Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

His brain sagged gently into a peaceful and celestial neutrality. His eyes moistened from the lacy steam that arose from the water as though from a druid’s tarn. His mind was little more than the cipher which activates the amoeba and the paramecium.

Only then did the labyrinth of his system begin to confound him; first with bowel misgivings which, in his beatitude, he tried to ignore; then with a series of seizures that ran through his viscera like lightning. It was too late to ignore them.

He grabbed the stainless-steel sides as though it were a tossing boat and, moaning aloud, felt the sharp contractions of that most privy and yet imperious of the intestines.

Looking down in his abandonment of all hope, he saw, as though a cloud had crossed the sun, the water darken suddenly around him. And he knew that the worst had happened.

He wrenched at the controls violently until the bath shut off and he sat in the now stilled fluid. A moment later, Clovis, sensing something, carefully shut off his own and the two men sat with new silence roaring up around them.

Suddenly, Jack Clovis wrinkled his face violently.

“Good Christ, Payne! What in God’s name are you cooking there!”

Payne got to his feet looking, really, as though he had just come from Miami, a city he never liked that much. And he was too far gone to be amused.

Doctor Proctor, manipulant-grandee of the proctoscope, an instrument which brings to the human eye vistas which are possibly forbidden (possibly not), lazed at home watching the Olympic bobsled trials on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The lush blue carpet cuddled his pink physician’s heels and when he walked across its Middle Eastern richesse, he pretended to himself that it was the guts, tripe and visceral uproar amid which his profession obliged him to live.

Here it was different. Here where the goggle-eyed street urchins of his most valuable canvases stared at one another from the soft contours of his walls, he was inclined to dream of all the things he no longer was. Then, he would find himself a little droopy and all too inclined to pop a couple of amphetamines from his big fat doctor’s stash. And then, when he overdid, as he did tonight, he would be the energetic boy of before, laughing, crying and gouging quickly at his crotch in that little athlete’s gesture of look what we have here.

Tonight, snuffling a trifle with the upshot of his high, Proctor made his way to the darkling trophy room of his Key West home; and, once again, commenced vacuuming the hundreds of dim upright mouths of his trophies with his well-used Hoover. Standing waist-deep among the winged victories and gaping loving cups, he knew, somehow, who he was.

Often, in such a mood, his nurse would appear to his imagination, often up to something freakish which Proctor could not ordinarily have contrived. Recurrently, on the other hand, she would appear nude and aslither atop an immense conduit covered with non-fat vegetable shortening. Such a thought could not have been foreborne without eventual relief; and his little wrist-flicks at himself came to linger for the serious business at hand.

But nothing disruptive, all in all. Proctor functioned. So it was that in the morning hours when most people were asleep, Proctor, who never had slept, headed for the clinic in his green Aston Martin DB-4. Heel-and-toeing to keep his revs up, he brodied and drifted through the damp morning streets of the Island City.

Well, he said to himself, life is a shakedown cruise. Wanna bet? Through housework, pills and orgasms, he had lost eight pounds since nightfall. He hadn’t been on a zombie run like this since the service where, with his usual athletic finesse, he had distinguished himself as a fighter pilot.

He had flown the almost legendary and sinister fireship, the carrier-based F4 Phantom, making night runs and day runs with the same penetrating fanaticism that vanished with very little aging and required the bolstering of pills.

For a while, all the pilot’s bugaboos had haunted him: night landings on a heaving carrier deck in the fierce rocket-laden thirty-eight-thousand-pound flying piano, hoping to hell that on that blackened deck the aircraft would find one of the four arrester wires and keep him from deep-sixing off the bow.

Vertigo: One cloudless night on the South China Sea, Proctor had been practicing his sidewinder runs and barrel rolls and high-performance climbs with the afterburner pouring the last possible thrust beyond Mach II; when suddenly his brain would no longer equilibrate and he couldn’t tell which end was up; somehow he flew pure instrument on the carrier landing, straight on for the Fresnel light on the ship’s stern, catching the fourth wire and snatching up short of a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the blackened South China Sea. He felt the entire rotation of his brain; all the physical perceptions which were his only moral facts gently rocked into place again; and the next day he started cinching them down with goof-balls.

Soon enough, the younger pilots who had begun to resent his sheepish hand on the stick saw the old fiend was intact after all; and from then on, when he came in from a strike with leftover fuel, he sneaked in around the islands and blew up junks and sank native craft with his shock wave and really made himself felt.

Naturally, the skipper who had been watching this appealing Yankee Doodle and who was alerted to this new panache by the revived Proctor habit of picking his arrester wire on landings — traditional fighter-jock’s machismo caper — called him in and, chuckling, told him to lay off because the gooks were going to load the junks with anti-aircraft equipment and start weeding out those four-million-dollar Phantoms.

Proctor quipped that he didn’t care if they got the plane as long as the seat worked. But the old skipper reminded him that Charlie would find you if you ejected and make a Countess Mara with your tongue. And still Proctor didn’t give a damn, really didn’t give a damn! He boomed, bombed, blasted and killed and sank small craft the same as always except now he did it during bombing halts when he was supposed to have been on reconnaissance.

Into his continuous vile blue yonder, Yankee Doodle Proctor went, high as high could be on various purloinings from the flight surgeon’s old kit bag; still masturbatory as all get out, he sometimes gouged at the crotch of his flight suit in the middle of combat, giggled when flak gently rocked the aircraft or snuffed one of the smaller Skyhawks that always went on strike with the dreamy, invulnerable McDonnell Phantoms.

Sometimes, in over the trees supersonically, he would get glimpses of Migs deployed on jungle runways, some of them scrambling. And once a SAM ground-to-air missile, like a white enamel tree trunk, appeared in the formation and Proctor purposely let it pick him up and follow for a thousand feet before he duped its computer brain into overshooting. Again, he giggled and gouged at his flight suit to imagine that prize gook investment on its pitiful try at killing the sun, which Proctor had substituted for himself by way of a crazy parabolic maneuver that made the pale metal wings of the Phantom lift gently with the force of God knew how many G’s; that made even old giggling Yankee Doodle’s face pull and flow toward his ass; that made the smooth voluptuous curves of Asia, caressed by his shock wave, clog with unimaginable scrollery of trees and detail. He climbed, sonic booms volleying over the country, after-burners pulled to the utmost and cleared out at fifty thousand feet in whorls, volutes, beautiful spirals of vapor.

Three weeks of gouging had made a shiny spot on his flight suit.

How close this all now seemed. And, really, it spoiled his driving; a sports car for God’s sake with its stupid bland instruments that indicated the ridiculous landbound progress of the machine. By the time he was in the staff parking lot, he was cranky. A pharmaceutical supply truck was parked at the loading bay and Proctor, already coming down, imagined eating his way through the truck, stem to stern. Inside the first door, he spotted a gabble of creepy little interns with careful telltale stethoscopes hanging out of their pockets. Proctor told them to break it up and they did. They knew Proctor would besmirch them at staff meetings. In the involuted parlance of the world of interns, Proctor was an “asshole.” But this was unfair to Proctor, an altogether harmlessly overpaid popinjay of the medical profession.