Something to Be Desired

by Mcguane, Thomas

  Acclaim for

  THOMAS MCGUANE’S

  Something to Be Desired

  “Vintage McGuane: the same strong, clear prose, the same flair for the comic and the absurd, the same romantic awe of nature and of women.… Funny, invigorating, thoughtful.… It’s as good as any novel I’ve read of his, including his manic The Bushwhacked Piano.”

  —Robert Wilson, USA Today

  “McGuane’s writing seems to have moved on with the decades.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Nobody writes so well about the incongruities of modern western America.… Something to Be Desired is as invigorating as a fresh whiff of sage straight off Thomas McGuane’s Montana uplands, and a welcome relief from the overly wrought and overly cautious fiction of so many of his contemporaries.”

  —Howard Frank Mosher, Chicago Tribune Book World

  “McGuane has brought us closer to the pain this time, without compromising his keen sense of drama or comic genius.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  Books by

  THOMAS McGUANE

  The Sporting Club, 1969

  The Bushwhacked Piano, 1971

  Ninety-two in the Shade, 1973

  Panama, 1978

  An Outside Chance, 1980

  Nobody’s Angel, 1982

  Something to Be Desired, 1984

  To Skin a Cat, 1986

  Keep the Change, 1989

  Nothing but Blue Skies, 1992

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1994

  Copyright © 1984 by Thomas McGuane

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  McGuane, Thomas.

  Something to be desired.

  I. Title.

  [PS3563.A3114S6 1985] 813’.54 84-27124

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82200-0

  v3.1

  For Count Guy de la Valdene

  There is no question that the dog who is really ready for a big trial is on the threshold of committing grave mistakes.

  —CHARLES MORGAN,

  On Retrievers

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  1

  The moon lofted off the horizon to drift low over the prairie, white and imperious as a commodore. While the two walked, their shadows darted over the ground and through the sage. The boy went along, concentrating on the footing, which was secure and reliable except where the washes had undercut ledges that sloughed quickly beneath them. His father strode ahead in silence, his boots making a steady beat unmodified by the boy’s breathlessness. The boy still wore his baseball jersey and had a green sweater tied around his waist. The wind came out of the draws and breathed through them toward the lights of town.

  “You out of breath?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Keep moving.” His father made forward in vengeance, then asked, “Do you feel like you’ve been stolen?”

  “No, sir.”

  His father had returned after hiding from his mother, hiding in, of all places, Arequipa, Peru, where he had cooked on sheep dung and drunk too much and mailed deranged letters to his son until his son flunked his courses and got kicked off the baseball team. Then on a morning when the boy spent still another Saturday at home, away from his beloved third base, the father walked in and said, “What’ll it be, Lucien? Where do we go?”

  Lucien, a small-town boy buried in Ernest Thompson Seton, said, “Up in the hills.” He was baffled by his father’s dramatics but, more than anything, happy to see him again.

  Now they were lost. They had been lost for two days. Not seriously lost, because they could see the lights of Deadrock; but they had lost their own camp on the rocky escarpment of the Crazy Mountains. And though they could have walked to the highway in a few hours, they still hadn’t had food in days. Their feet were blistered; twice the father had curled up on the ground before walking the great circle again with fury and self-pity. When he heard the boy’s hard breathing, he said, “You’re a baseball player and I’m fifty. Keep walking.” Lucien was silent. He thought of his books and wondered if they were still on the study-hall desk, in the nearly empty room with its clock, superintended by a history teacher one week, an English teacher another, some bored man with a paperback spending his time miserably. Lucien’s sudden fall to flunking seemed strangely permanent. One upperclassman called him a forceps baby. The light of detention fell through institutional windows upon Lucien and the books that had suddenly gone dead on him. He was homesick and there was no home, nothing to fill a caissonned heart, until the blazing satisfaction of his father’s arrival, descended from the inexplicable Arequipa, Peru, where Lucien pictured Indians and colonials circling his father through the divorce. It was the year of the vicuña scandal in Eisenhower’s administration. The profanity of his father’s departure seemed to the boy to infect national politics. Furthermore, his mother didn’t want to give the family another try. “It’s quits,” she said of the marriage.

  Lucien began to think, If we cannot find the camp, we’ll have to go to Peru. Moreover, his last history lesson, possibly still open on the study-hall desk, concerned the Teapot Dome scandal. Lucien knew that Teapot Dome was out here somewhere, maybe between here and camp; and around it were the ghosts of crooks in vests and homburgs, crooks with money. He had already learned that in America the very good and the very bad had money to burn.

  “If you want to give up,” said his father, “we can start toward the highway.” His face was charged with suffering and there was a slight whistle in his breath.

