Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

The crowd, too, was sobered by the sight of the multiple amputee. “My partner’s slighting remarks,” he began, “about minority groups are not necessarily the opinion of the management. Ahaha. Ahmm.” As far as the crowd was concerned, Clovis was a dead man. “You’re ah you’re a um a really great audience folks!” Then simply, humbly, “And a much appreciated customer.” He smiled, head bowed, awaiting the kind of response Payne had gotten. It never came. Better speed things up. Better speed them right the fuck up before this dude comes down like a bomb.

The potato salad had begun to stir. Dexter Fibb nervously crushed his worn blue-and-gold yachtsman’s cap about his ears, preparing himself for action, and cried, “Let’s put these bats to work!”

Clovis suddenly and almost spasmodically went into his speech about encephalitis and about how bats were like little angels and how mosquitoes were like flying pus-filled syringes. But he ran down like a child’s gyroscope. His face, at last, revealed his defeat.

Only Payne was able to start the applause — a strange noise like breaking waves. The vacant faces were intent with the motion of their hands beneath them. It surged through the mangroves in a gesture of confidence and of more than that: of faith.

Ultimately, though, looking into all those hopeful vacant faces gathered at this tower from every corner of the U.S.A., his own flush with the purloined funds and a special joy that went beyond that, Clovis snipped as he must with heavy shears the blue satin ribbon. Dexter Fibb gave a self-conscious rebel yell, got a red face and pulled the rope. The polyethylene came down the sides of the tower, caressing it as it went, lofting and flowing in wind-borne plastic beauty. Bright orange bats poured into the sky.

They were scattered at first, just as they ought to have been, circulating in the immediate area. But then they began to form up. A single shape, more demonstrative than an arrow, in a color derived from every neon monstrosity in the land, formed on the soaring sky at the edge of America. All the hopes of all those empty faces were pinned to that shape that held brilliant overhead a moment more then headed for the interior of the continent and disappeared.

Quite rightly, the wail went up: “They’re gone! They’re gone forever! They won’t ever come back!” and so on.

And when the anguish had passed, the potato salad began to advance upon the podium. Dexter Fibb, seeing slippery-looking Payne and the horrifically malformed Clovis, cued the crowd with outraged glances at the two. A serious question with its roots deep in Econ had arisen.

With the first movement of the crowd toward him, Clovis fell to the boards, dragging the Telefunken microphone after himself, convenient to his lips. The great portable speakers transmitted his gasps and howls: “MY HEART IS ON THE FRITZ!” It was amplified over the sea of bat fans, bug loathers and mangroves. “THE FRITZ I SAID!”

Croaking even more impressively than Clovis, Dexter Fibb cried, “Look at him, he’s dying!” and stared pale and mute at this crooked item on the stage. Payne listened to Clovis perform extravagantly at the microphone, bleating a ravaged play-by-play as to the condition of his ticker. Payne knelt consolingly beside him. Clovis glanced at him, simulated a grisly death rattle, looked at Payne once again in surprise, looked all around himself and said, “No.” Then, without further notice, he died quite blankly.

Payne was the solitary customer at the burial. Though, because of some logistical miscalculation, row upon row of empty folding chairs faced the oblong black hole in the sod. Overhead, a green and white canopy — a pavilion — was turn-buckled tautly on a galvanized pipe frame. Four men took the coffin, a piece of mildly pretentious metal furniture containing the jury-rigged mortal remains of C. J. Clovis, and lowered away. Payne sat on a folding chair, his legs crossed tight on themselves, leaned his face heavily into his hands and thought, “Oh, gee. Oh, fuck.”

Payne stayed, after the four men left, in the big open cemetery. The skeletal Poinciana trees stood upon an enormous ocean sky with tenuous, high-altitude horsetail clouds. Key West, a clapboard town accreted upon a marine hummock at the end of the continental shelf, seemed a peculiar place to have buried Clovis, who had entrusted himself to Payne. Overhead, a pair of frigate birds circled in perfect synchronization as though fixed to the ends of a glass fulcrum.

Payne was tapped gently upon the shoulder by a recent graduate of the police academy who said, “You are under arrest.”

“What is the charge?”

“Fraud.”

In the police cruiser, Payne quietly began to slip a little. They drove past the cryptic gestures of docks, careened trawlers and crawfishing boats of Garrison Bight. They passed the breaking Atlantic at the foot of Simonton Street. “Take me to the Burger King,” he told the cop without getting an answer. “Officer, what you see before you is a futuristic print-out of a thousand years of bog-trotting and one boat ride to an experimental republic: a fiasco.” Silence . It was dizzying to Payne. From the inside of a police sedan, Payne believed he could see a vast and unplowed interior ridge, buried beneath flags, gum wrappers and diplomas. “I have found my swerve, officer. It makes a gentle glowing contour on the history of the New World.” This hero, Nicholas Payne, began smiling. He had the oceanic feeling a thousand yards from sea. The lowering of one defunct sensorium into the sod still filled his head with the martial music of winds and supermarkets, a fugue of singing trees and internal combustion engines, of Miss America contestants past and present doing night things with sturdy flutes, an international autoharmonium of homocidal giddiness manipulated by played-out bobby soxers and sharp dressers in security councils and command modules; it was all out there, the unplowed ridge where energetic riders on winded ponies were impeded by hairdressers with bullwhips, tigerish insurance adjusters, rodents in command formation and other servants of the commonwealth. The last thing Payne said to the perplexed young policeman was, “To me he was illustrious.”

• •

By returning most of the money, the small discrepancy justified by the touristic utility of the empty tower, Payne avoided the brunt of sentencing. And finally, it was agreed that if he would re-enact his trial for the TV program Night Court , he would be let free altogether.

Payne walked into the studio. Two or three technicians wandered around trailing rubber cables and, finally, rolling a camera forward on its dolly to face a plywood judge’s bench. The “Judge” himself came in a few moments later and prated in a resonating actor’s voice that if Equity found out what he was getting for this bit they’d have him in the slammer so fast his head would swim. Once seated, his judicial mien returned and he was given a “policeman” who declared court was in session. Payne felt as if he were in a dream. He watched a man tried for manslaughter do some wonderful Karl Malden stuff, his upper lip whitening with the tension of vigorous speeches, slobbering with Actor’s Studio reality an ad-lib monologue that had the technicians winking at each other.

Then Payne, dreaming, was called, and subsequently so were the witnesses against him. The charge was fraud. The witnesses were Dexter Fibb and five Mid-Keys Boosters, including the chief petty officer, all on TV for the first time.

When they got to the death of Clovis, Payne burst into his only tears since the actuality, a weeping sleepwalker. He looked around himself, saw the trial as though through glass. The judge tried not to beam. The director crowded behind the cameramen to see this. Night Court , rich with corrective lessons, was a hit.