Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “She got a boyfriend?”

  “She did. I hesitate to tell you this, but he had a gold ring in his nose.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  “I ain’t a-shitting you,” said Frank rakishly. He wallowed in the fellow feeling produced by sharing this impression of weirdness in his child’s generation. The nose ring was part of the bohemian stance of the young man, a stylish underpinning for his scheme to get into “pizza graphics.” Frank hadn’t asked about that. He’d just said, “Right.” He was baffled by young people these days and knew full well that that was a cyclical thing. He just couldn’t fathom how they could be so indifferent to their own future and security when it looked like the country had much to fear in years to come. Even the entrepreneurial adventure that Frank had more or less backed into was without appeal to them. Frank thought he himself must be a transitional figure, unlike his father, who had never wanted anything but a business life; Frank had waffled into it, then grown to like it. The young people he ran into seemed only to have a sense of entitlement to clean air and money.

  “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” said Bob. “My boy brings his friends out to the ranch. They think it’s a kind of zoo. He brought this big old football player out, boy about yay big, and he wanted to know which one of the animals he could pet. I told him, ‘Size you are, you can pet ’em all.’ He didn’t want no part of that. Says he wasn’t petting nothing he didn’t know all about.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him to pet the goddamn lambs. He kind of flutters out in the pen and goes to petting. I tells him, ‘You’ll be okay’ ”

  They thought about this.

  “Frank,” said Bob, “I believe a man could put five hundred head out there.”

  Bingo. That was what Frank was waiting to hear. He kept talking but he was already running the numbers in his mind, already picturing the strategy with the bank, perhaps deferring some interest. He wanted a reason to have to come out here. Something about the other stuff was starting to go.

  “Here’s where we left off,” Frank was saying. He was back in town. The banker George Carnahan was standing between Frank and the Dolan Building, which housed a shoe store and a row of second-floor apartments. There was a man in the window of the shoe store hunkered down in his stocking feet, arranging shoe samples. “You were going to go halves with me on the cattle. We were going to fix the rate at nine and there wasn’t going to be any points or other charges.”

  “That’s where we left off?”

  “Yeah.”

  Carnahan had a young face and white hair. His mouth was small and level and it was right under his nose. It was like a face by someone who couldn’t draw too well.

  “Where did we have to go from there?” The banker smiled.

  “Size,” said Frank.

  “Size?” asked Carnahan.

  “Size,” said Frank. “This is going to be what you guys call a jumbo product. I’d like a quarter of a million dollars. More or less. It’s five hundred yearlings, basically. You’ll have to get back to me, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And remember this, it’s only money.”

  “I’ll let you know, Frank.”

  “And I hope we won’t be talking about other collateral than the yearlings.”

  “Right, Frank. Frank, we walk it through. Don’t always be so adversarial. I think it makes you feel you haven’t sold out if you act like you’re always in a fight with the banks.” Carnahan laughed; it was really a sharp remark and he was quite proud of it. Frank had to smile. “I think you know it’s kind of a joke about confining the collateral to the yearlings alone. We like you, Frank, but if you fuck up we’re going to get you. We’re a traditional small-town lender, just like it says in our ad.”

  Frank had come to rely on this fiscal narcosis in the last few years. He suspected it had to do with insufficient spiritual values, but those seemed to have gone out the window with his wife. Press forward, he thought. Buy things, then sell them. Try to make a profit. Embed yourself in the robust flux, the brushfire of commerce. Sometimes, when he ate at Julio’s deli with his friends, he saw the university people here and there. They looked positively lost among the florid car dealers and subdividers. They winced at the loud townspeople or gazed fondly at the farmers and ranchers, who they thought were purified by their proximity to Mother Earth. Maybe they would like to have the farmers and ranchers up to try their special spaghetti sauce. And what a shame it was that some of the weavers and potters up at the college didn’t take more time to get to know the snowmobilers. It wasn’t just that fellow feeling was plummeting around the land but that the animosity was getting to be so detailed. Frank wondered if maybe he was getting morbidly sensitive to all this floating ill will. It was a terrible thing when a neighborhood deli felt like the Gaza Strip.

