Something to Be Desired

by Mcguane, Thomas

  They drove toward Deadrock, where they had rented the car. They weren’t going to turn the rental in today; his father promised over and over that they wouldn’t turn it in today, as though Lucien cared. “We’ve had this car for nearly half a week,” his father crowed, “and it’s got less than fifty miles on it!” As they drove, Lucien listened to stories of the living descendants of the Incas, how they hid gold in lakes, cut out hearts, sacrificed virgins. He heard of the astonishment of these small people, with their great Andean chests and earflaps, at the sight of Art Clancy’s Corvette. Peru had been quite a deal. The Indians tried to put their hands all over the car. Art Clancy spoke to them in a kind of imitation Khrushchev. “Hands off,” he told the little Incas. “Gives a shot in the head.” The year of Cabo San Lucas there had been a long aftermath of Mexican. “Eees good!” stood for approval. When Lucien hooked a trout in the ditch back of the house, his mother cried out, “Feesh! Eees good!”

  Lucien suspected that his mother was as much on his father’s mind as she was on his own. It was his father’s quietness as he made his way across the river bridge, then the railroad tracks. Maybe Lucien’s mother should have thrown his father out; but when she did, she threw everything out and maybe she shouldn’t have done that. Who would ever know? Nobody. It infected everything from daybreak to baseball. It infected all things. It was a pestilence.

  They drove into Deadrock. They were traveling light. The town crouched in front of the terrific mountains to the south, great wildly irregular peaks that seemed to say to the little town, Don’t try anything. No one strolled the streets as Lucien and his father sat in the parked rental car. There were plenty of people visible but they just emerged from one store or bar and darted into another, short sudden arcs, escaping the same general gaze. This irresolute air suited Lucien and his father perfectly. The day felt too early and too late. Before the divorce, this had been his father’s hometown too.

  “We better get a room,” his father said.

  He restarted the car and began to hunt for a place. There were a couple of satisfactory hotels which they cruised past at very low speed. His father looked at them critically, then leaned out into the warm air to crane up at their higher stories either to evaluate their height and substance or to hope for an anomalous penthouse, more satisfactory than the lower rooms, rooms to which Lucien was sure his father referred when he uttered the single word “dandruff.”

  Then impatiently he gunned out onto Parkway and found Deadrock’s only motel, a new place. In 1958 a motel was a pretty exciting thing, comfort and life alongside your car. Now Lucien saw that his father was okay once again, that there was volition and not a mind wandering through things spoilt. And the reproachful presence of your own child. Yes, Lucien felt that now.

  Lucien’s father went inside to get them a room. He came out with a ballpoint, wrote down the license number and went back inside. Then he came back and jumped in the car heartily. “Fifteen B, I love it! ‘B’! They only have one floor! You ought to see the owner. Get the feeling you don’t take a room and the bank pounces on him.” His father smiled wide with charity. Lucien glanced over and saw the motel lady, drawing back the venetian blinds, caught. He waved a little.

  The room was another world: up-to-date, lightless. There were little things on the bedspread you could pick at. Lucien’s father made his way sideways to each reproduction on the wall, thrummed his fingers on top of the TV, counted out ten dollars and weighted them with an ashtray. “I’m going out for a belt. I’m late and you get hungry, here’s ten bucks.” He was gone in a shudder of daylight.

  Lucien read the welcome to Big Sky and thumbed the motel Bible. Kukla, Fran and Ollie wouldn’t be on television for a while. He pulled the curtain and saw their car was gone: he’d never heard it start up. He wondered if anyone would get some use out of their tent; maybe the owner of that horse—it would make a good combination for a man wanting to travel out in all those hills and mountains. He lay down for a moment trying to get control of himself. Very soon he wasn’t moving.

  He woke up in the middle of the night. His father was standing bolt upright in his shorts, arm outstretched, finger pointing, a dynamo of rejection, a god casting someone out. “Go!” he roared.

  Indeed, someone was being cast out; but she felt very strongly that she had not been given time to dress. She complained with acid bitterness as she crawled through her own clothing, holding individual articles up toward the bathroom light for rough identification.

