Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“They are merely a facility.”

“But they mean something tacky,” she said.

“They are a simple public facility.”

“I know what a public facility is,” she said.

“Okay, all right.” He waved her off with both hands.

“It’s as if something low—”

“We pay for them. We ought to use them.”

“Something shabby—”

In 1929 the Fitzgeralds were married. On their first morning together, he bellowed for his breakfast. She called the police on him.

“—merely—”

“—even vulgar or—”

He never asked for his breakfast again. Not like that. Sometimes he got it anyway, in those early days. Now the maids brought it. He bellowed at them, like in 1929. Let them try the law.

“Call the police,” said Fitzgerald doggedly. “Tell them the circumstances. They’ll hand Payne his walking papers so fast. Or I’ll get the bugger on the phone myself. I’ll tell him he just doesn’t figure. Do you read me?”

In 1929, when two large bozos of the police profession snatched the up-and-coming economist from his breakfast table, he had doubts about the future of his marriage. As the shadow of his struggling form left a bowl of Instant Ralston in uneaten solitude, a vacuum fell between them that later became tiny but never disappeared. “The year of the crash,” he often said wryly, meaning his own little avalanche.

Missus Fitzgerald had lost her rancor, temporarily, in the realization that Payne’s inroads had been made possible by a certain amount of cooperation if not actual encouragement from Ann. It was so dispiriting. A pastiche of lurid evidence made it clear what she had been up to. Infamy and disgrace seemed momentary possibilities. And though she took a certain comfort from such abstractions, there were dark times when she saw an exaggerated reality in her mind’s eye of Payne hitching in naked fury over her spread-eagled daughter or worse, the opposite of that. At those times, Missus Fitzgerald scarfed tranquilizers again and again until all she could think of was heavy machinery lumbering in vast clay pits.

Fitzgerald was thinking he should have slapped the piss out of her in 1929, that rare crazy year. (Sixteen years before Payne was born when his mother and father were touring Wales in a rented three-wheel Morgan; and twenty years before Ann was born. Ann was conceived in 1948. Her mother, already Rubensian, to be generous about it, stood on an Early American cobbler’s bench grasping her ankles as the then-wasplike Dad Fitzgerald — so recently the squash champion of the D.A.C. — laced into her from the rear. As he had his orgasm, he commenced making the hamster noises that lay at the bottom of his wife’s subsequent sexual malaise. His legs buckled and he fell to the floor and dislocated his shoulder. What neither of them knew as they drove to the hospital was that Ann’s first cell had divided and begun hurtling through time in a collision course with Nicholas Payne, then knuckling around the inside of a Wyandotte playpen.) But he never did and now it was too late.

“You wonder about old man Payne,” said Fitzgerald.

“Yes, you do.”

“He has the finest law practice in the entire Downriver.”

“Yes he has.”

“He’s right up there, you know, up there, and he throws this classic second generation monstrosity on the world.”

“You wonder about the mother,” said Missus Fiztzgerald. “She was once the chairman of the Saturday Musicale. She got the Schwann catalogues sent to everybody. How could decent people develop a person in this vein? I ask myself these things.”

“Yes, but like all women you fail to come up with answers.”

“All right now.”

Dad made his fingers open and close like a blabbing mouth.

“I’m sick of the theory approach to bad news,” he said. “I’m a pragmatist. In my sophomore year in college two things happened to me. One, I took up pipe smoking. Two, I became a pragmatist.”

Mom Fitzgerald began to circle the Dad, her neck shortening under the blue cloud of ’do. “Well, you little pipe-smoking pragmatic G.M. executive you,” she said. The hands which banished bad thoughts flew about in front of her. “You’re going to give us one of your little wind-ups, are you? Your college history, are you?”

“I—”

“I’ll pragmatize you, you wheezing G.M. cretin.”

“Your pills, Edna, your pills. You’re getting balmy.”

“Show me that little trick with your hand, where it tells me I’m talking too much.”

“Get your pills, Edna.”

“Go on, show it to me.”

He showed her the blabbing motion with his hand at the same time he told her, “Get the pills, Edna.” She slapped his hand open. He made the blabbing motion again. “Get your pills I said!” Then she nailed him in the blaring red mug and ran for it. He galloped after her grunting and baying as he hauled her away from the desk. She turned then and raked his chest with a handful of ballpoint pens and a protractor.

He tore open his shirt, revealing his chest, and seeing with his own starting eyes the blue and red lines all over it.

“You maniac! You shitbird! Oh my God you piss-face you!”

Wayne Codd, deliriously attracted to this compromising episode, sprinted across the immense living room. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, looking in on the extraordinary uproar of Dad Fitzgerald stripped to the waist, his wife sobbing on the couch, her bum in view, sheathed in a vast reinforcement of pink rubberized girdle and a systematic panoply of attachments; everywhere it was not held back, terrible waffles of flesh started forward. Codd felt he had them dead to rights.

“Saddle my horse, Codd,” said Fitzgerald.

“You want to ride horseback?”

“Saddle that horse you God damn mountain bonehead.”

Codd looked at the scrimshaw on Fitzgerald’s chest.

“No one talks to me that way, Fitzgerald.”

“Oh, of course they do. Now saddle the horse. No cheap talk.”

Codd darted for the stable. It was the wrong time for a face-off. He meant to keep a low silhouette.

Fitzgerald turned to Edna.

“Duke,” she said. His chin rested fondly on his abstract expressionist chest. Their obsession with Payne was temporarily suspended in a vision of Instant Ralston, cobbler’s benches and happy squash tournaments at a time when Europe was beating its way into the Stone Age.

“Edna,” he said.

Ann troweled around the strawberry sets in her little garden, weighting the corners of each square of net. Sweet Wayne Codd had made her a little irrigating system, a miniature of those in the hayfield with its own little head gate and little canvas dam and little side ditches that went down all the little rows between the little strawberries. Each day Wayne came down and opened the gate, flooding the little garden with clear cold creek water that made the strawberries grow fast as wildfire. How sweet they would be too, she thought, bathed in mountain sunlight and floating in that heavy cream Wayne skimmed and brought up from the barn. Nicholas, are you thinking of my little strawberry garden?

Mister Fitzgerald rode his strawberry roan across the creek, his chest stinging with strawberry-colored tincture of merthiolate. He was on the lookout. He thought of all the sauce the old broad still had in her.

“… what those five feet could do

has anybody seen my …”

Payne towed the wagon up Bangtail Creek and, in an agony from his labors, sat waist deep in his sleeping bag. He leaned over to look at the vast strawberry evanescence that was ending the day and yelled at the sky, “I’ve had more heartaches than Carter’s got little liver pills!”