Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“Anyway,” he said mellifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, “you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig’s guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is.”

And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven.

An instant later, he imagined he was singing the Volga boat song. Ann clapped a hand over his mouth. It wasn’t the Volga boat song. It was some febrile, mattoid, baying nonsense. No one saw why he should be acting up like this.

“What are you doing? ” It reminded her of the way people went crazy on TV as opposed to Dostoyevsky.

“Dunno.”

He had strained himself.

His feeling was that it was the dining room, the act of eating itself, that dramatized what the Mum, the Dad, had in mind for him. That was what was behind their fierceness over their food; they were pretending it was him, he decided; and he didn’t like it from an almost metaphysical plane of objection; to the effect that martyrdom should be represented more strikingly than in platters of meat and vegetables. These things, thought Payne, are not relics. Bits of the true sirloin. He imagined monstrances filled with yams and okra; our beloved smörgasbord has gone on before.

Payne calmed down. He considered the solemn flummery of the Fitzgeralds’ departure, the effect that time was not to be wasted on him. He looked at Ann, becomingly leaning on the table with both elbows. A certain hirsute mollusc came to mind.

“Dinner seemed to fall short of one of those civilized encounters of mind we hear about.”

“Yes,” Ann said, ungratefully adding, “your fault as much as theirs. It just seems completely uncultivated.”

“I think so.”

“That kind of silliness could be endless. You’ll never tire each other out.”

“My silliness means more.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I’ve made it a way of life,” Payne said. “That means something.”

“But what are we going to do. I’m so tired of this, this—”

“Yes, me too.”

“This, this—”

“Yes,” Payne said.

“We could run off,” she said, thinking that she could take pictures, making the act of running away itself the unifying factor or theme.

“I see it in my mind’s eye,” Payne said wearily.

“I mean it though, Nicholas.”

“The hobo shot. The American road. We sit in ditches covered with sage and pollen. Cannonades of giant mid-American laughter flood the sky around us; it is ours. We are giants in the earth snagging Strategic Air Command bombers in our hair because it is big hair. That goes up. Where bombers are.”

There was a disturbance at the door, a small aggressive shuffling, the lout’s movement of Codd.

“I was wondering.”

“Yes?” Payne said, the dim view showing.

“If there was anything I could do.”

“No, Wayne,” Ann said pleasantly. “Thanks, not now.”

“But Mister Fitzgerald said to come over and see what I could do.”

“Nothing, thanks, Codd,” Payne said.

“I was sure that—”

“The old dodo gave you a bum steer,” Payne said simply.

“I’ll tell him,” said Codd with the smile there.

“You tell him that you were given a bum steer by him and had received it in good condition.”

“Yes, because he said for me to come see what I could do. But I’ll tell him from you that the thing was he had given me this bum steer.”

“One other thing, Codd.”

“No, you one other thing a minute. I’m thinking of busting you in the God damn mouth.”

“No, Codd.”

“No, what.”

“You won’t do that. You’ll announce it over and over but in the end you won’t do it.”

“That’s your idea, huh.”

“Sure is.”

“Well if you get it,” Codd said, “don’t come cryin to me. Because it’ll just be a case of you achin for it and me givin it to you.”

“As a guest here I resent the abuse of footlings. Presently, I may be heard to shriek for the management.”

“Do it.”

“ Peep . See? My heart’s not in it. Codd, one false move and I’ll pull your upper lip over the back of your head. And another thing: I love you.”

“Then you’re a fruit.”

“But Ann too, see? It’s one of those world brotherhood deals that’s liable to end in liquidation. Damn it, I’m washing my hands of you. I’d hoped you’d turn out to be something better than this. Your mother and I had dreamed you’d be the first mate on a torpedoed Nazi destroyer. And I don’t know where this leaves us; with our dreams I guess; of what you might have been; if it hadn’t been for the war years.”

“What you ought to do,” Codd said, seeming to know what he was talking about, “is go up to Warm Springs and get yourself certified. Far as I’m concerned, yer too crazy to beat up.”

“Yes,” said Ann. Her soundest social notion was that everyone in the world was too crazy to beat up.

Codd walked down the hallway, the bulldogging heels of his tiny cowboy boots ringing on the hardwood. With a light feinting gesture of the head, he avoided injury by elk’s antler at the corner of the living room; with a low scuttling jump, he avoided entanglement with bearskin at the front of the grotesque travertine fireplace with its iron firedogs and prestolite scented simulogs. Pivoting in a sharp dido around the far entrance to the living room, he was in an identical hallway where, once more, there was the ringing of the tiny boots as his forward bolting posture soon hurtled him through the far screen door. On the lawn, he walked over the cesspool, invisible to him under the sod; among the heavy willows he strode toward his bunkhouse beneath the singular tattoo of Orion.

Hanging, later, upended over the dormer window of Ann’s room, he watched her mock burlesque before Payne, their subsequent entanglement, her compact uplift of blushing buttock, his paler flesh and hers flaring in their seizure, the long terrific prelude and final, spasmic, conjunctive entry, marked, unknown to either of them, by the gloomy jetting of Codd against the shingles overhead.

Codd, spent, saw the rooftree sink suddenly in his vision, Orion start up, and realized he was falling. In a terror of being perceived hanging from the lintel, his livery about his knees, he launched himself into space, plunged into a lucky willow and merged himself against the heavy rigid trunk while Payne knuckled up and down the sill saying I know you’re out there.

Satisfied that it had only been a limb falling, Payne returned to Ann, lying upon her stomach. The peerless, long back arced up at her bottom; Payne sat next to her and slid his hand underneath, thinking this is where Darwin got the notion of primordial ooze; put a speck of it under a microscope and see Shakespeare leaping through time; also, lobsters, salamanders, one coelacanth. He knelt between her thighs, raised her hips, thrust and flooded helplessly. My God. How many fan letters could you seal with that. Enough to get the message across, perhaps. Mock turtle soup.

Leaving Ann’s room and proceeding to his own, he passed, in the lugubrious great hall of the house, Mister Fitzgerald, smoking peevishly and adjusting with one glowing foot an ornate iron firedog.

“Evening, sir.”

“Well, Payne, good evening.”

“Do you want to speak to me?” Payne asked.

“Not at all.”

Payne continued past the stone entry of that really funny room and into the glossy varnished passageway to his own quarters. About halfway down that corridor, he ran into Wayne Codd who, from his position within an insignificant shadow cast by a large plaster-of-paris penguin, inquired whether or not Payne would care to fight.

“No,” Payne said, and went to his room where he admired the drum-tight Hudson’s Bay blanket with its four black lines for the indication of class or general snazz. He had locked the door; but it was a short time before the clicking of Codd’s skeleton key groping for the indifferent tumblers of Payne’s lock was heard. Payne patted the cool surface of the sheet. “This is a happy Western lodge,” he said to himself. “I smell elk in this pillow.” Then close to the door, he said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll unlock it.” For a long moment, he made no movement. “You’ll have to pull the key out.”