The Bushwacked Piano

by Thomas McGuane

  Soon enough, he went on a cheerless regime of mineral oil and a soft low-residue diet. Nevertheless, early in the second day, after half a dozen Sitz baths had restored the firmer edges to his personality, he found it necessary to adjourn to the bathroom for his first postoperative bowel movement.

  Why go into such a nightmare? A single enormous turd explored every surgical error Proctor had made. Somewhat to his own discredit, Payne howled like the Anti-Christ.

  And when he heard Proctor and the nurse muddling around the room outside the john, he booted the door open exactly as he had booted open the door on his grandfather’s disused farmstead, shamelessly revealing himself in an exhibit of fearful squattery and tragically droned, “You bastards core me like an apple and let me have a hard stool two days later! That makes me laugh my God that makes me laugh!”

  He wouldn’t shut up though he could see Ann snapping away with her Nikon. Next to his bed, wet roses soaked on a newspaper; the note was hers: “This is it.”

  Ann looking in at this ashen, pooping, howling form felt, thus early in her career, a grave seepage of idealism, an invidious pissing away of all that was good and held meaning. She found herself staring out the window past the parking lot and the blackened contours of asphalt, past the lunatic geometry of Key West roofs to the dynamo sky of America; and turned to smile inwardly; hers was one dream that wouldn’t get off the ground.

  It was a pleasure to sit at the wheel, the diesels not straining, and listen to the ship-to-shore. The captain found on a clear night like tonight he could pick up the other boats as far off as the Cay Sal Bank. After a month in the Tortugas and Marquesas and a week or two violating the nursery ground, he was ready to go back to Galveston. Where he was known.

  “You don’t figure she’d use the camera to blackmail no one?”

  The mate who looked more and more like a hillbilly song star the more the running lights accentuated his face’s declivities, said, “Of course not, Captain. This here is just some sort of adventurer.” The captain got up happy.

  “Steady as she goes,” he said to the mate, who took the wheel with a gravity that was possibly not genuine. He waited for the captain to head for the lighted companionway. “If you want yer trousers pressed, skipper, why the winch would be an awful good spot to leave them,” he said, bringing down the house.

  It was a starry night going to Galveston with the boom of the big trawler swaying a black metronomic line over the silver fan of wake.

  And it was real life out there on the Gulf of Mexico; because down in the hold of a Key West shrimper, a person of culture was committing experience.

  The tower went up with embarrassing speed and now it was Saturday on Mente Chica Key. The bats had all been dyed day-glo orange so that their bug scavenging circulation would be plain to all. Confined by a single polyethelene sheet, every last one of them was sealed in the tower.

  There was a blue satin ribbon tied about the base of the tower. The tower itself stood stern and mighty and impervious to termites against the Seminole sky. Around its base, the Mid-Keys Boosters stirred by the hundreds in anticipation. There were many military personnel in Polynesian mufti. There were many retired persons of legendary mediocrity known locally as “just people.” There were many snapping camera pests from the newspapers.

  All around the area, the mangroves released their primitive smell and made expanses of standing water where billions upon billions of the little dark awful salt-water mosquitoes would be born in perpetuum, bats or no bats, quite honestly.

  Nicholas Payne and C. J. Clovis flanked Dexter Fibb, aging Grand Master of the Mid-Keys Boosters, and explained how he must yank the manila rope, how he must bring down the polyethylene sheet to release the bats so that they might begin devouring the mosquitoes that this minute were making every spectator’s head lumpy. Payne, unable to accustom himself to a sanitary napkin, shifted about irritably.

  Dexter Fibb crushed his worn blue-and-gold yachtsman’s hat about his ears, preparing himself for action, should it come his way.

  As anyone could have seen by looking into their eyes, Clovis and Payne were flush with the seventeen thousand.

