Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

A discovery that Ann was not in her room wrecked everything. Now the toilet paper, in snarls and strips forever, angered him. He thought balefully of climbing the old lady just to fix them; but felt, all in all, that he’d rather not. Free of the paper, he sauntered gloomily through the blue light tapping ashes on the rug, heartbroken. The bitch.

He bashed around the upstairs, not hearing the Fitzgeralds stir this time, and headed down to the den moaning a little. He poured another brandy, relit his cigar, gulped the brandy and smashed the glass against the far wall.

Finally, the throwing of light switches and the wily flap of carpet slippers came to his attention. A tongue of light advanced to the foot of the stairs. Payne scampered around the room repeatedly imagining he would get off with a spanking.

It was both of them. Payne was now crouched on the shelf beside the door. He turned at their sudden voices and rammed the gun cabinet door with his nose, actually slamming it. He knew paralysis. A voice: “Is this, is this, do they, where’s the—?”

Then Missus Fitzgerald was in the den fixing instantly upon the smashed glass, the shotgun on the floor and the stain of brandy. Her eyes met those of Payne. Startled, she soon let her joy upon this ruin of him as a suitor be perceived.

“I’m a person you know,” Payne claimed.

“Come.”

“With valves.”

“You’re going to get a crack at cooling your heels in our admirable county jail,” she said, moving toward him. “Do you know that?”

“I want my walking papers.”

“No. You’re going to jail you shabby, shabby boy.”

“Back off now,” Payne said, “or what I leave of your head won’t draw flies at a raree show.” He turned around and faced the bookshelves from five inches. “When I look I want you to have given me room to clear out. I’ll count three.” In the bookcases he saw, once he had focused at this close range, numerous volumes of interest, not the least of which was Borrow’s incomparable Lavengro . But he was distracted by La Fitzgerald. By the time he turned and started out, she was screeching and hauling at the telephone. He wormed his way out of the narrow window into the garden; every pleached bush biting at once; dark, bark-packed, red meat bites all over him.

He went on all fours through the garden beds. He went, not like a man on his hands and knees, but with abrupt swinging motions of his limbs, head high for observation, hunting and on the move. This is the veldt, he thought, and this is how lions act.

I am leading the game, he thought, or not?

During the night, Payne frequently woke up, overtaken by horror. But nothing happened. He should have foreseen that. Not calling the cops was a precise piece of Fitzgerald snobbery. One’s name in the papers.

He had breakfast with his mother who came in from an early round of golf. Her hair in a smart athletic twist, she flapped down driving gloves beside a robust ox-blood purse. Radiating cold outdoor air, she brought their breakfast to the porch. Today she was a lady eagle, Payne noted. She reached for a croissant with her modeled Gibson Girl hand.

They were able to watch the river from here. The table was surrounded by the telescope, bird books and freighter shipping codes with which Payne’s father kept track of profitable tonnage on the river. (“There goes Monsanto Chemical loaded to the scuppers! They’re making a fortune! Don’t take my word for it, for God’s sake! Read about it in Barron’s !”)

Through the top of the glass table at which they ate, Payne could see both of their feet splayed on the terrazzo. He watched his mother probe daintily at her cheerless breakfast of champions awash in blue skimmed milk. And he knew by the warm detachment of her smile that she was about to spring something on him.

“What is it, Ma?”

Her smile soared up out of the wheat flakes, inscrutable and delicate. “You know Dad,” her voice rich with inflections of toleration, of understanding. “You know how he is, well, on the subject of you doing something a tiny, well, the tiniest bit reg ular or res pec table, you know how he, how he, how he—

“I know but stop that.”

“What?”

“How he, how he.”

“How he wants you to simply take advantage of your most obvious advantages and join the firm; and it’s not—”

“I will not subject myself to a career in lawr. I had my little taste of lawr in lawr skyewl.”

“I see.”

“Yass, lawr skyewl.”

“Yes, well I do think you ought to know that if you repeat that speech to him—” She said this simply and very wisely. “—it would be useful to plan on your having your hash settled. Uh, but good, I’d say.” She raised one thin arm emphatically, holding aloft her spoon; and a drop of milk, like a drop from the pale blue vein on her arm, quivered on the hand then ran into her palm. She turned her eyes to it. “You sneer at a man who offered to give you—”

“Strings.”

“—to give you—”

“Too many strings attached.”

“To give you, never mind, to hand over to you the finest law practice in the entire Downriver.”

“Altogether too many strings attached to the finest lawr practice in the entire Downriver.”

“But no—”

“But no I wanted to do something all by my lonesome possibly not even in the Downriver at all.”

“Really, Nicholas, shut up, wouldn’t you.” Payne put a piece of hot glazed almond roll into his mouth and stopped talking. Maybe Duke Fitzgerald was hiring someone to kill him at this very minute and he was sending almond roll down a gullet that was doomed. He looked fondly on as his mother lifted her spoon again and dipped a chunk of bread and yolk from her egg cup.

“You think that your allowance is to be resumed.”

“Okay, please, enough. I always supply my own funds.”

“I couldn’t go through it again,” she went on doggedly. “Like last Fall. Your father working and you duck hunting every day of the week and filling our freezer with those vulgar birds. And the year before riding up and down the country on the motorcycle. It makes my head swim. Nicky, it makes my head swim!”

“I have to keep on the qui vive for spiritual opportunity.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I do.”

“And poor Ann. I sympathize with her and with her parents.” Little do you know, Payne thought. I’ve got to bear down hereabouts.

“Mom,” he inquired. “You want my motto? This is some more Latin.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Non serviam. Good, huh? My coat-of-arms shows a snake dragging his heels.” His mother started giggling.

There was nobody here to make him see the world as a mud bath in which it is right tough to keep showing a profit. He invented a joke to the effect that blood was always in the red and death was always in the black; and thought: What a great joke!

By the time his father got to him that evening, Payne, by careful examination, found himself adrift. The two men each had a drink in hand. His father had had his annual physical and was in an already exacerbated mood. He’d had a barium enema. If you had an intestinal impaction, he claimed, “that barium bastard would blow the son of a bitch loose.” Payne said he would keep it in mind.

There had been trouble with the furnace. Since the house had been in his mother’s family for four generations, that whole sector was implicated by the mechanical failings of the furnace. Mister Payne presently insisted that the machine had been salvaged from the English Channel where it had received the attentions of the German U-boat corps in 1917. “It was installed in our cellar with all its brass and corrosion intact and in its earliest glory. The touching ships’ wheels by which the heat is adjusted have all seized in position so that the only real regulatory control we have is opening the doors and windows. I have been increasingly unamused during winter months in creating a false Springtime for six cubic acres around our house. The Socony Vacuum and Oil Corporation’s fee for this extravaganza customarily runs to three thousand per diem.”