Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

But Payne and Ann saw each other morning, noon and night. A certain amount of that time was inevitably spent up to no good. For Payne — and for Ann too — the whole thing seemed one of life’s maniacal evocations, a dimensional reach-through, heaven.

Once, for instance, they were on Payne’s little boat; he was in the cabin, adjusting the flame on the parabolic butane heater. Ann was on the bunk beside him, Payne in a Jesuitical hysteria of cross-purposes. Ann, clearly, prettily, waited for it. And Payne gave her one too, just like that. He looked underneath as he mounted her: a herring leaping from bank to bank, a marine idyll. Ann, for her part, should have never told him to hold on to his hat; because for an alarming instant he just couldn’t get going at all. She patted him with encouragement and told him we were a big boy now. She slipped her ankles up behind his knees. Payne felt as though he were inflating, becoming a squeaking surface that enlarged getting harder and paler, a weather balloon rising through the stratosphere, merely a collapsed sack at the beginning, growing rounder and thinner with altitude, then the burst and long crazy fall to the ocean.

Afterwards they watched a Lake Erie sunset together; a bleached and watery sun eased itself down on the horizon and broke like a blister, seeping red light over the poison lake. They could count the seven stacks of the Edison Electric Company. They smelled with affection the effluents of Wyandotte Chemical. They slept in one another’s arms on the colloidal, slightly radioactive swell.

Next day, he had a little hang-over. He smoked grass and consequently had the notion his chair was singing in a languid Dick Haymes voice. Outside, he was convinced the sky had been vulcanized. He tried to call Ann and got her mother who was cool to him. She reminded Payne that the whole family was packing to go to the ranch in Montana and that maybe it would be better if Payne called at the end of the summer.

Payne still could not believe that Ann would spend a minute with the other one. It broke his heart to think so. Her family hated him. She was always reluctant because of that to have him in the house at all. They knew he wasn’t working. They had seen him on motorcycles and felt he had thrown his education away. Now, on the phone, Ann’s porcine mother had it in her heart to tell him to wait until the end of summer to call. Payne doted on the pleasure it would bring to shoot the old cunt in the spine.

“Bartender,” Payne said, “my glass is leaking.” He looked at the flashing sign of the Pontchartrain Bar, visible from in here. “Have you ever tasted cormorant?”

He didn’t know George Russell, the other, but he didn’t hesitate to call him on the phone. “Listen George,” he said, “I demand a cessation of stupidities on your part.”

“Oh, Payne,” George said with pity.

“I want to help you.”

“Ah, Payne, please not that.”

“I remember you said once George that you could not live without lapels.”

“I didn’t say that,” said George with a debonair tone.

“I cannot live without lapels.”

“That’s not true. Are you drunk or taking dope?”

“Whether it’s true or not, why did you say it?”

“I didn’t say it.”

“What could it mean?”

“I didn’t say it.”

“What could that mean? ‘I cannot live without lapels’?”

“Payne,” George interrupted. “Can you live with this: Ann has been seeing me. Can you?” All Payne could remember about George was that he was what dentists call a mouthbreather. He had decent teeth which he had bought at an auction of Woodrow Wilson’s effects. George hung up. Payne had one foot in the abyss.

Someone put some change in the jukebox. Two couples who knew each other materialized in a sentimental jitterbug. It was the kind of thing sailors did with each other and with brooms when they were brokenhearted on aircraft carriers in World War Two, flight deck jitterbugs with the kamikazes coming in for the coup de grace; it was the very dance a bosun’s mate and a chief petty officer might have done a hundred and fifty-three miles out of Saipan with an eighty-five piece Navy orchestra playing Flatfoot Floogie on top of four hundred thousand tons of high explosives in a state of being approached by a religious Japanese in a bomb plane.

Payne headed back to his table, but some oddball had glommed it. “Who’s the oddball?” he asked the bartender.

“You are.”

“I saw a sign in the urinal that said ‘Please do not eat the mints.’ This goes for you.” The bartender forced a laugh, throwing back his head so that Payne could examine the twin black ovals divided by the stem of his nose. He went to his table anyway, carrying a fresh whiskey. “Tell me about your family,” he said to the oddball.

“Three of us is all,” smiled the other, “two dogs and a snake.” Payne looked at him, feeling his brain torque down into its first focus of the evening. The man picked up one of his galoshes from the floor and held it to his own ear. “I can hear Akron, Ohio,” he announced. Payne was enthralled.

The man was sloppy and stretched-looking. Seeing Payne look, he boasted of having been most monstrously fat.

“Guess.”

“Two hundred,” Payne said.

“Close. Five years ago, I weighed four eighty. C. J. Clovis. You call me Jack.” He pushed himself up. He was missing a leg. Then Payne saw the crutches. Clovis was neckless, not burly, and his head just sat in the soft puddle of his shoulders. “I lost more weight than I can lift!” He directed Payne’s attention to the various malformations of his skeleton produced by the vanished weight. The hips were splayed, for example. “My feet went flat! I had varicose veins popping on me! Danger looked from every which way!” He told Payne about his two friends in the Upper Peninsula who both weighed over four hundred and who, like Clovis, were brokenhearted because at that weight they couldn’t get any pussy. Therefore, they took a vow to lose all their excess. He dieted under the care of a doctor; his friends went on crashes of their own design. In the beginning he had reduced too fast and, consequently, as his body fed off itself, gave himself gout.

“Then I got this old fat man’s disease, gangrene, and lost my leg.”

“How long ago was this when you lost your … leg?”

“A month. But I’m going to get me an appliance and I’m as good as gold.”

“They say a missing limb continues to hurt.”

“Oh, naturally yes. Of an occasion.”

“How did these other fat guys make out?”

“How did they make out?”

“I mean how did they reduce?”

“They reduced all right,” said C. J. Clovis, looking angrily toward the bar.

“What do you mean?” Payne asked.

“They’re dead!” Clovis looked around fidgeting, looked out the window and fidgeted furiously before looking back at Payne suddenly. “I’m going to get me some appliance!” His hands flew aloft like fat birds.

“I believe that you are, Jack.”

“I’ll be rockin and a rollin,” he said with religious glee. “I’ll be good as gold! I’ll have a time! Do you understand, God damn it?”

“… yes …”

“Stay a while and see me smile! Give me a chance and I’m gone to dance! I’ll do the backover flip every trip! I’m gone to be reelin off the ceilin with a very happy feelin! I’ll be good as gold! ” Jack Clovis locked his eyes in position throughout the recital. Payne was locked in a paroxysm of embarrassment. “That is my pome,” said Jack Clovis. “You take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I could turn pro, Buster. You remember that.” Being called Buster was the only part Payne didn’t like.