  Lucien looked him over. “I don’t want to quit,” said Lucien. “I want to find our camp.”

  “We did this sort of thing at fifteen thousand feet,” said his father shakily. “In the Andes.” Lucien knew his father’s companion in Peru, a Billings car dealer named Art Clancy, also on the run from divorce. Art weighed two hundred thirty pounds. Lucien had a harder time picturing him at fifteen thousand feet than he had picturing his father. Art was a famous lady-killer, even at his weight; he had a secret apartment and a Corvette. There was some connection between these things and the separation of Lucien’s parents. One hung-over morning, according to Lucien’s mother, Art Clancy and his father had joined the winter segment of a thing called the World Adventure Series. It was a tour that went to Peru, where the Indians wore stocking caps with earflaps and where Lucien’s father, deprived of his secretary, wrote Lucien the only handwritten letters Lucien had ever seen of his. The writing was strong and linear and spoke of romantic escape: sometimes Lucien’s father was alone the romantic escapist; sometimes Lucien and his father were depicted in the letters as escaping; sometimes there was anger and glory, sometimes just anger. In all cases it was the world that was against them, a world that no
longer cared for the individual with his dread of homogeneity. Sometimes not one word of the letters could be read. It was like the night Lucien’s mother had made a tape recording of his father, and he went after her. Because of that, Lucien’s father went out the door with the police, and the next thing was the World Adventure Series to Peru with Art Clancy. Lucien’s mother called Lucien’s father a coward, a strong word.

  Lucien began to know where they were. He could have said so right away. Instead, he took a very slight lead until they were around the bottom of the low cliff. His father didn’t know they were on the trail again. Above them, the rock was black and spilled stars in a bright path to the lighted clouds. It was the perfect trail to get jumped on from above, by a cougar or a gook: Lucien had no idea who lived around here. But he did know it was more than a backdrop for his father and himself, more than an illustrated letter. For some reason he didn’t tell his father they were on the trail once more. He could hear the whistle in his father’s breath as though some small rigid thing were stuck in his throat, some forceful thing.

  A cloud of crows lifted from a depression between small hills, revealing the most remarkable hot spring imaginable, a deeply colored blue hole with pale steam blowing from its surface to tangle its streamers in the trunks of sage. For a brief time the two forgot their troubles as they floated in thermal blue. They saw the world through a gentle fog and they talked in the simplest statements.

  Lucien’s father spotted some ranch buildings in the distance. “This must be private,” he said; and they left.

  Then you could see their camp, a grim, improperly erected pup tent with canned food in a pile by its entrance. They had been gone nearly two days, and when his father saw the tent, he groaned and trotted toward it. He threw himself on the ground beside the cans; his curved and exhausted back heaved for a long time. Lucien wondered whether this was a heart attack. “Are you okay?” he asked but got no answer. He hated himself for not knowing appropriate first aid.

  His father slung himself up. He said, “We better eat. We better eat now.”

  Lucien began to build a fire. There was plenty of dry wood. There were matches and a patented product that he squirted into the wood. In a moment they had fire and heat.

  “Our time in the desert is at an end,” said Lucien’s father. Lucien had not thought of it as desert. He thought the two days following the sun around a long corner had been beautiful. He wasn’t sure in what way his father had been present, but his father had been present in the minimum way a boy will accept.

  The tent was an old one, bought by mail when Lucien was in the first grade, for a trip to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, a trip they were unable to make because of the recession, or something about middle management. The tent had been treated to waterproof it, a tar smell. The moon outside revealed the weave of the cloth. Lucien watched his father’s wonderfully peaceful sleep. He couldn’t make out if he was in worse trouble at school and would never be returned to the baseball team; or if his father’s terrific intervention canceled that world and its rules. In fact, he couldn’t exactly make out if his father was glad to be back. It was as if the same master stood over them with a stick and not only drove them but drove them in circles, around the mountains, around their camp, around their tin cans.

  His father had brought a fancy Zenith radio for the trip, so that they would not be surprised by weather. Lucien got nine countries on it. He turned it as low as he could and dialed away at his sleeplessness. He got Mexico, an exciting thing in 1958. The speaker from Mexico spoke very rapidly, reminding Lucien that he was flunking Spanish. If he picked up muy once, he picked it up a hundred times. Then he ran the six-foot antenna out the tent flap and dialed some more: he got an English-language Baptist station right in the middle of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right where they have voodoo, talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ; not at all the way a radio Baptist would carry on stateside. You could tell the people of Haiti had put a civil tongue in his head. Then Lucien got rough northern voices he could not understand. Maybe they belonged to Russians.

