Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

They listened to the local news and weather as Frank finished cooking and Holly set the table. She laid out the utensils and napkins; she centered the hot pad and then Frank served the meal and poured the beer. They sat down and Holly sighed.

“This is it,” said Frank.

“No food on the plane. I’m ready.”

Frank gazed with pride at his own cooking. Most of the time, he ate Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, Campbell’s tomato soup or leftovers dumped into half-limp taco shells while fixated on the livestock reports, the index of leading indicators, new home starts, west Texas intermediate crude or some other fool thing that seemed to connect him with the economics games there were to be played. In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power — as the Chrysler ads used to say — like the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Also, he was good at it and always had been. His mother had said he had his father’s nose: he could pick up the scent of a deal from a good ways off, as sharks are said to do with blood. He actually had the knack to a greater degree than his father.

“I regard this as a quality family atmosphere,” Frank said to Holly.

The superb golden light of evening came down through the leaves of the Norwegian silver maple and through the windows of the dining room and lit up their faces and the things on the table.

“Who’s your current boyfriend?”

“A fellow named Mark Plante.”

“I don’t like the sound of this. What’s he like?”

“Kind of a comical little nitwit. He won’t be around long.”

“I like this guy more and more.”

“There’s plenty where he came from. They’re like fleas on a dog. I’ve had several lunches with the leader of a citizens’ group. I’ve also had a few attentions from a young history professor.”

“They’ve begun preying on the students, have they?”

“I thought they always have.”

“Well, with these bountiful federal grants, there’s more time for dalliance than there was in my day.”

“They had other problems in your time — keeping you people from breaking into the president’s office and smoking the cigars, burning the flag, describing the pink spiders crawling out of your desks to the biology professor who can’t seem to make them out.”

“Don’t ridicule, Holly. That stuff’s coming back. What about this bird from the citizens’ group? Haven’t I heard of him?”

“He gets in the papers from time to time. He wants to keep Montana for Montanans.” Holly smiled with a new potato rakishly poised on a fork. “Would you ever let your hair grow again?”

“No. I don’t think any of us would. It’s better to hide these secrets. To infiltrate. To duly note the action of the scavengers who have followed us down the great American highway.”

“The secret drifter.”

“The secret drifter.”

“You are a drifter, aren’t you, Daddy? In your heart?”

“A drifter.”

“But you don’t move much anymore.”

“This is my home. Recently, though, I visited the Eskimos.”

“And?”

“About what you would expect, sans igloos. They’re in a place that’s hard to live and it seems to get them down. They have TV. They know what’s going on. They want to know why they got dealt the permafrost. There are anthropologists and sociologists up there teaching them to curse their fate and cast their blame in a wide circle.”

“I don’t understand what you were doing there.”

“I wanted to get away. Remember Mama’s friend Lucy? She’s a travel agent. I told her to just put a little trip together for me that would really be a break. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me.”

“How is Lucy, anyway?”

“She’s bored, a fine person. She sits under the posters of tropic isles and doesn’t really care if anyone goes anywhere or not. You hear it in her voice. She doesn’t have that big belief, that Kathie Lee Gifford sort of booming view of people getting out and about on a cruise ship. She doesn’t really see why anyone bothers. And of course this pops up on the balance sheet as self-fulfilling prophecy —” He stopped abruptly. He could hear himself talking exactly as he would if he were talking to Gracie. When he looked at Holly, who was not eating but simply gazing both fondly and reflectively at him, he knew she was having the same thought, or something very much like the same thought.

“Do you know why I stopped talking?” he inquired.

“Yup.”

“I thought so. Well, what can you do.”

Holly said, “I’ll wash, you dry.”

He turned on the radio, the oldies station, and Van Morrison sang while they worked.

You can take all the tea in China ,

Put it in a big brown bag for me ,

Sail right round all the seven oceans ,

Drop it straight into the deep blue sea .

“As we boogie to the suds,” said Holly, arms deep in the soapy water, Frank with his towel and lost in his dreams. “I know you’re thinking about Mama,” she said.

That night Frank lay in bed and watched the full moon from his window, the great pure shape rising through the telephone lines, the treetops and over the roofs to race cool and smooth and alone in the sky. Its pale light barely illuminated the distant mountains. He couldn’t sleep. He almost felt he’d gotten a hold of the moon and was being towed along in the chill.

He wondered what was to become of Holly. She was certainly the most reliable person he knew, filled with plans she was capable of achieving. He did not think she was liable to be swept away by someone she had failed to size up correctly. He liked life’s randomness, its buckshot absurdity and disconnections, but he didn’t like them for his daughter. The story possibilities for his life were getting narrower by the minute and randomness was perhaps what his life needed. Holly, he thought, needed narrowing story possibilities. Lying in his own panel of cold moonlight, Frank thought only of the madmen, the crazy drivers, the pretty boys, the flamboyant professors, the head of the citizens’ group, the careerists. He was worried sick about Holly and that was that.

Frank and Holly carried their coffee outside into the cool morning. The early sun slanted across the street in bands between the rows of spruce and silver maples. The street climbed rapidly to the south, and on either side were the old pioneer houses with their eclectic and eccentric architecture. They walked along and looked up onto the old porches, the hidden off-center doorways and the neat clapboard walls, the tall chimneys with recessed sides and fancy crenellated tops.

Frank didn’t want to eat at the Holiday Inn for fear of running into June, whom Holly liked but who seemed, when anybody else was around, entirely too raucous for Frank’s taste. And invariably, she tried to get Frank to buy Holly another car, a Buick, when she already had a good one, a jaunty green Honda Civic. Frank thought he was bending over backward in the friendship anyway by driving a Buick he couldn’t bear, a car as loose-jointed and ungainly as Rozinante. So they went to the Dexter; but it was such a beautiful day, they ordered the Travelers’ Special in order to get back outside as soon as possible. He thought Holly might want to fish, but today she just wanted to visit the ranch. He didn’t mention that he and Mike had decided to sell it.