  The dedication of the bat tower was seen as a great chance to cement the U. S. Navy’s relationships with the Downtown Merchants’ Association. So there were any number of Mister Fix-It types of formidable rank, often chief petty officer, on loan from the base. These helpers, enclouded by mosquitoes, gathered around bits of electronic gear, loudspeakers, strobes and emergency gadgets, sonic shark repellants and smoke bombs for attracting helicopters. One group, ordinarily employed maintaining the kind of fighter planes Doctor Proctor himself had flown, had erected a banner over their project that read:

  PHANTOM PHIXERS

  Some of the wives had laid out tables of country fixings, jams and jellies and whatnot, in a sentimental materialization of the kind of quasi-rural bonhomie that seemed a millimeter from actual goose-stepping and brown-shirt uproars of bumpkin fascism.

  Payne moved through, scared to death. He saw the tower and the old wagon beneath, the bats whirring, vortical. The mosquitoes were definitely a problem. One reason the bats were whirring, vortical, and not sleeping was that the mosquitoes were biting them all the time and the bats couldn’t do a thing about it.

  To show that their husbands had gotten priority tours, some of the Navy wives wore grass skirts and red bandana tops. Beyond their muscular shoulders you could see the tower, the crowd, the whirring bat wagon, the mangroves and the hot glistening sky. Kids pegged rocks at the bat wagon and everyone swatted and dervished in clouds of mosquitoes.

  One of the husbands, a chief petty officer, darkened his crew cut with an oily hand and said to mid-air: “This oscillator is givin me a fit.” The chief’s wife was reading the newspaper.

  “Listen ta this what Pola Negri has to say: ‘I was the star who introduced sex to the screen but I don’t like nudity and obscenity in today’s films. Movies and men were more romantic in my day.’ I buy that.”

  “I do too, honey,” said the chief, “but I haven’t got time to think about it. Do you read me? I’ve got this oscillator and that rectifier back at the hangar I was mentioning which is causing me to throw a fit.”

  Payne was all ears. The wife saw and addressed her remarks to him.

  “Don is trying to make E9 before he retires,” the wife informed Payne, “then he is going to open a TV repair on Big Coppitt Key.”

  “What I don’t have time to think about,” said Don, the chief petty officer, “that is, if I am ever gonna operate a TV repair on Big Coppitt, is Pola Negri’s sex life.”

  “Although Don would agree, wouldn’t you Hon, that things in movies has got way out of line.”

  “I haven’t got time for a bunch of beaver shows,” Don told simply everybody, “Pola Negri’s or anybody else’s. I got this oscillator on the blink, frankly.”

  “What’s it for?” Payne asked politely.

  “Well, it’s not for nothing if it’s on the blink,” said Don. “You follow that, don’t you?”

  “Yes …”

  “And the rest I can’t explain unless you got a U.S. of America Navy rate in electronics which you don’t.”

  Payne wandered away without reply. He felt, somehow, that he was in no position to start skirmishes around here. But that wasn’t enough; the chief followed him. “Me’n the wife,” he said brazenly, “think you’re takin this outfit to the cleaners.”

  “The cleaners?”

  “That’s right. I have had a look at the tab. There’s quite the margin of profit.”

  “How much would you say?”

  “Two-thirds.”

  “Way off.”

  “Am I?”

  “I’m afraid you have no head for economics. Econ as we used to say.”

  “Uh huh. You know, us ordinree citizens has about had it with being milked all the time.”

  “You’re not being milked.”

  “We’re being milked. Don’t cont
radict me.”

  “You’re being taken to the cleaners,” Payne corrected. “And if you had something going on in your head besides a few gummy notions of how to work less and keep the old lady in Monkey Ward’s pedal-pushers and plastic bath clogs, you’d never get taken. Now, unless you want to come out and play with the grown-ups, I suggest you quit whining and go back to fixing wires for the U.S. of America Navy before you spoil your credit with them. Isn’t all that many outfits have room for you time-servers.”

  The chief came very close, squinting. He waved a whole handful of fingers slowly in Payne’s face. He tilted his head. “Amo tell you one thing sumbitch; if I see a way to come in on you, amo take it.” The not quite pitiable swab was worked up to the point that, with any more goading, he would have had a philosophical outburst with references to the nation and its perpetrating enemies. There seemed to be no cure for pests like Payne but automotive decals and secret handshakes. The freaks were coming out of the woodwork.

