Something to Be Desired

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “Why don’t you leave the dog …”

  Lucien thought about it, then hitched Sadie to the leg of one of the ruined chairs and got a coat. Emily had a pair of jeans pulled on under a nightshirt. She tied the tails of the nightshirt and, downstairs, pulled a loose sweater over that. They headed into the night like laundry.

  Lucien didn’t feel very good. As they walked out into the dark, things rose to meet him, then passed. He once reached up to put an arm around Emily but missed completely without her noticing; his arm merely fell through air, then returned to his side.

  Lucien made a willow-leaf mouth whistle and blew two notes over and over until Emily took it away from him. She led him over a ridge and a ravine and kicked to dust an abandoned anthill. When Lucien passed a big cottonwood tree, his shadow shot up the trunk, scared him, and disappeared.

  In a depression between two small hills was the blue hole. Lucien had seen it before. It was a small steamy spring, pouring hot water out of rock slab, then brimming over into the woods below. You could see the stars above and the lights of town beyond. Lucien reached down to touch the water, to see where the surface was. The only way he knew his finger had arrived at its surface was by the mark of current that appeared and shone in the light; and down below were shapely round stones that were deep and far away.

  Lucien heard Emily’s plunge, then saw her emerge through the curtain of bubbles, wavering like an inverted flame. Lucien left his clothes on the bank and slid in thinking, Now it’s before I was born. They finned and treaded water in each other’s arms. Emily took Lucien and got him inside of herself. She held him on either side of his head with the flats of her hands while they made a queerish love with nothing to hang on to. Lucien came out of her just at the end, and a jet of sperm spiraled to the surface and floated. Emily trailed it off with the tip of her finger and smiled at Lucien.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Lucien. He felt himself rocketing into the past.

  Emily dug her nails into the backs of his arms. “Just what did that sonofabitch tell you, anyway?” she said.

  5

  Emily had incomplete use of her hands from an accident she’d had some years ago in which her husband had figured. Emily was a talented pianist, and there had been this accident. Even when they were in high school she had been considered very gifted; beyond just high school in Montana. They’d all expected to hear something of her talent, and then came this news of her getting her hands mangled. Lucien used to go over to her house and she’d be practicing. He had a brief, luminous spell as her sweetheart, ended, as it often was, by the arrival of Emily’s future husband, the doctor. He was rugged, intimidating and athletic. He was probably about twenty-one at the time, but to Lucien he seemed to be some outlandish oldster like a millionaire or a Green Bay Packer. Lucien was nervous for the short time that he was around him, shuffling in the front hall of Emily’s house. She and the doctor were soon a hot item. After that, that is, down through the years, the few reports were not good. Her husband was a surgeon, a hard drinker, a big-game hunter, a man of wealth; and so far as Lucien could tell from rumors and long-range snooping, tough with Emily. On a hot day she blew his brains out at close range and turned herself in to the sheriff in Deadrock.

  This ranch had been meant as a kind of retreat for that childless couple. Since it was her neck of the woods—he was a Detroiter—Lucien guessed this meant a small capitulation for him. She came earlier each summer, but he never stayed past antelope season. Lucien had observed him a few times at the Bozeman airport, standing next to his luggage in a stadium coat arguing with the baggage handlers about his rifles. Lucien hadn’t seen Emily at all.

  But for a short time long ago, Emily and Lucien were going into the sunset as a composer and a painter, leaving the world a richer place. Within a few years he was distributing leaflets to Latinos for the U.S. government and she was getting knocked around regularly by her college sweetheart. Lucien had spells of delicious blind ambition, spells of painting, spells of high courtship and long, accompanied starlit walks on empty Western Hemisphere beaches, barefoot and with the pantlegs of a well-cut tropical suit rolled higher than the warm breaking waves. He married the companion and had a wonderful little boy.

  He was sure Emily had had some fine times too. Lucien was now years older than that man she left him for.

