The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  At the instance of his mother, a red-beezered monsignor was soon found in the wings, ready to counsel him. The monsignor told Payne that if he kept “it” up he would roast like a mutton over eternal fire. Whatever it was that Payne answered, it made the monsignor leap with agitation. It nearly came to blows.

  Payne ascended the stairs of the bank building to the county treasurer’s office. He was looking for a job. The stairs circled above the green skylight of the bank on the first floor. Somehow the whole beastly building started to bulge, started to throb. And he dropped his briefcase through the skylight. A file clerk looked up at him through the hole. And Payne saw that it was better to be looked up at through the hole, crazy as you were, than to be the file clerk looking.

  He began thinking in terms of big time life changes, of art and motorcycles, mountains, dreams and rivers.

  Stay for the sunrise. This dude is the color of strawberry. It creeps up Bangtail Creek and flowers through spruce. It stripes the ceiling of the wagon, tints the porous Hudson, and makes, through the screen, something wild of Payne’s face.

  9

  Unbeknownst to Payne, a rare blackfooted ferret, which to a colony of gophers is somewhere between C. C. Rider and Stagger Lee, darted from its lair and crossed County Road 67 between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota; not far, actually, from the Cedar, which is the south fork of the Cannonball River. This rare tiny savage crittur came very close to being (accidentally) run over by C(letus) J(ames) Clovis, the round-man of total bat tower dreams, who pressed Westward in his Dodge Motor Home.

  In a single swoop, Clovis had justified at least a summer’s expenditure. Using only local labor and acting himself as strawboss, he raised his bat tower in the West and provided the first bugfree conditions for the American Legion picnic in Farrow, North Dakota. He had watched with a certain joy the bats ditch their high native buttes and come clouding in along the dry washes and gravel bars, through willows and cottonwood, bats in trees and sky pouring like smoke from their caves and holes, bluffs and hollow mesa dwellings, toward the first Western Clovis Batwork with its A-1 accommodations. At the little “Mayan” entrances, there were bat battles. It was—and had to be—first come first served. For a short time, the rats in the bats prevailed; on the little tiered loggias, fearful bat war broke out. And underneath, a worried C. J. Clovis stood with his first client, Dalton Trude, mayor of Farrow, and listened to the distant scuffle. Presently, victims of the fray began to fall; black Victorian gloves; deathflap.

  But once things settled down and the various freak bats of anarchy were either knocked off or sent back to the bluffs, Clovis could see that the tower would work. Two days later, the picnic was held and at dusk the bats gathered high over the hot dogs, fried chicken and a whole shithouseload of potato salad. Quite on its own, a cheer went up. Hurrah! Hurrah for them bats! Hurrah for American Legion Farrow Chapter Picnic! Hurrah for C. J. Clovis of Savonarola Batworks Inc. Hurrah!

  Clovis set out.

  He nearly hit a blackfooted ferret. He crossed the Cedar or south fork of the Cannonball River between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota.

  C. J. Clovis headed for Montana.

  A lowering sky carried smoke from the pulp mill through Livingston. Payne looked at rodeo pictures on the wall of the Longbranch Saloon, refused another drink with a righteous flourish. During the night the northwesternmost block of Main Street burned to the ground. The twenty-four residents of the Grand Hotel escaped without harm. A fireman ran in confusion out of a dress shop carrying a flaming dummy, crying, “You’ll be all right!” The dummy was not all right. It turned into a pool of burning plastic and gave off noxious black smoke for hours. A pair of chaps belonging to a man who had been on the burial detail at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were lost without trace. So was a Mexican saddletree with a silver pommel. So was a faggot’s collection of bombazine get-ups. So was a bird, a trap, a bolo. All that truck, without a trace.

  Payne walked around the fire zone. Adamant volunteers capered around the hook-and-ladder, dousing ashes and trying things out. The hotel appeared to be quite all right; but the lack of windows, the unusual darkness of the interior said no one was home. Possibly only a Commie.

