Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“I couldn’t do it,” said Frank.

“You don’t have to do it,” said Mike. “All you have to do is agree it needs to be done and I’ll do it.”

“I just don’t know, Mike.”

“Maybe she’s living in a bad dream, Frank. I’d want mine pulled.”

They agreed that they would do it. Frank wondered, after she died, what the actual moment of death had been: when this decision was reached, or when her pulse stopped and her temperature started down? It was actually Mike who removed the … stuff, the equipment, the tubing. The last thing she said — and they had to go back a number of weeks for this — was something that had just bubbled up from a Johnny Carson show she had seen, and they would never have known that except that Mike had seen the same show. In a crooning, faraway voice, she repeated the words of a famous model who was a guest on the show telling about her photo safari to Tanzania. Their mother seemed to become the model, down to peculiar expressions of enthusiasm like “off the graph”: “The lions were really off the graph!”

They waited a long time after the apparatus was removed and she lingered on. They decided to stay with her in shifts. Mike went home to eat with his family; Frank stayed and watched. She never moved. Frank thought about her for a while, then thought about himself. He considered the compartments they had gotten into over the years, starting with his father the farmer-entrepreneur, his mother the town beauty of the famous Geranium Festival, Frank the investment manager and Mike the orthodontist. Gracie was about to join the former-wife class, and his mother had eased into the class of the soon dead. Frank’s daughter was in the college class, to enter either the professional or the homemaker class and join them all in the grand march off the flat earth. He decided to stop thinking about himself and about all that this meant under his flat-earth view, and to listen. He heard nothing. He got up and stood next to his mother. Her small hand lay open on the bed. Her wrist was terribly thin. He rested his hand next to it and lay his finger across her wrist. Nothing. He remembered how superfluous she thought he was. She said he was the boy who held the lantern while his mother chopped the wood.

“There’s one of my patients,” said Mike. “See that pretty teenager there? Carrying the milk shake? Well, you oughta had a look at her when she arrived on my doorstep. Looked like a church key.”

“She looks fine now.”

“Nothing whatsoever to prevent her from falling into your basic local social pattern. When I got her, she was headed for a life either alone or with a wheat farmer.”

Frank asked himself how two brothers could have turned out so differently. Everywhere Mike looked he saw certainty, definition and meaning. And yet, when they were growing up, Frank was always optimistic and Mike suspicious. Mike’s suspicion had paid off. He knew absolutely where he was going and it didn’t bother him that it was one mouth after another. The inevitable things about life didn’t bother him either. Even death struck him as one more piece of local color, a nostalgic event.

“Frank, what in the hell are you thinking about?”

“I was just thinking how different we are.”

“You just figured that out?”

“No, it still is hard for me to understand.”

“Not me. You’re a year older. You had to break trail. Plus, Dad made more sense to me than he did to you. That’s why everything has seemed so much clearer to me. You always seemed to think Dad was crazy.”

“I suppose.”

“I may be missing a whole layer of life, you know,” Mike said. “Its seriousness. But I don’t strain my mechanism like you do. Sometimes I think you’re like an airplane that keeps taxiing and never quite gets airborne. I’m dumb, I just fly.”

“I was airborne for a while.”

“Maybe you were. But I don’t crave struggle. I enjoy my life. It goes by smooth as silk and I’d just as soon have it that way. I’m a big fat happy guy with a big fat happy wife and several extremely average children. I like it. I’m flying.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Frank. He looked up and saw Dick Hoiness coming in, the old guitarist hidden in a summer suit, and signaled him to come over.

“Hi, Dick,” Frank said coolly as Hoiness reached the table. “I wanted to thank you for slipping out of the bar the other day.”

“It had to be done.”

“Had to be done,” Frank said. “I ought to cancel my insurance.”

“Life will go on.”

“You cancel yours and I’ll cancel mine,” said Mike, always loyal. This might have gotten serious.

“What a day,” said Hoiness, starting for the counter. “Let me know what you want to do, fellas.”

“We forgive you,” said Frank. “We just wish you were more of a stand-up guy.”

“Musicians aren’t like that,” called Hoiness from the counter. “We’re gentle escapists — you know, four-F.”

“What about your claims adjusters?” Mike asked.

“Different breed,” said Hoiness. “Hard-boiled but compassionate, realistic but generous, universally loved. Montana natives one and all. Low rates and prompt attention. Our claims adjusters stand for family values and a decreased dependence on foreign oil.” He turned to the smiling girl behind the counter and ordered. He pointed to each item he ordered on the wall menu behind her, as though she had never heard of these things before.

Frank watched and thought how much he wished things would change faster at McDonald’s. Americans had overtaken their product line, if he was any judge, waiting for McThis and McThat. If there were only a few departures or insights — McShit on the toilets, anything — it would be so much easier to take one’s seat in this American meeting place and not feel such despair that the world was going on without you.

“How’s your deal going?” Mike asked.

“It’s all right. Hasn’t been much to it this last little while. Exchanged some cattle. Everybody’s getting run off the national forest. There’s a bunch of timid traders out there. I had the idea to do a warm-up lot somewhere, maybe Billings, but the way this yearling thing has been looking, the price of feed and everything else, I just didn’t have the juice to do it, not and guarantee gains where they need to be.”

“What about the water slide at Helena.”

“Sold it.”

“The Hertz franchise at Helena — I got to tell you, Frank, I’m hearing all the time now that you’re overextended.”

“It’s true, but I’m getting by with it. The Hertz franchise is fine. I wish I had a bunch more.”

“Frank!” Mike, at first incredulous, was soon off in thought.

Young people had started to fill up the place and were blowing the straw wrappers off their straws. They all looked so intense to Frank, so ready to burst into something. The ones who got crowded shoved back. The ones who were hot, coming in from outside, took off their coats and fanned their faces hard.

“I say we dump the ranch,” said Mike.

“Count me in,” said Frank, still looking at the youngsters clamoring for hamburgers. That should have been a signal to get back into the cattle business more seriously. He had bought and sold thousands of cattle the way other people played pinochle on Thursdays and he had done it with other people’s money as well as his own. Now he was thinking that once he got out from under the present loans, he might not want the risk, responsibility, commitment, whatever. So, sure, sell the ranch. And thus would end an American family’s place on earth.

“You want to list it?” Frank asked.

“Let’s run an ad.”

“Mike, why don’t you write it.”

“Sure, let me write it,” said Mike. “You know, I’m not a reflective guy, but at a time like this it might be nice to sit down and compose a few words about the old place.”