Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“Where are you?”

“The Texaco.”

“Are you coming back ever?” So Clovis had picked up the true pitch of Payne’s departure.

“The body says yes.”

He’d been gone an hour. When he sat down at the table, he could see the Fitzgeralds sniffing the Hornet’s fuel leaks. Once Payne saw a picture of André Gide in his library, wearing a comfy skull cap, looking at a bound folio and puffing his Gauloise cigarette. Thinking of that now, Payne couldn’t completely see why he should continue to take his lumps here in the presence of breakfast scraps and depleted grapefruits.

“We’ve been having an incredible conversation with your boss,” Missus Fitzgerald said to him.

“Good,” Payne said.

“About these oddities, these bat towers, you two are pushing.”

“I’m just the simple carpenter,” Payne said.

“Mister Clovis says you’re going to Key West,” said Fitzgerald, unnaturally elated to be able to announce this.

“It’s news to me.”

“Yup,” Clovis grinned, “it’s so. Are you ready for the rest?”

“I am.”

“I nailed them for twenty G’s: one tower and one only. Naturally, it will be our masterpiece.” Payne was pleased with the news; though it pained him to have Clovis use his confidence tone in front of the Fitzgeralds. “One catch. No bats down there. We’re going to have to bring our own. Just a detail. And you did hear me about the twenty G’s.”

“Yes,” Payne winced. They conversed as though the room were empty of anyone but themselves.

“You shoulda seen the two-page telegrams I was whamming down there. You didn’t know it but I composed the damn queries in that creekbottom. And you oughta seen my literary style. Right out of the adventurer William Beebe whose underwater footsteps I have always longed to trace through the atolls of Micronesia.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Clovis said, “and how we got them.”

About the time that it became plain that Payne would not only clear out soon but perhaps — even if it was not plain to the Fitzgeralds — take Ann along with him, Codd began to conduct a curious delineation of his own plans all toward asking himself the question whether or not he was willing to go to the State Penitentiary at Deer Lodge and there to manufacture license plates for automobiles, all for the pleasure of busting Nicholas Payne down to size and, in some ultimate manner, fix him for good. The question was in the long run one that sprang from a fantasy of himself scuttling out of a low, dense bush, whirring almost invisible out of that bush with his speed, to hit Payne over the head with something of a single ball-peen density sufficient to prevent the rising of Payne again from the spot on anything but a litter for the deceased. He giggled with a thought of Payne afloat in brains and spinal fluid. R.I.P. if you think you deserve it because here’s where God takes over! Wayne was a religious boy.

The relief Codd got at having developed a frame of action permitted him to enjoy, as he once always had, his little bunkhouse. On the shelf beside the Motorola, a blue flowerpot burst with poppies grown right from a Burpee’s packet. That took tender loving care! His postcards, cowboy writing paper, electric cattleprod, wrap-around sunglasses, Model 94 Winchester 30–30, bathing suit (Roger Vadim model), Absorbine, Jr., truss and Philmore crystal set with loop antenna — were all carefully arrayed in the doorless closet next to the TV. His 4-H belt buckle, angora dice, birthday cards (30) from his grandmother and novelty catalogues were all on the dresser next to his great-grandfather’s Confederate forage cap and great-grandmother’s hard porcelain chamberpot out of which he had eaten untold tonnage of treated grains and cereals from the factories of Battle Creek, Michigan.

And on the walls were many varnished pine plaques emblazoned with mottos. And there were snapshots of girlfriends, bowling trophies, hot cars, a dead eagle spread over the flaring hood of a Buick Roadmaster. In the top right-hand dresser drawer behind the army socks were many unclear snapshots of Ann’s twat. Seen from under the bathhouse floor by the impartial eye of the Polaroid camera, it seemed itself to be a small, vaguely alarming bird, not unlike a tiny version of the American eagle lying on the hood of the Buick Roadmaster; alarming to Codd anyway, who, let’s face it, never had known what to make of it. What was the use of his getting a lot of pictures of the darn thing if he couldn’t touch it?

The bed was just a bed. The chairs were just a bunch of chairs. There was a parabolic heater with black and white fabric cord. There was just a regular bunch of windows — well, only four; but they seemed to be all over the place. One window was close to the door and today it framed the blaring red mug of an unhappy Duke Fitzgerald.

“Come out here a minute, Wayne.”

There was just one Wayne Codd in there and he came out.

“Sir?”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“He hasn’t given me a chance.”

“He did night before last. I found you K.O.’d on his step.”

“I got sucker-punched, sir.”

“Well, Codd, I thought you’d have had your own stake in this.”

“Sir?”

“I mean I don’t know if you realize what he’s got her doing.”

A dish dropped and broke faintly in the main house.

“Oh, yes I do, sir,” Codd said firmly, “I’ve seen them at it.”

Fitzgerald waved his hands frantically in front of his face. “For God’s sake Wayne.” Wayne looked down at his boots, remembered Orion streaking up, the lash of trees. “I saw them, sir.”

Hideously, Fitzgerald had an agonizing image of Payne as a kind of enormous iguana or monitor lizard, even the beating throat, in rut, over the vague creaminess of Ann. Suddenly, out of the generalized eroticism, he was back in the winter of 1911, lying on his Flexible Flyer on a hill in Akron, imaginatively pitting himself against a flying-V of naked women. He remembered their rubbery collision, the women writhing and squealing under his runners.

“Codd it’s rough. Chemistry … changing times … God I don’t know.”

“But I will do the job, sir.”

“Gee Wayne I do hope so. It’s what he ought to have.”

“Don’t you worry your head, sir. He’s going to have it.” Codd began to choke a little with emotion at having proclaimed even in so veiled a fashion his dismal loyalty. He was without relations and nobody loved him. This was going to have to do.

“Ann,” said her mother, “wouldn’t you stay a minute?”

“Of course I will, Mother. You never—”

“I know I’m tiresome and maybe a … a little old.” The smile. “But just this once.”

“You never want me to stay! You want me to get going after meals. ‘Why don’t you get a move on?’ you’re always saying! I’d love to sit and talk a minute for crying out loud!”

Missus Fitzgerald fanned all that away, all that sass, all that fearful adolescent whatnot, all that chemistry.

“I’m going to make you a proposal.”

The little furrow, only one now, between the tapered eyebrows; the delicately rouged beezer narrowed with the seriousness of it. Ann grew desperate. I’m only a kid, she thought, I want to hightail it; not this thing with papers. She wondered what it could mean anyway, feeling her chemicals boil up the neck of her Pyrex beaker. But the old lady looked bananas as she produced now a red vinyl portfolio with her lawyer’s name, B. Cheep, Counselor-At-Law, in gold rubber on its handle. Out came the papers, business papers, girl; papers with which Missus Fitzgerald planned to make a serious obstacle to Nicholas Payne.

“These aren’t only for people who go bald,” said the Missus.