Nothing but Blue Skies

by Thomas McGuane

  “Ha, ha.”

  They walked together along the railroad track in the last light. There was enough curve in the lakeside route that the rails were always disappearing on the geometry of creosote sleepers just ahead in the woods. Honeysuckle grew wild down the steep banks where lake water glimmered through the trunks of tall old pines. Elise, that was her name, chatted along amiably and was very good at naming the birds they saw — the chipping sparrows, the yellowthroats, the kinglets. There was something about the way she touched her fingertip to the droplets of resin on the pine bark that made Frank think, I may be headed for a world of poontang.

  In Frank’s room, she peered examiningly at his cock. “The baleful instrument of procreation. Ooh,” she said, squeezing hard, “I can tell I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you having a nice time?” she asked.

  “Like my grandpa used to say, ‘If this ain’t it, you can mail mine.’ ”

  They kissed and she slipped a cough drop from her mouth into his; it was like a cool breeze. He slid down the length of her and, spanning the backs of her knees with his hands, licked deep into her. She moaned, then jumped out of bed and ran around the furniture. “That cough drop has set me on fire!” she hollered, and went into the bathroom. He heard her running the water and tried to decide what to do with the cough drop. Finally, he spit it down the wall behind the bed. He tried to blot his tongue on the wallpaper. She came back in with a washcloth clamped to her crotch, got into bed and sent the cloth back toward the bathroom with a kind of hook shot.

  “Just quit pussyfooting around,” she said, “and stick it in.”

  She had a long, firm body that she must have worked hard to keep in such shape, and she flung it around with great confidence in its appearance. Frank hadn’t made such buoyant love in memory. He got happier and happier until he wondered briefly if her energy was connected by some means to having found a cancer that day. He felt exultant and did not consider asking about it.

  Then, when they were through, he did think about that. Lying there, he must have been looking off and she caught it, scrutinizing him. The room was silent. She leaned across him, picked up the phone and dialed. After a moment, she spoke. She just said, “Hi.” Then the other person spoke. Then she said, “Sorry, I couldn’t make it,” and hung up. It was out of the question to ask who was on the other end; something in the flat way she spoke made Frank know that she was supposed to have been fucking this other person and not over here at the lake fucking him.

  It was late and the only thing they could get was the weather channel. Elise was smart and it was fun to talk to her about the possibilities of weather. There was a stalled-out high where they were and they could see it on the national weather map. Elise knew where it was going to go when it began to move; it was headed for the Dakotas. She stood naked beside the television set and pointed to where it was going. Their drought was over but it looked like others’ had just begun. She came back to bed. Frank could see where the heat spread west from Bullhead City, Arizona, then hit a kind of Pacific wall and stalled, rising slowly up the coast of California … She had her mouth on him now and the antics of the weatherman with his pointer didn’t make any sense at all.

  When they’d finished, Frank turned the weather off and got back into bed. They talked awhile about property. Frank said housing starts were way up in his part of the state. “The contractors who hung in during the eighties are really booked. Everybody’s working. We’re all trying to woo these new businesses, but our unemployment rates are so low and our warehouses so full, we know we’re askew on their shopping lists. I’ve got a little building I rent as a clinic-slash-boutique to four doctors.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m just there at the Valley Hospital. It’s okay. I don’t pack anything home with me. I’m still in my hippie mode, down deep.”

  “Were you a hippie?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Huh, so was I.”

  “I mean, I was pretty motivated compared to some of them, but I consider myself an old hippie. What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “People were doing this before the hippies.”

  “Not with the same spirit,” said Elise. “I was hitchhiking around Europe, and in Italy they called us I amici di Liverpool, because they thought all the hippies came from Liverpool, kind of a hangover from the Beatles era.”

  “I guess Italians get the news a little late.”

  “They just get it when they want it …” She seemed to drift off and then spoke again. “What’s the policy on your toothbrush?”

  “You can use it.”

  “Mm.” He could feel her drift off, her back to him. He put his arms around her and thought about considering the weather with someone else … thundershowers in Indiana … lake effect … Then he thought, To be living.

  He woke up in the dark. He was alone. That was probably why he woke up. The bathroom light was on. He made out a knee beyond the lighted doorway with the corner of a newspaper over it. He heard a deep, solid fart. He remembered a map-reading scene in a movie about the Civil War, when the noise of cannon fire was muted so you could hear the dialogue of strategy.

  She sensed something. “Are you awake?”

  “Just.”

  “Is this your Journal?”

  “Yup.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It says, ‘Natural gas is the fuel of the future.’ ”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a joke,” Elise said. “I know you were awake when I made that little noise.”

  “I’m afraid I was.”

  “ ‘The 1990s were supposed to bring a golden era for the gas industry. Repeated threats of oil shortages, ever-toughening pollution laws and federal tax credits refunding up to seventy percent of exploration costs seemed to guarantee that gas would become the dominant fossil fuel.’ What do you think?”

  “I don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or the other.”

