Despite his pleasure at Gracie’s figure of speech, Frank said grimly, “I know what it is.” We, Montana was an organization of citizens who hoped to keep any water from leaving the state, through the erection of dams and diversions. They had some reputed connection with the Posse Comitatus as well as the radical tax protesters of the Dakotas. They spoke to the press sardonically about their interest in “white water issues,” by which they meant water for white people. Frank especially remembered their Western Family archetypes: the John Wayne male and his bellicose, gun-toting woman, their cold-eyed, towheaded children.
“Then we started going to the pistol range together,” Holly said.
“Why were you going to the pistol range, darling?” asked Gracie.
“To be able to defend myself,” said Holly flatly. “I shoot two hundred rounds a week.”
“I never thought of you as being in danger,” said Frank.
“You’re not in danger,” said Holly, “until you develop a few convictions. I found that out. There are some very peculiar out-of-staters on campus that give you the feeling that happiness is a warm gun.”
“I guess that’s why we’ve been so safe,” said Gracie to Frank. She seemed lost by this new Holly. Frank was numb.
“I hope you’ll realize with what love I say this,” Holly said. “Your generation, especially with your own out-of-state experiences, has been pretty much bent on self-discovery. Something very different happens when standards enter into it.”
Frank missed something here. “What are out-of-state experiences, darling?”
Holly laughed. “Experiences outside of Montana!”
“Uh-huh. Just what it sounds like.”
Gracie turned slowly toward Lane. “Lane, do we have you to thank for this?”
“I’m not sure what ‘this’ is, but probably you have Holly to thank.”
“Mom, you’re not even from here!”
“Where are you from, Mrs. Copenhaver?” Lane asked quietly.
“Louisiana.”
“Louisiana,” mused Lane. “I’ve often heard how colorful it is.”
“Don’t be a wise guy,” said Gracie. “It’s a great place.” Lane bobbed his head agreeably. “You can get a soft-shell po’ boy there which sets it apart in my eyes.”
“I’ve heard a good deal about your organization, Lane,” said Frank. “What do you hope to accomplish? Elect some people?”
“First of all, it’s not my organization. We see ourselves equally vested in Montana. We don’t want to elect anybody. We simply wish to provide an atmosphere of accountability throughout the state.”
“Who’s trying to hide the water …”
“Exactly. That’s the magnetic issue which collects all the other iron filings. We take the position that no water leaves the state, period. That tells you all you need to know. It tells you who the tree huggers are, the wolf recovery sleazos, the grizzly kissers, the trout pinkos —” Frank glanced over to Holly to see if he had become a trout pinko. She looked straight back at him, through him.
“Uh, Lane. Some of the state is twelve thousand feet high and, uh, water goes downhill, as I remember. Seems like some of it’s going to leave the state.”
“Not if you impound it.”
“Not if you impound it …”
“Exactly.”
“But then all the streams and rivers would, would be impoundments, all the beautiful streams and rivers.”
Holly and Lane chanted at him, trying to help him see the light: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” This phrase must have held some philosophical importance to them.
“I met one of the wolf enthusiasts,” Frank said noncommittally.
“Those people — the birds, bees, wolf and buffalo people — need to know that Montana is not a zoo,” said Lane. He got up, went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of little reddish brown discs. It was elk jerky that he had made himself. He passed the plate around.
“I start every session of the legislature passing out jerky to my fellow Republicans.”
“We’re Democrats,” said Gracie. “What do you give Democrats?”
“A piece of my mind — no, just kidding. I try to give them a sense of our ideology. Liberals think a victimology is an ideology — just line up victims and the policy will dictate itself. T’ain’t so, McGee. There’s a way of looking at this world and this country and, more importantly, this state that begins with saddle leather and distance, unsolved distance. And water. American government is run on the squeaking wheel getting the grease. In Montana, we not only don’t need grease, we don’t need the wheel. We need water, and we’re going to keep every drop that’s ours.”
Frank was looking down at his disc of jerky, held between thumb and forefinger. He was trying to sink his nail into it while wondering what sort of family or town could produce a dipshit like this. Lane had the gleaming true-believer tone of a James Watt, but with his own beetling menace. It was the knowledge that people like this existed that made Frank really fear that he was losing some advantage in business. Given that Lane was dating Holly, Frank felt that if this were an Arab nation and he, Frank, were a middling sort of emir, he would go on ahead and have Lane beheaded. Maybe arrange to have the head fall into a bag so that Holly wouldn’t be traumatized. Have the headless corpse float out to sea after dark; try to do it in a thoughtful way. Maybe have an orchestra. So long, head.
Frank excused himself to use the bathroom, which was at the end of a corridor behind the steep stairwell. Lane followed him back there. Frank was surprised.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” he said.
“Just a quick word with you,” said Lane.
Frank stopped. “What is it?”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
“About what, Lane?”
“About me and Holly?”
“As a couple?”
“As a couple.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-three.”
“You’re several decades older than Holly, Lane. I think that’s a bit extreme.”
“Don’t get yourself off the hook with that, Frank. What do you actually think?”
