Thomas McGuane: Nothing but Blue Skies

Mr. Copenhaver tipped back in his chair and began to talk about growing up on the old home place, the long walk to school, the cold, some parenthetical remarks about rural electrification and rural values. Frank tried to stare out the window but his eyes were too weak to get past the glass. He was cottonmouthed with exhaustion and prepared to endorse any negative view of his character. At the same time, he’d had enough. He got to his feet on his leaden legs and raised his hand, palm outward, to his father.

“Goodbye,” Frank said. He went out the door and rarely saw his father again. Mike saw him frequently, even driving down from the school of dentistry. They had a nice, even relationship that Frank envied. Mike never made an attempt to be a businessman like his father. That, much later, would be Frank’s job, seeking approval from someone who had departed this world for the refrigerated shadows of death.

First he went to Seattle, where he worked for a short time tying up seaplanes at Lake Union. Coming from a land of little rain, he felt his clothes would never dry. He lived with a Quinault Indian his own age who was studying marine biology at the University of Washington and who wanted to go home and manage the salmon fisheries on his reservation. Frank kept tying up the planes and admiring the pilots and waiting for the weather to clear. It never did. So, he went to Los Angeles and worked as a framer on what was to be the biggest semi-enclosed air-conditioned seaside synagogue west of the Mississippi, but the funding went tits up and Frank was again unemployed, living in a pleasant rented room one block off Westwood and going to lavish previews of off-the-wall motion pictures made by other hippies.

He had various girlfriends, ones who cooked, ones who didn’t, ones who got on top and watched traffic at the same time, ones who passed a joint and held their breath while humping like a wild dog, flat-chested ones and ones whose breasts surged halfway to their belly buttons before trying to jump over their shoulders, ones who dealt, ones who typed screenplays for fake hippies from New York, ones who delivered singing telegrams and ones who sold airline tickets or served in-flight snacks and ones who like Frank himself were willing to support his weight but really just wanted to go back where they came from. It was sex en masse. It got monotonous and lasted one year, one month and nineteen days. He was out of there like a kerosened cat. He wanted to go back where he came from but he still couldn’t quite bring it off. Everyone in California seemed surrounded by quotation marks.

He answered an ad promising travel and went to work for a crew that drifted around the country wrecking old homes and hauling the doors, chandeliers, windows and hardware back to Los Angeles for use in houses that duplicated other periods. They even demolished a few mansions in Montana. Frank thought of getting home but the brute work of making sure the booty made it to the West Coast was all-consuming. He would have liked a shot at the old home place but it was too much to ask. The old home places of others would have to do. The billiard table of a Butte mining baron ended up as a striking salad bar in Van Nuys, and numerous farm wagons and buckboards met a similar fate in steak joints, shrimp joints, king crab joints. Frank had felt a subtle change of character as he took on the world of atmosphere, as a thing unto itself. It was like the covering of straw and pig manure of the Farm Life party that had put him on the road in the first place. It was interesting to try to produce atmosphere directly, without tediously waiting for human life to create it.

Frank rose up in this work and became an independent contractor. His work had a look. If a chili chain wanted ambience, Frank went to the border and returned with wetback cafés loaded on tractor-trailer rigs. By the time the Cajun mania hit, Frank already was deep into Louisiana and in fact had inventoried the lower Mississippi, all the way to Plaquemines Parish, for an earlier gumbo empire that had stretched from Ventura to Redding before falling of its own weight and turning back into gas stations. It was in the minute town of Chalou, Louisiana, on the crumbling riverbend steps of a fallen-down indigo plantation house, that he met Gracie. She looked a little bit like an Indian. She was brown-eyed, black-haired, five-four and carried a two-barreled shotgun with big mule-ear hammers and a white ivory bead for a sight and had some connection with the building. He knew right then he had totaled his last heirloom. Ever afterward he would marvel at his own solitary experience with love at first sight. He stood there under her gun, as he would later be under the gun of her departure and then absence. His diagnosis, after she’d gone, was that he had spent their time together building something to please his parents when he should have been building something to please Gracie.

Once Frank was directed off the property, Gracie put the mule-eared gun in the back seat of the convertible she had driven out to the river and explained that the house had been in her family. Frank took her to lunch at a place on the road out to Thibodaux and they shared a huge platter of boiled crawfish. The waitress was a great big Cajun woman wearing a T-shirt with a red portrait of a crawfish on the front. The woman’s T-shirt said, “You want me to suck what?” Gracie told him that real Cajuns suck the crawfish shells when they’re done eating them. Then she told him her family story in compressed form so that he wouldn’t think she was some trigger-happy hillbilly. Somehow they had been planters a century and a half earlier, been ruined, been “kinda like” rednecks for three or four generations and were now on their way back up. “Up” being a wholesale furniture outlet so successful they had acquired control of the headquarters in New Orleans. Gracie said that someday she hoped they would live back out on the river, in sight of the ruined plantation house. “Maybe you will,” said Frank. At this point, he didn’t realize that it mattered much. He guessed she had a romantic streak.

After lunch, Gracie took him to the furniture outlet. It was just outside the town of Houma, a vast cinderblock building that faced a parking lot that would have suited a small stadium. Something had been added to the gravel in the parking lot, causing it to sparkle, and the building itself was faced with a sparkling material. There must have been a hundred cars parked there. The great show windows rose almost a story and a half, and the name of the store, Bouget’s Lagniappe Furniture, was written in neon script across the top of the building, where it flashed at an emergency level. Beneath the sign was an enormous portrait of Gracie’s father wearing a shining crown to indicate that he was the king. There were low pines in the distance and the smell of a refinery in the air.

Inside, families and individuals wandered aisles of furniture, chattering in French and trying out merchandise. One olive-skinned paterfamilias was testing the mechanism of a TV lounger in front of his large and admiring family. He sat in the chair and pushed the footrest; the chair swept back so that Papa was gazing at the ceiling. The children sighed. Then Papa got up abruptly with a superior little smile on his face indicating that things were not so easily put over on him.

A little farther on, another family was seated at a dinette set pretending to have dinner. And beyond, an old man sat at a desk and imagined himself to be doing business while his wife pretended to be his secretary, scratching away at an imaginary writing tablet while he chattered at her in French.

Gracie led him to the back of the store and into an office, which was simply partitioned off from the vast warehouse-display area. Inside this office, Frank was introduced to Antoine “Fatso” Bouget, Gracie’s father. He was not quite round enough, Frank thought, to be called Fatso; but with his oval, smooth, olive face and unmoving arched black eyebrows, he was very distinctly one of the locals. He deftly questioned Frank about his work and background, then turned to Gracie and said, “Him we have out to the house.”