Thomas McGuane: The Bushwacked Piano

“I understand how you feel,” said Payne lamely.

“No you don’t. I learned yesterday that the breakwater is sloughing at inconceivable speed into the river. I’m afraid if I don’t pour a little concrete in there, we’ll lose the pump house this winter.”

Payne held his cold glass to his forehead. “I saw it was crumbling myself.” He crunched an ice cube; an illusion of his own teeth shattering.

“You don’t realize the cost of these things,” his father mentioned drily, his eyes leaden with authority.

“But if it has to be done.”

“Of course it-has-to-be-done. But you regret the cost of it. The cost almost overshadows the value of the pump house you’re trying to save .”

Payne gave this a moment’s quiet thought.

“Perhaps you’ll let it go then,” he said.

“And lose the pump house! With an irreplaceable pump!”

“Just what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to advise me. I would like to hear your ideas.”

“Sell the house and buy an A-frame somewhere very far inland.”

“Oh, well, if you’re laying for something.”

“How much sense does that make?”

“And maybe you ought to go easy on that stuff,” said his father, lordly in the precision of his tailored livery. He jabbed a finger at Payne’s drink, now splashing, then running, off the wall. “And if you don’t want a drink, don’t pour yourself one. The solution is not to pour yourself a drink and then throw the drink against the wall. It may be a solution in some circles; but it is not one I mean to finance.”

“I bought this drink in a bar. I am its proprietor.”

“I have attempted to talk about this breakwater, this ailing breakwater which, if it isn’t healed, is going to drop my high-priced pump house into the Detroit River, irreplaceable pump, tightly built clapboard shed and all. I scarcely need mention that it will break your mother’s heart. Her family has been in that joint for ten generations; and that pump house has borne witness to a hell of a lot of their hopes and fears. And I’ll be God damned if I am going to play host to a squadron of union cowboys at six bucks apiece per hour just to keep the Detroit River out of the lawn and I suppose, ultimately, the basement.”

“All right,” Payne said, “I’ll fix the breakwater.”

“Don’t do anything that’s too rough for you.”

“I’ve had enough hectoring now,” Payne said. “I’ll fix your breakwater but I’ve had enough of the other thing as of right now.”

“You do as you wish, my boy.” He gave the smile of love and understanding that is done primarily with the lower lip. “You have your life to live. Otherwise—”

“Other than what?” Payne interrupted, having become, some time ago, an expert on these lawyers’ jumps by which a grip is obtained upon the testes, an upper hand as it were.

“Other than your performing some reasonable duties around here as a basis for our providing, gratis, your keep, I don’t see how we can let you go on.”

“You’ve muffed it now,” Payne said. “I would have done it anyway. That’s too bad.”

“I’ve smiled through any number of months of your aimlessness, punctuated only by absurd voyages around the country in motorcycles and trash automobiles. I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. I want you to know that I won’t let you lie doggo around the house awaiting another one of your terrible brainstorms. My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure. I, of course, stupidly imagined that this leisure has been not possible without my going to work. Once I had seen that I knew I could at least have the pleasure of being the boss. I know it’s idle; but it gives me a cheap and real thrill.”

“You make it pretty clear,” said Payne with admiration.

“In other words,” his father said pleasantly, “fix the breakwater or get out.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to fix it?”

“Oh, not at all.”

“You’ll have to go,” his father said, “you’ll have to get out.”

They strolled around. It was a pleasant evening and the garden beds smelled better than they would later on when they were grown over with summer vegetation.

The next morning, they talked in the driveway. Now his father’s mind was on his briefs again. And the talk didn’t please Payne as the one the day before had. His father, then, stood, hat in hand, bored to tears. “You’re through here now,” he said with muffled alarm. “Now what are you going to do? I mean … what? In terms of your education you’re perfectly set up to …” His face looked heavy and inert as though you could have carved from eyebrows to chin and removed the whole thing without hitting bone. “… to …” He looked away and sighed, rotated the hat ninety degrees in his hand and looked at the door. “… you could …”

The boredom was infectious. “I could what?”

“I could find you a slot as a publicist.”

“Non serviam,” Payne said, “I’ve been reamed.”

“What in God’s name do you mean?”

“I actually don’t have a clue.”

They kissed like two Russians. “Goodbye.”

The minute his father drove off, Payne’s hemorrhoids began hurting. The same thing preceded the last motorcycle trip, commencing with a gruesome fistula that fought eighty dollars worth of Cheyenne penicillin to a draw. Interminable Sitz baths in flimsy flophouse sinks had given him the legs of a miler. Payne knew the showdown was not far away.

Payne felt that he was wrong to always hang in to bitter ends. The current declining note was an instance. He had lived too long with all the irritants of life at home, small contestations and rivalries which inconvenienced his happiness pettily. A kind of drear mountainous persiflage always accompanied such encounters. He ended by being buried in the piss-ant social inclemencies which turned him into the petulant loafer par tremendoso he himself regretted being.

In the past, he had run up and down America unable to find that apocryphal country in any of its details. His adrenalin cortex spumed so much waste energy that a lot of amazing things happened. And he deliberately changed his highway persona day by day; so that, across the country, he was variously remembered for his natty dress, for his opposite of that, for his persistent collection of “data,” for his arbitrary and cyclonic speechmaking, for his avowed devotion to his mother and father, for his regular bowel movements, for his handsome rather loosely organized mock-Magyar face, for his tiny library and transistorized machines locked away in ammunition tins, for his purported collection of the breakfast foods of yesteryear, and for his habitual parabolic coursing through the U.S.A. with attendant big trouble, pursuits and small treasured harbors of calm or strange affections along traveling salesman lines, facing enemies with billboard-size declarations of a dire personal animus, cluttering hundreds of small midland streets with regrettable verbs and nouns, sharp ones, heavy ones and ones which made barricades and tanktraps in peaceful summer villages where no one was asking for trouble.

In most ways it had been an awful strain, one he’d been glad to finish. Now, being on the verge of it again, he felt an uproarious tension in his mind.

People turn up.

For much too long, he continued to appear dazed. He often thought, “I couldn’t have been more of a pig.” Interested only in things that provided no morning after, he paid out deceptive conversations that made everyone in earshot fidget.

When he closed his eyes, Ann seemed to speed through a cobalt sky, a lovely decal on the rigid Ptolemaic dome. Every room gave at the corners. And why should anyone in the fat of late spring imagine that winter was not far away, scratching its balls in some gloomy thicket?