Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“Ladies,” he said in a clear voice. “I’m afraid he has seen me. Why don’t you get home as best you can. I’m going to have a word with Boyd.”

Boyd Jarrell rose slowly to his feet and his shadow shot across the yard. The women screamed and ran headlong into the willow bushes.

Frank wanted to slip away too, but this was his responsibility. He walked around to the door, which was unlighted. He tapped on it and got no response. He tapped again. Nothing. He opened the door. It seemed to open into the abyss.

“Boyd?”

He walked in.

“Boyd? It’s Frank.”

Frank walked around the house calling Boyd’s name. It was a plain house with a beer company print of Charlie Russell’s Last of the Ten Thousand for decoration. In the bedroom were a pair of dirty jeans over the back of a chair. The empty drawers of the dresser were pulled out. There were coat hangers on the floor and the closet was open, with a handful of worn snap-button shirts hanging inside and a battered pair of rough-out cowboy boots with curled-up toes.

He went back to the kitchen and looked in the pantry. There was a bottle of whiskey in there and he poured himself a shot at the sink and sat down. It was quiet. He sat and listened. He made out a train a long way off, then perfect quiet once again. He sensed that he was being watched from the side but didn’t turn that way for a moment, instead sipping the whiskey before deciding to look. He turned slowly and discovered a deer staring at him through the kitchen window. Beyond her, two others stood high on their back legs and ate the crabapples out of the tree in the yard. The deer faded from the window and Frank sighed. He made a note and weighted it with the whiskey bottle. The note said, “Stopped by — Frank.”

“Who’s the note for?”

Frank looked up. Boyd was in the room with him.

“Why, it’s for you, Boyd. I couldn’t find you.”

“I told the old lady to get lost. She didn’t want to get lost. So I helped her get lost.” His face looked dazed with backed-up rage. “Now I’m back.” Frank looked at the face. Boyd was almost beyond anger, his rage was so abstract. Frank felt himself turn helpless. This was just the moment when blood should have been flowing to his limbs, but it seemed to be going the other way. He felt like a flounder. He thought he might try defusing this situation by telling Boyd that he felt like a flounder, but there was not a lot of humor in the air.

“While I’ve got you,” he began.

“While you’ve got me?”

“Yes, while I’ve got you.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I didn’t think so, no,” Frank said. “What about the can. I use the can?”

“You gonna wet your pants?”

“Actually, possibly.”

“Go ahead, and then I want you right here.” Boyd gestured toward the hall with a jerk of his lips. He slowly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he watched Frank.

Frank went into the bathroom and closed the door. Then he turned around to look at the door. Good, a bolt lock. He locked it. Then he took in his surroundings. A toilet, a bathtub with a pipe ring around the top and a telephone-shaped shower head on a flexible metal pipe, and a big open window with the breeze pushing its plastic curtains.

“You better open up,” came Boyd’s voice. “I heard you lock it.”

Frank could see the door flexing against the restraint. He didn’t answer but looked at the window. He knew Boyd was thinking about the window too.

“I hope you’re not gonna watch me take a leak,” Frank said in a loud voice. He turned on the tap and hot water came out at a hard volume. When the steam billowed from the spray, he detached the shower head and stood next to the window. A few moments passed and Boyd lunged into the window space. Frank let him have it full in the face with the shower head. Boyd howled and went over backward. Frank ran through the bathroom door, up the hall, through the kitchen and out the front door.

Seeing Boyd come around the corner with one hand clapped to his face, Frank jumped into Boyd’s black Chevy half ton and got the doors locked before Boyd could arrive. Boyd picked up a rock from the driveway and brandished it alongside the driver’s window. Frank looked out, expressionless as a manikin, as he lifted his right hand slowly from his knee and felt the keys rattle against the back of his hand. He started the truck. Boyd went a short distance away and began beating a cottonwood tree with the rock. Frank felt he had no choice. He turned around and went out the driveway.

It wasn’t until he got out to the highway that he looked into the rearview mirror and saw Boyd crouched in the bed of the truck. So he went up Sand Hill Road to Blind Creek Road, the most potholed road in the county. He drove up Blind Creek Road as fast as he could and still successfully wrestle the wheel. Sometimes Boyd was four or five feet in the air. He could now see that Boyd was ready to beat the window in if he could, but there was nothing in back but a spare tire that bounded around, seeming to chase Boyd from place to place in the bed.

Blind Creek Road rejoined Sand Hill and took him into Belwood, still at a high rate of speed. As he entered Belwood, he could see the cloudy security light in front of a single-bay car wash and a green Chrysler Coronado starting to nose into the huge, whirling, soapy brushes. He drove in behind it, blowing his horn frantically. The Chrysler stopped and he bumped it from behind, still blowing his horn. The Chrysler pulled forward and Frank eased the Chevy into the car wash, looking up into the rearview mirror just in time to see Boyd vanish under the brushes. He pulled forward just a bit more and slid across the seat, letting himself out the far door. By crouching next to the wheel well, he was able to slip out without getting soap-brushed.

The big rack overhead rolled forward, transporting the huge spinning brushes and their load of hot water and soap. By the time Frank stood up enough to see, the owner of the Chrysler, a heavyset man in a nylon windbreaker, was standing next to the left fender of the truck, presumably waiting for the driver to get out. Frank slipped around the side of the building, and by the time he got across the street where there was a bar, he could hear oaths and the exchange of blows.

Saturday morning, first light, a silvery gleam along the ridge of the Lutheran church. The few cars reflected the sleepiness of their drivers as they eased up Assiniboine Avenue. Frank cleaned up the mess he had made, got the drink glasses out of their crevices in the living room, scraped the solidified mass out of the bottom of the wok with his cooking shovel under a stream of hot water and opened all the windows to let in the day.

He gathered up his rod, his fishing vest and waders, and drove over past Connolly Park where some children were already kicking a soccer ball back and forth between them. He stopped a few blocks beyond, where a street ended in a view of the stockyards, got out and knocked on the door. It opened and Phil Page came out carrying his tackle. Page was tall and thin with a long black beard that came down to his chest. Almost all that revealed expression were his eyes, which were detached and suspicious. Frank and Phil had played on the same baseball team in high school. Phil was a first baseman, and Frank always thought he had the right sort of detachment for that position, a driftiness in responding to the facts, a kind of lag timing peculiar to first basemen.

“Hi, Frank.”

“Phil. We’ll go in my car.”

Phil put his tackle in the back seat of Frank’s car and got in.

Phil Page was a brakeman on the railroad. Their friendship, which went back a quarter of a century, had been revitalized by troubles with their marriages. It was just like being back on the baseball team together. Phil usually fished with him on the weekends, but only if they made what he called a reasonable start.