  Payne joined Clovis at the tower where the two of them greeted the faithful. Payne stood beside him with an easy winning grin and waited for the group to clear. “Do you get the feeling they’re on to us?” he asked with a smile for a small lady gorged with potato salad who yoo-hooed from the mangroves, flapping at a cloud of insects with a red plastic picnic fork.

  “Sure do,” Clovis smiled to them all. “Let’s just hope we can keep it glued together until the ceremony is over. I notice you’re limping.”

  Some moments later, the chief petty officer of various electrical pursuits came toward the tower, only to set up the loudspeakers that would amplify Clovis’ singular voice. Nevertheless, he made Payne nervous. Payne had begun to regret his speech about taking people to the cleaners; and, in fact, had lost what little interest he had had in the money; so that he was in a very bleak frame of mind about their prospects.

  He had too a tremor of agony that some child would come up and tell him he hoped these bats would do the job because his baby sister was dying of encephalitis. Here, son, here’s all the grimy loot we chiseled out of your dad and his neighbors and here are the keys to my Hudson Hornet and that Dodge Motor Home over there. Wire me collect, Leavenworth, if you have motor trouble. I’m cashing in. My soul is all shot to shit and I don’t know where I get off next. I am penitent, Payne thought, I have brought this upon myself.

  Dexter Fibb, at fifty-three, had never had a moving violation. He had never declined a luncheon speech at the Lions and he had never hesitated to dry the dishes or take out the garbage when he was asked to do so by his wife, Bambi.

  Dexter Fibb loved symmetry. He loved the bat tower because it was symmetrical and he loved Bambi because her whopping bust was the same size as her gibbous backside. Dexter Fibb often grew upset with himself when he tried to cut his sideburns to the same length, and would advance them millimeter by millimeter until they were small indentations above his ears. He could never get his sleeves right when he rolled them up either; one would always be somewhat farther down on his elbow than the other and on those unfortunate mornings that he would button his shirt out of line, he would rip it from his body with a shriek and fish another heavily starched white-on-white see-thru from his top drawer.

  Fibb believed in many things that verged upon superstition but which helped him through a world in which he seemed to lack some essential spiritual coordination. He read Consumer’s Digest and evaluated his friends’ cars by looking at the color of the exhaust pipe. His favorite automobile was that old model Studebaker that seemed to go backward and forward all at once.

  The pilot committee of the Mid-Keys Boosters bought the bat tower mainly because Fibb made so much of its looking the same from any angle. And it is to his love of symmetry that we must ascribe his instantaneous horror at the sight of C. J. Clovis.

  On the sound truck next to the door, leaking wires into the hands of the electric petty officer, this sign:

  OUR GOD IS NOT DEAD.

  SORRY ABOUT YOURS.

  “How’s she goin, Don?” Fibb asked the CPO.

  “Real good, Dexter. I had this oscillator givin me a fit but I isolated the sumbitch with a circuit tester.”

  Fibb went inconspicuously to the microphone, still disconnected and, half-preoccupied, tried to warm it up. He did a couple of licks from old Arthur Godfrey and Paul Harvey shows. He did a quick Lipton Noodle Soup take and smiled to remember the old applause-meter. A couple of the muscular hula ladies wandered by and Fibb got randy.

  He sat on the platform, waving mosquitoes away with the want-ads from the Key West Citizen, and tried to think what he would say. Another hula lady went by and Fibb thought how he would like to slip it to her, right in the old flange, where it counted, by God.

  The chief pulled a plastic ukulele out of his truck and strummed at her wildly without effect. “You’re a damn lightnin fingers,” Fibb told him.

  “I own every record Les Paul and Mary Ford ever cut. My wife’s got all the Hugo Winterhalters. And have I got the Hi-fi. Crackerjack little sumbitch I grabbed cheap on my last tour. Diamond needle, sumbitchin speakers waist-high, AM, FM, the whole shootin match.”

  Dexter Fibb spotted C. J. Clovis looking just especially grotesque, all by himself, with that aluminum understructure sticking out of everywhere. He winced.

  “Kind of pathetic, ain’t he?” inquired the chief.