  “Yet you lay there like a secretive little mouse because I cut one lousy fart in the privacy of a motel bathroom.”

  “I wasn’t being secretive. I was asleep.”

  Elise came back to bed in a flood of warmth and immediately cuddled. “You married?”

  “Separated.”

  “Since when, since breakfast?”

  “Long time. How about you?”

  “Yup, nice husband, two nice kids, boys.”

  “So, what’s this all about?”

  “I belong to a dick-of-the-month club.”

  “Seriously.”

  “How should I know? You paddle out to the middle of a northern Montana lake to be alone and a decent-looking guy paddles out and rolls your raft. There’s nobody else out there. It’s determinism, it’s fate. Fate says: Put out, Elise. So, Elise puts out. You seemed to welcome the fate of Elise and its atmosphere of festivity. You seemed to salute the cheating heart of Elise.”

  “This is an unusual thing for you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Was that your husband on the phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about the cancer?”

  “That was pretty much true. I confess that it’s also sort of an unimpeachable excuse. But don’t you think that most personal freedom is built on other people’s misfortune?”

  “Good grief.”

  “I never look at a set of x-rays without being reminded how short life is. Lust follows. It’s like living in a city under siege. And here’s another weird thought: I’d hate to ever have to x-ray someone I’ve had sex with.”

  A few minutes later, Frank let his eyes close. What an adorable woman, he thought, a little crush forming; so full of life and now asleep with an untroubled conscience. Her peace was catching and he was soon falling asleep with a feeling that was a lot like love.

  In the morning, they g
ot doughnuts and coffee from a gas station-convenience store. The sky was clear except for a huge white thunderhead to the west that caught a pink-orange effulgence from the morning sun. Elise slid into her yellow Jeep Cherokee. Traffic headed toward Flathead streamed past behind her. She nodded, smiled as if to say “yes” or “yep” or “uh-huh” and pulled into traffic. He knew she loved him too.

  He finished his coffee and went back to the motel to check out. He felt a goofy pride to see the thrashed and discomposed bed. “Good job, Frank,” he said aloud, and climbed into the shower, letting the needles of hot water drive into his revitalized flesh. Then he shaved. Frank loved to shave. It was a daily challenge to get the little groove in his upper lip and to make the sideburns come out even. He had to stretch the skin of his neck to shave it smoothly, as it no longer stayed taut on its own. What difference does it make if my flesh is firm, he thought smugly, if they’re going to put out like that anyway? That simple fiesta of venery has restored me. I’m like the happy duck that spots the decoys.

  32

  He checked out and drove south toward Missoula, where he fancied the prospect of running into Gracie while he was detumescent, indifferent, superficially inquiring, amiable. The only thing new he had to talk about was whether or not he had lost his touch, and he didn’t expect to admit or say that.

  There was a fair amount of traffic on 93. Summertime seemed to reveal the ranches along that route in all their nakedness: junk-filled yards, small corrals with a couple of steers or sheep in them, modest flower boxes, yards that seemed meant only for their occupants and not the careering tourists of 93. Huckleberry stands appeared between Whitefish and Kalispell, then, as he started down the fjord-like shores of Flathead Lake, stands selling the incomparable Flathead cherries, cars nosing out of steep lakeside driveways to peek onto the highway. A condominium rose next to its white reflection on the black, clean surface of the lake.

  Frank pulled over and bought a couple of pounds of cherries and placed them on the seat next to him. He rolled the window down and spit the pits out as he drove until the hot buffeting wind made him feel deaf on that side. He rolled the window up and began spitting the pits onto the dashboard. He turned on the radio and listened to an old song called “Big John”: everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John. Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

  On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” No one compares with this guy, thought Frank. I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it. Frank paused in his thinking, then realized he was suiting up for his arrival at Missoula. In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky, the voice of Sam Cooke: “But I do know that I love you.” Frank began to sweat. “And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be.” He turned off the radio, looked into the oncoming chrome grille of a White Freightliner and shouted, “My empire is falling!” Then he twisted the rearview mirror down so that he could study his own expressions. He now permitted himself to think about Gracie. He knew that she might be in Missoula and he wanted to be ready but he didn’t know how. He was nervous.

  All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: “Give me water, my work is so hard.” What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead. Heading for a white world: polo shirts, imported beer. The back nine. Lawn care. Etiquette. Epstein-Barr. Then he thought with disturbance about trout fishing. Blacks didn’t seem to care about that. They liked fishing off bridges, though. It was hard to picture Otis Redding and Sam Cooke fishing off a bridge. Maybe they did before they were famous.

  Holly’s apartment was on a small side street behind the university, about three blocks from the Clark Fork River. Frank first stopped at the river and watched it rush through town. There were some small trout dimpling along a speeding current seam about ten feet below traffic. Because of the previous night, Frank felt it was going to be out of the question to develop a truly huffy tone. But he meant to do his best. There were several cars parked in front: Holly’s green Civic, a well-kept old tan Mercedes 190SL and a National rental car with Utah plates. Next door, a pretty college girl was hanging out wet towels while a Louis Armstrong solo played its scratchy uproar from the windowsill. In the space between houses a steep hillside angled away, green and dotted with small white stones. Frank could smell the nearby paper mill and just make out the iron red top of a crane moving beyond the roofs of buildings. He felt faintly sick to his stomach.

