Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

Around himself, he could hear the doctor talking, nipping off the words as if to challenge a misunderstanding of his grandiose medical technicalities. Payne felt that something like the same smugness and expertise must attend the performance of electrocutions, the kind of officiousness that would make a condemned man hesitate before using the terms “hot seat” or “fry.”

Proctor was cranky. He needn’t have made this kind of a mess. And so he muttered with the usual authoritarian voice that there wasn’t one thing there he couldn’t clean up. Not one.

Still, he didn’t know what had become of his coordination. Ordinarily, he could incise the most perfect demi-eclipse around the base of the hemorrhoid and dissect the varix from the external sphincter with a deft turn of the wrist. Truly, this was surgery that could have been performed with a rotary mower; and yet, he was barely up to it.

So, instead of a nice clean finish, he had to hunt up and down the patient’s dirt chute for bleed points, stop them — in one case resorting to catgut, so nasty was the lesion — and then impatiently make a thick dressing the size of a catcher’s mitt to sop up the serosanguineous ooze that was surely going to be a part of this man’s postoperative period.

He had Payne wheeled away unconscious after a veritable hosing down with demerol. He indicated he would have the nurse remain. When the door was shut and Proctor looked around at the spattered operating room, the nurse stood without motion. Proctor spotted smart wads of disapprobation in her eyes.

“Nice little rectum you left him with there,” she said in a brave squeak, “with your cut-and-try surgery there.”

“A bleeder.”

“That poor boy,” she said. “I have never in my life witnessed a thing like that. It almost looked like you were trying to make some sort of meal back there.”

“What meal!”

“I don’t know, some, I don’t know, almost like some sort of pasta fazoula or—”

“Pasta fazoula! Are you Italian? Pasta fazoula is this great Italian dish—” The nurse waved him silent with a harsh and impatient motion.

“God, Doctor, I was illustrating something oh never mind I …”

“Nurse, I used to sit on the starboard catapult during international emergencies, waiting to go bomb. In a forty-thousand-pound aircraft with wings that wouldn’t glide a sparrow if the engines ever failed: a flying piano. And me in the driver’s seat getting to feel more and more like pure crash-cargo, lady. And from my viewpoint on the steam catapult I could see, below me in the waters of the South China Sea, twenty-foot man-eating sharks that had been feeding on Oriental sea burials for a thousand years. How do you think I felt?”

“How?”

“Punk. Those sharks would break up a funeral halfway through the services and there’s me on the starboard catapult: one flame-out and you’re so much fish food. And you tell me pasta fazoula.”

“But Doctor I—”

“Tell me cut-and-try, do you?”

“Doctor, I—”

“I’ve had enough. I thought that after war a man could return to a life of service with interludes of silence spent among a tasteful collection of art objects.”

“Doctor, how can I make it up to you?”

Payne lay quiet as a fossil in the deep sweeping benignity of demerol, the Kuda Bux of Key West. Pale surgical lights rolled by as moons. Then it was blistering dry and hot; an expanse of macadam curled at the far edges and made twenty-nine identical mountains. Payne held a big, ice cold chronometer.

A bedside view would have shown that, if only for the time being, Proctor, Ann and Clovis had made of Nicholas Payne pure meat.

Finally, in the middle of the night, he woke up laughing in complete weakness. “Seep, seep, seep.” Clovis, in perfect health, yelled, “Shut up, can’t you! I’m a dead goose as it is for crying out loud.”

Payne opened his mind like the sweet dusty comic strip from a pink billet of Fleer’s bubblegum and saw things as deep and appropriate as soft nudes on the noses of B29’s. He saw longhorn cattle being driven over the Golden Gate Bridge, St. Teresa of Avila at the Mocambo, pale blue policemen nose-to-bung in an azure nimbus around the moon.

He had happy dreams. He could hear the punctual ringing of the first pair of steel taps on his first pair of blue suede shoes and remembered Jerry Lee Lewis climbing a piano in Miami in fiery lemon-colored underwear, assaulting the keys with hands feet head knees, two-foot platinum hair flapping the Steinway contours and howling GREAT BOWLS OF FAR!

Jerry Lee knew how to treat a piano.

• •

He awoke early in the morning in the sharpest kind of pain and with a feeling of clarity. The principal menaces were behind. And the rather murky situation with Ann seemed to have fallen into place; though he would have been hard put to say where. He felt as if he were collecting into one shape and that he would soon make a kind of sudden expansion. He would stop feeling the little nerve headaches urge their way up from his neocortex. He would get his saliva back and his lips wouldn’t stick to his teeth when he was talking.

It wasn’t at all long before he remembered the dreams of Ann and saw how extremely selective they were; to the effect that she was present in the dreams and absent in reality. An insistent phrase pressed itself upon him: I couldn’t have been more of a pig. He knew very well that an attempt to make something perfect — a love that would not exclude towers and romantic riskings of the neck — had turned swiftly into a regular fuck-up flambeau, staggering even in memory. No, he thought, it must be that I couldn’t have been more of a pig.

Soon enough, he went on a cheerless regime of mineral oil and a soft low-residue diet. Nevertheless, early in the second day, after half a dozen Sitz baths had restored the firmer edges to his personality, he found it necessary to adjourn to the bathroom for his first postoperative bowel movement.

Why go into such a nightmare? A single enormous turd explored every surgical error Proctor had made. Somewhat to his own discredit, Payne howled like the Anti-Christ.

And when he heard Proctor and the nurse muddling around the room outside the john, he booted the door open exactly as he had booted open the door on his grandfather’s disused farmstead, shamelessly revealing himself in an exhibit of fearful squattery and tragically droned, “You bastards core me like an apple and let me have a hard stool two days later! That makes me laugh my God that makes me laugh!”

He wouldn’t shut up though he could see Ann snapping away with her Nikon. Next to his bed, wet roses soaked on a newspaper; the note was hers: “This is it.”

Ann looking in at this ashen, pooping, howling form felt, thus early in her career, a grave seepage of idealism, an invidious pissing away of all that was good and held meaning. She found herself staring out the window past the parking lot and the blackened contours of asphalt, past the lunatic geometry of Key West roofs to the dynamo sky of America; and turned to smile inwardly; hers was one dream that wouldn’t get off the ground.

It was a pleasure to sit at the wheel, the diesels not straining, and listen to the ship-to-shore. The captain found on a clear night like tonight he could pick up the other boats as far off as the Cay Sal Bank. After a month in the Tortugas and Marquesas and a week or two violating the nursery ground, he was ready to go back to Galveston. Where he was known.

“You don’t figure she’d use the camera to blackmail no one?”

The mate who looked more and more like a hillbilly song star the more the running lights accentuated his face’s declivities, said, “Of course not, Captain. This here is just some sort of adventurer.” The captain got up happy.