Frank appraised him for a moment, feeling challenged. “It’s not so much a matter of thinking, Lane. It’s more a feeling.”
“A feeling of what?”
“Of being sick to my stomach.”
Lane smiled evenly and said, “Fair enough.”
Frank went into the bathroom and closed the door, bouncing a douche bag that hung from a hook there. It looked like some tired thing from a yard sale. There were small porcelain fragments of an angel fastened to the wall, children’s towels with cowboy and Indian scenes on them, a sunburst on the toilet seat and a claw-foot tub. He realized that he didn’t need to use the bathroom and that the reflexive trip down the hallway to its door was out of hope that Gracie would follow for a heart-to-heart talk, bandied remarks or whispers of assignation. He was eager to tell her that he thought he had a real chance of going broke, but he didn’t want Lane or Holly to hear. He desperately wanted her to know that he might fail. Nevertheless, his short absence produced a change. When he got back to the living room, Gracie, Holly and Lane were standing. Holly had a class and Lane had to get back to the office. Frank heard each of these two before letting his eyes drift to Gracie. She was looking at him.
“I’m available for lunch,” she said, “if you are.”
Frank just smiled and offered a poor joke at departure. “I look forward to seeing you again,” he said to Lane, adding, “Don’t forget your annual physical.”
The women looked over at him in barely concealed astonishment. This was beyond the pale, even for Gracie.
“And you,” said Lane levelly.
“My family’s up and grown,” said Frank.
“Yippee,” said Lane. “By the way, I’ll be down in your town lecturing. You ought to come and see me, see my constituents, before your mi
nd closes completely.”
“Boys, boys, boys,” said Gracie.
Lane stood without motion, made even taller by the lace-up boots that stuck out incongruously from the cuffless bottoms of his suit pants. Don’t want to get fooled by this arch-bumpkin livery, Frank thought; guy like that’d run a Dun and Bradstreet on you in a minute. Instead, he looked at his daughter, who had become a bit corn-fed, one of the few predictable effects of zealotry. As soon as he could get to a phone, he meant to offer her a trip around the world. Any horizon-broadening at all would reduce this Lane to a dot. Furthermore, he suspected it would be Gracie’s view that Lane was the sort of thing to be expected when Frank was functioning as a solo parent. If he could get her to a restaurant, he would disabuse her of that, big time.
They saw Lane to his pickup truck. Holly kissed her fingertips and reached through the window to touch Lane’s liver lips. Frank watched him bat his eyes in mock collusion; it was unbearable. Lane wound a gray curl around his forefinger and said to her, “So long, pard,” then nodded curtly to Frank and Gracie.
“Get us a table at the Red Lion and I’ll be along in just a minute,” Gracie said.
“Okay,” Frank said. He turned to Holly and squeezed her. “Bye, pet.” The embrace had become awkward. Holly was unresponsive.
33
He drove several blocks to the restaurant and went into the air-conditioned semi-darkness. He bought the newspaper from a stand next to the cigarette machine and got a table overlooking the Clark Fork River. The staff far outnumbered the customers. He ordered a Löwenbrau and leaned up against the plate glass window with his paper, trying not to think about family matters at all. He turned to soybeans in the Chicago Board of Trade report, then remembered you couldn’t really tell where things stood, as it would be another month until their moisture requirements peaked. And here was real live news of the drought elsewhere: corn stockpiles were the lowest they’d been in eight years, with estimates lowered by a hundred million bushels. He danced through his favorites: barley, flax seed, feeder cattle, orange juice, cotton, heating oil — no surprises, no atmosphere of opportunity. Maybe because he wouldn’t know an opportunity if he saw one.
Throughout the business world, there was a desire for clout. Clout was what Frank would want if Lane tried to investigate his financial health. Clout would prevent his bank from cooperating with Lane or any other lawyer. Cloutlessness sent politicians to pollsters. Frank wanted clout. Clout enabled you to fly your daughter around the world. Without clout, you grabbed your ankles and waited for the big boys to shred your undies. Frank’s curiosity about clout had sent him staring into the windows of neighbors to see what they were doing with what clout they had on the off hours. It seemed quite proper to seek information in a covert way — what the police called a fishing expedition.
A negligible domestic instant like meeting Lane made Frank want to start a riot, a civil disturbance that would ventilate his own malaise and sense of peril. Frank had felt for years that the new man in him was prepared for a debut, but it was locked in a lingering postponement. A galoot was after his baby.
“I’m devastated by this clunker,” Gracie said, as if reading his mind. She had pulled her coat off her shoulders and was standing next to the table.
He stared at her and attempted to think. “As who is not?”
This was not conciliatory. Frank had made the least of the opening. He just wanted to be in motion, not caught flat-footed, and he came up with something not so nice. But he jumped up to hold Gracie’s chair. She made a wry smile and sat down. He glanced at the top of her dear little head, then took his seat in despair. He could just make out the soup of the day on a chalkboard: cream of broccoli. His life reeled past, continuously taxiing, rarely airborne. When the waitress arrived, they vied to order drinks, Absolut vodka and grapefruit juice for both, pharmaceutically powerful choices.
