Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

But Fitzgerald had shown his right, even in this incomplete thrust, to a room at the top. Now he wanted to round things out. “Nick, there’s room here for you. Ann’ll tell you when we eat.” Even that took some restraint. Fitzgerald wanted to promise Payne that if he turned his back it was going to be angel choirs long before he thought he’d ever see them.

“Fine,” Payne said, nodding graciously.

“Okay, kid. We’ve got a deal.”

Fitzgerald went to the door and took its handle. He let his head drop a little without turning to look at them. “G’night, Annie,” he said thickly and went out.

When he had gone, Ann said, “He never called me Annie before.”

Payne seized her. They grappled lovingly among the hampers. A famous man says that we go through life with “a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms”; and these, these, these children , these these these these little children will soon not be able to feel this way about anything again.

Wayne Codd eased the bunkhouse door shut behind himself and made his way across the open drive to where Payne was unloading a couple of low, tatty, catchall suitcases. It was not in the least the kind of luggage Codd associated with top-level arrivals at Gallatin Field in Bozeman. The fourteen-carat buckaroos from Dude City Central Casting that poured out of those Northwest Orient Fan Jet Electras didn’t go around with deal luggage of that sorry order. It reassured him.

Then the haircut. You couldn’t see the bastard’s ears. Codd wanted to go up and flat tell Payne that red white and blue were colors that didn’t run. Instead, he took the time to estimate Payne as though he were a chine of beef; and he came up with the dispiriting intelligence that Payne was on the big side. Furthermore, he was throwing gear around the back of the wagon in a way that reminded Codd, by special paranoid telepathy, of himself being abused at some future time. He walked over.

“Nice day,” Codd said.

“Yes it is.” Payne rolled an Indian blanket and packed it beside the camp stove in the front of the wagon.

“Been sure hot.”

“Yes it has.”

“You workin here naow?”

“Just visiting.” He climbed out of the wagon. “I work with another fellow. I guess I’ll be staying here a bit though.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

“About how long?”

“I surely couldn’t tell you.” Payne introduced himself and they shook hands.

“You’re not workin here then, ay?”

“No.”

“And you’re not figurin on workin.”

“Why? Do you work here?”

“That’s right, friend.”

“You sound like a man with a situation to himself,” Payne declared.

“I am,” Codd said. “I expect to keep it that way.”

“Well, it is nice to be able to lay back without anybody cracking the whip when you do.”

“Yeah, only I don’t do that.”

“That’s even more wonderful.”

“I wasn’t callin it wonderful,” Codd said.

“Well, that’s even more whatever you’ve been finding yourself calling it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Look,” Payne said, “you were the one that came over and talked to me.”

“That’s so. I was.”

“Are you the foreman here?”

“Correct.”

“Got anything to do right now?”

“Nothin.”

“In that event,” Payne said, “why don’t you buzz back to the bunkhouse and let me get on with the job.”

Fitzgerald leaned out of an upper window.

“Wayne, give Nick a hand there if he needs you.”

“Run all those suitcases up to the guest room,” Payne said, fishing for a cigar in his shirt pocket. “I’ll be playing foreman over here at the foot of this tree.”

Codd put a forefinger into Payne’s chest, prefatory to making a remark of some kind. Payne spoiled his preparation by slapping his hand halfway around his back, establishing specific personal limits.

He lit his cigar and retired to the shade at the foot of the cottonwood. Codd disappeared into the entrance of the house. Fitzgerald smiled overhead … at what?

Payne lifted the wagon tongue off the wagon hitch and put his back into moving the son of a bitch under the trees by the tack room where it would be inconspicuous. He planned to use his considerable handiness in helping everyone at the ranch. Then they would all be happy and like one another. Thinking of Ann, of the ranch, of his happiness and good work under the mountains and sunshine, he sings:

All around the world

I’ve got blisters on my feet,

Trying to find my baby

And bring her home to me!

With a toothpick in my hand

I’d dig a ten-foot ditch!

And run through the jungle

Fighting lions with a switch!

Because you know I love you baby!

Yes you know I love you baby!

Whoa-oh you know I love you baby!

Well, if I don’t love you baby:

GRITS AND GROCERIES!

EGGS AND POULTRIES!

AND MONA LISA WAS A MAN!

Ten hours and fourteen and a half minutes earlier, C. J. Clovis had come out of surgery for the removal of his left arm which had been rendered useless and dangerous by a total closure of circulation and the beginnings of gangrene. Whether or not his doctors had been precipitous in the removal of the limb remained to be argued. In any case, they had consulted with his physicians in Michigan, including the singular young surgeon to whom had fallen the unlikable task that ended with lugging the heavy left leg of Clovis across the operating theater to the stainless bin; where it was discarded like tainted meat — which, presumably, it was. As with the amputated leg, the arm, discarded, had shown the baleful, zigzag incisions as though the work had been done with pinking shears.

It took Payne hours to find him in the empty hospital ward, where he rested on that particular fine summer’s day. Payne, worse than useless, permitted tears to stream down his cheeks, until Clovis shouted, “Stop it! I may be a goner! Just stop that!”

“I would have stayed up at Bangtail if I had known you were sick.”

“I didn’t know I was either. This is one fucking mess.”

“The doctor said this is the end of it. He said it’ll take some getting used to but this is the last thing that’s coming off.”

“Don’t listen to them, Payne. They’ve scavenged me as it is. I don’t know where they’re going to stop!”

“They already have stopped.”

“But can’t you see! With their tin-can optimism they feel no responsibility to be accurate! They just don’t want scenes in their waiting rooms! Everybody’s going to be okay! And these buggers probably believe it, is the worst of it. They believe everything is going to be okay right up to the point the patient kicks off, then they switch to their famous doctor’s resignation in matters of life and death. When those fuckers start in like preachers about doing all that was humanly possible I want to kick their big soft white asses. I want to yell, ‘shove your humanly possible! You’re dismantling me! My arm is gone! My leg is gone! Now just give me a God damn schedule and I’ll know when you’re gonna haul off the rest of it!’ Here’s the kind of deal that floors you, Payne: Where is my arm at this minute?”

After a while, Payne admitted he just didn’t know what to say.

“Almost the worst part,” Clovis said, “is that I just got a contract for a Batrium.”

Payne remembered the breakwater at home.

“I’ll do it. I’ll build the … batrium.”

“You don’t know how,” Clovis said, his face, unbelievably enough, lighting with ambition and greed.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m so happy. I may as well say it. I am.”