“I’d like you to pay a little closer attention to your health. This is the middle of your life,” said the doctor.
“You got that right. And it runs about a hundred years in length with record-breaking happy stretches.… Pump that sonofabitch. I’m a working man with a family to support.”
Then he took a walk through the streets of Deadrock, retracing a few childhood paths, remembering places where dogs got him on his paper route, and seeing the fine big houses, as well as the small homes in which there was owner pride; the different buildings where his father had had offices and the small pharmacies where his mother had secured wacky prescriptions and home-permanent kits. There were kids running along the sidewalk, many of them the kind of reasonably comely youths in which an already typed and crude adult can be seen. He saw where he learned to play third base and where he lost a big fight with his best friend and where he made his first wages pumping gas and working for a roofer. He could still remember leaving an unfinished brake job, the sedan up on the hoist, to go off and try to be a cowboy in the hills around town. He stayed away from the house where he had lived with his mother. Was it like women and childbirth in that the pain was not remembered? He still loved the place and saw no reason that you could not live there and always be happy.
He drove back to the house. When he went inside, Emily was sitting at the table reading the local paper. “I brought you a coconut from where the trade winds blow,” she said.
“You did?” he said vacantly.
“I put it on your side of the bed,” said Emily. Her hair was bleached bone-white and only her eyes were made up. She had a thin, hell-bent air.
“So!” said Lucien in a tone of discovery. “You’re back.”
19
By five Lucien was at the airport with the mayor, the city officials of Deadrock, a handful of community leaders and prominent ranchers, a Production Credit Association man, a trio from the Chamber of Commerce, one woman from the Better Business Bureau and the Deadrock High School band. Lucien still did not have the correct name of the sister city, but its delegation stuck out like a sore thumb climbing off the airplane. For one thing, they were tiny people and wore dresses or sarongs that swept the tarmac; you couldn’t tell the men from the women, and until one of them stepped forward at the end, there seemed to be no order to their arrival. They merely swept off the plane and moved haphazardly around the runway. One of the baggage handlers shooed them along toward the terminal. Once they got inside, an old man not much more than four feet high made a speech in his native tongue, a coursing of percussive notes across an unfathomable scale. A couple of the ranchers took it upon themselves to herd these people into the waiting cars. Lucien was not much help. In fact, the mayor studied him for a moment and asked, “Cat got your tongue?” Lucien shook his head quickly, then listened as the leader of the delegation from wherever it was said in perfect English, “We got jet lag. Time to sack out.” The line of cars strung along the interstate toward Deadrock and the hot spring.
Lucien watched the guests receive the delegation. Everyone was at poolside to observe the little people. Quite suddenly about half the delegation pulled off their sarongs; they were wearing cloths knotted about their loins, and they sprang into the pool, where they shot around like marine animals, hardly struggling but moving at what seemed an unnatural speed through the water. Some of them had larger breasts than the others and must have been women. Lucien used the house phone to call Suzanne.
“Hi, darling, I’m over at the spring. Look, I don’t know how long this is going to be going on. I think I’ll just kind of tough it out and stay at my house.”
“Have you taken something?”
“Taken something?”
“You sound as though you had taken something.”
“God no, I wish I had. I’ve just got my hands full here. Look, I’ll spell this out later.”
“I love you.”
“You do?”
“I sure do,” she said. “James is listening to me and pointing to himself and saying, ‘Me too.’ ”
“Oh, my lord,” said Lucien.
Emily turned off the television and looked at Lucien coming into the living room. “I just saw you with all those dwarfs on TV. What country is that, for crying out loud?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You can tell they’re foreign as hell,” said Emily “But that’s the first time I saw how you’d fixed up the spring. I mean, I expected a lot, but you’ve been a busy beaver, haven’t you?” She smiled at him fixedly. The room was filled with her perfume, a smell Lucien remembered as a fragrance favored in the big cities of Central America. “Have you turned over a new leaf?”
“Why are you wearing so much eye makeup?”
“Answer mine first.”
“Yeah,” said Lucien. “I have.”
“Well, it’s sort of a new me too. The best of the old and the best of the new. If you’re not crazy about it, you get a refund at the door.”
“At the door?”
“At the door.”
She went into the downstairs bedroom and began throwing things into piles on the floor. “I want to take a dip in my old swimming hole. Es posible?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that’s fine, because I do want to do that. Maybe later, after the dwarfs are sleeping.”
“They’re just small. They’re not dwarfs.”
“Shall we measure them? Where’s your sense of humor! Lucien?”
“You can have everything back,” said Lucien. “You can have it all.”
“You sound exactly like a man coming out of surgery,” Emily laughed. She looked ravishing in this off-center attempt to appear cheap or to be in disguise, which was more likely what it was. “Besides that, I just can’t figure where all this fits in. You’ve made so much of yourself.”
