nailed him with that fucking Art. What Gauguin did. What Dostoyevsky did. What Lozenge did. He told Ann everything. True and false. She showed a preference for the false. He told her stories of Grandma making mincemeat in the late autumn up in Alberta with her great tallow-colored buttocks showing through her shabby frock. It was all false, all untrue, all gratuitous. She made a whole view of him out of it. A whole history. A whole artistic story of his childhood.

  Then Ann began to catch up. She saw he had invented himself ab ovo. She was upset. After the first chink, he pissed away everything. She called him a mirage. That was the end of their week. She really laced into him. Underhanded stuff. Subliminal broadsides. But the mirage business hurt his feelings. There were certain areas where he was not a mirage. Period. There were certain areas where he was implacable, don’t you know.

  He kicked her out. Ann found out he was not a mirage in a way that brought her up short rather fast. Irony of being kicked out of the house by a mirage. He liked that sense of things. The recoil factor of reality. Now he couldn’t see it. That kind of impatience. But he had been pressed. Two years of the most needle-nosed harassment from home.

  Ten days later he saw her. A high-school science exhibit. He remembered it exactly. Ann was there. Right where they could see each other. There was a glass-enclosed diorama against the wall. It was supposed to be Patagonia. He remembered one tree full of plaster fruit. Looked like grenades. Hanging over everything on these thousands of fine wires was a cloud of blue parakeets. He left without a word. The most overweening cheap kind of pride. Not speaking. He would pay.

  A false spring night. He was out in the garden behind the house. He had a cloth sack of sunflower seeds. He was drunk. He pushed the seeds into the dirt with his forefinger. The sky looked like the roof of the diorama. This was Patagonia. He was part of the exhibit. He did not consistently believe that. He did not believe it now. But he will believe it again.