Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“Steady as she goes,” he said to the mate, who took the wheel with a gravity that was possibly not genuine. He waited for the captain to head for the lighted companionway. “If you want yer trousers pressed, skipper, why the winch would be an awful good spot to leave them,” he said, bringing down the house.

It was a starry night going to Galveston with the boom of the big trawler swaying a black metronomic line over the silver fan of wake.

And it was real life out there on the Gulf of Mexico; because down in the hold of a Key West shrimper, a person of culture was committing experience.

The tower went up with embarrassing speed and now it was Saturday on Mente Chica Key. The bats had all been dyed day-glo orange so that their bug scavenging circulation would be plain to all. Confined by a single polyethelene sheet, every last one of them was sealed in the tower.

There was a blue satin ribbon tied about the base of the tower. The tower itself stood stern and mighty and impervious to termites against the Seminole sky. Around its base, the Mid-Keys Boosters stirred by the hundreds in anticipation. There were many military personnel in Polynesian mufti. There were many retired persons of legendary mediocrity known locally as “just people.” There were many snapping camera pests from the newspapers.

All around the area, the mangroves released their primitive smell and made expanses of standing water where billions upon billions of the little dark awful salt-water mosquitoes would be born in perpetuum , bats or no bats, quite honestly.

Nicholas Payne and C. J. Clovis flanked Dexter Fibb, aging Grand Master of the Mid-Keys Boosters, and explained how he must yank the manila rope, how he must bring down the polyethylene sheet to release the bats so that they might begin devouring the mosquitoes that this minute were making every spectator’s head lumpy. Payne, unable to accustom himself to a sanitary napkin, shifted about irritably.

Dexter Fibb crushed his worn blue-and-gold yachtsman’s hat about his ears, preparing himself for action, should it come his way.

As anyone could have seen by looking into their eyes, Clovis and Payne were flush with the seventeen thousand.

The dedication of the bat tower was seen as a great chance to cement the U. S. Navy’s relationships with the Downtown Merchants’ Association. So there were any number of Mister Fix-It types of formidable rank, often chief petty officer, on loan from the base. These helpers, enclouded by mosquitoes, gathered around bits of electronic gear, loudspeakers, strobes and emergency gadgets, sonic shark repellants and smoke bombs for attracting helicopters. One group, ordinarily employed maintaining the kind of fighter planes Doctor Proctor himself had flown, had erected a banner over their project that read:

PHANTOM PHIXERS

Some of the wives had laid out tables of country fixings, jams and jellies and whatnot, in a sentimental materialization of the kind of quasi-rural bonhomie that seemed a millimeter from actual goose-stepping and brown-shirt uproars of bumpkin fascism.

Payne moved through, scared to death. He saw the tower and the old wagon beneath, the bats whirring, vortical. The mosquitoes were definitely a problem. One reason the bats were whirring, vortical, and not sleeping was that the mosquitoes were biting them all the time and the bats couldn’t do a thing about it.

To show that their husbands had gotten priority tours, some of the Navy wives wore grass skirts and red bandana tops. Beyond their muscular shoulders you could see the tower, the crowd, the whirring bat wagon, the mangroves and the hot glistening sky. Kids pegged rocks at the bat wagon and everyone swatted and dervished in clouds of mosquitoes.

One of the husbands, a chief petty officer, darkened his crew cut with an oily hand and said to mid-air: “This oscillator is givin me a fit.” The chief’s wife was reading the newspaper.

“Listen ta this what Pola Negri has to say: ‘I was the star who introduced sex to the screen but I don’t like nudity and obscenity in today’s films. Movies and men were more romantic in my day.’ I buy that.”

“I do too, honey,” said the chief, “but I haven’t got time to think about it. Do you read me? I’ve got this oscillator and that rectifier back at the hangar I was mentioning which is causing me to throw a fit.”

Payne was all ears. The wife saw and addressed her remarks to him.

“Don is trying to make E9 before he retires,” the wife informed Payne, “then he is going to open a TV repair on Big Coppitt Key.”

“What I don’t have time to think about,” said Don, the chief petty officer, “that is, if I am ever gonna operate a TV repair on Big Coppitt, is Pola Negri’s sex life.”

“Although Don would agree, wouldn’t you Hon, that things in movies has got way out of line.”

“I haven’t got time for a bunch of beaver shows,” Don told simply everybody, “Pola Negri’s or anybody else’s. I got this oscillator on the blink, frankly.”

“What’s it for?” Payne asked politely.

“Well, it’s not for nothing if it’s on the blink,” said Don. “You follow that, don’t you?”

“Yes …”

“And the rest I can’t explain unless you got a U.S. of America Navy rate in electronics which you don’t.”

Payne wandered away without reply. He felt, somehow, that he was in no position to start skirmishes around here. But that wasn’t enough; the chief followed him. “Me’n the wife,” he said brazenly, “think you’re takin this outfit to the cleaners.”

“The cleaners?”

“That’s right. I have had a look at the tab. There’s quite the margin of profit.”

“How much would you say?”

“Two-thirds.”

“Way off.”

“Am I?”

“I’m afraid you have no head for economics. Econ as we used to say.”

“Uh huh. You know, us ordinree citizens has about had it with being milked all the time.”

“You’re not being milked.”

“We’re being milked. Don’t contradict me.”

“You’re being taken to the cleaners,” Payne corrected. “And if you had something going on in your head besides a few gummy notions of how to work less and keep the old lady in Monkey Ward’s pedal-pushers and plastic bath clogs, you’d never get taken. Now, unless you want to come out and play with the grown-ups, I suggest you quit whining and go back to fixing wires for the U.S. of America Navy before you spoil your credit with them. Isn’t all that many outfits have room for you time-servers.”

The chief came very close, squinting. He waved a whole handful of fingers slowly in Payne’s face. He tilted his head. “Amo tell you one thing sumbitch; if I see a way to come in on you, amo take it.” The not quite pitiable swab was worked up to the point that, with any more goading, he would have had a philosophical outburst with references to the nation and its perpetrating enemies. There seemed to be no cure for pests like Payne but automotive decals and secret handshakes. The freaks were coming out of the woodwork.

Payne joined Clovis at the tower where the two of them greeted the faithful. Payne stood beside him with an easy winning grin and waited for the group to clear. “Do you get the feeling they’re on to us?” he asked with a smile for a small lady gorged with potato salad who yoo-hooed from the mangroves, flapping at a cloud of insects with a red plastic picnic fork.

“Sure do,” Clovis smiled to them all. “Let’s just hope we can keep it glued together until the ceremony is over. I notice you’re limping.”

Some moments later, the chief petty officer of various electrical pursuits came toward the tower, only to set up the loudspeakers that would amplify Clovis’ singular voice. Nevertheless, he made Payne nervous. Payne had begun to regret his speech about taking people to the cleaners; and, in fact, had lost what little interest he had had in the money; so that he was in a very bleak frame of mind about their prospects.