Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

Frank put his car in the short-term parking lot and walked into the airport, a low and rustic-looking modern terminal just past which could be seen the tall silver tail of an airplane. It was dusk and the airplane was tinted with the dusty pink of sunset. Frank was sure it wasn’t Holly’s plane, and when he got inside he found he had almost ten minutes to spare.

He stopped at the newsstand and bought the paper, skimmed the local news and left it on a plastic chair. The plane on the ground was being loaded and there was a short line at the security x-ray. A few of the older and more countrified travelers who perhaps had not flown much put their purses and other belongings on the conveyor belt with extreme suspicion. Frank hunted around for a tearful goodbye and found one, a plain girl in dowdy navy blue slacks and jumper, squeezing the hand of a vague-looking youth with long sideburns and a catfish mustache; she wept silently. She stared into his face almost imploringly while he gazed around in a rubbernecked way, as if to say, “Get a load of this.”

Frank was eager to see which one was leaving. When the ticket agent announced the final boarding call, the girl released the young man’s hand and boarded the plane. The young man looked around anxiously to see if anyone had been watching, and in case someone had, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and flicked the imaginary drops of perspiration to the ground. In a matter of time, Frank thought, this loving relationship would be converted into a marriage.

Frank joined the mixed group at the big window in scanning the sky for the next inbound flight. For some reason, he remembered a winter trip to St. George, Utah, he had taken with Gracie and Holly. He and Gracie had had an argument at their motel and Holly pretended to be drowning in the swimming pool. It was a realistic imitation of a drowning person — face down, limbs slowly sinking — and it ended the argument. Frank and Gracie were startled that Holly would go to such lengths. The desert abruptly seemed pointless.

A glint appeared to the north, right at the level of the horizon, and began to enlarge. A moment later, the plane was taxiing at right angles to the terminal, a good way off, and then it turned and came straight in — pure, pretty silver, pink in the dusk with wriggling heat waves behind it and a big sound that suddenly penetrated the building.

Frank stared at every passenger emerging from the expanding tunnel that attached itself to the plane. Some passengers took their own sweet time getting off and held up people behind them. After the first press, only a few passengers remained and Frank was afraid Holly wasn’t among them. But then she emerged, burdened by carry-on luggage, magazines and rolled-up newspapers, with the beaming smile that still filled Frank with complete happiness. She affected a rolling, impatient sailor’s gait until the last passengers were out of her way.

He put his arms all the way around Holly and her luggage and squeezed. It was wonderful to feel plain love, even stupid love, just this sense of everything mattering all at once. He began hanging the luggage from one arm as he unloaded it from Holly’s. “Do you have a suitcase?”

“Nope, this is it.”

They walked toward the lobby. Frank gazed at her from the side while she walked, looking straight ahead, occasionally smiling at him. Holly had a serenely pretty olive face with brown, almost black, eyes that were as intense as the eyes of a sleek, quick animal. But when she grinned every bit of her face was affected in a crinkled way that swept Frank away with appreciation. She was wearing baggy cotton pants and a washed-out pink mountaineer’s jersey. She had an old green bookbag with a drawstring of the kind that prevailed during Frank’s college years. And she wore a big, cheap man’s wristwatch without a strap safety-pinned to the jersey. She looked a little like her mother, but even more definitely she had inherited Gracie’s careless prettiness and the unpretentious assumption that, somehow, she was being admired. Our only child, thought Frank. It’s true!

They got in the car and started toward town. Along the road out to Seventh, clouds of grackles showered down from power lines and swept back up again. Holly picked up one of Frank’s cassettes and smiled. “Can I play this?”

Neil Young filled the car, guitar feedback and all. Holly played it loud and looked out the window at the weedy ditches flying by, the crazy, day-in-and-day-out blue sky of Montana, and the mournful howl of Neil Young: “Your Cadillac got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” It was funny, Frank thought, how that tone of apocalypse just kind of went away.

When the song was finished, Holly turned it off and looked fondly at Frank. She said, “Dad.”

“Weird Dad,” Frank said.

“Weird Dad.” She punched out the cassette and held it up. As she peered at it, it seemed to acquire the quality of an artifact. “Where do you find these things?”

“They find them when they demolish old mansions.”

“Like you used to do?”

“Yeah. They tore down this copper baron’s mansion in Butte. The walls were filled with Bob Dylan. When they got to the attic there was a mountain of Big Brother and the Holding Company posters and Jefferson Airplane albums nearly devoured by pack rats.” Frank was getting into this. He saw the black hand of times gone by lying on this treasure trove.

For some reason, Holly liked to toy with the idea of her parents’ great and irreversible ancientness. She loved anecdotes about the sixties, which she associated with her father; she viewed him as a romantic rebel of ambiguity. She knew that he not only wasn’t fighting or protesting, he was demolishing the mansions and heirlooms of unguarded America. He was furnishing franchises with salad bars — and he never ate salad. He hated salad. He liked T-bones and potatoes. He even tried to tear down Mama’s indigo plantation! This last was a shared family-origin tale, though Mama owned no such plantation. Daddy the opportunist appears on the levee with a wrecking bar in his hand and a Los Angeles restaurant-chain contract in his hip pocket like a four-shot derringer. Gracie allowed a barbaric rakishness to seep into her version of Frank’s fomenting the spread of neon down the Mississippi. Holly always wanted to hear little stories of how they met and married.

“What would you like to eat?”

“Are you cooking for me?”

“Have I ever not?”

Holly puzzled through the tense, then said, “No, you’ve never not.”

Frank had already started her favorite, a monster of calories and simplicity known as New England boiled dinner, featuring corned beef, rutabaga, new potatoes, hot mustard and coarse grain bread he got from the Blue Moon bakery, whose sweet-smelling baked goods were proscribed by every responsible doctor. And beer. He loved to guzzle yellow cans of Coors with his beautiful daughter and talk football, school work, America, money, romance, the evolving life of the Great American West.

She always asked about his fishing. Sometimes he showed her a new rod or an English reel or curious flies like sparkle duns and olive emergers and flashabou woolly buggers. They’d pull open his desk drawer at home and peer into the pewter-colored fly boxes with their exotic mysteries of silk and steel and feathers. He’d mention favorite river names: the Sixteen, the Ruby, the Madison, the Jefferson, the Bow, the Crow’s Nest, the Skykomish, the Dean. When she was a little girl, he would make up stories that took place in the great drainages like the Columbia or the Skeena or the Missouri, and the place names would restore their years together. He could still thrill her with the story about the time the great brown trout towed his canoe past the city of Helena in the middle of the night, past the glow of its lights on the night sky of August, a fish he had to break off at the head of thundering rapids whose standing waves curved five feet high in the cold white moonlight.