  Lucien attempted over the next few days to have a serious conversation about the cattle with Brer Austinberry. He was not interested. This place, he reminded Lucien, was a strict grass outfit and, as such, subject to the worst statistics then current in the cow business. There was a three-year immediate history across the state of Montana of beef prices dropping twenty cents per pound between turnout and shipping in the fall, which meant every cowman went backward until about halfway through the summer or maybe longer, depending upon the nature of his loan. This did not hold Austinberry’s attention; he continued to jingle back and forth across the kitchen in his big roweled spurs. Lucien said, Let’s haul everything to town this fall, accept that we had little that would grade better than utility cattle; then start anew with first-calf heifers in the spring. That meant buying some hay right away.

  “We don’t want to buy hay,” said Austinberry. “We don’t want to spend any money.”

  “What are we going to feed in the spring?”

  “I don’t care what we feed in the spring.”

  “Don’t you plan to be here?”

  · · ·

  After lunch he went up the dry creek bed that wound straight up to the Crazies like a holy road. There was an old wagon track that made parallel grooves in rock. In a hairpin turn he found a moldering pile of empty .45-.70 cartridges, an old firefight in a quiet hollow. Because of his hearty lunch Lucien was suffering what the nutritionists call the alkali tide, and in his lassitude he dreamed of water galloping down the rocky walls of the dry bed and taking him to the ocean, where no decisions would be required and where he could have his little boy back.

  Lucien and the lawyer hovered around the glow of the lamp, a medieval gimmick in a lonesome theme restaurant, and a terrific minor anomaly for a Montana cow town. The lawyer, Wick Tompkins, was a heavy man who, you could see, had risen from another station in life. In trying to express the solitude of his existence, he asked Lucien if there was anything sadder than returning home to an empty answering machine. He had a quick-moving face that tapered cleanly from temples to chin; but his hands were those of an honest laborer and fell upon the table with an earnest thud to underscore each phrase. Lucien rather liked him, but Tompkins was determined to maintain an adversary air. It was he who had designed the ranch-forfeit document for Emily.

  “She’s going to go to the penitentiary,” he said. Thud. “To make a long story short.” This time the hands fell from a greater height.

  “And you’re her lawyer,” said Lucien, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’m her lawyer.” The hands lay conspicuously still.

  “Oh boy.”

  “Hey, look at it this way: she killed him deader than a mackerel. But this is the land of Japanese horseshoes, Taiwanese cowboy shirts and Korean bits. Who knows what a jury will say?”

  “There must have been a reason she killed him.”

  “There was a good reason. He beat her. But he hadn’t done it in a long time. Therefore it was premeditated murder. She describes it as premeditated murder. A jury with a room-temperature IQ will see it as premeditated murder. It’s perfectly inescapable. Put yourself in my shoes. I’m going to explain how he slammed her hands in the car door to keep her from playing the piano. And about the time that sinks in, here comes Mr. Prosecutor with a photograph of the mortal remains featuring a face that’s all powder burns except where the bullet actually goes in, which is a hole.”

  “Well, then,” Lucien asked, “what good are you?”

  “I am going to try to reduce her sentence, string out the road show through appellate court, work on her eligibility for pardon and just all-round obfuscate ju
stice like the good mouthpiece I am. You know, for a country boy.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t see. What you see is acquittal for her and a fresh start for the two of you. Y’know, quiet evenings around your paint-by-numbers kit out there to the ranch.”

  “You’re getting a little loose-lipped now. This thing is bad enough without the grandstanding. I mean, spare me. And make that your last one—” Lucien pointed at his drink. “Tank towns know few more unpleasant eyesores than native-son lawyers with land-grant educations tottering out of some roadhouse where they know the owner.… I got to go.”

  He started to leave. The lawyer called after him, “One’ll get you ten you lose the hundred thou.”

  When Lucien looked back, the lawyer had a light sweat from thinking up his last line. It was like a jog around the block for a guy who runs a lot. He looked fairly pleased with himself, but Lucien appreciated him: freewheeling hick-town wise guys were getting scarce.