  Glass was scattered clear across Main. The plate window of Paul’s Appliance Mart blew when the walls buckled and the second story fell into the cellar. The prescription file of City Drug was salvaged and moved to Public Drug where orders will be filled as per usual. A precautionary soaking of the Western Auto roof produced unusual water damage. Bozeman sent their biggest pumper and four firemen. Let’s hear it for Bozeman. “Livingston teens were helpful in ‘cleaning out’ City Drug,” the mayor said ambiguously. The Livingston Enterprise mentioned “raging inferno,” “firemen silhouetted against the flames,” a “sad day for all concerned” and various persons “bending over backwards.”

  That, thought Payne, gazing at the wrack and ruin, is the burned-down block of my hopes, doused by the hook and ladders of real life. Some varmint signed me up for a bum trip. And, quite honestly, I don’t see why.

  It looked like rain. Nevertheless, art had raised its head. Ann brought her books inside, field guides and novels; and stood the field glasses on the hall table. She took her camera out of its case and mounted it on the aluminum tripod before pulling on her slicker and going outside again. She folded the tripod and carried the whole thing over her shoulder like a shovel and crossed the yard, climbed through the bottom two strands of wire and dodged manure all the way to the unirrigated high ground where the sage grew in fragrant stripes of blue. The lightning was shivering the sky and it scared her enough that she prudently avoided silhouetting herself on hill tops. When she finally set the camera up, she had no even ground and had to prop the tripod with stones. She checked frequently through the view finder until she felt she had it plumb and began composing. The view finder isolated a clear rectangle of country; three slightly overlapping and declining hills, quite distant; evening light spearing out from under dense cloud cover. The hills divided the frame in a single vibrant line; and though she thought there was something tiresome and Turneresque about the light spears, she liked the incandescence of the cottonwoods whose shapes gently spotted the sharp contours of hill. She had trained herself to previsualize all color into a gray scale so that she could control the photograph in black and white. It pleased her to see the scale here would be absolute. The white, searing lightning with its long penumbra of flash, graded across the viewed area to the pure black shadows in the draws and gullies. Ann felt this polarity of light with an almost physical apprehension; the lightning thrusts seemed palpable and hard. She turned the lens slightly out of focus to exaggerate the contours of the composition; then returned it to a razor edge. She held her breath as though shooting a rifle and kept her hand cradled under the lens, looking down at its pastel depth-of-field figures, the three aluminum legs opening from under the camera like a star. A light perspiration broke out upon her upper lip as she pared away, focusing, selecting aperture and shutter speed toward the pure photographic acuity she perceived in her imagination. The lightning would have to be in it or the picture would be a silly postcard. But it was flashing irregularly and she never knew when it would appear. She wanted it distant and to the left of the lower end of the hills for decent compositional equipoise. As the storm, still distant, increased, the bolts of lightning appeared with greater regularity, a regularity Ann began to feel was rhythmical. She attempted to anticipate this rhythm so that she could trip the shutter at the suitable moment; at each plunge of lightning, at each searing streak, she tightened her muscles and gradually closed in on the interval until, after a dozen or more instances, she stood away from the camera with the cable release in her fingers and moved—very slightly—from head to toe. Her eyes were closed, it must be said. After some moments of this strenuous business, she opened her eyes, dazed, and tripped the shutter at the microsecond that the lightning shimmered, distant, over the lower end of hills
. Black and white, diminishing grays were, she knew, stilled and beautiful across thirty-five millimeters of silver nitrate emulsion inside her little camera.

  Ann panted there for some time before gathering the legs of the tripod and heading back down toward the ranch.

  She felt at one with things.

  She felt as if, plumb tuckered, she had blown her wad. She knew that inside her box was an undeveloped image awaiting the bath of real chemicals. Her mind and heart rang with these volleys of zickers. Her step was springy. And her desirable little ass was tight and peach-cleft with girlish go. Aristotle says Eudemonia, she thought.

  LAUREL, MONTANA

  FRIENDLY CHURCHES

  COME

  SEE

  US

  It won’t be long now, thought Clovis. Billings was behind at last. To the immediate right of the controls was the television. Clovis had turned it on and was watching The Dating Game. An attractive adolescent girl had just won two weeks in Reno with a glandular Chief Petty Officer. She had picked him because his voice reminded her of Neil Sedaka. But when he came out from behind the curtain, the girl was agog.

