Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

Clovis set out.

He nearly hit a blackfooted ferret. He crossed the Cedar or south fork of the Cannonball River between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota.

C. J. Clovis headed for Montana.

A lowering sky carried smoke from the pulp mill through Livingston. Payne looked at rodeo pictures on the wall of the Longbranch Saloon, refused another drink with a righteous flourish. During the night the northwesternmost block of Main Street burned to the ground. The twenty-four residents of the Grand Hotel escaped without harm. A fireman ran in confusion out of a dress shop carrying a flaming dummy, crying, “You’ll be all right!” The dummy was not all right. It turned into a pool of burning plastic and gave off noxious black smoke for hours. A pair of chaps belonging to a man who had been on the burial detail at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were lost without trace. So was a Mexican saddletree with a silver pommel. So was a faggot’s collection of bombazine get-ups. So was a bird, a trap, a bolo. All that truck, without a trace.

Payne walked around the fire zone. Adamant volunteers capered around the hook-and-ladder, dousing ashes and trying things out. The hotel appeared to be quite all right; but the lack of windows, the unusual darkness of the interior said no one was home. Possibly only a Commie.

Glass was scattered clear across Main. The plate window of Paul’s Appliance Mart blew when the walls buckled and the second story fell into the cellar. The prescription file of City Drug was salvaged and moved to Public Drug where orders will be filled as per usual. A precautionary soaking of the Western Auto roof produced unusual water damage. Bozeman sent their biggest pumper and four firemen. Let’s hear it for Bozeman. “Livingston teens were helpful in ‘cleaning out’ City Drug,” the mayor said ambiguously. The Livingston Enterprise mentioned “raging inferno,” “firemen silhouetted against the flames,” a “sad day for all concerned” and various persons “bending over backwards.”

That, thought Payne, gazing at the wrack and ruin, is the burned-down block of my hopes, doused by the hook and ladders of real life. Some varmint signed me up for a bum trip. And, quite honestly, I don’t see why.

It looked like rain. Nevertheless, art had raised its head. Ann brought her books inside, field guides and novels; and stood the field glasses on the hall table. She took her camera out of its case and mounted it on the aluminum tripod before pulling on her slicker and going outside again. She folded the tripod and carried the whole thing over her shoulder like a shovel and crossed the yard, climbed through the bottom two strands of wire and dodged manure all the way to the unirrigated high ground where the sage grew in fragrant stripes of blue. The lightning was shivering the sky and it scared her enough that she prudently avoided silhouetting herself on hill tops. When she finally set the camera up, she had no even ground and had to prop the tripod with stones. She checked frequently through the view finder until she felt she had it plumb and began composing. The view finder isolated a clear rectangle of country; three slightly overlapping and declining hills, quite distant; evening light spearing out from under dense cloud cover. The hills divided the frame in a single vibrant line; and though she thought there was something tiresome and Turneresque about the light spears, she liked the incandescence of the cottonwoods whose shapes gently spotted the sharp contours of hill. She had trained herself to previsualize all color into a gray scale so that she could control the photograph in black and white. It pleased her to see the scale here would be absolute. The white, searing lightning with its long penumbra of flash, graded across the viewed area to the pure black shadows in the draws and gullies. Ann felt this polarity of light with an almost physical apprehension; the lightning thrusts seemed palpable and hard. She turned the lens slightly out of focus to exaggerate the contours of the composition; then returned it to a razor edge. She held her breath as though shooting a rifle and kept her hand cradled under the lens, looking down at its pastel depth-of-field figures, the three aluminum legs opening from under the camera like a star. A light perspiration broke out upon her upper lip as she pared away, focusing, selecting aperture and shutter speed toward the pure photographic acuity she perceived in her imagination. The lightning would have to be in it or the picture would be a silly postcard. But it was flashing irregularly and she never knew when it would appear. She wanted it distant and to the left of the lower end of the hills for decent compositional equipoise. As the storm, still distant, increased, the bolts of lightning appeared with greater regularity, a regularity Ann began to feel was rhythmical. She attempted to anticipate this rhythm so that she could trip the shutter at the suitable moment; at each plunge of lightning, at each searing streak, she tightened her muscles and gradually closed in on the interval until, after a dozen or more instances, she stood away from the camera with the cable release in her fingers and moved — very slightly — from head to toe. Her eyes were closed, it must be said. After some moments of this strenuous business, she opened her eyes, dazed, and tripped the shutter at the microsecond that the lightning shimmered, distant, over the lower end of hills. Black and white, diminishing grays were, she knew, stilled and beautiful across thirty-five millimeters of silver nitrate emulsion inside her little camera.

Ann panted there for some time before gathering the legs of the tripod and heading back down toward the ranch.

She felt at one with things.

She felt as if, plumb tuckered, she had blown her wad. She knew that inside her box was an undeveloped image awaiting the bath of real chemicals. Her mind and heart rang with these volleys of zickers. Her step was springy. And her desirable little ass was tight and peach-cleft with girlish go. Aristotle says Eudemonia, she thought.

LAUREL, MONTANA

FRIENDLY CHURCHES

COME

SEE

US

It won’t be long now, thought Clovis. Billings was behind at last. To the immediate right of the controls was the television. Clovis had turned it on and was watching The Dating Game. An attractive adolescent girl had just won two weeks in Reno with a glandular Chief Petty Officer. She had picked him because his voice reminded her of Neil Sedaka. But when he came out from behind the curtain, the girl was agog.

The summer mountains were the color of cougars. In the foreground, a flippant Burma-Shave antagonism manifested itself. Horses stood in the shade of larger signs and switched. Clovis was thinking of Payne’s youthful power. It won’t be long now, he reminded himself.

Is this fair, Payne asked himself, is it? He looked out of the window of the Big Horn cafe. There was a crowd in the street watching the wreckage of the fire: cowboys, loggers, businessmen, a camel. A young schoolteacher was having lunch with a promising student. “Once you get the drop on Shakespeare,” the teacher said, “you’ve got the whole deal licked.” The mayor arrived outside.

A wrecking ball came through a half-burned building, an old mortician’s shop, raining pieces of unfinished headstone, tongue and groove siding, bird and mouse nests. A small group had formed around the mayor who gestured toward the fire damage with one upraised palm. “We’re gonna prettify this son of a bitch or die trying,” he assured his constituency.

“I don’t like my work,” Payne told an elderly waitress.

“Never mind that,” she said. “Have a bromo, honey.”

“I’m unhappy with my lot,” he told her.

Ann wasn’t small. She was delicately made though and long rather than particularly slender though she was slender too; but what impressed you about her hands, nose and feet was their length and the paleness of her skin. Her eyes seemed very fully open, the upper lid nearly invisible and the lower seeming pared away to a sliver, though without the usual quality of staring. When she smoked, she handled a cigarette with careless precision and could leave a cigarette in her mouth, breathing and squinting through the smoke, and look rather beautiful doing it. She listened attentively even to Wayne Codd who had decided that, after the honeymoon in Paris, they would just constantly be going to operas.