  The door to Holly’s apartment opened and instead of Holly, there was Gracie. That’s what he was afraid would happen. Frank was partway out of his car, still cushioned by the sounds of the radio as well as by the accidental moods of a neighborhood of temporary college housing; but it nearly stopped his heart, a feeling so intense it resembled fear more than anything else. He felt as if his brain were photographing everything in an exhausting superrealism that he couldn’t absorb. He was experiencing flu-like symptoms.

  “Would it be better if I left?”

  “As you wish, Gracie.” He could scarcely believe the bland tone of his voice.

  “As I wish?”

  “As you wish.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay.”

  For the second time in a weekend, Frank thought he had found himself in hailing distance of dramatic poontang. If nothing else, such a puerile thought was heartening in the face of his shakiness. He was swept under by self-contempt. He didn’t even have time to imagine who was the wronged party or, still worse, account for the water over the dam. He feared old rooted love more than anything else, blunt and tragic, like horrible news from the doctor.

  “Gracie, how are you?” he asked, now at the door.

  “I’m fine, Frank, and yourself?”

  Bad English, thought Frank, but said, “I’m fine. Holly here?” Gracie sort of smelled his little thought and squinted before speaking. Her squint was perfect, eternal.

  “Yes she is, Frank. And she’s with … Lane.”

  “Who is Lane?” Frank asked, titrating just a bit of conspiratorial intimacy into his conversation. She stayed rigid. It didn’t appear she wanted much to do with him. He was a jerk.

  “Lane is Holly’s gentleman friend. Shall we?” She backed away from the narrow screen door to let Frank into the hallway. Frank stepped in and then Gracie followed, a panicky situation in a small spot. There was a brass holder for umbrellas, to remind Frank that he was in a rainy area. Beyond a pair of divided-pane glass doors was the old parlor of the house, which Holly had furnished with junk shop furniture, including a folding card table, a cream-colored La-Z-Boy recliner, a television set with its futuristic insides exposed, cinderblock-and-board bookcases and a large public drinking fountain. On one wall was a poster so out of keeping that it startled Frank. It showed the bomber Enola Gay with the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima behind it, and underneath the legend “It’s Miller Time.” There was a miscellany of small, uncomfortable metal chairs in one of which, gesticulating feverishly, sat Holly, and in another a gaunt figure with a shock of gray curls, wearing a three-piece suit and lace-up cowboy packer boots, Lane Lawlor. He dressed the same way Frank’s grandfather had, only that was sixty years ago and the old fart had had a Maxwell touring car. Who was this costumed geezer courting his daughter? Frank wondered.

  As he held out his paw, Lane Lawlor actually said to Frank, “Put ’er there.”

  “Daddy,” said Holly, “this is Lane Lawlor.” She smoothed the front of her dress and shrugged up one shoulder. She shifted her look to Frank and said, “And Mama, she’s met.”

  Gracie came in from behind and almost secretively found herself a chair. Everybody looked over at her and she reexpl
ained, “We’ve met.”

  Frank gazed at Gracie. Love had turned to rage. It came out in some rather sharp questioning of Lane.

  “Where you from, Lane?”

  “I’m from Fort Benton,” he said, “right where she all began.”

  “Right where what all began?”

  “The history of Montana, the fur trade and so on.”

  “Oh, the white history of Montana.” This wasn’t quite fair, as it suggested subtextually that Frank spent a good bit of his time fighting for the rights of Indians. He really meant Otis Redding. “What’s your line of work?”

  “Water.”

  “A swimmer?”

  “I’m an attorney. My practice is confined to water issues — apportionment, adjudication, priority and so on.”

  “You’ve been at it several summers, I take it,” said Frank, allowing his eyes to drift to the gray curls.

  “Sure,” said Lane, ready to take him on, which seemed to be looming.

  Holly made a presentational gesture with both hands toward her mother. Her interest in Lane had made her into a bit of a simpleton. She had an expression of appalling devotion, a Nancy Reagan gaze directed at the side of his head. “Well, what do you think?” Holly asked.

  “She looks well,” said Frank. He wasn’t controlling his projected tone very well. He was usually better at this. Either more was at stake or the background of his slipping business was seeping in. He tried it again. “She looks well.” This time it sounded as if he were saying she didn’t look well at all or was actually ugly.

  “You look well too,” said Gracie.

  “Thank you. Anytime.”

  “Oooh,” said Gracie, and this almost got away from them. Holly was frozen. Frank noticed that Gracie was angry.

  “You want to hear how we met?” Holly asked.

  “Yuh,” said Frank. “How?”

  “At a rally for We, Montana.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, darling,” said Gracie, “but your father and I don’t know what that is.”