Crow Fair

by Thomas McGuane

  “I hate her,” said Adele. “Three hundred fifty miles in a white Honda Civic is not what I had in mind. And she’s got breath like kerosene.” The waitress brought the check.

  Adele stared into my eyes. “I’m sure you could see, as I could see, that she’s onto us.”

  “I’m not particularly intuitive but, yes, I thought there was something there.”

  “Something unpleasant as if …”

  “We’d been nabbed.”

  “Well, maybe not so clear as that but suspected, perhaps. Can I ask you a favor?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t ever do this to me again.”

  “And all this time, I thought it was mutual.” I didn’t know what else to say, or why I more or less sang these words. I’d never seen Adele angry before, and I was startled at the transformation.

  “This strikes you as a good time for irony?!”

  “Adele, people are staring.”

  “Staring! I’d love to be able to worry about stares.”

  Esther appeared in the doorway and came toward us in big strides, like a forest ranger. “Everything okay?” She glanced back and forth between us with transparently insincere concern. Adele’s mottled face made an implausible attempt at reply.

  “Just winding up here, Esther. I’ll be right along. Sorry to hold you up.”

  Esther backed away giving us a good long look at her quizzical expression, then strode out the door again. I perhaps felt less vulnerable than Adele and believed that while Esther was happy to exhibit her intuitions, hers was still a theory masquerading as a fact. She had nothing to go on.

  “I’d better leave.”

  I didn’t dare try an affectionate farewell given Esther’s circling. I said, “Well, kiss, kiss.”

  Adele said, “Same.” She got up, gave me a small waist-level wave, and went out. I wasn’t proud of the speculating I began. I barely knew Adele’s husband, Marty, a petroleum geologist originally from South Africa and something of a lady’s man, as I said. There might be a tiny contretemps just on principle, with some awkwardness on those rare occasions when we met again; or the shit might really hit the fan, with Adele winding up out on the street and Marty drawing me into fisticuffs, for which I have no particular talent. I was cringing at how quickly my erotic stream of consciousness had evaporated into a haze of measliness and fear. Adele came back and sat down.

  “Screwed. She left. She’s going to turn me in.”

  “Adele, honestly I doubt it.”

  “I’m toast, and you know it.”

  Part of me wanted to exploit this heightened state erotically, but that seemed a dangerous idea, and so in the end we made a gloomy pair heading across the lake to the cottage, Adele facing the bow while I steered. The lake was still quiet except for cat’s-paws and the wakes of birds. Just past midway, I could smell the piney breeze from shore as I dwelled on Adele’s shape through her blue dress, and as she braced herself on the seat. Her hair was loose, stirred around her shoulders by the air moving across the boat. I thought that at some point she might look back at me, but she never did. In our nine years of meeting I had given her very little to go on, and now I could see that it wasn’t enough.

  I tied the boat up and tilted the engine on the transom. Adele was already walking up the dock but stopped halfway, her forefinger crooked and pressed it to her lips in thought. “Maybe I’m overreacting.” I followed her partway, encouraged that she was taking a more hopeful view of things; but what I had to say put an end to that.

  “Deny everything. Esther wasn’t here. Marty wasn’t here. Tell them their data is corrupt.”

  Adele’s arms fell to her sides in disgust as she walked the rest of the way to the cottage. I could only follow and then watch her throw her belongings into her suitcase. I may have breached the bedroom door too enthusiastically; it banged against the wall behind it, causing Adele to look up sharply from her packing. “Is this your James Cagney moment?”

  “No, no, it isn’t,” I said mildly.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said tearfully. “This has always been inevitable. I should have taken it better. I love Marty. What the fuck have I been doing?”

  I had a flippant answer for that, too, but it would have only revealed my bitterness. I hardly needed to be reminded of her love for Marty, who had always seemed pretty and bland and devious to me, although I probably made that up. All I really knew of Marty was that women found him presentable. I thought his expensive clothes were odd on a petroleum geologist, and that to me suggested a real slyboots in his finery. But I also knew my inferences were utter crap.

