Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

The horse finally got its footing and soared angrily away between two pick-up riders, one of whom reached to snatch the bucking cinch free so that the horse seemed to glide to a stop, flaring at shapes and fences.

Payne smiled to the lingering applause and beat the dust from his Levi’s with the borrowed Stetson straw.

Wayne Codd drove. Fitzgerald sat in front, not thinking of Payne. He was trying to imagine why all those polled Herefords he bought had calves with horns. He was suspicious that Codd, who had arranged the purchase, had just dehorned a lot of cheapjack range stock and turned himself a tidy sum. It was mortifying to think this throwback could have cheated him.

Ann sat in back with her mother. She burned with love and admiration while her mother merely burned. The four of them rode up the valley of the Shields and stopped when a shepherd drove his band of blackface sheep across the road in a single surge, his two dogs running importantly around their perimeter like satellites.

“You are to be strictly unavailable,” counseled the mother in no uncertain terms.

Ann did not answer. She was finding it difficult not to respond to Payne’s heroic performance. She still saw him insouciant far across the arena and beneath the judge’s stand, a giant, vicious horse soaring over his head. It was too bad, she thought, that she lacked the nerve to call him, if only in her heart, Pecos Bill. It seemed for once his confusions and indecision were invisible and gone as he stood in perfect clear air under mountains — at one with the situation. And this made her think of his refusal to read her favorite D. H. Lawrence novels because he said Lawrence always tried to be “at one” with things.

“We weren’t born in a Waring Blender,” he told Ann. He called Lawrence “Lozenge” and frequently associated him with devices that made pulp from vegetables.

To the immediate east of them, in the Crazy Mountains, a Forest Service plane stocked a mountain lake with trout, releasing its cloud of fish against the Delft-blue sky.

Ann lay her head back on the tan leather of the Mercedes’ seat and did quadratic equations in her head for a while; then rehearsed the skeletal articulations of the Rhesus monkey that she had dissected against Gray’s Anatomy. For reasons only she knew completely, Ann was ready for ficky-fick.

Wayne Codd, two years on the job, had certain reservations about his employers. His predecessor as foreman had blown a ventricle and died the previous winter pushing bales of winter feed off the wagon. Codd thought the man was a good old boy and when his request of the Fitzgeralds — that he be buried on the old ranch — was refused , Codd signed off on them for good. The foreman had wanted his spot under the big sky, up on the old Soda Butte where he could see the ghosts of retreating Shoshone. Codd, then just a hand, knew he would succeed the old foreman so long as he didn’t offend the realtors who were running the place; but the advancement embittered him. It still seemed that — even though the old boy had only worked on the ranch five-and-a-half weeks — his request to be buried up in the high lonesome deserved better than the Fitzgeralds gave him.

Instead, they sent the foreman’s body back to the wife and child he had deserted in Wyandotte, Michigan. His union local buried him in his arc-welder’s uniform. The casket was draped with leis. The funeral dinner was catered by River Rouge Polynesian Gardens.

Wayne Codd had not only the physical features but the memory of an elephant. He knew that when the chips were down the Fitzgeralds would go South on everything he damn well knew was decent. And that went for Ann. That is why, on hot swimming days, he put in the long, long hours under the bathhouse. At the end of the day, the little Polaroid Swinger seemed to weigh a ton; and for this trouble and the trouble of lying on his back swatting the big striped horseflies, his Stetson dropped over the pointed toe of one boot and the circles of honest cowpoke sweat expanding toward the pearly diamond buttons, he got a handful of obscure little photos of what looked like a field mouse behind bars.

Missus Fitzgerald stared at the first of their own sections, her mood utterly forged by the appearance of Pecos Bill. She had learned to identify the reddish furze of mature cheat grass and had been informed that it would not feed the stock. And though it was the only grass she could identify besides Kentucky Blue, she seemed to be singling it out of some fabulous variety when she cried, “That cheat grass!”

The ranch house, with its downstairs sleeping porch that gave the effect of a lantern jaw, was surrounded by lesser buildings, all log: the barn, stable, bunkhouse and shop. She could see it now at the end of the ungraded road in the cottonwood trees she considered neither here nor there. She was an enthusiastic bird watcher with a mild specialty in warblers. Out here, all the beastly birds of prey that appeared in her Zeiss weighed down her spirits. In fact, she had asked Codd over and over to shoot a big harrier, a marsh hawk, that she could see from the breakfast room, sailing low over the gullies and pockets. From time to time, Codd would blaze away to no avail. And Missus Fitzgerald, seeing the great hawk, felt anew that Nature was diminished by it. It was warblers she wanted, the little pretties.

They drove up front and parked. Fitzgerald looked around at the house and the yard. He looked at the great sheltering willow that had gotten its roots into the septic tank and gone beserk. “Peace,” said Dad Fitzgerald. “Ain’t it wonderful?”

The Fitzgeralds’ Double Tepee Ranch, whose twin triangle brand aroused local cowboys to call it wishfully the Squaw Tits, sat on a bench of fat bottom land in a bend of the Shields River somewhere between Bangtail Creek and Crazyhead Creek. It was one of the many big holdings whose sale was consummated through the pages of the Wall Street Journal . The ranch had been founded, under its present name, by Ansel Brayton, a drover from New Mexico who had brought the earliest herds this far north. It was sold — through the Wall Street Journal —by Ansel Brayton’s grandson, a well-known Hialeah faggot.

Fitzgerald was proud of his place and often said to his wife, “The ranch is good, Edna.” He would stroll along the willows of his river frontage or along the lane of Lombardy poplars, stop beside the lush irrigated hayfields now mowed and raked, with the bales still lying in the combed golden order of the harvested acreage. It was his ranch, not Edna’s.

Of course, she wanted as small a part of it as she could. From his G.M. earnings he had set up separate investment facilities for the two of them; and it produced a little happy contention. She had built, with her share, a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions. She often compared its profitable records with the slightly scary losses of the Double Tepee. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceiling with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads. No sirree, Bob, thought Fitzgerald, I’ll take Montana.

The living room of the ranch house was two stories high with a balcony at the second story. It was all done in a kind of rustic art nouveau: birchbark ormulu and decorated extravaganzas of unpeeled log.

At the north end of the first floor was the library where they held today’s meeting. The question at hand was whether or not to call the police. “I don’t know,” said Missus Fitzgerald, “any use of the police at all downgrades everyone involved.”