Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. Mister and Missus Fitzgerald opened the door together stretching their arms to him, paternally and maternally. In the long warmly lit corridor Ann stood shyly murmuring “darling.” They took him inside, warming him with their bodies; everyone, it seemed, tried to hold his hand. “May we call you son?” Ann cried with happiness. They leaped to each other, kissed with youthful passion, held each other at arm’s length. “At last!” A beaming, lusty preacher moved forward as though on a trolley, supporting a Bible with one hand and resting the other on top of it.

Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. He heard someone move and was afraid. Frequent nerve farts troubled the silence. He thought: Windex, buffalo, Zaragoza. He knocked once more and the door behind the little grate opened at eye level. Nary a sound was heard. He knocked again, stood quietly and knocked once more. A weary voice, that of Mister Fitzgerald, was heard from the grill. “I hear you, I hear you. I’m just trying to think what to do about you.”

“Let me in.”

The door opened suddenly. “Right you are,” said Fitzgerald. “God help us.” He shut the door. “Follow me.” Fitzgerald pulled him into the hallway. Payne followed him down to a small utility room. “Stay here.” Fitzgerald left.

Payne stood very nearly without motion for ten or fifteen minutes. Nothing. The washing machine stopped and a few minutes later the dryer, which also had been running, whirled to a stop. Payne idly opened the washing machine and saw the still wet clothes pressed centrifugally to the walls of its tumbler. The door opened behind him.

Missus Fitzgerald’s voice came from behind him. “Who are you?”

Payne turned, stood, smiled. Her face was more delicate than a casserole.

“GET OUT”

When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

Payne offered to explain.

“GET OUT!” She just said that. “HE’S IN OUR HOUSE!” she added, taking credit for a discovery that was not hers.

“I can—”

“NO!”

“I can—”

“NO!”

“No, what?”

“YOU CAN’T … YOU HAVE TO GET OUT!”

Somewhere along in here she began scoring heavily with a plumber’s friend with which she belabored Payne. He shielded himself and sought protection behind the hampers. “You’ve got crime written all over you,” she panted. He seized the plumber’s friend, suppressed an itch to beat the living piss out of her with it. Fitzgerald arrived, having allowed a leisurely ripening of the scene.

“You jerk,” said Fitzgerald, “you didn’t know when a favor had been done for you.” He chuckled grimly to himself. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that when the Second World War was raging and Hitler was riding high that I was the squash champion of the Detroit Athletic Club?” This stopped everything.”

“What has that got to do with anything!” his wife, Edna, wailed. Fitzgerald started into a long song and dance about the kind of guy he was. And though there was considerable poignancy in his latest fatuity, its effect was to shatter Missus Fitzgerald’s primitive stagecraft of shrieks and accusations.

“Ann!” Payne bellowed after some thought, trying to bring things to life. He caught the right note; because Fitzgerald lunged to shut him up. But Payne could not mistake the sound of her skittering descent of the stairs, one hand on the rail, the which seemed to last an eternity.

As she appeared, he commenced cowering before her parents. They melted under her glare. Payne saw her, his spirit twining and tautening. Before him, the one true. They smiled amid the total inutility of this bug scuffle. Discreetly, Ann recorded everything with her camera, including a final blow with the plunger.

“Neutral corners,” cried Fitzgerald.

“Are we not ever to be safe?” inquired his wife. Payne quietly turned the washing machine on again.

“I can explain everything,” he said with sudden blind joy.

“We don’t want to hear!”

“Maybe you should,” Ann said, her voice a saffron buffalo trotting to Jerusalem with a pony express mailbag of loving hellos. “Maybe you ought to.”

“Are we not ever to be safe from the depredations of this criminal?”

“Edna,” said Fitzgerald in the plainsong of common sense.

“Never?” A minute fissure had appeared in her voice.

“Edna,” Payne said.

“I want someone to tell me,” she said with a noble, judicial mien — as though her voice was making an independent threat to cry—“I’m prepared to make other arrangements with my own life if we are to be repeatedly and casually displaced by the depredations of this hoodlum … Catholic criminal type.”

“Oh, now Edna.”

“I’m a backslider,” said Payne. “There’s many an empty day between me and my last novena.”

“I have my wig bank, as silly as that may sound. But there is work for me.”

“No, no, no. Payne will be gone. You’ll see.”

A flash of hatred as can only be produced by an inconvenienced businessman arced from Fitzgerald’s eyes to those of Payne. Payne wanted so much to have a showdown; but he knew it would come to nothing with Ann. It was part of her style to present herself as an integral part of a noble family package.

On the other hand, when her father took Payne by the throat and attempted to strangle him, it was Ann who tore free his hands.

This was another mistake for Fitzgerald; its unseemliness even drove his wife from the room. She went out saying she no longer saw how it would be possible to inhabit this ranch.

“This hasn’t been a satisfactory show,” tried Fitzgerald, winningly, “on the part of the Missus and myself.”

“Frankly, the part with the toilet plunger left me cold.” It had become difficult to be heard over the washing machine. It shuddered and wobbled in a steam-laden surge. Engine-driven, Payne imagined, it whirled a sacred cargo of Ann’s little things.

“Daddy,” Ann said, “it’s too late for this kind of … protection .”

“It’s hard to face that, honey.”

“But you must.”

“I know that darling. I see that too. We never interfered much before, did we? Before Payne broke into the house? Did we darling? And bombarded Mom with filth when she found him in the library? Did we? But, kids, try and see it my way, huh? Nick here screaming that Mom’s head wouldn’t draw flies at a raree show — that’s not good, is it kids? Or is this a generation deal?”

“Can we leave the laundry room?” Payne enquired.

“Let me just say this,” Duke Fitzgerald went on. “Ann, do as you wish. We’ll honor whatever you decide. And Mom will back me up. I promise.”

“I don’t know what I wish!”

“Ann—”

“I don’t know, Daddy!” Ann didn’t want to pair off. She wanted to play in her room with all the junk for a few more years. Fitzgerald, the ghoul, saw it.

“I mean, look, do you want to get married?”

“No one said that,” Ann said. Payne was grievously pained. Fitzgerald raised his palms up, both of them to one side of his face in a gesture of assured noninterference.

“You wanna set up house, I’ll get outa the way.” Fitzgerald could have had the ball game then and there; but a sudden vision of a house without Ann in it, and of his wife charging in with a fistful of ballpoint pens, made him pull back. He lacked — at that moment anyway — an essential killer’s instinct.