  Either Adele didn’t want to be seen with me on arrival in Glendive, or the long ride together would have been too fraught; either way, we ended up at the nearer Kalispell airport to rent her a car, a Kia that made her seem bigger than she was as she gave me a forlorn wave and departed. Kaput.

  I moped around the cottage for another day and headed out. The day I got home, Esther and I met for coffee at her request. She hadn’t abandoned Adele at the restaurant after all; she’d gone for gas. When she returned and discovered us gone, she searched frantically for Adele and finally gave up and drove to Glendive. I suppose she was aware of what we were up to together; but taking Adele away must have seemed the perfect chance to break it to her that Marty wasn’t coming back anytime soon. He’d met someone in South Africa, an English girl working at a branch office of Deutsche Bank.

  I had dinner with Adele that winter at Walkers American Grill in Billings, always crowded with local suits, but now it didn’t matter who saw us together. She was working hard and living alone, her marital situation still unresolved. She blamed herself for everything but placed her hopes on Marty’s irresolute arrangement with his girl in Johannesburg. “He honestly doesn’t know where it’s all going,” she said, smiling uncertainly. “He told me he just wants to live it out.”

  I guess I’ll have to wait. Esther thinks I’m being a dope, but she’s so instinctively protective I can’t take her seriously. She’s a specialist in damage control, adequate company, and may see more in me than is actually there. We’re kind of in the same boat.

  Kurt was closer to Mother than I. I faced that a long time ago, and Mother pretty well devoured all his achievements and self-aggrandizements. But there came a day when the tide shifted, and while this may have marked Mother’s decline, it was a five-alarm fire for Kurt. He had given Mother yet another of his theories, a general theory of life, which was the usual Darwinian dog-eat-dog stuff with power trickling down a human pyramid whose summit was exclusively occupied by discount orthodontists like himself. Kurt had successfully prosecuted this sort of braggadocio with Mother nearly all his life; but this time she described his philosophy as “a crock of shit.” This comment had the same effect on Kurt as a roadside bomb. His rapidly whitening face only emphasized his moist red lips.

  Kurt and I put Mother in a rest home a few months back. I don’t think you can add a single thing to putting your mother in the rest home. If ever there was an overcooked topic, popping Ma in the old folks’ home has to be a leading candidate. Ours has been a wonderful mother and, in many ways, all the things Kurt and I aren’t. We are two tough, practical men of the world: Kurt is a cut-rate tooth straightener; I’m a loan officer who looks at his clients with the view that it’s either them or me. The minute they show up at my desk, it’s stand-by-for-the-ram. Banks love guys like me. We get to vice president maybe, but no further. Besides, my bank is family owned, and it’s not my family. Kurt goes on building his estate for Beverly, his wife, and two boys, Jasper and Ferdinand. Jasper and Ferdinand spent years in their high chairs. Beverly thought it was adorable until Ferdinand did a face plant on the linoleum and broke his retainer. What a relief it was not to have them towering over me while I ate Beverly’s wretched cuisine. Her Texas accent absolutely drove me up the wall. Kurt has lots of girlfriends in safe houses who love his successful face. His favorite thing in the world is to make you feel
like you’ve asked a stupid question. Beverly has some haute cuisine Mexican recipes no one has ever heard of. She has to send away for some of the ingredients. She says she’d been in Oaxaca before she met Kurt. Some guy with his own plane. It was surprising that Kurt and I turned out like we did. Our dad was a mouse, worked his whole life at the post office. In every transaction, whether with tradespeople or bankers like me, Dad got screwed. To make it even more perfect, his surgeon fucked up his back. Last three, four years of his life, he looked like a corkscrew and was still paying off the orthopod that did it to him.

  But Mother—we never called her Mom—was a queen. Kurt said that Dad must have had a ten-inch dick. When we were Cub Scouts, she was our den mother. She volunteered at the school. She read good books and understood classical music. She was beautiful, et cetera. Like I said. This is the sort of shit that happens when kids fall in love in the seventh grade, brutal mismatches that last a lifetime. Dad’s lifetime anyway, and now Mother’s in God’s waiting room and going downhill fast. Kurt and I always said we hoped Mother cheated on Dad, but we knew that could never possibly have happened. She was above it, she was a queen, and despite our modest home and lowly standing, she was the queen of our town. She gave us status, even at school, where Kurt and I had to work at the cafeteria. People used to say, “How could she have had such a couple a thugs?” meaning me and Kurt. Some words are born to be eaten.