  He turned back to Haiti. Cold wind stirred the tent sides, a rocky wind that murmured through the imprecations of the stranded preacher in Haiti so anxious to make friends among the heathen that he pronounced their country “I.T.,” as the Haitians did; the wind murmured over the tired Peruvian traveler and a son still early in his journey.

  The day broke blue and northern on the basin of gravel, a basin lined with thin glittering springs and the delicacies of vegetation that spilled their edges all the way to the brisk willows at the creek bottom. The creek turned south till it fell off the end. Someone’s lost saddle horse stood exactly where the creek fell into pure blue sky, alternately grazing and staring across the gravelly basin to their camp. Lucien’s first thought was to catch him, ride him back to school and get to play third base again.

  I could never catch him, he thought. He remade the fire for breakfast, building it in a single blast with the patented fire-starter, a flame as tall as Lucien that wavered ominously toward the tent, then shrank into the firewood peaceably. His father woke to the smell of hash and eggs, and crawled forth with a bleak squint into broad daylight.

  “You left the radio on, Lucien. The battery is dead.” His father doubled over to scrutinize a blister on his heel, displacing its liquid between opposing thumbs. “God-almighty,” he said.

  They breakfasted and Lucien cleaned the aluminum plates in the spring. The cold water congealed the grease to the metal, and he had to scour them with sand to make them clean. Lucien was conscious of his father staring at the peaks, plain rock jumping out of ground that looked as soft as a stream bank. “No wonder nobody lives here, no wonder they stay back in town,” his father said. “There’s no reason to be here. You come here to get something and then out you go. Look at that poor damn horse. Can you feature that?”

  This gave Lucien no feeling whatsoever, not unless that in itself was a feeling. It was like hitting a baseball and having it just not come down. You could hardly call it a fielding error.

  His father circled the tent slowly, digging a finger into his disordered hair, inventorying the camp, the camp that a few days ago had been erected as a gateway to an improved world.

  “We’re looking at under a hundred bucks,” said his father, standing at their camp. “Let’s walk away from it.” Lucien listened, awaiting some further information, but that was all: leave it.

  They had nothing to carry, nor the struggle of climbing; Lucien’s father led the way with a jaunty step. Part of the mission was completed. The lights of Deadrock were reduced to the dimensional outlines of the little burg; and there were brief gusts of stink from the hot springs south of town. Lucien wondered why unpleasantness and healing were always connected.

  “I’m afraid I feel a little guilty,” said Lucien’s father with a laugh. “A little guilty, a little hungry and a little thirsty.”

  “Guilty for what?”

  “Taking you away from school.”

  Lucien walked on for a minute, scuffing along the dry, stony trail. “I wasn’t doing well,” he said. “You didn’t do any harm.”

  “I’m sure I did a lot of harm,” said his father. Lucien wondered why he always made his father feel so guilty. They had had so very few adventures together, but each one of them made his father burn with guilt. Maybe they shouldn’t try to have adventures; the thought choked Lucien with sadness, but maybe it was true. Not if the adventures were just going to make his father burn with guilt. They had gone to Cabo San Lucas, and his father burned like a martyr because it was the first trip they had made that reflected the deterioration of Lucien’s parents’ marriage. That trip at least had been on a school vacation, so the sense of irresponsibility had not been so hard on his father as this time. Lucien knew that this time his father felt more like a kidnapper than an adventurer.

  For the last half mile the trail was only a ledge in the granite. Beyond the ledge, soaring birds were seen from above, now and then
diving feetfirst into the prairie. Their car could be discerned too: an almost vertical view, a rectangle of paint, like the toy car Lucien used to scuff one-handed on the carpet at home. That was back when his mother and father had had famous parties where they displayed their outstanding dancing and where Lucien, already dying to please, had trained himself to be a perfect bartender, silent and friendly, willing to overrule the jigger for family friends, later listening through the floor for the bellowed jokes and the Valkyrian laughs of the wives. It was when the census bureau harried Lucien’s father for declaring himself an entrepreneur; Lucien still wasn’t sure what that was, but all the adults banded together to throw parties to fight the census bureau, to pass the hat, to declare their faith in entrepreneurs, a category that the census bureau would not accept. It was exciting. Lucien was the pubescent speedy bartender, who bracketed new people in town, the probational ones, with his strict jigger. Then suddenly things got so exciting that his father tore off to Peru with the man who sold him his last car: a car different from the plain business model the trail wound toward; the car Art Clancy sold his father was a Thunderbird, and now his mother had it. She had the house and she had the assets. Plus she had done something Lucien couldn’t quite fathom—she had let the memberships go. And now they were gone, his father had said dolorously: the memberships are gone.