  The summer mountains were the color of cougars. In the foreground, a flippant Burma-Shave antagonism manifested itself. Horses stood in the shade of larger signs and switched. Clovis was thinking of Payne’s youthful power. It won’t be long now, he reminded himself.

  Is this fair, Payne asked himself, is it? He looked out of the window of the Big Horn cafe. There was a crowd in the street watching the wreckage of the fire: cowboys, loggers, businessmen, a camel. A young schoolteacher was having lunch with a promising student. “Once you get the drop on Shakespeare,” the teacher said, “you’ve got the whole deal licked.” The mayor arrived outside.

  A wrecking ball came through a half-burned building, an old mortician’s shop, raining pieces of unfinished headstone, tongue and groove siding, bird and mouse nests. A small group had formed around the mayor who gestured toward the fire damage with one upraised palm. “We’re gonna prettify this son of a bitch or die trying,” he assured his constituency.

  “I don’t like my work,” Payne told an elderly waitress.

  “Never mind that,” she said. “Have a bromo, honey.”

  “I’m unhappy with my lot,” he told her.

  Ann wasn’t small. She was delicately made though and long rather than particularly slender though she was slender too; but what impressed you about her hands, nose and feet was their length and the paleness of her skin. Her eyes seemed very fully open, the upper lid nearly invisible and the lower seeming pared away to a sliver, though without the usual quality of staring. When she smoked, she handled a cigarette with careless precision and could leave a cigarette in her mouth, breathing and squinting through the smoke, and look rather beautiful doing it. She listened attentively even to Wayne Codd who had decided that, after the honeymoon in Paris, they would just constantly be going to operas.

  On that appointed day, Payne watched Main Street from the crack of dawn. And at the crack of dusk, the great Dodge appeared, blocking the end of North Main and browsing up the center line with the head of the immortal fatty craning around the inside.

  Payne jumped up from his seat in front of the Peterson Dewing building and ran alongside the vehicle. They shook hands through its window and Payne rode on its step while Clovis hunted a forty-foot parking spot.

  They camped that night on Bangtail Creek, leaving the Dodge behemoth on the highway. They schemed like Arabs until the morning and rose at first light. Payne built a fire in a small wheelbarrow he found; and in the morning chill, they moved the wheelbarrow around to keep in the sun. They warmed their hands and planned it all.

  There was time to go over it later; but, perhaps, Payne began to see as he had not seen before that in certain important ways his own life, like Clovis’, was not funny; or only limitedly so, like cakewalking into a barrage; or better, one of Clovis’ horrific signs, the Uncle Sam, for instance, shriveled, asking for a pick-me-up. Payne’s indirection took him strangely, as though he were coming down with it, feckless flu. The headlong approach of C. J. Clovis made him, in his vigor and arrogance, the stick in the candy apple of America; it filled Payne with the joy of knowing that expressways are inhabited by artful dodgers, highhanded intuitive anarchists who don’t get counted but believe in their vast collective heart that the U.S.A. is a floating crap game of strangling spiritual credit. Write that down.

  Clovis saw quite another thing in Payne.

  10

  C. J. Clovis stood on a bench in Sacajawea Park at Livingston, Montana, haranguing an audience composed of cranks and drifters not unlike himself, on the subject of bat towers. Bats in Clovis’ description were tiny angels bent on the common weal, who flittered decoratively through the evening sky ridding the atmosphere of the mosquito. Now the mosquito to Clovis was a simple pus-filled syringe with wings. Was that what you wanted your air filled with? If so, never mind bat towers. If not, contact Savonarola Batworks, Incorporated, poste restante, Livingston, Montana.

  “Dear Governor Wallace,” wrote Ann to the famous Alabaman. “As an American artist, I would like to offer my condolences for your deceased wife. Rest assured that your darling Lurleen awaits you in Hillbilly Heaven. Sincerely yours, Ann Fitzgerald.” Ann was constantly ready to lace into rednecks and right-wingers.

