Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  He sat down opposite Lucy and tilted slightly in his chair. He sighed and drifted forward in his imagination to winter, a scene in which one shoulders from the front door to the car through volumes of north wind. He rested on an image of jumper cable attachment, his imaginary self disappearing in the rooster tails of blowing snow that follow passing cars. Lucy was watching.

  “How about a converted slave quarters on Nevis?”

  “What month?”

  “January.” She pushed a brochure at him.

  “I don’t think so. I want something, I don’t know, something that would take me back to the glory days —”

  “The early seventies.”

  “But exactly.”

  “How about a hammock on Cay Caulker, Belize?”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. It’s a straight shot across the gulf.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you could pick up an oldies station out of Houston.”

  “Oh, Lucy.” He thought for a moment. “Is there a brochure?”

  “I think that would be very much out of keeping with the spirit of my suggestion.”

  “Quite right. How about the local weed?”

  “I’m sure they can find you some…‘good shit.’ And if you like the hammock, you can always grow your own.”

  “I see.”

  The room fell quiet. A car antenna moved into view in the window, backed up and rotated to a stop. Something was coming up inside Frank. Voices outside, laughter, more voices, deals, assignations. I hope it goes on for a million years, thought Frank gratefully, defying gravity and cold. Now he was nervous. He thought about his mother on her last day in her own house. She had a purse that weighed about fifteen pounds that had a lock on it; she had lost the key to the lock long ago and carried this massive purse whose contents no one could any longer remember. She even took it with her when she sat down at the disc-driven grand piano, shouting, “It’s magic!” while the robot piano played Mozart like a barrel organ in a nightmare. It was a flat earth and they were all going off the edge.

  “You’re never going to buy a trip from me,” said Lucy.

  “I could,” he said and thought, Here it comes. We have these jokey meetings almost daily and they go nowhere. Because she was Gracie’s friend, I’m paralyzed to so much as ask her to dinner. We leave the lightest moments red-faced and sweating, out of fear one of us will ask, “What do you hear from Gracie?” You move toward something that could mean something and all it does is produce fear.

  “You’re not like the others,” Lucy said. “You won’t go on a cruise. You don’t like other people well enough.”

  “I deplore their eating habits.”

  “You won’t go to the Bible lands.”

  Frank reached across and covered Lucy’s hands with his own. “Not even Jesus had to worry about hijacking,” he said.

  “What’s that have to do with it?”

  “Didn’t he, more or less, put the Bible lands on the map?”

  “That’s certainly a very strange way to say it, Frank.”

  “My problem in planning a trip is getting time and place in the proper relationship. For example, I would love to go to New York, but certainly not after 1925.”

  “That’s a problem, and by the way, my hands are beginning to perspire. Don’t keep coming on to me if you’re just going back to your cubicle.”

  Astonished, Frank stood up. “You’re a hundred percent correct.” Her beauty was sudden phosphorus, ignited by her remark. He had a spell of immolating madness, wanting to offer himself in some way.

  “How’s it going over there?” She nodded in the direction of his office.

  “I had one good transaction.”

  “Grain?”

  “Cattle. How about you?” His mind was diving around like a hooked fish. If they could only get off this dead center.

  “Pretty good. Mostly getting kids back from college. Nothing substantial in the way of trips. One screamer, didn’t get his diabetic dinner on a Seattle flight.”

  Now Frank felt a wave of insubstantiality. The whole thing was getting away from them. The normal, pleasant prevarications of daily life were becoming unbearable. It would just zoom in like this and be awful. The terror had to be replaced by blind courage.

  “Last night,” he said, “I was sitting in your apple tree.” This was it. This was it!

  “You were?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing in my apple tree?”

  “I was watching you … uh, get undressed and, uh, watch the news.” What an exciting new world this was. He was perspiring. But no matter what the consequences were, he was going to accept them.

