Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“—think I’m atomic powered or some damn thing.”

“ Atomic powered! Oh, God kid, you’re gonna go.”

Unable to think of it any more, Ann went out onto the terrace in the dark. Overhead, the standard decal moon of Spain hung under the auspices of the Falange. Under such circumstances, it was scarcely a bustle of nard.

She had fallen in love with Payne; or at least with the idea of that.

• •

Payne dozed achily in his wagon, the roar of Bangtail Creek nearby. When Ann had come home from Europe she found Payne crazy. They rented a little house for a week. And stayed together.

Payne dozed and woke in completely unspecific exhaustion. Every night the dogs had come into the house. He knew they were down there. He always knew. He watched them for months. He looked for heads but could only see a glitter of eyes in his penlight. He never knew their number. He was not afraid. He let them drink from his toilet. He kept it clean for them. He left food but they wouldn’t take it. He was never afraid. One week. She stayed and saw them. She held the penlight and they both saw them. They figured twelve feet and they divided that into four dogs. It could have been three dogs. They thought with terror that it could have been two dogs. Sometimes they giggled and talked about it being one dog. They heard them drink. They didn’t know. It made them fastidious about the toilet. They didn’t forget to flush in times like that. They knew the dogs were coming. They kept it clean. They made love and talked about the dogs. Payne was trying to put his suspension system back in order. For quite a while there it was okay. He needed to get in touch there again though. It was like some kind of middle ear trouble. He woke up and couldn’t tell which way he was pointing, whether it was his head or his feet that were pointing toward the door. When the dogs came he would really start whirling. Maybe he should have shooed them out. He didn’t see the point of that. Neither did Ann. He was awfully crossed up and the dogs didn’t hurt and later Ann said that there had not been any dogs. He was fielding grounders. It had been hot all day. He imagined that all the leaves had turned. That everything outside was bright with frost. That winter was not far away. He did not know about that. It wasn’t that he wanted winter. He wanted to get his white Christmases off a bank calendar.

“It’s all in your head,” Ann said. Which was exactly right. Not that anyone was ever helped by that kind of idle information. But she tried so hard, so awfully hard. No she didn’t. She didn’t try all that hard. She always nailed him with that fucking Art. What Gauguin did. What Dostoyevsky did. What Lozenge did. He told Ann everything. True and false. She showed a preference for the false. He told her stories of Grandma making mincemeat in the late autumn up in Alberta with her great tallow-colored buttocks showing through her shabby frock. It was all false, all untrue, all gratuitous. She made a whole view of him out of it. A whole history. A whole artistic story of his childhood.

Then Ann began to catch up. She saw he had invented himself ab ovo . She was upset. After the first chink, he pissed away everything. She called him a mirage. That was the end of their week. She really laced into him. Underhanded stuff. Subliminal broadsides. But the mirage business hurt his feelings. There were certain areas where he was not a mirage. Period. There were certain areas where he was implacable, don’t you know.

He kicked her out. Ann found out he was not a mirage in a way that brought her up short rather fast. Irony of being kicked out of the house by a mirage. He liked that sense of things. The recoil factor of reality. Now he couldn’t see it. That kind of impatience. But he had been pressed. Two years of the most needle-nosed harassment from home.

Ten days later he saw her. A high-school science exhibit. He remembered it exactly. Ann was there. Right where they could see each other. There was a glass-enclosed diorama against the wall. It was supposed to be Patagonia. He remembered one tree full of plaster fruit. Looked like grenades. Hanging over everything on these thousands of fine wires was a cloud of blue parakeets. He left without a word. The most overweening cheap kind of pride. Not speaking. He would pay.

A false spring night. He was out in the garden behind the house. He had a cloth sack of sunflower seeds. He was drunk. He pushed the seeds into the dirt with his forefinger. The sky looked like the roof of the diorama. This was Patagonia. He was part of the exhibit. He did not consistently believe that. He did not believe it now. But he will believe it again.

At the instance of his mother, a red-beezered monsignor was soon found in the wings, ready to counsel him. The monsignor told Payne that if he kept “it” up he would roast like a mutton over eternal fire. Whatever it was that Payne answered, it made the monsignor leap with agitation. It nearly came to blows.

Payne ascended the stairs of the bank building to the county treasurer’s office. He was looking for a job. The stairs circled above the green skylight of the bank on the first floor. Somehow the whole beastly building started to bulge, started to throb. And he dropped his briefcase through the skylight. A file clerk looked up at him through the hole. And Payne saw that it was better to be looked up at through the hole, crazy as you were, than to be the file clerk looking.

He began thinking in terms of big time life changes, of art and motorcycles, mountains, dreams and rivers.

Stay for the sunrise. This dude is the color of strawberry. It creeps up Bangtail Creek and flowers through spruce. It stripes the ceiling of the wagon, tints the porous Hudson, and makes, through the screen, something wild of Payne’s face.

Unbeknownst to Payne, a rare blackfooted ferret, which to a colony of gophers is somewhere between C. C. Rider and Stagger Lee, darted from its lair and crossed County Road 67 between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota; not far, actually, from the Cedar, which is the south fork of the Cannonball River. This rare tiny savage crittur came very close to being (accidentally) run over by C(letus) J(ames) Clovis, the round-man of total bat tower dreams, who pressed Westward in his Dodge Motor Home.

In a single swoop, Clovis had justified at least a summer’s expenditure. Using only local labor and acting himself as strawboss, he raised his bat tower in the West and provided the first bugfree conditions for the American Legion picnic in Farrow, North Dakota. He had watched with a certain joy the bats ditch their high native buttes and come clouding in along the dry washes and gravel bars, through willows and cottonwood, bats in trees and sky pouring like smoke from their caves and holes, bluffs and hollow mesa dwellings, toward the first Western Clovis Batwork with its A-1 accommodations. At the little “Mayan” entrances, there were bat battles. It was — and had to be — first come first served. For a short time, the rats in the bats prevailed; on the little tiered loggias, fearful bat war broke out. And underneath, a worried C. J. Clovis stood with his first client, Dalton Trude, mayor of Farrow, and listened to the distant scuffle. Presently, victims of the fray began to fall; black Victorian gloves; deathflap.

But once things settled down and the various freak bats of anarchy were either knocked off or sent back to the bluffs, Clovis could see that the tower would work. Two days later, the picnic was held and at dusk the bats gathered high over the hot dogs, fried chicken and a whole shithouseload of potato salad. Quite on its own, a cheer went up. Hurrah! Hurrah for them bats! Hurrah for American Legion Farrow Chapter Picnic! Hurrah for C. J. Clovis of Savonarola Batworks Inc. Hurrah!