  Lucien tried to think directly about Emily shooting her husband, a brutal Type A personality who took it out on all and sundry. Emily would look the facts in the eye. Lucien felt he had never been able to do that. He could see her weighing the old husband in the scales of justice the way a park superintendent reviews the record of a garbage-raiding bear who is scaring the campers: we’ve got one here who’s got to go.

  Lucien got up early and made breakfast. It was a wood stove with a water jacket, and kind of amusing to run. It had a lot of hot spots on top, so cooking eggs required moving the skillet around until you found a reasonable temperature that didn’t burn them up. Today they were going hunting.

  Lucien stole some glances attempting to see storm clouds on her brow as she ate. There weren’t too many storm clouds. She still had the serenity of the class beauty transported through years of tribulation like a vase that has survived a revolution. It seemed a handsome contrast to his infuriating jauntiness, the air of boyish resilience that had probably cost him Emily in the first place. An eighteen-year-old boy with the air of a tired salesman thirty years his senior will get all the girls every time.

  When they started out of the kitchen, Austinberry appeared and asked, “Where’s everybody going?”

  “Hunting,” said Emily.

  Austinberry stared at them for a long time, a gaze that was meant to be burning, and said, “Oh goody.”

  They stopped the truck at an old homestead. Lucien let Sadie out to tear around the buildings while they looked through the broken windows; all the glass was on the floor. There were worn-out irrigator boots and a Scotch cap hanging on a nail. The place had been empty a long time. There was a tin of bag balm on the sill that was heavy enough to be full, but the lid was rusted shut. The gray outbuildings surrounded a common space, and the sense of their being huddled against terrific and frightening outside forces was enough to make Lucien glad he had never faced the frontier. That was no spot for a guy who trips over his own feet.

  The first field had been in years past a great one for birds. It was level and uniform, and the scent of fowl had lingered in its invisible air currents. A dog like Sadie would make a strong race and lock on point in the first two minutes. A wheel-line sprinkler lay across it like a monster.

  “Emily,” he said as they went along down the furrows, “how is it you’re so calm?”

  “I’m not calm. I’m fatalistic.”

  Lucien took this in. “You know I had a drink with your attorney.”

  “Oh, I wish that you hadn’t done that.”

  “Well, I did, and I wish he were more optimistic.”

  “There’s nothing for him to be optimistic about. He knows I’d do it again.”

  They hit a good stubble field. There was still frost on it, and it looked like some huge glassy thing had tipped over and shattered. As Lucien looked across it to the Crazies, he wanted to shield his eyes. It was a beautifully farmed field that used all the flat ground; but it was wonderful to see the sage-covered remains of buttes and old wild prairie that wouldn’t submit to plowing. Lucien released Sadie and she cracked off on her first cast, ignoring the showering meadowlarks that broke into song exactly as his bird book described it: “Boys, three cheers!” To Sadie these were mere decoration, furniture. The undertow of game was stronger.

  For a moment Lucien didn’t care whether Emily shot her husband, pissed up a rope or went blind. He had the sublime freedom of the hunt.

  Presently they rode down among the thin, pale, jerky trunks of an aspen grove following a small stream toward its source. It must have been a spring because the stream’s stable mossy banks were obviously undisturbed by runoff. When they reached the spring, it was just a swamp, a small and beautiful swamp, though, from which snipe bolted in that down-angled hurtling flight that makes them seem so bold. The wet ground supported an even, refined stand of cattails, some brown and velvety, some wound with streamers of windy cotton.

  “These moments, these long looks,” she said.

  “How am I going to find any grouse without long looks?”

  They had to go across some of the boggy ground. Sadie danced over the surface while they hunted dry spots and moldering logs. Once clear of the cattails and sedges, they could make out the shining granitic roof of the Crazies.

  One of the miracles of the land was the isolation of water: as soon as they came out of the boggy ground they were once more on the juniper and sage uplands, where the circulation of prairie air bore the feeling of distance and dryness and great shapes, quite different from the intimacy of spring bogs; it hardly seemed the two could exist side by side.