  She withdrew her hands from beneath his. There seemed to be no motion anywhere in the building. His eyes felt dry. She got up and went to the window, but moved away from it. He waited for her to talk.

  “You’re quite a guy,” she said in an extraordinarily flat voice. Everything seemed in jeopardy. He couldn’t imagine what he had been doing there. He was walking home from the golf course in the dark. Two drinks. Not enough to explain anything. And suddenly he was there. It was too bad he told her. If he didn’t tell Lucy, he knew there could be another time and then it would become routine; then he would be headed off the end of the world. It was time to put himself in her hands. He could tell when she turned around to look at him that he was not going to get off lightly, but it had been his only chance to stop and now he was going to have to take it like a man.

  “I think the best thing would be if you went back to your office,” she said. “I think you need a little vacation, Frank. Let me work on it. I’ll give you a ring when I get this trip put together.”

  “When you get this trip together …”

  “Yes. I’ll call you when I put this little trip together. I can’t do it in five minutes. But not to worry: this has been a long time coming and you’re leaving town. You need to leave town. You haven’t been anywhere since Gracie left. You’ve got to break the pattern.”

  “Fine,” he said dully. “Call me.”

  In a couple of hours, she dropped off his plane tickets and itinerary without a word. He read it with amazement. He swallowed several times but the feeling his trip gave him wouldn’t go away.

  8

  Frank pulled the parka up around his face and looked out at the river. Pack ice from the slow breakup of winter had crowded the river from bank to bank. The Eskimo shacks along the shore seemed to reveal no signs of life except for the old caribou hides nailed to their walls and flapping bleakly in the north wind.

  Frank wandered back to the hotel to play video games with the Eskimos. The town had the appearance of a military supply dump: windowless storehouses, pyramids of fuel barrels, vehicles abandoned where they would never run again and where they would endure for centuries of refrigeration.

  The hotel, like the other buildings, rested on top of the ground on blocks, out of reach of permafrost. It was a carelessly constructed building, mostly prefabricated, and was not expected to last many more winters. From its windows could be seen the endless granite landscape, streaked with snow and running water, more of a plan for country than country itself. Through this unchanging vista, hundreds of Eskimos appeared each night on hot-rod four-wheelers, heading for the hotel bar. Frank went down the first night to have a drink with them, but they took him outside and tossed him in a blanket until he passed out. He definitely avoided drinking with them thereafter, because after three or four they became sharply conscious of the injustices Frank’s race had committed against them and began to get psyched up for another blanket toss.

  The desk clerk and manager was an Englishman who had come during the sixties to do good work among the Eskimos. Funding for that had disappeared and, not wanting to leave the North, he took on the hotel job. He was a stolid Yorkshireman, settled here now with his family. He said that his children were veteran smokers and drinkers by the age of ten. “Bloody little Inuit, they
are,” he told Frank.

  An Eskimo woman who had gone to Toronto, a three-hundred-pound crack addict who listened to rap music on her Walkman all day, wandered into the dining room to order breakfast.

  “Have I had any calls?” Frank asked. “Anything on the radio?”

  “Nothing at all,” said the manager. “Your vacation winding down, is it?”

  “You really never know,” said Frank. He was reduced to reading the last newspaper he had bought in the airport and speculating about the life he had left behind, if only for one of the longest weeks of his life. He learned that California community planner Richard Reese hoped to produce a more “nurturing” lifestyle in his new planned communities. Reese intended to use psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to build a town that functioned as a kind of golden stairway to wellness. On the count of three, thought Frank, all will cut off their dicks on the road to wellness. Reference made to Seaside, Florida, the assemblage of playhouses on the Gulf of Mexico. Says here that business is flat in the world of bronzed baby shoes, an admittedly “schmaltz-oriented” enterprise. Frank sighed. The faster he became an Eskimo, the better off he’d be. Then he could go home, having repaid his debt to Lucy. He could chew blubber in his office like a gentleman.