  He got the loan, and in the wild fluctuations of the cattle market it was a dangerous loan. They were happy to walk it through when they thought it might blow up in your face. Despite his bold speech to the banker, it cost Frank a lien on the clinic.

  The yearlings arrived in nine bunches, from Choteau, Camas Prairie, Sumatra, Sedan, Wise River, White Sulphur Springs, Ekalaka, Cat Creek and Geraldine. Frank stayed at the Graves, in Harlowton, and met each load with his summer cowboy, a very competent twenty-eight-year-old nephew of Bob named John Jones. When Frank sat down in the café of the Graves with Jones to do his W-4 form, he found that this bright young man could neither read nor write. For some reason, as he helped Jones, whose face blazed with shame, he felt like a transubstantiated version of his father, a patient and unambiguous man who would see Jones’s illiteracy as just a small impediment in getting the yearlings onto the grass in an orderly way, where they could begin to gain weight and be worth more money. To Frank’s father, every animal had a dollar meter on its back and the needle was always in motion. Sometimes it was going down. If you ran a thousand head, you had a thousand meters and you had to keep those needles going up.

  Frank wondered what his father would have thought at a time when big calves were going for five hundred dollars a round and that quarter-million-dollar note was dragging its ass at nine and a half percent, compound interest all summer long, rain or shine, secured by a note on a medical clinic! He would have made money, Frank concluded, for the simple reason that his father never saw any romance in cattle. There’s a little money in cattle, he used to say, not much, and no romance. A hundred years ago there was big romance in cattle because there was big money in it. There is no big romance combined with small money. Period. Frank’s uncle Rusty once said: The lady doesn’t marry the carpenter unless he’s got a second home in Santa Monica or a two-foot dick.

  6

  Frank Copenhaver tapped a hard-boiled egg on the counter, slightly crushing the shell to keep it from rolling. Two old men next to him were lamenting conditions in the range livestock industry.

  “Why does the Lord want me to serve him in this way?” inquired a leathery sixty-year-old with a short cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. Frank spread the Wall Street Journal out onto his part of the counter and ordered a pork chop sandwich from the waitress, who took orders and refilled coffee in one efficient trip down the counter. The old man slowly stirred a cream substitute into his coffee and Frank listened attentively. “Why, it’s not as if we had nice childhoods, home alone sewing up prolapsed cows with hog rings and shoelaces — I’m sure you done that. Or digging a dead calf out of a cow by yourself when it’s twelve below and you’re twelve years old.”

  Frank looked up from the Journal into midair. It’s quite unimaginable that they would secretly look into someone’s bedroom window, he thought, and I have done it without remorse and, really, without having been driven to do it. Unless Lucy’s being Gracie’s oldest friend in Montana drove me to do it.

  The old man’s companion, a bit younger and with a distinctive furze of reddish silver hair around his scalp and the genial, unspecific face of an apprentice
barber, said, “I was born broke and I’m broke now.”

  The waitress caught Frank’s eye on this one and smiled at him. She wouldn’t have smiled if she really knew about me, he thought.

  “If steamboats was selling for a nickel,” said the older man, “all I could do is run up and down the dock and yell, ‘Ain’t that cheap!’ ”

  On the way in for lunch, Frank had been held up behind a crew of house movers who were taking a drive-in movie screen right down the interstate. He had stopped to talk to the sharecropper on his grain farm, then got behind the movers, and now he was cornered at the counter during the luncheon rush, something he usually avoided. He sat in the drifting cigarette smoke and waited to eat. This eavesdropping was irresistible and very much like looking in Lucy’s window.

  “I spent two years’ days on an irrigated Indian lease,” declared the older man next to Frank. “If I survived that, I can survive eighty-cent calves.”

  “We’ll survive it,” said the other, “and then they put us in the home.” Frank was listening closely. He and his brother Mike had put their mother in a rest home and felt guilty about it. He always perked up for talk about “home,” as the word was so charged with meaning, dread and guilt.

