Thomas Mcguane - Something to Be Desired

When Lucien looked over at James, he was holding the pigeon in his hands. Its eyes were closed. Its head was angled harshly onto its back. Blood ran from the nostrils down the domestic blue feathers of its narrow shoulders. Lucien said nothing.

“We both fell asleep at the same time,” said James in an unsteady voice.

Today was not going to be a day to be scattered and worried. Today he would indulge a few small preferences like keeping the house temperature low and wearing a sweater. He would read Lord Byron’s letters. Evidence indicates that alcohol’s irritating effects on Byron’s urogenital tract forced him to seek relief in blind liaisons of the sex type, producing children, which Byron called hostages to oblivion. He got that one right. From a burning sensation to a dynasty in three steps. Byron and his poor old dick.

He boiled two eggs. He had a porcelain eggcup that he’d had for thirty years. He had a set of silver military brushes given to him as a baby. He had his first fishing license from back in the days when you could buy worms along the road and get angling tips from the barber. A bit of moving water then was an exaltation of riches; the eggcup and the military brushes connected him to a time he intended to return to. And with each passing year he failed more miserably. As he sliced the tops of the eggs off and checked their doneness with the curve of spoon, he thought, Perhaps a little country with slaves in it would be better, for my very own. His mind drifted away to possible chancelleries, the Archbishop’s study connected by tunnel to the back of his fireplace, a thundering speedboat to move over territorial tidewaters with President Lucien at the helm, cher , all alertness for counterrevolutionary elements attempting a landing. That’s what the eggcup did to him, took him back to when all was possible.

Then the phone rang.

“Where did you put Kelsey?”

“Well, we finally got him out of the station wagon,” Lucien laughed. “Who’s this?”

“This is his wife.”

“Oh, God, are you serious?”

“I am indeed. Your secretary gave me your number after I’d threatened her good.”

“Well, we buried him, actually, uh, ma’am. At Valleyview. Here in Deadrock.”

“Valleyview.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sounds real Kodachrome. I’ll tell you what we need up here estatewise, is about six copies of the death certificate. You handle that?”

“I can.”

“Your people got the address here; I just received Kelsey’s bill.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s pure-D exorbitant. What in God’s name were you feeding him?”

“We—”

“Anyway, he isn’t missing anything. I’ll wait on the certificates. Thanks for your efforts. G’bye.”

Lucien hung up. If that doesn’t do it, what will? He knew he had gotten ahead of himself when he buried Kelsey.

· · ·

Lucien went through the front door of the hot spring and into the front office. Antoinette sat on the corner of the reception desk. She was waiting for him.

“Dig him up,” said Lucien

“What?”

“We have to dig up Kelsey.”

“I don’t believe this,” said Antoinette.

“We don’t have a death certificate. We can’t get one without the coroner’s report.”

Lucien had been through his share of burials, certainly ones closer to him than this. But having to dig up Kelsey made all the others seem not final. It wouldn’t do. It would make things seem like some medieval uproar with loosed spirits ranging about among live people.

“He had a twinkle in his eye, that Kelsey.” Antoinette said this with the innocence of an aborigine sticking something into another mammal and breaking it off.

“You’re on the detail to dig him up,” said Lucien simply. It was the acme of infantilism.

At the cemetery a big yellow backhoe was off to one side, and a stranger in coveralls was viewing the bag containing Kelsey. Antoinette sobbed uncontrollably in her camel’s-hair coat and cowboy boots. Two pool cleaners were coming to load Kelsey to the coroner’s office. “Call Mrs. Kelsey once he’s delivered. Tell her he’s all hers. I hope it’s the last I hear of him in this life.” Lucien cut his eyes to the container. “What a thing to say about a companionable fellow like that.” He returned the questioning stare of the man in coveralls. “So many of our customers are people you hate like heck to spend an evening with. This guy had one good story after another.” Lucien paused by his car and, without turning to face Antoinette, urged her to get a grip on herself. Beyond the low line of foothills he could hear the iron connecting of trains. The low drifting smoke from the plywood mill came ghostly through the coulees as thermals changed in the approaching afternoon. Overhead two groups of crows passed each other, one going to the river, the other to the hills. Imagine if the papers got a picture of those boys sitting on Kelsey. Remains of area industrialist handed over to carrion birds in Montana. Are we one nation or not. The civil war where you least expect it.

Lucien stood by the galvanized tank and ran water for his horses, the hose three feet under and sending up circling shafts of yellow straw through the dark water to show it in motion. Over the white pipe fence the cedars twisted in the wind. Lucien thought, What am I looking for? What in the world?

Where hard spring snow had turned enamel under the huge pines, sudden birds’ shadows now appeared, then went; Lucien carried buckets of grain and thought, It has lasted until June, a miracle which may have fallen on Thanksgiving. His spirits were starting up. They would stay up for a while if they could get Kelsey buried once and for all.

As Lucien thought about it, he really didn’t know what the effect of trapping the hawk had been on James, what kind of day it had made. When Lucien had dropped him off, the White Cottage was full of Suzanne’s relatives, mostly cousins and including a good number of no-accounts who had nothing better to do than give Lucien a dirty look as one who’d done a good girl wrong. There was a cousin from Great Falls who used to run a greasy spoon up that way that was open twenty-four hours a day and therefore had no doorknobs. On days he wanted to fish and could find no one to spell him, he wrapped a hundred feet of logging chain around the building and padlocked it. He alone smiled at Lucien standing awkwardly in the doorway, the unwelcome host. But early Tuesday morning Suzanne called and said that James had enjoyed his day.

“Did he say anything about the pigeon?”

“Yes.”

“Did that upset him?”

“He seems to appreciate that you and he had some kind of adventure. When I said it was sad about the pigeon, he said that’s how hawks have to live. He was kind of taking up for you in that, I thought.”

“That’s nice.”

“So things aren’t as bleak as you may believe.”

“It serves my purposes to feel that I am singled out. I get mad. Which serves to get me out of bed in the morning.”

“Do you remember my cousin Danny?”

“Not really.”

“Well, he wants to know if you can use an irrigator.”

“I want to hold you and kiss you.”

“You stop this right now.”

“We don’t need an irrigator. We put in a wheel-line sprinkler and we don’t use it. We just write it off. Lying there, it underscores the nothing-is-real atmosphere that people on holiday demand. Your cousin Danny would ruin that.”

“You’re not kidding about the atmosphere. I’ve seen some lulus around that spring.”

“I know.”

“But I also noticed a lot of the old local yokels.”

“They get to have it both ways. Their thing is to come just out of curiosity, night after night. I humor them. We elbow each other in the ribs. We point. They keep coming back. I specialize in catering to the big-spending local dipso. If I didn’t have the out-of-towners, I’d have to hire topless dancers.”