  Now he mostly played the video games with those Eskimos who preferred not to drink. There was a two-seated Grand Prix game with a screen revealing a pair of racing cars ready to race if you had fifty cents and a partner. Frank played this regularly and came to know many extended Eskimo families. The steering wheels of the racing game, once black, were worn silver. Passing the winter, young Eskimos pondered the images of the red and blue Ferraris as they surged down a simulated narrow lane in pleasant southern France. Frank Copenhaver wheeled his racer among the palm trees and blue glimpses of the sea even if, as today, there was no one to race but himself. He got up and joined the crack addict for breakfast. She seemed glad of the company. She was shaky from her vice and seemed to bear an infinity of sorrows. And just when he wished to think of average things for discussion, like weather, her interests were entirely millennial: world war, the antichrist, the hole in the ozone layer.

  Tuesday he went home. It had taken him half his trip to look at the return reservations on his ticket inside the Sunseeker Travel Service folder. He went through customs in New York and didn’t declare the snowshoe keychain that was his only purchase. Lucy picked him up at the airport, where he took great breaths of the smell of new grain fields in the advancing summer in the Gallatin Valley. This alone gave him the feeling that his trip had been a success. Lucy had a twinkle in her eye. “I know I have a good figure,” she said, “but was it worth it?”

  “I hate it when all and sundry are so literal.”

  “May I take you to dinner?” she asked.

  “The hotel, if you can call it that, was out of hot water the last two days. I haven’t had a shower.”

  “Will that prevent you from eating?”

  “I guess not. All I’ve had is smoked almonds all day.”

  Frank shoved his duffel into the back of Lucy’s gray Volvo and got in. The radio was still playing, a disc jockey crying, “Oh, no, not again!” They started toward Seventh. Frank could see the odd spook shapes of the cottonwoods toward the Bridger Range. The radio announced the coming appearance of a “gospel magician” at a gathering for teenagers. No wonder they stuffed themselves with drugs. Then the folks from Coca-Cola came on and said Coke has always been there for you, always at the heart of the things you do. They said that with Coke and days off, you’ll never be able to beat the feeling. Frank’s spirits sank slightly. The Civic Center, said the radio, was going to have professional wrestling, including a ten-man battle royal in a steel cage; afterward, Sir Lathrop versus The Animal.

  “Well, how did you like the Arctic?”

  “It was real different.”

  She handed him her sunglasses. “Look at the clouds through these, they’re so vivid.” Frank put them on and in fact the clouds thickened up brightly, wet and full of color. With these enriching glasses clamped to his head, he felt a lewd stirring.

  “And how have you been?” Frank asked, handing back the glasses. He really didn’t want to get into this.

  “I get up in the morning. That’s half the battle.”

  Traffic slowed down as an old lady in white headgear and black wraparound sunglasses crossed the road carrying a bag of clothes. She walked straight across through the cars without looking right or left. She reminded him of his mother, at her worst a decrepit scheming shadow who lived to interfere.

  An old sedan passed, pulling a cage on wheels filled with white Muscovy ducks. The Volvo crossed Main and entered the parking lot of the Thai restaurant. Lucy got out. “Let’s play the hands we were dealt,” she said. “We will begin by eating.”

  Frank looked around the dirty parking spaces under the trees and felt a wonderful lightness. “Remember Gram Parsons’s ‘Grievous Angel’?” he asked.

  “Sort of.”

  He sang: “ ‘Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down, and they all led me straight back home to you.’ ”

  “How extremely sweet!”

  “This is a perfect time and place,” said Frank sincerely. They walked into the restaurant. It had that wonderful feeling of restaurants that had recently been houses: walls in the wrong places, the waitress emerging from what seemed to be a parlor, carrying a tray. The room was nearly full, with couples, families and even two cowboys who, Frank noticed with irritation, had not removed their hats.

  “Hello, Frank,” said one of the cowboys.