  “I ain’t goin’ to no home.”

  “We’re all going to a home.”

  “Kiss my ass, I ain’t goin’ to no home.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “By the way,” the older man said, relighting the cigarette stub, “I believe my dog is superstitious. This morning he wouldn’t go up to that green stock truck belonging to Vanderhooven. Do you recall Joker ever being run over by anything green or anything which was owned by Vanderhooven?”

  “Joker’s been around a long time. He’s had plenty of time to think.”

  “Let’s go. They need these places for lunch.” The two left a dollar for their coffee and, pushing off the counter to get to their feet, went out. The waitress placed the pork chop sandwich right on top of the Wall Street Journal. Frank was still thinking about having put his mother in a rest home, thinking about the anticipatory dread of the two old ranchers. They were right, of course, but what could you do without these old folks’ homes? You were not in a position to change the diapers yourself. Still, it was a wonder the roofs of those places were not adorned with vultures.

  He had taken his mother to Fort Myers as a last try some years before, got her a little house; then a bar opened across the street with a nightly wet panty contest and a sign in front that said, “Guys, come as you are! If you worked in it, you can party in it!” So, he took her back to Montana, got her one more house which did for a year, then into the home. In Fort Myers, all the white-haired people with brick red faces, plus the tones of mayhem at night from the workingmen at the wet panty contest, had frightened her more, late in life, than anything up to then. Yardboy drug dealers stalked the sidewalks in pump-up basketball shoes as wailing police cruisers shot through the humidity. As if his poor old mother were to be allowed to miss no modern nightmare, a man in the airport had a condom full of smuggled cocaine burst inside him, producing a howling seizure in front of a booth that shipped oranges and coconuts to the folks up north. She huddled by the ticket counter and stared at the departure screen and the word “Denver,” which was where she changed planes to come home.

  The waitress was talking to the cook: “Dad, he wants to go to Searchlight. Mom, she wants to go to Elko. So, they stay home. I was going to get some peace.”

  The pork chop sandwich was delicious, juice sopping deep into thick homemade bread. A cowgirl grandmother took the seat next to Frank, big owl-frame blue glasses, hair teased up in a bottle blond pile, buck-stitched cowgirl boots, little radiating lines around her mouth, looked mean as a snake. She too ordered the pork chop sandwich, a house specialty, then gazed at Frank appraisingly while she slowly lit a cigarette. Frank said nothing. Before his wife left, he had been a classic never-met-a-stranger type, but now he spoke mainly when spoken to. He kind of wanted to talk to this mean cowgirl grandma but he had lost his fluency in these matters, and had become an eavesdropper.

  Frank went out onto Main Street where a crew was making repairs. It was still spring and the smell of hot tar was its classic smell on Main Street.

  “Wake up!” said a voice, and Frank focused suddenly. A man stood in front of him in a seersucker suit, the tie pulled down and askew. He was hawk-eyed and intense. It was Dick Hoiness, his insurance man.

  “Dick! God, I was elsewhere. You’re right.” Cars had started to pile up at the light on Grand. Spring sunshine boomed from all the car colors. Frank thought, Where am I?

  “Well, how are you?”

  “I’m all right,” said Frank. “At least that.” Someone tapped a car horn and Frank flicked a wave without looking into the glitter of windshields.

  “Frank, when you get a minute, we need to go over the farm buildings I’ve got covered with you.”

  “You’ve got the houses, right?” Frank felt himself concentrate, somewhat unwillingly, on an inventory of buildings.

  “I’ve got the houses and the main shops and of course the clinic. I just need to double-check before we renew. I think we’re insuring more buildings than you really care about. You still got the grain farm and the ranch I know of?”

  “Yes, but that could change. Mike splits the ranch bills. We own that together. What about the old hotel?”

