Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“You want to try it now?”

Mike got a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket, where it had made a dime-sized blue spot. “Fire. You start,” Mike said, and turned over his paper placemat. “Give me a headline.”

“Old home place,” said Frank. “In capitals, OLD HOME PLACE.”

“Okay, then underneath: ‘In same family four generations.’ Didn’t our grandfather start the place?”

“It was his parents. Fattened oxen that came off the immigrant wagons.”

“Gotcha: ‘Local farm dynasty decides to relinquish ancestral headquarters.’ This I like. Don’t say anything against it. ‘Long-awaited decision. Priced to move. Principals only.’ Got it. Hoss, I’m putting it in the Wall Street Journal . I’m going to say that Hollywood types forced us out of the cattle business. That’s one of the best ways to get a Hollywood type to buy it.”

“Add: ‘Moose, deer, bear, elk, grouse, trout.’ ”

“Why?”

“They all have that, all local ads. One keystroke on the IBM. You don’t want this ad to look like it was done in L.A. They never mention the one kind of wildlife they all have, rattlesnakes.”

“All right,” Mike said, writing. “What else?”

“What’s the view?”

“There isn’t one.”

“We better come up with one or we’re going to have to go on owning it. Can we just say, ‘Big sky’?”

“I think that’s fair. That doesn’t really misrepresent anything. I mean, what’s big to one person may not be big to another. Anyway, people who are out there trying to scoop up old family places are in on this bullshit. It’s kind of like date rape. You can’t get fucked if you don’t spread your legs.”

“You’re great, Mike. You always see things so clearly. I get bogged down thinking about the lives that have been lived out there, the crops gathered, the calves shipped.”

“It just gets in the way, Frank.”

Frank left it in Mike’s hands and walked out to the parking lot while his brother visited with the many normal people he knew inside. Whenever they talked business, Mike liked to act tough. That’s why his deals were all stiffs. Frank barely cared, but he did care, and an undetected slyness had worked for him long enough that he was dangerously overextended. He had to keep a mental buoyancy or go under.

The parking lot was now full of cars and the great white clouds were reflected on their colored roofs. Frank looked up and got the feeling he was looking clear into outer space. A truck piled high with yellow split firewood went through the drive-up line with two laughing cowboys in front, their hats on the back of their heads, the radio blaring the Neville Brothers’ “Yellow Moon.”

Frank stopped and tried to feel his detachment against this throbbing daily intensity that was all around for the asking. Whenever he jumped in, he overjumped; when he tried to stay reasonable, he was like a cat burglar in the homes of everyday people, or someone who had broken into the zoo on a day when it was closed. The street was busy; people were pouring in and out of the restaurant. People sat with their car doors open, their feet on the pavement, and ate ice cream. And yet the big vacant sky seemed to proclaim their isolation. Frank found it attractive in a way even he knew was ludicrous, like the impulse that sends shy people to nudist colonies. Or even the one that landed him among the Eskimos. This is why bland people buy sports cars, he thought; things get lively around them and they have to jump in there with their car. He remembered how he and his friends used to dance through the night to the rock bands, none more extreme than Dick Hoiness’s Violet Twilight, or the Great Falls screamers Standing Start, or the psychedelic band from the Assiniboine reservation, Arthur and the Agnostics, with its stupendous lead singer Arthur Red Wolf, or the great all-girl hard-rock band, the Decibelles. And what fun those darn drugs were. Marvelous worlds aslant, a personal speed wobble in the middle of a civilization equally out of control. And it was wonderful, however short, to have such didactic views of everything, everyone coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Hard to say what it all came to now. Skulls in the desert.

Frank set out for the ranch in somewhat higher spirits, the possibility of not owning something that had always been in their lives throwing the place into sudden and blazing relief. He was able to go over its every feature in his mind now, from springs to dragging gates to the smells of the cellar and the loose boards in the parlor, the paint on the cupboard doors with the previous contrasting paint job, the flour bins with the odorless mummified mice. Yes, he thought, a lost home and the gates of hell.

There was little traffic, and clouds distinct enough that one could navigate by them. A distant tractor plowing a summer-fallowed field trailed a plume of brilliant dust high in the air. The yellow-and-black-striped gates at the railroad crossings stood out vividly in the farm greenery along the tracks. “Slippin’ and a-slidin’,” sang Frank to himself, “peepin’ and a-hidin’.” What a day. What freedom, what breezes. What life ahead! “I been told, baby, you been bold!”

When he drove into the farmyard and looked at the fine old white house with its porches and chimneys, its slanted stone-sided cellar entry, its small chaste cedar shingles, the outbuildings, fenced and ditched small fields beyond, he could already feel it floating into abstraction like a diploma, into a rather glamorous distance.

Things seemed to be in apple-pie order, just as they were when Boyd left. That whole thing was entirely unfortunate. He thought with a bit of a thrill that he ought to go over to Boyd’s house and express his regret that things had ever come to such a pass.

There was a car parked in front of the Jarrell house, not Boyd’s black Chevy half-ton pickup. Frank walked briskly to the house. He shot his cuff to look at his watch, suggesting that there would be many stops today. When he knocked, it was to a jokey little rhythm. He whistled and cast an admiring glance at the scrubby vegetation. The door opened and there stood Mrs. Jarrell: middle height, close-cropped hair, blue tank top and a face that saw through everything. She held the screen door in her hand and kept it between them. Frank was surprised to see her.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. He could see the little irritated red dots in her armpit where she had shaved. The shadows that fell on her face from the door made her seem even more grave and unreachable than the already frightening tone of her voice.

“I won’t take any of your time. But I do need to reach Boyd. It’s business, that’s all. That’s all it is.”

“Maybe you’d like to come in.”

She opened the screen door a little more, just enough for Frank to sidle through, which he didn’t want to do. It seemed that if he declined he might set her off, and so, as obsequiously as he could, feeling the spaciousness behind him, he turned sideways to enter. She seized him by the shirt and pulled his face to hers, a knot of hatred and the pale ocher eyes of a weimaraner, her words full of spit. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she hissed. “You listening real good? Now get the fuck out.” And then he was looking at the discolored white mass of the locked door. He went around to the side window, which was partly opened.

“I’ll bet you’re a good cook too,” he called out. “Probably have a million friends, bunch of adoring nephews and nieces —” Glass exploded over the top of him as an electric flatiron came through the window. He picked a few shards from his hair. “I’ll catch up with you later. Ciao! ”