  Kurt and I have lunch on the days we visit her in assisted living. These are the times we just give in to reminiscence, memories that are often funny, at least to us. In the seventh grade, Mother took all of our friends to the opera, La Bohème, in her disgraceful old Pontiac, five of us in the backseat chanting, “Puccini, Puccini, Puccini.” She was worried as she herded us into our seats under the eyes of frowning opera fans. We stuck our fingers in our ears during the arias. One little girl, Polly Rademacher, was trying to enjoy the show, but Joey Bizeau kept feeling her up in the dark. Mother would’ve liked to have enjoyed herself, but she had her hands full keeping order and succeeded almost to the end. When Mimi dies and Rodolfo runs to her side, we shrieked with laughter. The lights came up, and Mother herded us out under the angry eyes of the opera patrons, tears streaming down her face. It was a riot.

  The Parkway was a nice but short-lived restaurant that didn’t make it through the second winter. Before that we just had the so-called rathskeller and its recurrent bratwurst, but it had turned back into a basement tanning parlor with palm-tree and flamingo decals on its small windows. While we still had the Parkway, Kurt was picking at his soufflé as the waiter hovered nearby. Kurt shook his head slightly and sent him away. Kurt has natural authority, and he looks the part with his broad hands and military haircut. He rarely smiles, even when he’s joking: he makes people feel terrible for laughing. I’m more of a weasel. I don’t think I was always a weasel, but I’ve spent my life at a bank; so I may be forgiven. “Remember when she got us paints and easels?” We laughed so hard.

  Several diners turned our way in surprise. Kurt didn’t care. He has a big reputation around town as the guy who can get your kid to quit looking like Bugs Bunny; no one is going to cross him. It was a tough call selling our crappy childhood home, but it helped pay for assisted living. Mother would’ve liked to have had in-home care—that is, when she was making sense—but the day was fast arriving when she wouldn’t know where the hell she was, unless it was the chair she was in. Anyway, we’ve got her down there at Cloisters. We just hauled her over there. It’s okay. Kurt calls it Cloaca.

  Mother’s days are up and down. Sometimes she recognizes us, sometimes not, but less and less all the time. Or that’s what Kurt thinks. I think she recognizes us but isn’t always glad about what she sees. When she is a little lucid, I sometimes feel she is disgusted at the sight of us. I mean, that’s the look on her face. Or that we’re hopeless. Or that I am: she never could find much wrong with Kurt. This used to come up from time to time, a kind of despair. She once screamed that we were “awful” but only once, and she seemed guilty and apologetic for days, kept making us pies, cookies, whatever. She felt bad. If she’d had any courage, she’d have stuck to it. We were, and are, awful. We will always be awful.

  We were in Mother’s room at the center. I won’t describe it: they all have little to do with the occupant. Me and Kurt in chairs facing Mother in hers. Her face is pretty much blank. Someone has done her hair and makeup. She still looks like a queen, keeps her chin raised in that way of hers. But she just stares ahead. Kurt bangs on about a board of supervisors meeting; then I do a little number about small-business loans, naming some places she might recognize. Mother raises her hand to say something.

  She says, “I gotta take a leak.”

  Kurt and I turn to each other. His eyebrows are halfway to his scalp. We don’t know what to do. Kurt says to Mother, “I’ll get the nurse.” I stole around in front of Mother to get the call button without alerting her. I couldn’t find it at first and found myself crawling down the cord to locate it. I gave the button a quick press and shortly heard the squeak of the approaching nurse’s shoes. Kurt and I were surprised at how hot she was, young with eye-popping bazongas. Kurt explained that Mother needed the little girls’ room. Ms. Lowler winced at the phrase. Kurt saw it, too. He’s quicker to take offense than anyone I know, which is surprising in someone who so enjoys making others feel lousy. When Mother came back from the bathroom, she was refreshed and a little communicative. She knew us, I think, and talked a bit about Dad, but in a way we hadn’t heard before. She talked of him in the present tense, as though Dad were still with us. “I knew right away he wasn’t going anywhere,” she said. We were thunderstruck. Mother yawned and said, “Doozy’s tired now. Doozy needs to rest.”