“For some reason,” Gracie drawled, as though they’d been talking all along, “I don’t think we’re the quality of people who can finish some long-term thing like raising a child. I should have known that what we thought we’d done with Holly would turn out to be an illusion. That cluck is far from what I had in mind for her.”
“Your great anthem was, Never give up your illusions.”
“There’s illusions and there’s illusions.”
“Well, Holly’s illusion is that this water-hoarding bozo is a romantic figure.”
It was hard to be indignant about this. He didn’t really know where Gracie had been and the look of defiance he had expected wasn’t there. Gracie was mostly a practical person and she looked as sad as it was practical to be. The biggest thing that they had once had together had been themselves — not some third thing, not a business or a child or even a view of the future, but just this enveloping situation that had lasted a long time — had lasted, in fact, right up to the very second that it didn’t. And then it was truly gone.
“How did you get here?”
“I drove. Frank, do you know what? I don’t think I can sit in this depressing place long enough to get something to eat. Would you mind terribly if we went someplace else?”
“No, not at all. I — not at all.”
“Maybe we can get the girl to put our drinks in to-go glasses. Or I’ll tell you what, we’ll just gulp them and split.”
“I’m not hungry anyway.”
“Neither am I.”
They drove to a small park with modest houses around its sides, a concrete tennis court without a net, a swing set and a steel flagpole. There was a light overcast sky and it was pleasantly cool. The only people in the park were those crossing it to go elsewhere, including an old woman making agonizing progress on a cane. Sitting on one of the wooden benches, Frank looked around and thought how easy it was to feel sunk into one of these spots where the world goes by. He thought of the doctors decamping from his clinic, now a pathetic shell, and the bath he took on the yearlings, the sort of faux pas he once never made. You could sit in this park and in a couple of months get a warm sweater and sit in it some more and feel yourself either immersed in the small human routines of a town or perched on a cooling planet hurtling through time and space. It was dealer’s choice.
He couldn’t understand sitting next to Gracie. Either this was an illusion or she had never gone, never really gone; or if she had gone, she would be right back; or, how was this, she had gone but she’d had to go and then would be back. It was satisfying to think in little crazy units like this, kind of absorbing to avoid sweeping concepts. Gracie was there, then went forth, then returned. She was following her star! He was stuck in the mud. She was on a high wire. He was sucking wind. Other times, it was his star and her mud. Other times, for each of them, it must have been like leaving the house to go to work while the old dog watched from the lawn and wondered why he didn’t get to go along. When he had been young he barked; when he was old he just watched; and then he was dead and gone.
And Frank remembered how poorly he had dealt with solitude — well to remember that, because he was going back to it — how he had slunk around like a coyote, encountering other lonely prowlers, joyless, glancing occasions, losing ground with every event in a steady regression. What was the name of that girl he met at Hour Photo? Picking up her nephew’s school pictures? Gone. He covered Gracie’s hand with his. She removed her hand and laughed. Out the window went his dream of mystery poontang.
“What are you laughing at?” Frank asked, wondering if she could read his mind.
“Remember when Holly was little, she used to drink out of the hummingbird feeders?”
“Yeah.”
“I was just remembering.”
“Well, it takes a big dog to weigh a ton.”
“Sure enough?”
“It seems funny, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The way things have flown by.”
“Flown by,” said Gracie. “They’ve flown by, all right.”
“I think once I get over b
eing bitter, I’ll feel we had a pretty good run at it.”
“I’m already at that point. I never was bitter.”
“What did you have to be bitter about?”
“Oh, Frank, let’s not start.”
“Okay.” He was inches from an unproductive fugue state, the very trees in the park darkening as though in an eclipse. He looked around at the beaten paths in the grass, a lot of anonymous human use. He wished they were living together now in a raw Sunbelt subdivision with no history whatever.
“I feel kind of guilty about this,” Gracie said. “I promised that this trip would be highly focused on Holly’s situation.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I wasn’t anxious for any renewal of intimacy.”
“Is that what you think I have in mind?” No sense in trying to fool her, he thought. “I imagine you’re pretty loyal to Ed …”
“It’s not that. He’s been no solution to my problems. But his problems may be more serious than mine and I can’t push him off the brink, which is where I think he is currently living.”
“In what way?” Frank asked, his heart leaping. What did he hope for, cancer? bankruptcy? AIDS?
“I don’t want to get into it. He’s still married too.”
“Leave him —?”
“God, just look at you!”
“I can’t conceal everything, Gracie.”
“What’s the difference, Frank? You couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, a regular hanging judge. Anyway, I’m going to need to get a few things out of the house,” she said.
How was this to be understood? “To be continued”? She was certainly a bit agitated. “Okay,” said Frank boldly, “so you’re out of this relationship at some level and it’s, what, reconnaissance time?”
“Fuck you, Frank.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I hate it when you look so triumphant. What a disgusting man you are, Frank. Yes, disgusting.”
“You act like you lost match point and that’s not at all the way I’m viewing this, Gracie, honestly it’s not.”
“You’d just like to find some alpha male one-liner for the coarseness and lust that drove me from my home. I know your every thought, you rotten shit.”
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