  They followed a steep wash and, just below the line of wild roses at the crest, Sadie went on point. Lucien hoped the birds would hold, because it was almost a vertical climb. He started up, carrying the little L. C. Smith in one hand and looking for things to grab hold of as he went. He had to stop and blow like an old pack horse about halfway up; but she held the point, a brilliant mark on that ocher ridge.

  Lucien arranged to come up on flat ground behind her and could see then that she was pointed staunch into ideal berry-filled cover. He was already anticipating the roaring flush. He glanced down to see Emily below him, watching with a slightly opened mouth. Lucien concentrated himself to shoot well, walked past Sadie to make the flush; but when the grouse went up he just watched them go, brown and mottled against the open sky.

  6

  Lucien slept, and during the night he dreamed or overheard—he’d never know—incessant activity, activity which must have gone on long into the night: the dragging of objects over the wood floors, the random opening and closing of doors, the shunting about of vehicles in the dark, the long cry of a horse left in the wrong corral, then silence. When Lucien woke up, he found Emily awaiting him with breakfast on a tray. He was not warmed by this treatment and just leaned up on one elbow waiting for her to speak.

  “It’s all yours,” she said, “but I’ll always be able to come back, now, won’t I?”

  Lucien didn’t speak. He guessed his accepting the knowledge she was leaving made him an accomplice. “I’d like a picture of you,” Lucien said. “Portrait-style, with a good frame.”

  He watched the light and clouds make changes in his window; he saw the revolving shadows in the peaks of the Crazies, and night arriving not simultaneously but in different places and at different times. He began to wonder what screwballs lived here in other days who had hidden whiskey bottles under the porch or made the dog graves by the creek. Then having rested most of the day, he lay awake through the night and looked out the window at the cold moonlight on neglected meadows. He was just wondering how you’d care for a piece of ground like that. All that grass; all that timothy and brome and foxtail and oat and fescue and rye and orchard grass and bluegrass and panic grass and river grass and six-weeks grass and brook grass! All those rocks! All that running water!

  That night, aircraft lights wheeled around the flat across the creek and Emily was gone, a fading drone behind the clouds. L
ucien wept at his loss. In these tears flowed the venom of a jilted schoolboy facing magic that wouldn’t die at the right time and be good remembered magic.

  The day broke on Lucien’s ranch. He fed all the saddle horses because there seemed to be no sign of W. T. Austinberry. He found himself unconsciously counting bales in the shed, dividing rations into the number of winter months. He stared at the shallow creek streaming through the corral and wondered where the best place to spud a hole in the ice would be. He also wondered if all those horses were indeed saddle horses or if there might not be a bronc mixed in there, disguising man-killer traits with good fellowship among the horses at the feed bunk. Then it came to him clearly: Austinberry had departed with Emily. For some reason it magnified Lucien’s humiliation.

  In W.T. he thought he saw a ridiculous version of himself tottering off down the trail. And yet he peered with avaricious eyes at his own new land. He could only have seemed more preposterous to himself if he had been wearing a tie. He was spared that.

  Well, Lucien thought, the sun goes down and the blues come around. He sat in the old chicken coop to get out of the wind and smoked and felt alone. He sat on a row of brooder boxes and watched the white and final streamers of cloud on the good sky. He had read somewhere that those are ice crystals, and at that time and place he felt they were. His whole past didn’t shoot by, but some of the big items, the big wins and losses, did. By the time the harvest moon crossed the chicken wire, Lucien had looked at his life and was ready for a new one.

  Lucien went inside; he filled the tub with deep hot water and soaked and watched the morning light cross the old linoleum flowers on the kitchen floor. He had benign thoughts for the man, now doubtlessly gone, who had dreamed up those appalling flowers for the linoleum factory. Could he have known what a half century’s muddy boots and all that domestic abrasion would do to his bright flowers?