Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

A day later, Payne, with his biggest hang-over ever, and his companion, the poacher Junior Place, with a big one of his own; and Ann snoozing in the Hornet with an actual puker of a white lightning hang-over and her peroxide beehive full of sticks and bits of crap of one description or another, and the North Florida sun coming in like a suicide; the men paused at the end of the sandy road in the palmettos beside a pile of wrecked automobiles each of which held a little glass-and-metal still — the product of which drew a considerably better price locally than any bonded sauce you could find out at your shopping plaza. Payne was flattered at this confidential disclosure.

They had little distance to go. Junior had loaned Payne a pair of his own snakeproof pants — citrus picker’s trousers with heavy-gauge screen sewn inside a canvas sleeve from the knee down. And the two of them crossed the palmettos on a gradually upward incline, near the crest of which Junior Place began to scout back and forth for the mouth of the cave.

He told Payne to feel as best he could for a breeze. So Payne wandered the crest of the hill, feeling for a breeze that came to him shortly as a breath of something cool and watery, something subterranean rising around him. He found the entrance in a cluster of brush from which a solid cool shaft of air poured. He called out its location.

The two men carried triangular nets on long hardwood poles. Payne had his nine-battery Ray-O-Vac and Junior Place carried a carbide lamp. Junior came over and pushed aside the brush to reveal a coal-black oval in the ground, a lightless hole through which he slid as from long practice.

It proves one thing about Payne that he followed straightaway. He wanted to maintain voice contact. “How do you know C. J. Clovis?”

“Hardly know him a tall,” said Place. There was no way of knowing the immensity of this blackness; it sucked away Payne’s voice without an echo.

There were things going by his head at tremendous speed. “I had a five-minute talk with the man,” said Place. “He is a freak of nature.” The blackness pressed Payne’s face. “I’d do anything in the world for him. Come up side of me now. Okay, use the lamp.” The lights went on. The paleness of the limestone hall surprised and terrified Payne. The colliding planes of wall and ceiling appeared serene and futuristic and cold. Every overhead surface was festooned with bats. They were all folded, though some, alive to the presence of the men, craned around; and a few dropped and flew squeaking crazily through the beams of light. Then a number more came down, whirled through the room with the others; and as if by signal they all returned to the ceiling.

They set the lights where they would give them advantageous illumination; and with the long-handled nets commenced scraping pole-breaking loads from the ceiling. A million bats exploded free and circulated through the chamber in a crescendo of squeaking. They upended the bats in the plastic mesh bags and continued swiping over head. By now, they needed only to hold the nets aloft and they would fill until they could not be held overhead.

Bats poured at Payne like jet engine exhaust; pure stripes and curves of solid hurtling bats filled the air to saturation. The rush and squeaking around Payne were making him levitate. As when the dogs were in the house, he no longer knew which way his head or feet were pointing. He had no idea where the entrance was. Junior Place continued at the job, a man hoeing his garden. Payne whirled like a propeller.

When it was over, Payne had to be led out of the cave, carrying his net and shopping bag. There was an awful moment as the entrance began to pack all around him with escaping bats. When he finally stood outside the hole, he watched a single, towering black funnel, its point at the hole, form and tower over him.

He would have to tell Clovis: a tower actually made of bats.

They liberated the bats in the wagon behind the Hudson. The bats circulated, a wild squeaking whirlwind, before sticking to the screen sides to squeak angrily out at the men. Some of the bats, their umbrella wings partially open, crept awkwardly around the bottom of the wagon before clinging to the screened sides. Soon a number of them were hanging from the roof adaptably.

“Do you have any idea what a hang-over is like in the face of that?” Ann asked the two men.

They said goodbye to Junior Place at the end of the road. Payne returned the pants, gingerly fishing his own from the wagon.

Ann slumped against him and fell asleep once more. Place, at the end of his white lightning road, waved a straw hat and held his nets overhead at the edge of a palmetto wilderness in his snakeproof pants.

Payne aimed the load for Key West.

I got ten four gears

And a Georgia overdrive.

I’m takin little white pills

And my eyes is open wide.…

They woke up in the morning in the sleeping bag beside the car. The bats were running all over the wire. They already knew Payne was the one who fed them: banana and bits of dessicated hamburger.

Across a wet field in the morning in the peat smell of North Central Florida and surrounded by a wall of pines stood a rusting, corrugated steel shed with daylight coming through its sides variously. From one end, the rear quarters of a very large field mule projected; and the animal could be heard cropping within. On the broad corrugated side of the shed itself in monstrous steamboat letters, filigree draining from every corner,

FAYE’S

GIFT

SHOPPE

Payne fed the bats and started coffee on the camp stove while, her hair teased into something unbelievable, Ann shot over to Faye’s. By the time the coffee was ready, she was back at the car with long gilt earrings hanging from her ears. “Check these,” she said. “Wouldn’t they be great for when we went dancing?”

“They would be that.”

They could have made the Keys by nightfall. But Ann wanted to stop at a roadhouse near Homestead where she played all the Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, Jeannie C. Riley, Buck Owens and Tammy Wynette records on the jukebox and danced with a really unpromising collection of South Florida lettuce-pickers and midcountry drifters. Then Payne got too drunk to drive; so they slept one more night on the road at the edge of the ’glades with the bats squeaking and wanting to fly in the dark, wanting to go someplace, and Payne remembering in a way that made him upset the aborigine of ten years before.

In his liquor stupefaction — and rather woozy anyway from the tropic sogginess and the streaked red sky and the sand flies and mosquitoes and the completely surprising softness of the air and the recent memory of the yanking jukebox dancing — he was just a little alarmed by Ann’s ardor at bedtime. She had the camera within reach and he was afraid she would pull something kinky. And then he was just detached from everything that was happening to him; so that he saw, as from afar, Ann commit a primitive oral stimulation of his parts. Engorged, frankly, as though upon a rutabaga, her slender English nose was lost in a cloud of pubic hair. They had the sleeping bag open, underneath the wagon, in case it rained. Ann detected Payne’s reserve and aggressively got atop of him, hauling at his private. There was so little room that each time her buttocks lifted, they bumped the underside of the wagon and sent the bats surging and squeaking overhead. She facetiously filled the humid evening with Wagnerian love grunts.

They hit A1A heading down through Key Largo, the mainland becoming more and more streaked with water and the land breaking from large to small pieces until finally they were in the Keys themselves, black-green mangrove humps stretching to the horizon and strung like beads on the highway. Loused up as everything else in the country, it was still land’s end.