The moon came straight down through the skylight, and the pool was empty except for Emily and Lucien, who swam in its depths. “I want it like poison,” Emily said. “That’s how I want it and that’s how I’m going to get it.” Her silvery hair was almost invisible floating out against the surface. She tilted her head back and looked straight through the skylight. “After that, I want you to give me a room right here at my old swimming hole.”
20
The band was playing “Red River Valley.” Lucien sat with the mayor and the rest of the party, nearly forty people including the convocation from their sister city. Flatware accumulated with course after course of Henchcliff’s food. The little people were eating with their hands and radiating a rare and genial mood that affected the earnest citizens around them. Wick Tompkins was there too with the grin of a sprite. He tried their eating methods and praised them. Lucien called down the table to Wick, jumping his eyebrows in a gesture meant to break the ice. He said, “I have to talk to you.” The little people stared around in incomprehension. Their elder, who spoke English, cried out, “Party time!” with a hopeful smile. Lucien went down to Wick’s end of the table.
“Emily’s here.”
“I thought something was the matter with you.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Have yourself a couple of belts. You’ve got a speech to make.” Wick was wearing a striped suit, and his face was as blank as that of a bystander at an excavation. “I’m afraid you’re all alone on this one.”
“The trouble is, I still have some feeling for Emily.”
“No, Lucien,” said Wick. “You love Suzanne and little what’s-his-name, little four-eyes.”
“Speech! Speech! Speech!” They were clapping their hands and repeating the imprecation while looking straight at Lucien. He returned to his seat and stood for a moment until it was quiet. Then he spoke of his town and his country and his life. He was not afraid of losing his listeners. He knew he still had them as he talked about children and the next world. When he sat down they applauded while the elder and his closest aides cried out, “Top brands!” with such merriment and accord and humanit
y that in it was a kind of sacrament between them all. Lucien couldn’t imagine where it was coming from.
When the meal was finished and the milling began, Lucien returned to the house and went upstairs. Emily was stretched out on the bed with her hands over her forehead like a cloth. He couldn’t see her eyes. “I hope that you can appreciate that I am coming off an extremely checkered year.”
“I understand,” said Lucien, aching with sympathy.
“Did the sad tale of W. T. Austinberry make it this far north?”
“Yes, it did.”
“A sad tale for all.”
“Yes,” said Lucien, shocked.
“I shot him with this.” She held up the pistol. It was a polished, thin, flat thing. Lucien felt a fleeting, mad regret that he hadn’t found a way of exchanging W.T. for Kelsey. Then he knew it was crazy. It was alarming to feel the desire to go on rescuing Emily.
She reclined on her side. He found himself staring. “And don’t imagine you’re the only one who wonders why I am back. I had a vivid, I’m telling you vivid, life among those special American people who cannot return to the country. It is a superb club composed of the most interesting people that our society produces. You ought to look into it. Membership usually requires doing something awful, but where is it written life is to be easy? We even had a couple of Nazis. Not that I approve. But they were gentlemanly in all respects, and more than anybody else in the group, they seemed to know how to dress fashionably in the tropics. You know? The rest of us were rolling up our sleeves and gleaming with perspiration. I can only imagine we must have seemed pathetic. But that life down there takes time to learn. As I speak of it, Lucien, I grow more and more nostalgic. Obviously W.T. didn’t fit into any of that. Till my dying day, I will see W.T. wearing cowboy boots on those beautiful beaches. And believe you me, whoever said the ones in the big hats are the premature ejaculators had that one right.”
“Why weren’t you tried?” Lucien asked.
“Some very good American friends found me one of those countries you can spit across, and we went there in a sport-fishing boat. And that little country was just full of people who couldn’t go back to their little countries. So I found myself in a society that was entirely less attractive than the one I had just left. But if it could have been proven that I killed W.T., it was because in his desperate, misguided adoration of me he began to behave just exactly as my husband had, though he never quite reached the heights of beating me, slamming my hands in car doors, selling my piano and all but kenneling me. In short, I have not had clear sailing. Do you think I have?” She was crying, her rage and grief showing all at once.
Lucien was tormented. He had to get out of there. He told Emily that he had to be at the spring by closing time and went out of the house, leaving her upstairs with the curtains blowing.
The bar was still nearly full of customers. When Lucien walked in, Wick cried out from a bar stool, “ ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and sore vexed. For ofttimes he falleth into the fire and oft into the water.’—Matthew seventeen.”
“That’s nice,” said Lucien coldly. “Everyone should read the Bible. It’s not getting the play in bars it once did.”
“Are you gonna stand there till you fall to China?” said Wick drunkenly. “Or are you gonna drink?”
“Drink.” Lucien sat at the bar.
“Lucien,” said Wick, “there’s a time to try and a time to fly and a smart bird knows why.”
“How true,” said Lucien with sarcastic tolerance. The bartender set their drinks down. Wick brought him into focus, then pushed some money his way.
“Excuse me,” said Wick to the bartender, “but you’re shitting in my wallet.”
