Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“What do you think you’re doing?” Payne finally asked.

Ann turned a face to him as expressionless as a pudding under the glued, brilliant hair.

“What do I think I’m doing?” she repeated as though to a whole roomful of people.

On either side, the serene seascapes seemed to ridicule the nasty two-lane traffic with monster argosy cross-country trucks domineering the road in both directions. From time to time, in the thick of traffic problems, Payne would look off on the pale sand flats and see spongers with long-handled rakes standing in the bows of their wooden boats steering the rickety outboard motors with clothesline tied to their waists. Then below Islamorada he saw rusty trailers surrounded by weedy piles of lobster traps, hard-working commercial fishermen living in discarded American road effluvia.

In Marathon, a little elevation gave him the immensity of the ocean in a more prepossessing package — less baby blue — and he saw what a piss-ant portion of the terraqueous globe the land really is. They stopped to eat and Payne had turtle. The end of that street was blocked with the jammed-in immense bows of four shrimpers. Their trawling booms were tangled overhead. He could read Southern Cross, Miss Becky, Tampa Clipper and Witchcraft . On the deck of the Tampa Clipper , a fisherman in a wooden chair, his hat pulled over his eyes, and half-awake, gave the finger to a lady who sighted him through the view finder of her Kodak. When she gave up, his arm fell to the side of the chair, his head settled at an easier angle. He was asleep.

Suddenly, they were in the middle of Key West and lost with a wagonload of bats lurching behind them in side streets where it was hard to make a turn in the first place. They passed the Fifth Street Baptist Church and read its motto on a sign in front:

W

HERE

F

RIENDLINESS

I

S A

H

ABIT

AND

P

ARKING

I

S

N

OT A

P

ROBLEM

.

They ran into the old salt pond and had to backtrack. They cut down Tropical Avenue to Seminary Street down Seminary to Grinnell out Grinnell to Olivia and down Olivia to Poorhouse Lane where they got the car jammed and had to enlist the neighborhood; who helped until they got a good look and backed off, saying, “Bats!”

But suddenly Payne was happy to be in Key West. It was Harry Truman’s favorite town and Harry Truman was fine by Payne. He liked Truman’s remark about getting out of the kitchen if you couldn’t stand the heat. Payne thought that beat anything in Kierkegaard. He also liked Truman’s Kansas City suits and essential Calvinized watchfob insouciance of the pre-Italian racketeer. He enjoyed the whole sense of the First Lady going bald while the daughter wheedled her way onto the Ed Sullivan show to drown the studio audience in an operatic mud bath of her own devising.

They went past the cemetery, the biggest open space in Key West, filled with above-ground crypts, old yellow-fever victims, the sailors of the Maine , as well as the ordinary dead, if you could say that.

Ann sneered at everything, though she had acquired, quite without irony, a rural accent.

“What is this act?” Payne asked, as if his own attempts to extrapolate the land through mimicry of its most dubious societal features were not absurd.

But Ann just watched the beautiful wooden houses go by; each, it seemed, separated from the other by a vacant lot full of moldering and glittering trash or by small, rusting car gardens with clumps of expired fantasies from the ateliers of Detroit.

To Ann, at that moment, America said one beautiful thing after another.

To Payne it said, I got all pig iron .

“Which way to Mallory Square?”

“Keep going.”

They kept going and hit the Thompson — O’Neill shrimp docks.

They went thataway. From afar, the anodized fantasm of the Dodge Motor Home was peerlessly evident. It sat under the quasi-Moorish battlements of the First National Bank. On the Motor Home, this note: “Payne: I’m at the Havana Hotel. Room 333. Get a move on. C. J. Clovis, Savonarola Batworks, Inc.”

Clovis himself looked petulantly from the window of Room 333 with no certainty that Payne would ever come. He could see the reflecting metal roofs of Key West, the vegetation growing up between and, across town, the Coast Guard and Standard Oil docks. He wanted to play tennis but he only had one arm and one leg.

He tried to interest himself in the builder’s plans for the tower which was to be built on nearby Mente Chica Key. But he was upset. He wanted vodka. He wanted a tart. That girl of Payne’s was a tart. Why didn’t he get rid of her? A rich tart with an old rich tart for a mother and a successful stupid male tart for a father. He should have hit the bastards for a fifteen-level bat atrium.

Clovis was quite upset. He had an ailment.

In a small glowing plastic cube hovered the numeral 3. Payne pressed the cube with his index finger and the doors slid shut and the two of them soared upwards. Presently, they stopped and the doors opened and there was a sign.

←300–350

351–399→

Payne turned left down the corridor, leading Ann by the hand. Ann’s prole mania made her strike up conversations with every Cuban chambermaid that were singularly brittle in the vastitude of their misunderstanding.

Finally, room 333. A knock.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

“Come in. I can’t come to the door. I’ve got an ailment.”

They went in. Clovis was on the bed, the covers pulled up under his chin. He looked peaked.

“I’ve got one this time,” he said in the chanting voice he always used in speaking of illness.

“What.”

“I’ve got a real dandy on this run,” he said.

“The other leg.”

“No.” Clovis looked out of the window a long time. A tear tracked down his cheek. He did not look back at them. “My heart is on the fritz.”

They sat down. This was a sorry way to start the venture. There was work to be done. It was warm. You could go for a swim and all be friends.

“From a fugitive’s point of view,” said Clovis, pulling himself together, “this is the worst place in the world. You can’t get off the highway anywhere from here back to the mainland for a hundred-and-fifty miles. The bastards would have you funneled.”

“Are you planning to be a fugitive?”

“No. Payne, how are your hemorrhoids?”

“Fine; thank you for asking.”

“Take care of them before they get out of hand. Once they’re thrombosed you get impaction and every other damn thing.”

“They’re already thrombosed.”

“Then you’re in for a postoperative Waterloo.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not having them operated on.”

“Well, that’s just what I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask me what?”

“Whether you wouldn’t join me in the hospital.”

“No, I won’t.”

“This time I’m scared.”

“I don’t care. The answer is no.”

“Where is your humanity?” Ann inquired, thinking of how that lay at the roots of Western culture.

“Among the dying grunions,” Payne replied, “at Redondo Beach.”

They put everything — Hudson Hornet, wagon and motor home — under a shade tree behind the Two Friends Bar. Payne fed the bats and wondered if they missed their home in the limestone cave. It had gotten hot.

Once inside the motor home, Payne drew all the blinds and turned on the air conditioner. It was soon comfortable and they napped on the broad foam bed. When they awoke, it was dark. Ann was chewing a large wad of gum and sipping from a bottle of whiskey she had bought at the Two Friends Bar while Payne slept. She poured him a drink without saying anything. She was strolling around without her clothes on.