  “Untouchable firetrap, Frank,” said Dick, backing off into the flow of pedestrians before continuing on his way. An exchange of waves and they parted into the sunny day. Frank thought about his insurance man; he’d known him for a long time. Dick had been a bassist in a local band, got his long hair cut off in 1980, then got in trouble for drugs, cleared that up, and when the Mission Mountain Band was wiped out, he took it as a sign that an era had ended and went looking for what was then known as a straight job. He had done well and now lived with his small family in Chokecherry Canyon. It was getting harder and harder to remember one’s old hippie friends as they disappeared into local society; but like them, Frank Copenhaver went on with the vaguely disreputable feeling acquired during those years, a feeling that later gave him a coolness, a detachment toward his adversaries. A refrain went through his mind from an old song: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me …”

  Frank glanced at an architectural magazine on his desk — “Bogus Colonials Invade Boston” — and a sporting magazine with a story about a man who pitches camp on the drifting carcass of a dead whale, hoping to ambush a great white shark. Definitely have to have his outfit dry cleaned after that venture. Frank couldn’t bring himself to make his calls. I’m guilty, he was thinking. He dug into the morning news. Baby boomers were buying vintage guitars: bits of splintered lumber formerly owned by Pete Townshend, various “workhorse” Stratocasters, nostalgic early-middle-agers battling the Japanese for Buddy Holly’s Gibson, flame-patterned Les Paul models sailing across the Pacific to museums.

  He went to the window. An old couple in the yard of the small house next door, now surrounded by offices like Frank’s, took in the midday sun. He had seen them before. They were very old, and she quite senile. The old man always wore a suit and his little wife a kind of sack dress, probably so that the weak old man could manage to pull it over her head when helping her dress. Frank observed while the old man slowly unwrapped a piece of candy for his wife. She watched patiently.

  Frank went back to his desk. It was becoming hard for him not to think of work as something completely made up, no matter how remunerative. It seemed an excuse for not loafing. He was sometimes surprised everyone didn’t see through it. This was Gracie’s old pitch and he had never bought it. He had taken it that she was attacking his achievement. But it was time to go ahead and do something. The pork chop sandwich was starting to churn. He remembered that first trip down to Louisiana when he had taken a shit out his future in-laws’ upstairs window. He rested his hand on his stomach and thought about how Bunker Hunt used to bring his lunch in a b
rown bag, creating a reputation for penury, when in fact the bag was filled with the kind of gourmet items you couldn’t buy just anywhere. He picked up the phone and dialed Grant Weller, a cattle order buyer, and after a few formulaic remarks and parryings over price, bought another 500 six-hundred-pound steers, which he appended, with one more call, to the loan secured by his best property, his real trophy, the Alpenglow Clinic. He had a place to run them at ten bucks a head per month, about two bucks worse than he was doing with the Salvation Army. He needed to park them only a short while, until he could get them on feed.

  “Good heavens. Where are these going?” asked his banker, George Carnahan, with a gasp.

  “I’m going to background them at Mission Feeders. Call me for the deposits. Gotta go, bye.” He hung up, sat back and thought. He returned to the window. The old couple were gone. He could see the candy wrapper on the ground and walked out of his office into the hallway. He went down two doors and into the travel agency, waved to the secretary and went past to a smaller office.

  7

  Lucy Dyer was at her desk, didn’t really notice him in her doorway. The wall was covered with posters, tropical getaways for people in the extreme north. He always looked at the brown girl wearing little more than a dive watch under the waterfall in Kauai. Lucy had a long brown braid wound up behind her head and wore a navy blue jacket over a white open-throated silk shirt. Once when Frank worked on a road crew in Yellowstone, when he was young, a girl who looked like Lucy stopped in her convertible while a bulldozer crossed the road. They spoke briefly, Frank put down his shovel and got in the convertible. When he returned two weeks later, the job was gone. He could remember still the smell of the evergreens and dusty tar, hear the mountain stream that roared along that road, remember every instant of the two weeks. She was a lovely rich girl in her own Mustang convertible, but she did give him gonorrhea. He drove all the way to Laramie, Wyoming, to feel anonymous enough to see a doctor.