“Why don’t you go home and go to bed,” said Lucien. Wick gulped his drink and stood up haughtily.
“I wonder if you know who you’re talking to,” said Wick while everyone looked on. “I’m currently starring in the life story of an elderly auto dealer, now appearing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, which features endless laughter from a fortune-teller’s booth and other modern situations. History at its most informative. Do come back and see me in my dressing room. Free mints. Standing ashtrays. Others like yourself from the smart set. At the end of the play they pin a big paper daisy to my chest and hand me a piece of spoiled fish. The curtain falls to immense applause, mostly for me.”
He took one step and passed out.
Lucien walked around past the spring. It was now quiet, and he tried to imagine it as it had been when he was here with his father and the cloud of crows lifted from its surface into the sky. He thought of the poem where death leaves a hole for the lead-colored soul to beat the fire. And he thought of the days he floated the river alone, carrying a life jacket in his son’s size.
Lucien could tell from a distance that Suzanne’s light was still on, the windblown shrubbery turning its glow into semaphore. Inside, Suzanne sat beside a table reading. She wore a sweater over her bathrobe. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“You knew I had that dinner.”
“Yes—?”
“And Emily is here,” said Lucien. Suzanne’s eyes were so blank it was as if the optic nerve had died.
“Is she.”
“I thought I had better tell you that.”
“Why don’t you not talk about it, Lucien.” She turned her book onto its front.
“Okay.”
“But when you see her, remember how well I’ve been doing on my own. And no matter what, it might be years before I trust you again. It might be never.”
Lucien said, “I’ll take that chance.”
Emily slept naked on top of the covers with her purse next to her. She woke up when he came in but barely moved. The security light broke through the venetian blinds and striped everything. There was a light in the bathroom, too, and you could see half of the medicine cabinet and a wet washcloth hanging from the edge of the sink. Digital numbers glowed on the clock radio and it was very quiet. Lucien asked her to get dressed, and she stood up and started dressing; the stripes of light divided her body. Lucien watched.
“I’m in your hands, aren’t I? Especially if I like where we’re going. Because mystery is glamour and vice versa. That’s what courtship is all about. People court love—reach me those shoes—and they court death. All the big things are courted. Where are we going?”
“To get you a plane. I’m sending you away.”
“What if I don’t go?”
“I’m not sure. I guess the police will find you.”
“You absolutely will not hide me?”
“That’s right. I could sell the place and send you whatever it brings. I could do that.”
“No, darling, you should keep it. It fits you like a glove. It would be like defacing a painting to separate you from your sideshow.” He knew she still had the gun, and when she gazed at him, he felt her weigh him neatly. It was a privileged, eerie look at eternity.
They drove on until the starlight on the prairie showed the winding road like a piece of string. There were huge dry-land farms on either side of them where the wheat had been cut in panels of design and immensity. The cool night wind crossed the cropland and entered the sedan. Whatever it was that was happening to Lucien seemed as if it could have come from some source thousands of years or thousands of miles away.
“Do you understand that if you send me away it might be the end of me?”
“Yes, I do,” he said, and he felt suddenly uprooted, a feeling as violent as childbirth. Light jumped at them from the airfield, and a clamor of wind from the croplands filled the interior of the car. Lucien stopped. He got a dime from her and called the pilot. A light went on in a trailer a few hundred yards away.
“Do you remember when you came home from your broken marriage and your shattered wifette and made that wonderfully infantile gesture of paying my bail?”
“Why do you call it infantile?”
“Because I could perfectly well have
paid it myself.”
“I thought it meant something when you let me do it.”
“It did mean something! It meant that the ranch would not be seized when I left the country because it was in your name. It meant that I would always have it to come back to. That’s how much contempt I had for you.” The flashing light from the airfield ignited their faces.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I should think you would be. But you’re not cruel, Lucien. That’s what sets you apart from the others. On the other hand, you haven’t faced much either.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
Lucien stood out on the grass to watch the plane take off. It started across the runway and swung into the wind. It was away in the dark when it left the ground and began to climb at a steady angle. In a very little time, Lucien couldn’t tell its lights from the stars.
Suzanne rented a car because she wanted to drive across Wyoming with James and let him see the Wind River Range and the Red Desert, where the bands of mustangs could be seen from the road. They would turn the car in when they got to Denver and fly home. She said she wanted James to know she was a western girl even if they spent all their time in the city. James hung around his father’s neck and kissed him goodbye and said he would see him next time. When the boy was in the car, Suzanne said, “He isn’t afraid of you anymore. That’s the best thing that’s happened. Weren’t you always afraid of your father?” She got into the car.
“I guess I was,” said Lucien, “but he’s long gone now.”
Lucien’s son waved back to him, and Suzanne kept her eye on the road.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Ninety-two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Panama; Nobody’s Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change; and Nothing but Blue Skies. He has also written To Skin a Cat, a collection of short stories; and An Outside Chance, a collection of essays on sport. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.
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