  The clear shadow advanced across the parquet floor of her bedroom. She had been in the room since dawn making marks on the floor, every hour on the hour, numbering the shadow’s progress to indicate the time. An imperfect plan, she thought, but I’ll always be able to glance at it in August and know quelle heure est-il. I never come except in August. She sings “Stars Fell on Alabama” in a quiet, pretty voice. Her attitude toward Governor Wallace begins to soften.

  Her thoughts of Payne are sporadic and persistent; there has been a pattern. Thoughts of love upon waking in the morning. Thoughts of deprivation then fulfillment on the great unwobbling pivot just before lunch. In the late afternoon, she often thinks of him with anger. Why does he act like that? In the light of the present household tensions, which are terrifically nonspecific, Montana itself begins to pall and subsequently the West, America and so on. As the features of the world recede, Payne is left high and dry like a shipwreck in a drained reservoir. Ann longs to move longingly among his waterlogged timbers, carrying the key to his sea chest. Angelfish, Beau Gregories, tautogs, lantern fish, sergeant majors, morays, bullheads, barracudas, groupers, tunas, flounders, skates, rays, sea robins, balao and narwhals gasp on waterless decks as Ann runs through Payne’s bulkheads.

  Payne walked across the town to the railroad station where he had left the car. The wagon remained at Bangtail Creek; he hoped not very seriously that it hadn’t been vandalized. Underneath the trees on the long lawn beside the station, Pullman porters took the air, chatting with each other and with conductors over the noise of steel-wheeled wagons trucking luggage into the station. Payne wanted to ride the Northern Pacific to Seattle, sitting with Ann in the observation car; perhaps jotting in a pigskin diary: My Trip.

  I sometimes see myself, thought Payne, in other terms than standing on the parapets with my cape flying; but not all that often.

  Payne did not carry a pistol and tried not to limp.

  Payne watched Clovis eat. Clovis was a nibbler; not the kind that doesn’t like to eat but the kind who tantalizes himself and makes the food last. Between nips, Clovis described the deal he’d made to build a bat installation in the top stage of an abandoned granary. Payne was to do the building by way of preparing himself for larger projects. It was to be called either a “Bathaus,” a “Batrium” or a “Battery”; but, in no case, a “Bat Tower”; the latter being reserved for the all-out projects of Clovis’ dreams.

  The bat installation was being constructed for a prosperous rancher/wheat farmer whose wife liked to shell peas outside in the evening. She was allergic to 6-12 and Off.

  “What if these towers draw vampires?” Payne inquir
ed without getting an answer. Clovis nipped and nibbled, occasionally touching the merest tip of his tongue to a morsel and re-examining it before popping the whole item down his gullet.

  Payne watched him. He was draped over his bones. The appliance was the only thing that seemed alive. A morbid air radiated from the man, a certain total mortality that made Payne think rather desperately of Ann.

  “What are you gulping for?” Payne asked Clovis, who was swallowing air.

  “I am filling my air sac.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, because despair is my constant companion, I guess.”

  Payne thought: what?

  “I didn’t see any mention of it in the Yellow Pages.”

  “What’s in them Yellow Pages is between me and the phone company,” said Clovis.

  “Okay.”

  “So don’t throw the Yellow Pages in my face.”

  “And those loony signs you had signed your name to in that alleyway off Gratiot Avenue.”

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with them?”

  “They’re unpatriotic!”

  In a single violent motion, Clovis pulled the little pistol from the back of his waist band. Payne snatched it away and shot holes in the tires of the Hudson Hornet. “You want to hurt me?” he said. “There! Now my Hornet won’t go any place!” His voice broke.

  “I didn’t mean a thing …” Clovis was upset now.

  “You didn’t? You pulled that pistol!” Payne’s throat ached and seized. He thought he was going crazy. Bangtail Creek beside them roared like an airplane. Mayflies and caddises hatched from its surface and floated toward the stars. Two hundred yards above, it formed its first pool where a coyote made rings in the water around his nose.