Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“Okay.” The key was extracted.

“Come in,” Payne said. The knob wrenched and the door did not open.

“It’s still locked,” came the ululating voice, urgent with wrath.

“Hang on. Just a sec.” Payne brushed his teeth. “What did you call me?” No answer, but once more the swift perfect failure of the skeleton key. Payne’s ablutions were most complete. He brushed first smartly the teeth then smoothly the hair. He never once poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. He adjusted trimly the clavicles and elevated the coccyx at a racy angle like a Masai. By way of preparation, he bounded around the room in what came to seem a perfect frenzy. Abruptly, he flung open the door, knocked Codd unconscious, closed the door and turned in for the night.

Presently, however, a brisk knocking was heard upon the door and Payne answered, expecting to find the drear, abnormally expanded face of the recently comatose Codd. Unexpectedly, he found instead Fitzgerald, at pains not to tread upon his foreman.

“What’s with him?”

“Receipt of blow to his chops. The hydraulic effect of that, you might say, toward a reduction of consciousness.” Fitzgerald stepped over him and entered the room. “I know why you’ve come.”

“You do?”

“Oui, mon enfant,” said Payne, “you want to invite me into your family.”

“Do you realize how inexpensively I could have you shot?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“But I’m alarmed you would maintain such connections.”

“Well, goodnight then, Payne.”

“Goodnight to you sir. I trust these morbid preoccupations of yours will not trouble your sleep. Look at it this way, I could have you shot as cheaply. I presume the price is within both our means.”

“Yes, I suppose. Well, goodnight then, Payne.” He went out, taking elaborate pains not to step into the face of his foreman, Wayne Codd. Payne went to sleep, moved by the pismire futilities of moguls — their perpetual dreams, that is, of what could be done with the money.

A long gliding sleep for Payne was followed by a call to breakfast. He stumbled into the hallway and found himself in some sort of procession, the whole family moving in one direction, deploying finally in silence around a glass pantry table. They were served by an old Indian lady who maintained a stern air that kept everyone silent. Plates were put on the table with unnecessary noise. Then, when it seemed finally comfortable to eat, there was an uproar in the hallway. Behind Codd, darkling with rage, came the fabulous multiple amputee of untoward bat-tower dreams — none the worse for wear — C. J. Clovis, variously sustained with handsomely machined aluminum mechanisms and superstructures; around which the expensive flannel he affected (and now a snap-brim pearly Dobbs) seemed to drape with a wondrous futuristic elegance. The Indian woman stepped through the smoked-glass French doors in petulant response to the noise. Breakfast was ordered for Clovis. The Fitzgeralds arose, smiling gaily aghast. Admittedly, the rather metallurgical surface Clovis presented to the world would have been intimidating to anyone who hadn’t been in on the process.

Payne made the introductions. Codd, sporting welts, bowed out. Payne watched him until his attention returned to the others; he found Clovis already selling a bat tower.

“We don’t want a bat tower, Mister Clovis,” said La.

“In what sense do you mean that?”

“In any sense whatever.”

Clovis gave them the encephalitis routine — mosquitoes as pus-filled syringes, et cetera, et cetera — including a fascinating rendition of death by microbe during which his plump sagging little carcass writhed mournfully beneath the abrupt motions of the metal limbs. From the viewpoint of the Fitzgeralds, it was really appalling. Coffee and toast cooled without interference. Fitzgerald himself was perfectly bug-eyed; though by some peculiar association he remembered canoeing at a summer camp near Blue Hill, Maine; afterwards (1921), he had puked at a clambake.

“Still don’t want bats?” Clovis asked in a tiny voice.

Missus Fitzgerald, who could really keep her eye on the ball, said, “Nyao. And we don’t want the tower either.”

“Where’s my breakfast?” roared Clovis.

“We want to live together,” Ann addressed her mother. “Nicholas and I.”

“How did you pick us?” Fitzgerald asked Clovis.

“I was looking for my foreman.”

“Shut your little mouth,” Missus Fitzgerald told her daughter, who gnawed fitfully at a sausage. Codd was at the door once again.

“Write my check,” he said, “I’ve had the course.”

“We’ll talk about this after breakfast,” Fitzgerald said to him. “You may be right.”

“It’s him or me,” Codd said.

“Quite right,” Fitzgerald said, “but later, okay? We’ll have it all out.”

“I’m old enough to make this decision,” Ann told her mother. Codd went out. Clovis’ breakfast came. He scowled at the lady of Amerind extraction who drummed around the table splashing cups full of coffee.

“What did you say?” Fitzgerald, this shocked man, asked his daughter.

“Nicholas and I wish to set up housekeeping.”

“You just aren’t fussy,” her mother accused, “are you.”

“And it’s time she got started,” Dad averred.

“Well, she’s not, Duke. She’s not fussy and she never was.”

“Life has a way of bringing out fussiness.”

“Ann,” said her mother, “I hate to see you learn to be fussy the hard way.”

“I told you later!” said Fitzgerald to Codd who had reappeared. “Now get.” Codd shrank away. “Not one bat tower,” he said, catching Clovis’ eye.

“I can get it for you cheap,” Clovis said.

“Tell us you don’t mean that,” Missus Fitzgerald said.

“I don’t mean that.” Ann shrugged.

Now Clovis really began to eat as if there were no tomorrow, shooting through not only his own large breakfast, but all the leftovers as well. At one point, he had three pieces of toast and an unsqueezed grapefruit clamped in the appliance. It would be friendly and fun to say that he held the others in thrall.

Payne excused himself with the tiny wink that means the toilet; and escaped. The truth was the blood vessels in his head were pounding in an apoplectic surge. He went outside under the exploding cottonwoods and hot mountain light feeling an upwelling of relief of freedom of space of scarcity of knowing there was the invisible purling descent of mountain water someplace right close. In the watercourses on the side slope he could see green hands of aspen the million twirling leaves. Then he jumped into the Hornet and bolted.

A time-lapse photograph would have shown the palest mint-green band against the mountains and the steady showering of transcontinental earthclods from the dying rocker panels and perforated bulbosities of fender. Behind the spiraling lizard of glass-faults, the preoccupied face of him, of Payne. What did he ever do to anybody?

The man at the Texaco who had excited himself about the bushwhacked recaps said, “Go ahead and use it. Not long distance, we hope.” Payne looked around. There was no one else. “We?”

“You and me.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no just a local call.”

A minute later, Payne asked Codd to give him Clovis. Clovis came to the phone.

“Hello?” he asked warily.

“Me, Payne. Get out of there. I don’t want you peddling a tower to my future in-laws.”

“Future in-laws. You ought to hear them on the subject of you, pal.”

“I have and don’t want to anymore.”

“A horse who isn’t gwine finish.”

“I don’t need to know that.”