Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

The bartender was right in his face. “No egg?” he said.

“My eyes were bigger than my stomach.”

“You think it’s a good idea to handle them a lot, then toss them back in for the next customer?”

“Only a sucker would buy one of those eggs,” said Frank.

“You’re buying them all or you’re out.”

“Put them on the tab, Hal,” called Karl from the table. “Frank, get your ass back here and stop wandering around stirring things up.” Frank seemed to respond to this suggestion and trudged back to the table and sat down.

“What’s the subject? Still Middle East?”

“No,” said Hoiness, “the spotted owl.”

“Another round!” bayed Hammersgard. “Get in here and don’t act like you want to go out and face the world. Be a gentleman, even if it kills you.”

“The world is just an illusion anyway,” said Hoiness. Most of Frank’s friends were able to revert to hippies in a heartbeat. He knew plenty of middle-aged people ready and willing to discuss karma at any time.

“Not in Red Lodge it ain’t,” said Hammersgard. “They got one of the best defensive ball clubs in the state of Montana. They got a third baseman who’s like the Crest invisible shield. Nothing gets by this monkey. That’s why I’m fielding my man. When he turns his shit loose, the Red Lodge nine will make appointments with their optometrists.”

Frank leaned across the table and said, “My face is numb.”

“I’m close to hysteria,” said Hoiness. “I’ve got an appointment to sell a group plan to the cement plant in Belgrade. Before I sell them even one leetle premium, I’m gonna show them how the big boys puke.”

“Euphoric,” said Frank.

“How’s that?”

“Euphoric.”

“Oh, good, Frank,” said Dick, “that’s good.”

Four cowboys burst in the door. They were in high spirits, laughing even before they came in. The bartender checked the shortest one’s identification and the others ridiculed him and pointed out that Shorty didn’t need to shave because the cat could lick his beard off. In a moment, tall draft beers were arrayed before them.

“Kids,” said Hammersgard cheerfully.

“But loud,” said Frank.

“It’s part of their deal,” said Hoiness. “Frank, it’s normal.”

“Loud is?”

“Mm-hm.”

“How are you?” called one of the cowboys, a tall man with a rag tied around his neck.

“We’re fine,” said Karl.

“Why, that’s all right,” said the cowboy, turning back to drink with his fellows.

“What did he mean by that?” Frank said. “What’d you mean by that?” he called across to the cowboy. The cowboy put his beer down on the bar and came over to the booth. He wore a green flannel shirt and a belt buckle with some sort of animal head on it, a sheep or a goat.

“I guess I meant, how are you,” he said.

“Do we know you?”

“Frank, Frank,” said Dick.

“I’m not acquainted with Tex,” said Frank. “What difference is it to Tex how I am?”

“You need us over there?” called one of the cowboys at the bar.

“Not yet,” said the one at the table. “Just doin’ an attitude check here.”

“Let me save you some time,” said Frank. “The attitude is bad. I may cancel my insurance.” His head was full of clouds, the day, the misunderstanding, the drinks. “I may cancel your insurance,” he added in a ridiculously ominous tone.

“Let me help you to your feet,” the cowboy said, and reached across Karl to take Frank by the shirt. Karl roundhoused him onto the floor with such concussion, the three other cowboys had to more or less jump over their companion to reach Karl, Frank and Dick at the mouth of their booth. “Not again,” said Hoiness in a voice of despair; yet in pretending to rise to his feet, he was able to surprise one cowboy with a stomach butt and knock the wind out of him. Frank bent over the airless man sitting like Raggedy Andy and pressed him for his social security number. Frank was slugged solidly in the right ear, which removed his sense of humor instantly.

The bartender moved quietly to the phone, and the cowboy who had come to the table first, seeing this, slipped over to the farthest bar stool to feign quiet drinking. Karl charged the entire row of bar stools and the cowboy went down in a wilderness of chrome legs and red naugahyde. The front door parted just enough to flash in some sunlight and the prospective customer failed to enter. Gripping each other’s ears, Karl and the tall cowboy began a grim waltz down the center of the bar. Frank and his new acquaintance were silently trying to lift each other off the floor by the ears. Hoiness had succeeded in recognizing the smallest of the cowboys, who looked like a penguin in a big hat, and knowing his ID was false (“I know how old you are, I sold your father crop insurance this summer”), urged him to go out the back door before the police got there. It must have been Hoiness’s years of barroom rock and roll that sharpened his instincts, because he slipped out the back with the youngster.

When the police arrived, the ear-grip dancing was still in stately progress, and the hair lifting too, though handfuls of it were scattered here and there around the booth. The arrival of the police was like the sound system quitting at a disco. Everything just wound down and stopped. The bartender was fooling with the dial on his radio. One policeman, a handsome young man with curly black hair and a jawline like Superman’s, leaned close to the entrance and kept an eye on things while his companion, a much older man with a bright gold tooth, helped the fellows with their handcuffs. “You can make nice or not,” he said in a jolly way that made everyone feel better, “but it’s down to the hoosegow we go.”

In one way or another, they all agreed to go; they were eager for someone else to plan for them. It was only human. Frank and Karl slipped quickly into the back of one of the two squad cars, embarrassingly surrounded by pedestrians in a town where everyone knew everyone else. Karl said to Frank, “It would have been nice if you hadn’t called that feller over to our table.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” said Frank as a joke. But it didn’t go over.

“I thought hindsight was when you had your head up your ass,” said Hammersgard coolly.

“Want me to knock the piss out of you?” Frank inquired, adjusting his suit jacket. He was still trying to look his best.

“No, and besides, you couldn’t. In fact, pull yourself together, Frank.”

The police officer with the gold tooth got in and twisted around like a cab driver to look in back. “Looks like we’re all set,” he said. “Next stop, jail.”

Sheriff Hykema was there to help process the five. The cowboys trooped down to their cell quietly. “Karl, what’s all this about? Don’t you have a game tomorrow?”

“Red Lodge.”

“Go on, get out of here.”

Karl ducked his head slightly and went out the door before the sheriff could change his mind. Then Hykema eased up to Frank. “My lucky day,” he said with a big smile.

“Eat shit,” said Frank, not mincing words.

“Right,” said the sheriff, and turned him over to a deputy with a short crew cut and the kind of clear-rimmed glasses they issue in the armed forces.

Frank went through a very long checking-in period, including fingerprinting and some interviewing against questions on a computer, the answers to which were logged and sent out via modem. “I’m so sleepy,” Frank said to the officer.

“Shut up,” said the officer.

“Right you are. Turn other cheek.”

“It’ll have to be one of your cowboy friends.”

“Oh, those guys. They don’t like me.”

When they put Frank in the cell with his three adversaries, he told them to eat shit just so they would stay away. But they were sick of Frank. He was able to curl up near the drain and pass out with the sense that he was sinking into disarray and hellishness. At the exact moment of sleep, he seemed to plummet.