  “Go!” roared his father.

  “I’m gone,” she whined. “But not like this.”

  She struggled a bit more, stood and slanted through the small opening Lucien’s father made for her into the night.

  Lucien listened to his father walking around, stopping only for long sighs. Finally:

  “Lucien?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “I’m sorry …?”

  “I’m awake, sir.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Not long,” Lucien said.

  “Lucien, when you were a small boy, I let you have lots of pets, hamsters, rabbits and so on. Do you remember I allowed that?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “That was so you could learn about animals, about how we are all animals.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now I want to call Momma.”

  He got the night operator or the morning operator, whichever, and revealed to Lucien’s mother that they were no longer out in the mountains. “Momma,” he said. “I’m with Lucien. We want to come home to you, Momma.” Lucien could not devise an attitude toward this. His father suddenly fell to listening. He repeated “uh huh” a number of times in a deeper and flatter voice. He waved Lucien into the bathroom, then waved the door shut behind him. Lucien leaned on the faucet, turning it microscopically until a drop of water came out, shut it off, and did it again. Then he heard his father call for him.

  When he went into the bedroom the reading lamp was on and his father sat right next to it, weeping, silently with heaving shoulders.

  “What’s the matter, Pop, can’t we go home?” Lucien was scared.

  “It’s not that—” He sobbed for a few more minutes and composed himself carefully. “Art Clancy was shot and killed by his girlfriend,” he sobbed. “In Arequipa, Peru.”

  Lucien’s father had coached him carefully as they walked across town from the motel. They stood in front of their house while his father ran a finger around the inside of his collar, then gave Lucien a quick, conspiratorial nod. He knocked. In a moment the door opened and there was his mother, all dressed up.

  “When’s lunch!” Lucien and his father cried together.

  She looked from one to the other. “That hungry gang of mine,” she said with a warm smile and turned into the house for her men to follow.

  Chili was gone. He knew very well that his mother might have disposed of the small, blue, merry bird; or at least given the bird away, purely on the basic of its Hispanic name. Lucien was sure she pictured Clancy of Peru in his shantung suits, his Corvette and his bad Spanish in a way that made a parakeet named Chili look bad. He already suspected that her greeting was camouflage, so the crack of his mother’s hand against his father’s face came as not much of a surprise. His father just took it. There was little else he could do. Raising his hands in self-defense would have made him a pantywaist in the eyes of his own son.

  “I’ll go,” said Lucien’s father.

  “Where? Peru?” Her long patrician face always looked surprised when she was angry. What many took for astonishment was in fact a prelude to hysterical fury. “You and your Peru!”

  Then Lucien’s father did something very strange and yet wholly characteristic of him: he waved to an imaginary person in the window behind her; when she turned to look, he flattened her with a tremendous blow.

  His father left the room, straight through the French doors into the side yard, where the dog hid in its Tudor house, the chain
making an abrupt circuit back into the little doorway as it always did in a family dispute. He sauntered over the high ground beside the lilacs and took a final glance into the living room before retiring to the guest room over the garage.

  Lucien’s mother still lay on the floor, lightly fingering the discoloration around her left eye. “I’m a chump if I don’t call a cop,” she said, using a diction she seldom used unless she was trying to reveal the actual sordid texture she saw in her life. If this had all happened to an acquaintance, she would have said, “She’s deluded if she doesn’t call a policeman.” She slung herself upright, got to her feet and headed for the stairs. “You had better find something to eat, Lucien. I’m in no shape to help you men. Not today. Perhaps not ever.” Lucien felt the excitement return at these last words. He still felt the raw electricity in the air. He made a sandwich.

  When he had finished it, he went over to the guest room. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed like a man on his first night at boot camp. “I couldn’t let her go on like that, kiddo,” he said. “Not with you there.” He looked up to see if Lucien was buying it. Lucien let no expression cross his face. “I don’t even know whose side you’re on.” He flung himself on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “Out in those wide open spaces … now, that was another thing entirely. Out where they don’t hamstring a man for standing a little tall.”

