Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“We have decided,” said Mister Fitzgerald, looking hopefully at his bride, “that Ann is old enough to make her own decisions. In this case—” Oh, this was beautiful. “—we definitely do not approve of her decision.”

“But will you stand in her way?” Heath, out of control, pleaded.

“No.”

“What! You’re opening the door to lewdness!”

“Heath,” Payne warned.

“She’s a grown woman,” Missus Fitzgerald insisted.

Heath began to shout: “There’s a question of consortium here, God damn it! It is technically questionable if these people have a right to intercourse. And without that legal right they are fornicators! You call yourself parents in the face of this abrogation of decency!”

Payne: “Shut up, Heath. Shut up and get out.”

Heath ignored him. “A minor distrainment of your chattels and you sell your child into bondage! Let me ask you one thing. Let me ask you this. Have you questioned the effect of bastardy on the esteem you doubtless hold in your community? I mean, what if there is illegitimate issue? What if there is?”

Payne lay on his side now holding his head. The others were rigid with horror as the white-knuckled L.A. shyster circled them sinfully. “Let us talk reason. Exemplary or punitive damages in this action are extremely unlikely, right? The community has no need to make an example of you. Do you follow me? In equity, the assessment of damages is wholly within the discretion of the court where you will be more likely to get sympathetic treatment than my client. I mean, look at him. He looks like a crackpot. My client is everybody’s fantasy of an ambulatory anarchist. Isn’t he yours? Ask yourself that.

“Now lastly — and try to get this straight — it is the plaintiff’s responsibility to keep damages to the minimum indicated by the tort. In this instance, the multiple of damages actually sustained is difficult to specify.

“I advise that you settle out of court. I advise that you keep your daughter in the home in which she belongs.”

“How much?” Fitzgerald asked.

“I’m thinking of a hundred grand.”

“The hell with that noise,” Fitzgerald said and walked, his wife beside him, with dignity from the room. They would have to buy some champagne and celebrate their victory.

Ann delayed. She leaned over Payne’s bed and filled Payne’s ear with hot breath when she said, “They’ve sold me down the river, darling. It’s you and me now.” She left.

On his own way out, Egdon Heath said, somewhat acidly, to Payne, “I ought at least to nail you for my air fare.”

“That’s the life of a speculator,” Payne said. “Nice try.”

Payne was whacked out. He made friends with the nurse who attended him. She had tiny close-set eyes and an upturned bulbous nose. She told Payne her life story pausing upon occasion to break into tears. She had remained unwed through her thirties; then suddenly married an elderly motorist from a nearby town. Recently he told her that it had not in the least been love at first sight. So there was that for her to cry about. Payne took her hand, seeing her face at the end of a tube, and told her, “Don’t sweat it, darling,” in his most reassuring glottal baritone.

They didn’t do a thing to Payne but take one kind of reading or another, including an X-ray. They took readings day after day. “What’s my temperature?” Payne would ask. Or, “What’s my pulse?” Or, “What’s my blood pressure?” One day, sleepily, he inquired, “What numbers am I, Doctor?”

“Quite a few,” the doctor said. “All of us are.”

One thing Payne thought of continually was the time he blasted the piano with his.22, the beautiful splintering of excessively finished wood, the broken strings curling away from liberated beams of spicy piano light, the warm walnut stock of his.22, the other spice of spent shells, the word hollowpoint, the anger of the enemy, the silver discs the bullets made on the window, the simple precision of a peep sight, the blue of barrel steel, the name Winchester when you were in America, the world of BB Caps, Shorts, Longs, and Long Rifles, the incessant urge to louse up monuments, even the private piano monument he perforated from a beautiful tree with an almost blinding urgent vision of the miserable thing ending in an uproar of shattered mahogany, ivory, ebony and wire. No more Bach chords to fill the trees with their stern negation. There’s no room here for a piano, he remembered righteously. No pianos here please.

Ann sat in the front of the Hudson. Just as in the songs, she had hair of sparkling gold and lips like cherry wine. Perhaps, hair of sparkling pewter and lips the color of a drink called Cold Duck. She looked like an awful floozy. Her eyes had melting antimony edging on their lids. God only knew what she had in mind. She looked as round-heeled as a tuppeny upright after ten years of throwing standing crotch locks on every womb worm that came her way.

His vision, however, had improved; to the effect that the world no longer appeared as a circular vista at the end of a conduit. His urge to ride on the highway was now a quiet, tingling mania.

“Let us hear from you,” the Fitzgeralds said when the kissing had stopped.

“Sure will,” Ann said, “I’ll drop you a line one of these days.” Her parents looked at her. They needed the right word and quick. Something had gone entirely dead here.

“Let us know if you need anything,” her mother tried.

“Yeah, right.” Payne started to back around. “Take it easy,” Ann said. And they left.

“I guess,” Ann said after they had driven a while, “it had gotten to be time for me to cut out.”

“All right,” Payne said, “now take it easy.”

“Darling, I’m upset.”

“Yes, me too. My head is all fouled up.”

“I feel like a hoor,” she said. Payne felt a distant obligation to contradict her.

They passed through the box canyon of the Yellowstone where the venturi effect of chinook winds will lift a half-ton pickup right to the top of its load leveler shocks and make the driver think of ghost riders in the sky until the springs seat again and the long invisible curves of wind unknit and drive him through the canyon as though his speed were laid on him as paint.

Some hours later, Ann seemed to have fallen into a bad mood. “Where are we going?”

“Bat country,” said Payne. That quieted her down.

“You know what?” she asked later.

“What?”

“This damn car of yours is coming off on my clothes.”

At Apollinaris Spring, Ann thought: My God, if George ever saw me pull a low-rent trick like this! In fact that’s something to think about. She began to record the voyage with her camera.

They dropped down into Wyoming and headed for Lander, running through implausible country where Sacajawea and Gerald McBoingBoing fought for the table scraps of U.S.A. history.

Coming down through Colorado, still west of the Divide, they passed a small intentional community — people their own age — all of whose buildings were geodesic domes made of the tops of junked automobiles. Payne could see gardens, a well, a solar heater and wanted to go down. But the members of the community were all crowding around down there and rubbing each other. They were packing in down there and Payne felt the awful shadow of the Waring Blender and drove on. Ann was mad. “Why won’t you mix, God damn it?” I read Schopenhauer, Payne thought, that tease!

They headed for Durango, stayed for a day, then dropped into New Mexico and headed for Big Spring, Texas.

They cut across Amarillo and made a beeline for Shreveport on a red-hot autumn day to Columbia, Florida, where Payne had been sent in the first place by Cletus James Clovis. This was bat country. Payne took a piece of paper out of his pocket. A short time later, he was knocking on the door of a reconditioned sharecropper’s house. When the man opened the door, Payne saw the wall behind covered with curing gator skins. “C. J. Clovis said to see you about bats,” Payne said. The poacher told them to come in and have something cool to drink.