  “Some people just don’t draw lucky,” said Dexter Fibb with some strain, watching Clovis hitch across the field.

  “I don’t know, Dexter. I think he come up with a handful on this go-round.”

  “Oh, God, who’s to say, who’s to say,” said Fibb, eyes askew.

  The chief said with craft, “Would you just want me to estimate the rake-off for you? I have a little background in econ, Dex. I could show you …”

  The generosity of the Navy was considerable. A parking problem which had begun to look acute was quickly alleviated by the arrival of four MPs whose training showed immediately. The incoming mass of automobiles magically became rows of parked cars with walking lanes in-between that permitted people to move directly to the stage and tower.

  Clovis met Payne at the bat wagon. Payne talked to a booster who was handing out ice-cream parlor fans. He limped over to Clovis, gesturing to him with his head.

  “They want you to speak,” said Clovis. “I told them you were a lawyer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want any loose legal questioning. I wanted them to figure you as an expert.”

  “Oh, God, I don’t think I can make a speech.”

  “You plain have to. You make one before they open the tower and I’ll do the wind-up. Hell, that’ll give you a chance to get to your car before I do.”

  “No,” said Payne the sport, “I’d wait for you.” He couldn’t think of a thing he could tell these people, except possibly that they’d been had.

  But when the time came for him to speak, he climbed up on the platform not only ready but with a sense of mission. At his very appearance, a shimmer of antagonism passed through the crowd; and when, in his introductory remarks, he referred to beer as “the nectar of the gobs,” he was actually booed, if only a little. He began to wonder exactly how he would handle himself if the crowd decided to work him over. “Beer then,” he said after his joke was badly received. “Have some beer.” Silence. You bastards, he thought: very well. I will win them over.

  “Let me be quite frank with you,” he lied. “I’d like to say that even though I don’t recognize a face out here except that of my partner, I feel as if I’ve known you all. Everything here has reminded me of you folks. Not so much the tower as the potato salad you folks been eatin out chere.” He thought he’d try a little Delta gumbo-mouth on them. “Do you know what I mean? Last night I listened to a nigra militant on TV, talking about what he called blapp people and gee as I look around I see this community is entirely short of blapp people. Not only blapp people but weirdos.” The sympathetic chuckle that ensued put him entirely
out of reach of hecklers. “Why God, you’re the secret honky underground network of America!” Applause. “And I don’t see any backs up against any walls!” More applause. “Why it’s solid potato salad out there!” The applause this time was uncertain.

  “Well, now. Next time you’re recollecting this day, as you will, just remember that you bought yourselves a bat tower and all the freaks and weirdos and agitators and blapp people didn’t!” Wild, bewildered applause.

  “I’m just awful afraid the aforementioned citizens didn’t buy a bat tower at all!”

  “NO!” from the crowd.

  “But you doozies with your prickly heads and hush-puppy shoes sure bought one!”

  “Hurray!”

  “I was just telling this chief petty officer a few minutes ago. You people have been taken to the cleaners!” A good-natured, superior murmur passed over the potato salad. “You’ve been fleeced!”

  “HURRAY! HURRAY! HURRAY!”

  Clovis, ashen, passed Payne on his way to the microphone. “You’ve got moxie,” he offered, “I’ll say that.” Then he added: “In another hour, A1A will be a fugitive’s bottleneck.” Payne limped off, patting his pocket. The wad of money was as big as a pistol.

  Dexter Fibb received Clovis on the podium, unable to touch him or shake his hand or really take in with his eyes Clovis’ implausible lack of symmetry. Moreover, Fibb was miffed that he had not himself been asked to speak.

  The crowd, too, was sobered by the sight of the multiple amputee. “My partner’s slighting remarks,” he began, “about minority groups are not necessarily the opinion of the management. Ahaha. Ahmm.” As far as the crowd was concerned, Clovis was a dead man. “You’re ah you’re a um a really great audience folks!” Then simply, humbly, “And a much appreciated customer.” He smiled, head bowed, awaiting the kind of response Payne had gotten. It never came. Better speed things up. Better speed them right the fuck up before this dude comes down like a bomb.