  “Hello,” said Frank, staring fixedly at the unremoved hat. Behind them came a great big man in overalls, freckled arms as big around as most people’s legs. Frank looked at him. “Hello, Paul.”

  “Hello, Frank.”

  “Lucy Dyer, this is Paul Smith.”

  “How do, ma’am.”

  “How do you do, Paul.”

  “Frank,” said the immense man, his face creasing in two with a pained smile, his head settling down and driving out one more row of wrinkles around his sunburned neck. “I burned the feed bunks and farmed right up to the walls of the barn.”

  “You’re better off,” said Frank. “You’re much better off, Paul.” It was nice to tell someone they were on the right track. It was nice to notice that people sought his approval in their business decisions. He decided not to tell Paul that he was even deeper into feeder cattle. With his current low spirits, he wondered why he had ever let that happen.

  The waitress seated Lucy and Frank at a small table slap against the wall and handed them their menus. Ordinarily, Frank ordered Mongolian beef extra hot and kept washing it down with beer until he felt somewhat crazy.

  “I nearly froze up there.”

  Lucy stared at him. She said, “It was supposed to be a joke.”

  “It wasn’t a joke to me.”

  “I mean the travel arrangements.”

  “I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”

  “Here she is, let’s order,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor,” she said to the waitress.

  “You don’t need one for Mongolian beef,” Frank said.

  The waitress was looking on to her next table. The two cowboys were staring past each other in silence, waiting for their litchi nut. Paul Smith, the farmer, was now at a table by himself, looking like a freckled mountain. Frank turned around: every time the kitchen door opened, the music of Neil Young poured out. Frank loved these sentimental tunes. “I’d cross a mountain for a heart of gold …”

  He looked back and it wasn’t Gracie. It was Lucy. His face broke out with sweat. He was starting to go loose with panic.

  “I gotta go.”

  He stood up and abruptly went out the door.

  “Do you have any idea where he was going?” Lucy asked Paul Smith. Smith looked embarrassed. He got redder. “I mean, what was that all about?”

  In the parking lot Frank t
hought, I’m not gaining, I’m not getting anywhere. Lucy came out of the restaurant a minute later. She stopped in its lighted doorway and stared around at the cars parked under the trees. “There you are,” she said. She came over and gazed at him. Frank could just make out her face; she came up to about the middle of his chest and she was not looking at him. She took the edge of his shirt in her fingers. He smelled violets.

  They crossed in front of the car and got in. As soon as she began to drive, he felt a tension in his legs from wishing to work the pedals himself. They drove out of the parking lot to Deadrock Street. Homebound traffic from the mall kept them tied up at the stop sign in silence.

  Lucy pulled into the takeout line at McDonald’s and, seeing that it would be a wait, turned on the radio low, too low to really make out the music or the excited patter betweentimes.

  “We’re down among them now,” said Frank, listlessly contemplating the menu painted on the side of the building. But when the food was handed to them in a bag, the car filled with the appealing trash aroma of fast food. He reached into the bag and felt the hot, salt-grainy ends of the french fries as they wheeled back onto Deadrock. It was wonderful to stare openmouthed into traffic with the radio muttering and the lousy food steaming on the seat between them. Splendid to take what you are given. He smiled, felt the happiness go over the top of him. A long-ago day came back.

  “It’s 1964 and news of Dad’s hole in one has just shot through town.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I was just thinking back … It must be hell being a travel agent.”

  “It’s not so bad. You get so you don’t want to go on a trip.”

  “I got some slides from the Far North. Would you like to see them?”

  Frank ran the projector. The air was warm and stale in his house. Lucy sat next to him in the dark while he listlessly clicked one snapshot after another of Eskimos passing the time on the banks of an arctic river, working on their Japanese ATVs and smoking cigarettes. They had a way of smoking that looked like they were eating the cigarettes. He had bought these souvenir slides hoping they would trigger reminiscences when he got home. The trouble was, they didn’t. They scarcely mitigated the effect of the humid old couch.