Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

“At what,” he asked baldly.

“Why after I get that appliance I might take up an instrument. I could go a hundred different ways. You’ll be able to hear me laughin a mile off and performin on some God damned instrument.” He swung his head angrily through a hundred eighty degree sweep. “When I think of them other two fat boys and what they’re missing. Shoot! they too smarted themselves that time.” Payne thought of the two fat boys ballooned against the insides of their coffins while his old friend schemed about an artificial limb, entirely magic in its pink plastic and elastic hinges.

The two men sat in a field of formica and did not speak. Payne could not accept the relief of an electric pinball machine that bloomed for him. Even without his gratitude, it spilled its pastel clouds and rang its bells while an unmoved player draped two fingers on the plunger and waited for it to get his victory out of its system.

“May I have your ear?” asked C. J. Clovis, a disturbing question from an amputee. “I need your confidence. You have heard haven’t you of farmers who bring ten citrus fruits to bear from a single tree. You have heard of winter wheat. You have encountered, possibly, forced vegetables. I cannot go into it at this time; but let me say only this. There is a special application of these wonders that applies to the life of bats. And the potential? Top dollar. I will say no more.

“My own appliance,” he continued to say, “which I mean to have in no time flat will be itself a natural wonder. I have confidence in it. It will have more actual articulations in it than a real limb. Though I will still be a monopod, this aluminum wonder will fetch me from spot to spot. Your name and address?” Payne gave it to him. “Let me drink in peace, sonny. And one last thing. Remember, won’t you, that I am in the Yellow Pages.”

“Yes, sir.”

You do meet some people in a bar, thought Payne who continued drinking. Gradually, he ceased to think of the unimaginable C. J. Clovis; and to nurse, instead, his obsession with the possible infidelities of Ann. He thought of calling the house but knew his fears would be heard in his voice. He was, moreover, a little intimidated by her parents. They were good at their world at least; and he seemed bad even at his. Darling be mine I love you. More Black-Jack Daniels, he said, and make it snappy. I am the customer. It was brought. “I pay,” he said lashing simoleons to the countertop. “I own a chain of wurlitzer chicken parlors and every Grade-A fryer has my brand on its ass.” Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air. Payne reeled into the night.

He was standing in front of the Fitzgeralds’ door, in the dark, with no good in mind. Ann would be asleep. Inside of him, where all secrets were borne in darkness, a kind of Disneyland of the intestines went into operation, throwing forth illusions, mistimings and false alarums. Payne had a moment of terrible littleness. He pulled his sleeve back to learn the time and discovered he no longer owned a watch. He felt better. He saw again how he might be illustrious. The wrought brass knocker on the recessed oak door said FITZGERALD in stern, majuscule letters; above, heraldic devices worked in the metal itself proclaimed the Fitzgeralds rampant animals of one sort or another; while below — a pause while Payne goes completely out of focus, considers his mortality, our times and the music of the spheres, and refocuses — while below, then, a semicircle of smaller English uncials warned, “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.” It had been made to order, Payne surmised, by a microcephalic pump jockey from Burbank.

A stern Payne lifted the knocker as to announce himself, stopping on the upstroke. Its squeaking changed his mood. His thoughts were awash with all the noises he hated; especially Pomeranian dogs, wind chimes and windowpanes wailing under soft cloths. He lowered the knocker and released it.

Then he thought very hard. He stood without moving for a long moment and he thought quite as hard as he could. And when he had absolutely enough of that he turned the door knob slowly and firmly, opened the door, stepped inside and closed the door behind: a felon.

All of the lights were turned out on the first floor and in the living room, though there seemed to be light enough in the air for him to see his way; and crystal shone dully on the end tables. He wandered out of the living room and into the den, shutting the door behind.

In almost the first cabinet he rifled, he found brandy and the most magnificent Havana cigars he had ever seen, the legendary coronas, Ramon Allones Number One. His mouth was watering before he had one lit. With the first blue puff unraveling in the air, he poured himself a tall slug of brandy. He pulled Fitzgerald’s Holland-and-Holland shotgun down from its cabinet, threw it up to his shoulder and, in his happiness, believed he saw the big canvasbacks coming in flat, slipping just under the wind and flaring all around him.

Could the Fitzgeralds have heard? Could they have heard him making shotgun noises with his mouth? Big ones? Like a twelve-gauge makes? He went to the door, stood behind it, pushed it open with his foot and jumped into the opening, brandishing the shotgun in the darkness. If anyone had been there, the situation had been clear and they had chosen not to show themselves. Payne pulled the door shut again and, holding the shotgun by the barrels, rested the butt on his shoulder and sat down, staring out of the dark window at the darker branches against it. “Pleasure is not the absence of pain,” he said aloud and swallowed all of the brandy. Instantly his eyes brimmed with tears and he ran around the room crying, “I’m dying, Egypt, dying!” Then he sat down again, took off his shoe, put the barrels of the Holland-and-Holland in his mouth and, sight unseen, pulled the trigger with his toe. There was a single, metallic, expensive and rather ceremonial English click. He took the barrels out of his mouth and thoughtfully replaced the cigar.

Feeling his way along with the shotgun, he began to explore the house. He went upstairs in the streaming moonlight. The first room on the right was a bathroom with a sunken tub and a shower nozzle on a pivoting arm. Payne unzipped his fly and began to urinate into the toilet, carefully shooting for the porcelain sides of the bowl. Then — and the gesture was perfectly aristocratic — he shifted his stream to the center of the bowl. It made a lot of noise. Then he flushed the toilet.

Payne tucked the end of the toilet paper in his back pocket, without detaching it from the roll, and returned to the hall. The paper quietly unwound behind him like a cave-explorer’s twine. Over his shoulder, he could see its reassuring stripe in the darkness.

At the first bedroom door, he turned the knob. The door caught and would not open freely. He hesitated, then gave it a good jerk. It came free with a small creak. In the gaping space was an enormous double bed, Fitzgerald on his face, his wife on her back facing the ceiling. The enemy. It was some moments before he realized that the door was letting the wind pass through uninterrupted and the organdy curtains were standing into the room and fluttering and making noise. When he shut the door behind, he felt the unmistakable hum of fear. It had set up headquarters under his sternum. He lost track of what he was doing. His coordination departed and he made unnecessary noise with his feet. He still bravely managed to get to the edge of the bed and look down at the muzzle of the shotgun bobbing under Missus Fitzgerald’s nose. He had occasion to recall the myriad exquisite ways she had found to make him uncomfortable. He remembered too — looking at her laid out like this — that Saint Francis Borgia had been impelled to his monkhood through horror at the sight of the corpse of Isabella of Portugal. Beside her, and invisible in a ledge of shadow, her husband rotated in the blankets and unveiled his wife. Wearing only a pair of floppy prizefighter’s trunks labeled Everlast , her gruesome figure was revealed. It upset Payne to see such a thing. She began to stir then, and he withdrew the gun. In the moonlight, he could see where her nostrils had fogged its blue steel. The room was filled with cigar smoke now. Under Payne’s eyes, the two Fitzgeralds blindly and in slow motion fought for the covers. She won and left him shivering and naked. He was as fuzzy and oddly shaped as a newborn ostrich.