Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

Why not simply accept the fact that the willow is a symbol.

“Thank you,” said Wayne.

“What do you think of this Payne?” asked Missus Fitzgerald.

“I dunno really.”

“Go ahead,” said Fitzgerald, “roll it over in your mind: What do you really think of the bastard.”

“I’ve got my doubts,” Codd said.

Missus Fitzgerald chuckled. “You’re so deferential, Wayne. That makes us even fonder of you.” Wayne thought of automotive differentials, how they accepted the power of the motor and made those wheels turn massively like all those wheels turned massively in grade-school educational movies about the U.S. on the go.

“Wayne,” said Fitzgerald, “we’ve got our doubts as well. But because of Ann, who is essentially just a baby still, can you follow that? still just a baby, Wayne, because of Ann this guy has us over a barrel and we have no recourse at all. He cannot be discouraged. He cannot be sent away. God, I remember when I was wooing the missus, why hell I—”

“Let’s not talk about you just now, dear.”

“That’s right, honey. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. — Uh, Wayne, I don’t know how to say this—” He turned to his wife. “—but God damn it honey, aren’t we getting fond of Wayne?”

Wayne picked up the thread right along in here, about how he was earmarked as the son-in-law. In his mind’s eye, he twirls a silk opera hat; beside him in the box, Ann listens raptly as a heavy fellow in a jerkin bays, “Amour!”

“Yes, Duke, indeed we are.”

“Wayne, let me throw the meat on the table. This bird has kind of got the double whammy on us, what with Ann’s being, at this point, little more than a child. And, on the level, the guy has our hands tied.”

“This goes way back,” says Missus Fitzgerald. “We’ve had him in the house like a cat burglar, you know, rooting through the liquor cabinet and whatnot.” Fitzgerald studied her face for indiscretion. “No, Duke, now,” she said, seeing it. “Wayne has to know.”

“This is true,” Duke acceded slowly.

“Anyhow, we just wanted to fill you in,” she said.

“Kind of put the bee in your bonnet,” he said.

“And you kind of see what you can come up with,” she said.

“Go ahead and finish your highball,” he said.

“You’ve hardly touched it,” she said.

“Oh, hell, take it to the bunkhouse and finish it,” he said. “And bring back the glass when you’re through.”

C. J. Clovis too was now asleep in the mobile home; he had removed the two artificial limbs. Since the missing arm and missing leg were from the same side of his body, he looked, sleeping on his stomach, like a boomerang. In his dreams, he twitched with happiness. He saw his towers crossing the country, none out of sight of the other. He dreamed of a natural harmony in which the silent war of bats on bugs left a ground level peace where ladies shelled peas under evening trees. Slivers of white showed between his lids as his eyes rolled to applause.

Two years ago, George published Ann’s poems. It was a birthday present. The book was reviewed in Sumac , a literary magazine which had assumed the subscription list of a former publication, Diesel , a journal of lesbian apologetics. Seeing the review again gave Ann such a sense of her own ability to synthesize hard-edge experience that she lost a good deal of her fear of going off with Nicholas:

• •

It is difficult to talk of the work of Ann Fitzgerald without mentioning the sense of longing, of time and love past, that percolates through her best verse. These are delicate moods that survive the most concrete — even brutal — details. This, from A Loss Of Petals (George Russell Editions, Malaga, 1968):

“Beside me on

our

bed

his sleep fitful:

We

lingered

at our lovemaking(s).

And at his tossings

his

dong

flopped

wanly

To the Posturepedic shadows

of mice and loss.”

At a time when poetry faces schism and a dearth of real gift, Fitzgerald’s perfect reveries throb just under the skin of a discredited craft.

She would have shown the book to Payne long ago, if it hadn’t been for the publisher’s colophon. And she didn’t really want him to know how clever she was. Moreover, she had a specific interest in photographing him when he was being most emptily superior, when reflex maleness made him show himself at his worst. Nothing personal, mind you; she was chasing universals.

In the immediate future, she wanted only a dead-level view of the country. She wanted to be along for the ride just like those cowboy’s floozies she saw at all hours sitting under the rear-view mirrors of pickups. The simple national archetypes like floozies, bowlers and rotarians seemed suddenly to be rather at one with things, possibly in a way Lozenge could never have foreseen. In an epoch in which it was silly to be a druid or red Indian, there was a certain zero-hour solace in being something large enough to attract contempt. Ann looked forward to being a floozy as another girl might have anticipated her freshman year at Vassar. With almost Germanic intentness, she had set her sights on being cheap and available and not in the least fussy.

She broke out the peroxide, pouted at herself in the mirror and squeaked, “Call me Sherri.”

In the quiet of a Michigan evening, Payne’s mother tweezed a dog’s hair from the meat loaf. A moment later, without warning, she thrust a spoiled cheese into a lidless plastic garbage pail. Payne’s father, in the den, stared at a picture of Payne dribbling in for a lay-up. “Mother,” he called to Missus Payne, who was trying apparently to thrust that cheese all the way to the bottom of the pail. “Here’s that picture of Nicholas dribbling in for a lay-up you asked about!”

Nicholas Payne hunkered in his handmade bow-roofed and screened motor wagon and packed with joy his possessions. He knew that this little driveway he was parked in was hooked up to every road in America; and all those roads ran to the sea.

He slowly packed his mummy bag into its stuff sack thereby closing the parenthesis on whatever fantasies he had had about walking over the mountains that summer. He took the sheepherders’ stove to pieces and stored it. He lifted the cookware down from the hooks on the ceiling and rolled the Coleman lantern in a towel.

• •

Wayne Codd sat on the one-front step that his bunkhouse had, watched Payne, and waited for it to get dark. He just wanted to get in there and play it by ear. Afterwards — on those evenings when he and Ann weren’t at the opera — they would have two possibly three hand-picked couples over for bridge and drinks. Sometimes when they were feeling restless, they would drive out to Gallatin Field to see the kind of people who got off the plane, just to keep a check on that. Late that night, Ann would perform her duties as a wife. Codd troubled over that idea a moment or two, mistakenly emphasizing the word “perform” in his mind; until with exquisite anguish he saw what was essential to the notion. “Duties!” he groaned with ecstasy. “Perform duties!”

Dad Fitzgerald was awfully hungry and just prowling around the kitchen and getting in the Missus’ way. She ignored him and moved through the room with a certain dirigible grace. When, from time to time, he caught her eye they smiled at each other; until once when he smiled and she just stared back at his face. She came up close to him. “I thought so,” she said. “Get back upstairs and groom your nose!”

“I’m hungry!”

“I’m not going to have that at dinner. I told you if you let yourself go I’d go back for bank inventory. Now groom that nose.” Fitzgerald started to leave the room. Her voice softened. “Dinner will be ready when you come down,” she added to placate the honking auto dodo.