Thomas McGuane - The Bushwacked Piano

Payne walked around Livingston, hands deep in pockets, head deep in thought, feet deep in the dark secrecy of boots. He went into Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery to try on footwear. He had no money but he wanted ideas. He felt if he could hit on the right boots, things would be better. His throat ached with the knowledge that it would not be impossible for him to run into Ann in this town. “Howdy!” The salesman. Payne sat.

“Boots,” he said.

“What you got in mind?”

“Not a thing other than boots.”

“Okee doke.”

“Can I charge them?”

“Live in town?”

“I sure do,” Payne said.

“Then go to her,” said the salesman. “Let’s get you started here.” He brought a pair of boots down from the display stand. He rested the heel of one in his left palm and supported its toe with the fingertips of his right hand. “Here’s a number that sells real well here in Big Sky Country. It’s all-American made from veal leather with that ole Buffalo Bill high stovepipe top. I can give you this boot in buff-ruff, natural kangaroo or antique gold—”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“It is not right that a cowboy should dress up like a fruit.”

“Now you listen to me. I just sold a pair of boots to a working cowboy in pink turtleskin and contrasting water buffalo wingtips.”

“You don’t have to get mad.”

“I sold a pair of dual re-tan latigo leather Javelinas with peach vamps to a real man. And you tell me fruit.”

“No one said you had to be a meanie about it.”

“Okay, we drop it.” The clerk insisted that they shake hands. “Let’s get you into a pair.”

“Now I want tennis shoes in mocha java.”

“I thought you wanted boots.”

“If I go barefoot will you tint my pinkies Antique Parmesan?”

“Sir.”

“Yes?”

“Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery doesn’t want your business.”

Payne went to the front of the store, stepped up to the X-ray machine, flipped it on and put his eyes to the viewer. There was a handle at its side that controlled the pointer which Payne directed at the memento mori of his skeletal feet on a billiard-cloth green background. He suddenly saw how he would not live forever; and he wished to adjust his life before he died.

Payne took to his room and napped unhappily until evening. He woke up thinking of how he had camped one night on the Continental Divide and pissed with care into the Atlantic watershed. Now he wasn’t sure he should have. He tried to imagine he was saying toodleoo to a declining snivelization; and howdy to a warwhoop intelligentsia of redskin possibility with Ann as a vague Cheyenne succubus — the complete buckskin treatment.

But under his window, attendants drifted in a Stone-henge of gas pumps. Fill er up! America seemed to say. A blue, gleaming shaft descended cleanly under the grease rack and a Toyota Corona shot off into the Montana night. Hey! Your Gold Bell Gift Stamps! Poised against the distant, visible mountains, the attendants stood by a rainbow undulance of Marfak.

All the windows were open to the cool high-altitude evening; under the blanket of his rented bed, Payne had the sudden conviction that he was locked in one of the umbral snotlockers of America. On the pine wall overhead, a Great Falls Beer calendar with Charles Remington reproductions of wolves, buffalo and lonesome cowpokes who tried to establish that with their used-up eyes and plumb-tuckered horses they were entitled to the continent. George Washington had tried the same thing: Throwing coins across a river, he had glommed America from the English. Payne could even understand how, in the early days, Indians, oriented to turkeys and pumpkins, were depleted by unfired blunderbusses, sailboats, maps. Just as Payne felt macadam and bank accounts depriving him of his paramour.

It had been, he felt, another migraine spring. He sat up and bit into an apple, a handsome, cold Northern Spy; blood on the white meat; teeth going bad; tartar; sign of the lower orders; drop them at the dentist; refurbish those now you.

Sleep.

C. J. Clovis, former fat man and entrepreneur of large scale “gadgets” of considerable cost and profit to himself, sat in his Dodge Motor Home, easing a clear lubricant into the bright steel nipple on the upper articulation of his appliance. He smiled admiringly at the machined bevels at its “knee” and saw the little quarter-arcs of ballbearing brighten with oil. Laced neatly to the aluminum foot, with its own argyle, a well-made blucher seemed quite at home.

The built-in television murmured before him: the Johnny Carson show. Clovis flicked it off and rolled out two blueprints on the dining table, weighting the corners with heavy coins of some foreign currency which he produced from his pockets. The plans depicted a model of a bat tower which Clovis would build for America; modern, total engineering of bat enclaves, toward a reduction of noxious insects in the land. On the prints, the handsomeness of the structures was not hidden; they arose with loftiness from formed concrete piers and had stylish shake-shingle roofs surmounting three tiers of perforations through which the bats could enter. The floor plan, if that is what it must be called, was based loosely on the great temple of Mehantapec in the Guatemalan highlands. That is, the “monks” in this case, bats, dwelt in individual but linked sequences of cells roughly oblong in cross section, each of which debouched into a central chute or shit-scuttle; the accumulation, a valuable fertilizer, could be sold to amortize the tower itself.

The bat tower involved sixteen hundred dollars in materials and labor. Clovis had slapped a price tag of eight thou on the completed item; and considered himself prepared to be beaten down to five. Not lower. Not in a land where mosquitoes carried encephalitis. Next a note to Payne who had been reamed and would not serve: offering him a position as crew boss in an operation dealing in the erection of certain pest control structures, a highly engineered class of dealie. No holds barred financially. Need aggressive young man with eye on main chance. Address me Clovis/Batworks, poste restante, Farrow, North Dakota. All the best.

Clovis worked his way toward the stern and made himself a nightcap: eleven fingers of rye in a rootbeer mug, and adjourned to the toilet for a rapid salvo; a fascinating device, the machine used flame to destroy the excrement. Clovis stood in now slow-witted eleven-finger wonder as the little soldiers accepted the judgment of fire. Like toasted marshmallows holding hands, they became simple shadows and disappeared.

The instant before he fell asleep in the comfortable double bed, he commenced to feel sad. C. J. Clovis had every right to believe, as he did, that it was no fun to be shaped like a corncrib under a tarpaulin and to have only one leg. He was already sick of the appliance. He looked out of the high laminated window to Sagittarius on the close night sky feeling the ache of tear ducts under his eyeballs; and thought, soon it will come.…

In the early morning, under Payne’s window, no one moves at all. All along the curb, cars, pick-ups and stake trucks are angled in. The street is dusty in front of rolled awnings, conventional stores in a region where Montgomery Ward sells roping saddles. The Absarokas tower at the south end of Main Street; east of town a fish in whitewashed stones decorates a snuff-colored mountainside, its dorsal exaggerated where children walked too far with their rocks.

At this very moment, Payne should have been seeing Ann. Was it that he feared arrest?

Some time ago, when Payne and Ann had first met and been so interested in one another, Ann went to Spain with one George Russell, a young associate of her father’s. She had in Ann Arbor developed a reaction to the ineffectual group of bridge-playing bohemians who hung around the Union and with whom she, as an artiste , spent her time. George, who at least seemed decisive as her new friend Payne did not, convinced her to make the trip. Unlike the bridge players, she thought, George was the kind who could receive and transfer power, big G.M. power. Nevertheless, her societal notions were such that she could, despite her infatuation with Payne, conduct a trial run for her European trip, with George, in a Detroit hotel. As far as Ann was concerned, it was just barely okay. George’s fiscal acumen was not matched in his bedroom performances. He seemed weirdly unsuitable.