  Lucien took a pitcher of ice water up to his mother. She drank hungrily, as though she had come in from a long journey only moments before. “I wonder who the real ringleader on that Peru trip was. Now Clancy is dead. I guess I’ll never know, will I? Clancy would have told me because Clancy knew better than to cross swords with me. Do you follow, Lucien? Of course you don’t, you little angel with silver wings, you.… Brandy.”

  Lucien went downstairs and brought back the brandy and a snifter. His mother had a candle going in her room by now and swirled and heated her glass as she sipped. “No, Lucien, between your father and Art Clancy there wasn’t a stick of decency.” She held her glass so the candle danced on the other side of it. She squinted and continued. “Clancy? I hope he fries in hell.” Lucien shuddered at this, to him, wholly realistic idea. “Your father is not man enough to deserve such spectacular punishment.” She spat. “Did you have a lovely time out in the country?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Just this horse.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a trip.”

  “It’s hard to describe.”

  “Well,” she said, “at least you’re not old enough to have gotten into any trouble. Though that too, I suppose, is just around the corner.”

  His mother’s search for the combination that would tie them in an awful knot had begun to strike Lucien right in the stomach. His mother fished a mirror out of her purse and sized up the swelling on her face. Then she patted it with a powder puff, as though she wished it could not be seen. She drew out a picture and held it close to her face. “Clancy,” she said. “Who would have ever thought?”

  There was something in the air that Lucien didn’t like, didn’t like at all. After this kind of talk, no one in the family would know to turn up the heat in the winter or close the windows when it rained or put antifreeze in the Thunderbird in November. No one would remember to send crazy Aunt Marie a thank-you note when she forgot to send a Christmas present, and Aunt Marie’s Christmas would be ruined.

  The long night got longer. First Lucien’s father stole down for a late snack and nearly collided with his mother. Lucien watched from the couch. The French bread under his arm, the six-pack of imported beer, the cheese and the fruit all fell to the floor. “It takes quite a bit to spoil your appetite, doesn’t it, Gene?”

  “Hunger and grief are absolutely compatible, you goddamned whore,” replied his father. “Lucien,” he added, “get your mother a sweater. It’s cold down here.”

  Lucien ran his hand up the long, cool banister and watched the candlelight from his mother’s room flicker on the carpet. First he got the sweater, the cableknit cardigan she wore when sick, then he rifled the purse for Clancy’s picture. He cut that up with his jackknife and flushed it down the toilet. He read a quick couple of pages from the Kinsey Report lying by the bed, and went downstairs, where he found his parents hugging and cooing. Tex Benecke’s band was playing “Maria Elena” on the record player, a sure sign of new weather. “I love you, you bugger,” said his father, “you know I do.” This last was slightly crooned to the big-band sound in the air.

  Lucien went out and sat in the rock garden and thought about the hills and the tent they had left and the old rock sheepherder’s monument that looked out over the valley of Bangtail Creek. He thought of the rental car, the freedom vehicle that had almost succeeded, and his father banishing devils in the motel. The laughter and toasts that came from the house now seemed like a home team faithfully cheered for a bad loss. His father’s occasional riggish chuckle made Lucien uncomfortable.

  The next thing he knew, Father Moore’s big car came pouring up the driveway. The minister, not knowing he was observed by Lucien, climbed angrily out of the car, knocked and went in. Father Moore always bought season tickets with Lucien’s father. In years past they had gotten into lots of trouble together. By the time Lucien went inside, Father Moore, in his sweatshirt and khakis, had a big drink of his own and was joining in on the spirit of things. Lucien’s mother hung slightly forward from the waist in her cableknit cardigan and did not quite seem to know what was going on. The stars that had illuminated the rock garden were invisible through the brightly lit living-room windows.

  Lucien’s parents stood shoulder to shoulder. His father was hugely animated and shouted everything he said. Lucien was given a small pillow for the ring. Father Moore—“Dicky” Moore—had his limp Bible splashed open on one hand while the other held his drink. He rattled through the marriage ceremony, stopping once for a refill; and at the end, when Lucien’s mother was to say “I do,” she instead screamed, “The man I love died in Peru!” and threw herself to the floor.

