Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

It was quickly apparent that Codd had not given Payne, as it first looked, a blow that was mortal. The question of damage to the brain, however, was not settled. The notion Ann had was that her family would take an upright line in compensating Nicholas. As for herself, she would feel honor bound to do whatever he told her to do.

Now that was an alarming idea. She was filled with a terrifying and delicious vision of living her life out with a man who had been made a feeb by damage to his brain. She saw her parents out of misguided loyalty giving Payne work that he could do. And suddenly a terrible picture of Payne wheeling bins of disinfected wigs in her mother’s wig bank came to Ann. For a long time, she had secretly photographed Payne at his worst moments; but pictures of him reduced to idiocy by brain damage would be of merely pathological, rather than artistic, interest. This thought of hers, clear as it was, diminished Ann more than she would ever be able to know.

But, poor girl, she was so undermined at the moment. At the time of the accident, she had seen the complicity between Codd and her parents; one, she assumed, that had got out of hand. Then her mother had spotted Ann’s peroxide hair and, even before it was determined whether or not Payne was dead, had screeched, “You little hoor!”

When Payne regained consciousness, he discovered that he had lost much of his peripheral vision; producing what the doctor described as “vignetting”; it gave him the sense of looking down a pair of tubes. Added to the insane headache he had, it was very disconcerting. No one knew if it was permanent or not.

Ann came often but he could never quite figure if he had just seen her or imagined it. So he lay there in an indescribable air of expectation, most of which turned out to be unwarranted.

Clovis was in and out all the time, displaying his familiarity with the staff. He gave Payne some advice that seemed rather wild-eyed in the beginning and then made sense. Clovis conducted a few arrangements to substantiate the advice and, two days later, Payne was feeling well enough to act upon it.

Summoned by Payne’s attorney, sitting beside him now, the Fitzgeralds arrived at the hospital, all three of them. Payne directed them to chairs and they sat, next to the sink.

“As soon as I am able,” Payne said, “I am going to Key West to build a bat tower. I plan to take Ann with me. We will of course live together; ‘cohabit’ is the word, Heath informs me.” Payne gestured to indicate Counselor Egdon Heath beside him. “Both on the way and after we get there.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” La smiled, boiled eggs for eyes. “We don’t operate that way.”

“Fill them in, Heath.”

Heath ingratiated himself with a suggested, if not actual, undulance and a winning meringue smile. The Fitzgeralds were thrown into ghastly discomfort. “There are any number of writs we can serve you with at this time,” he began. “I have advised my client to pursue an individual suit in the amount of two millions. Mister Payne has a fetching inability to speculate in terms of such numbers. So I showed him the tax assessor’s rather conservative estimate of the value of your ranch and assured my client there would be quite a bit of change left over! I do not hint at avarice by any means when I say that this procedure has had the effect of piquing Mister Payne’s interest. And of course we have not given up the notion of going for the wig bank as well. My own point of view is based on the fact that I am here on speculation. And it costs me twenty thousand dollars a week to leave my office in Los Angeles.

“Furthermore … a mint?” They shook their heads. He ate one, palming the foil. “Furthermore, a Mister Wayne Codd, temporarily resident in the fearful little city, has signed his name to half a dozen statements of his own composition. My evaluation is that they hint at a criminal dimension to this affair that could be explored with a mind to not only cleaning you out but salting you away!” He muttered insincerely to himself that he must abjure the vernacular, then cried, “Acky poo! I know how you feel about that! In the beginning, I didn’t see why I should leave Los Angeles. I just didn’t. But there was something that turned me on. Something that thrilled me and I searched it out. I lay in my Barcalounger until it came. And it turned out that it was the fact that we had both punitive and compensatory options in prosecuting this suit that gave me, frankly, a kind of hard-on to represent this man.” Then Heath admitted to his voice a dry Episcopal scorn he had learned many years before at the Cranbrook School for Boys.

“Mister Payne has made me promise to say this: He will call me off in the event your daughter goes to Florida not only unhindered but without disapproval expressed through inheritance provisos.” Heath was counting on a certain Republican solidity in the Fitzgeralds to keep his case airtight.

“We will not be blackmailed,” one or possibly both of the Fitzgeralds said firmly.

“Presumably not,” said Heath, “and that point of view fills me with pleasure. I personally never expected you to sell your daughter down the river in quite the manner indicated here.”

“Heath,” Payne said, “you’re chiseling.”

“Quite right.”

“I told you I wouldn’t have any of your damn greediness,” Payne said. Heath was chastised.

“You’re absolutely correct,” he said; he could afford this. Payne had the opposition dead to rights.

“I suggest you drop everything you’ve said,” Missus Fitzgerald announced, looking at the ceiling with a bored recitative air, “while you still have something left.”

“There’s nothing more to add, madame,” said Heath, not only a lawyer, husband and father, but an influential man who had given Los Angeles Episcopalianism its particular sheen. “You know how it stands. I assume we begin suit. Do contact your own attorney immediately; and be sure he’s good.” Frivolous imitations of generosity by Egdon Heath.

“I should have thought your investigations would demonstrate that we have effective counsel,” said Missus Fitzgerald, her words and words only having any conviction.

Fitzgerald himself broke in, chuckling to himself for quite some time. “You lawyers have tickled me for years. You’re all pork-and-beaners till the day you die. I don’t care if you make a million a day.”

“Go ahead. You’re bagged. Get in a speech.”

“May I go on, Mister Heath? I was saying I really have to chuckle—” He showed how you do. “—when I think of you guys. You never get the human underpinning into your heads. You’re constantly trotting out your writs and enjoinders without ever seeing that the law is a simple extension of the most ordinary human affairs.”

“That’s not true. Go ahead.”

“May I continue, Mister Heath?”

“Do that. But you’re bagged and bagged big.”

“May I go on you fucking shyster?”

“Duke!”

“Daddy!”

“Wildly and emotionally inaccurate. But go on.”

Fitzgerald composed himself and said, “What you as a particular lawyer have missed in this particular instance expresses perfectly what I am saying.” Fitzgerald sat on his triumph like a jocular playmate. “Our daughter has already expressed a wish to go off with Mister Payne!” Missus Fitzgerald joined the fun of a smiling triumph directed at this L.A. pinhead.

“I know that,” said Heath simply.

“Then what’s the problem?” one or possibly both of the Fitzgeralds asked at once.

“You said she couldn’t go,” Heath said with even greater simplicity.

“Your small sense of conduct surprises us in a professional man of law,” said Missus Fitzgerald. “Any parent would recognize our refusal as a way mothers and fathers have of stalling for time while they make up their minds.” Her pronunciation of the words “mother” and “father” was straight out of Dick And Jane. The Fitzgeralds looked at each other. They were winging it together, depending now on their intimacy, their knowledge of each other. This would be a test of what their marriage was founded upon.