  Outside, Kurt splayed both hands and leaned against the roof of his car. “Doozy? Who the fuck is Doozy?”

  “She is. She’s Doozy.”

  “Did you ever hear that before?”

  The door was open to Ms. Lowler’s office, which was small and efficient and clean, and refreshingly free of filing cabinets. Little uplifting thoughts had been attached to the printer and computer. Have-a-nice-day level. I took the initiative and asked if we could come in. “Of course you can!” she said with a smile and hurried around to find us chairs. Kurt introduced himself, booming out “Doctor” and I made a small show of modesty by just saying, “I’m Earl.”

  “Your mom has good and bad days in terms of her cognition generally, but she never seems anxious or unhappy.”

  “She got any friends?” said Kurt.

  “I think that’s a bit beyond her. Her friends are in the past, and she mostly lives there.”

  Kurt was on it. “Who’s this Doozy? That name mean anything to you?”

  “Why, yes. Doozy is your mother. That’s her nickname.”

  “Really?” I said. “We’ve never heard it.”

  “Doozy is the nickname Wowser gave her.”

  “Wowser? Who’s Wowser?”

  “I thought it might be your dad.”

  I just held my head in my hands. Kurt asked if this had gotten out. Ms. Lowler didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, what he was talking about.

  Kurt and I love to talk about Mother because we have different memories of her before she lost her marbles, and we enjoy filling out our impressions. For example, Kurt had completely forgotten what a balls-to-the-wall backyard birder Mother was. We went through a lot of birdseed we really couldn’t afford. Dad shot the squirrels when Mother was out of the house. By holding them by the end of the tail, he could throw them like a bolo all the way to the vacant lot on the corner. Naturally, Mother thought the squirrels had decided the birds needed the food more and had moved on.

  Kurt remembered her gathering the cotton from milkweed pods to make stuffing for cushions. He was ambivalent about this because we both loved those soft cushions, but it seemed to be a habit of the poor. Dad was the one who made us feel poor, but through her special magic Mother made us understand th
at we had to bow our heads to no one. By being the queen she transformed Kurt and me into princes. It stuck in Kurt’s case. Wowser and Doozy put all this at risk.

  Two weeks later we were summoned back to the home by Ms. Lowler, who this time wore an all-concealing cardigan. She’d had enough. It seems Mother had been loudly free-associating about her amorous adventures in such a way that it wasn’t always best that she occupy the common room during visiting hours. She had a nice room of her own with a view of some trees from her window and a Bible-themed Kinkade on the opposite wall and where she couldn’t ask other old ladies about whisker burn or whatever. That’s where we sat as before, except this time I located the call button. Kurt and I were in coats and ties, having come from work, Kurt shuffling the teeth of the living, me weaseling goobers across my desk. She smiled faintly at each of us, and we helped her into her chair. Kurt started right in. I kind of heard him while I marveled over the passage of time that separated us from when Mother ruled taste and behavior with a light but firm hand and left us, Kurt especially, with a legacy of rectitude that we hated to lose. Kurt was summarizing the best of those days, leaning forward in his chair so that his tie hung like a plumb bob, his crew cut so short that it glowed at its center from the overhead light. Mother’s eyes were wide. Perhaps she was experiencing amazement. As Kurt moved toward what we believed to be Mother’s secret life, her eyes suddenly dropped, and I first thought that this was some acknowledgment that such a thing existed. Kurt asked her if she’d had a special friend she’d like to tell us about. She was silent for a long time before she spoke. She said, “Are those your new shoes?”

  I followed Kurt into Ms. Lowler’s office. “I would like to speak to you, Ms. Lowler, about our Mother’s quality of life.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “She’s no longer here at all, Ms. Lowler.”