  Lucien’s father went out the door, never to return. Lucien sat once more on the starry lawn listening to Father “Dicky” Moore move through the vegetation, nervously murmuring his name.

  When Lucien was an adult, when rain whirled up through the hayfield and scattered birds with its force, he heard his own name in the rock garden and knew he was free, as the saying once went, to dispose himself as he pleased.

  2

  For almost five years Lucien and his mother lived alone on the street behind the library. They lived on alimony, child support and donations of relatives. Lucien seldom saw his father and seldom heard from him, except very occasionally in the form of highly emotional letters on hotel stationery.

  Next door there lived a family with two sons; the father was an executive with Montana Power, but mainly they were displaced southerners. The father had gone to the Virginia Military Institute, and the only books he owned were the series Lee’s Lieutenants. This man, when drinking, encouraged his boys in a violent world, which resulted in Lucien’s receiving many a thrashing at their hands. They helped Lucien learn to think of himself as, first of all, a man of considerable sensitivity, and a ladies’ man, not like the two next door who fought, masturbated and picked their noses. Still, Lucien impressed hardly anyone in those days gone by. His mother, a day-long tippler, always called him a “prize boob” around seven in the evening.

  Lucien began to run in the hills, not like a genuinely solitary boy but like one with a highly charged view of his own importance. He had a paper route and with the proceeds bought a horse and paid for its pasture out in the Crazies. He always took his sketch pad with him and drew what he thought he was seeing. His heroes were Ernest Thompson Seton and Theodore Roosevelt. Like all boys, he dreamed of consequentiality, and of romantic unrest. In school he was a poor student who tested in the high percentiles that set educators gambling: he was recommended
to the college of his choice. Later, when he went out the door to school, his mother followed him and didn’t stop until she got to Florida, from which state she occasionally called around nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time to address Lucien as a “prize boob.” Lucien then used concepts larger than he could handle, and accused her of being a Jezebel. Being called a Jezebel triggered some new change in Lucien’s mother; and with that, she began to tell Lucien that she was disappointed in him. It seemed a bigger change. From then on, this disappointment would be her principal theme. “You are the leading killjoy of my life,” she assured him. “God will pay you back for disappointing me.”

  Lucien worked his way through the state university as a pizza chef, setting log chokers, as a tool-pusher and, home in the summers, as a cowboy, a fencer and an irrigator. He was a valuable ranch hand and a superb horseman.

  In his first year of college he dated two girls from his hometown, Emily and Suzanne. Under Emily he was going to be a rancher and a painter of sporting subjects on the order of Thomas Eakins. Under Suzanne he would grasp desperately at his deep testability, land himself among the upper percentiles and, having trained himself only generally, go off to Latin America for the United States Information Agency, spraying leaflets on the mestizo millions. He married Suzanne.

  Emily loved a medical student the entire time she saw Lucien. Later that student became a doctor, and later she married him. Emily was a raving beauty with electrifying black eyes, and she had been seeing the doctor-to-be since she was in high school. Though they had passed each other in the high school’s corridors a thousand times, Emily had no idea who Lucien was. By way of compensation, she slept with him on their first meeting at college. Lucien fell so immediately in love, he hoped she was pregnant. She used to ask him where he had been all her life in such a vague way, he knew she didn’t mean it. He cooked her soufflés on the nights the doctor-to-be was studying, and she made love to him between classes or read to him from the hippie books that were just then hitting the ag schools. She made him make love to her when she talked to her parents on the phone. Lucien thought it was some kind of psychological experiment; in fact, she often referred to Lucien as a “volunteer.” Then one time the doctor-to-be nearly caught them together; Lucien hid in the closet, and Emily took great pains to seduce the doctor, who commented genially on her excited state. She positioned him clearly in view of the parted closet door and drove the swart medical candidate into a frenzy. When he left, Lucien made frantic love to her and Emily clawed great evil stripes in his back. He pretended to be pleased with these passionate badges; but he was barely able to put his shirt on. In blank confusion, he went into the kitchen to attempt a new soufflé. “What if he’d known I was here?” asked Lucien, thinking of the kind of violent treatment he might have received, the very kind Lee’s lieutenants would have dished out.